No, it has only input. Divergence from reality (insofar as it can be centered) is a hallmark of human thought as well, so perhaps the models are simply performing.
If you look at the parameters for the "valuation" of a SARS-CoV-2 infection, they are hard to take seriously. They are based on a mapping of typical workplace injuries to viral infections. This is the paper referenced: http://ftp.iza.org/dp13632.pdf.
A purely asymptomatic infection is valued at $11,000
A symptomatic but non-hospitalized infection is valued at $33,000
If you are in the hospital for any reason with an infection, $512,000
If you are in the ICU for any reason with an infection, $1,100,000
I would not value the public health cost dollar estimate of an asymptomatic infection at 11k. I would not value the public cost dollar estimate of a non-hospitalized infection at 33k.
They do have some discussion in there about the option of valuing asymptomatic cases at $0. So it's not like they didn't think of this option. But they went with $11,000 as the default option in their model, anyway. This leaves me thinking we may be looking at a Chesterton's Fence situation: the reason isn't obvious to me, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist or isn't a good one.
I'm guessing there is some subtext here that an armchair analyst isn't going to catch from reading just this paper. Perhaps, for example, the cost of asymptomatic cases is there because "asymptomatic" doesn't actually mean "no symptoms at all", it means "the patient didn't subjectively feel ill enough to seek care." In which case there probably is some real cost to factor into the average. Or perhaps the argument is that asymptomatic cases still carry some risk of secondary effects such as myocarditis that absolutely need to be taken into account and averaged into the group from a public health perspective.
It's hard to say for sure, since the paper clearly isn't written for a non-expert audience and therefore doesn't spend much time on defining jargon.
I've seen reporting recently that studies showed some large percentage (63%?) of asymptomatic patients had visible signs in chest x-rays. So asymptomatic doesn't seem to always mean "absolutely no measurable effects".
I'm probably going to perma-delete my HN account after this, but this is my main complaint with popularized scientific research being parroted for political purposes. "The paper isn't written for a non-expert audience" yet one of the authors is going on Anderson Cooper tonight to talk about it to a non-expert audience.
Wouldn't that be the best way to communicate this to a non-expert audience? Bring the expert in to explain the report and fill in the context that the layman is missing compared to an expert?
The same researcher can speak to a popular and expert audience. And that researcher should absolutely say things in the paper that they don't say in the popular outlet, and vice versa. They're different audiences with different needs and different background knowledge.
Compare the experience of reading one of Einstein's scientific papers with the experience of listening to one of his interviews. It's almost like they're not even the same person.
If you read the literature, they compare a symptomatic viral infection to having your hand or foot broken, or a pelvic fracture, or a mild to severe head trauma. I do not see any evidence of those things being equivalent.
For the person who suffers them, they are not equivalent. But that isn't what is being measured.
When measuring economic impact, they could very well be equivalent. A dollar lost when someone can't work due to a broken bone is economically equivalent to a dollar lost when someone bedridden with a virus.
Best case, your comment is an oversimplification of what the authors spent a dozen or so pages explaining. The limitations they describe perhaps encompass some of your concern. They also describe alternative calculations.
On the surface it doesn't seem like a bad comparison. Out of work for weeks, potentially protracted recovery including possible long term limitations. What's the problem?
Downvoted because this is not an argument, just a statement that you don't like their estimate. That doesn't contribute to the discussion. If you're asymptomatic and you make someone else sick and they die, the cost is a lot more than $11k.
How many subsequent infections are caused by an asymptomatic infection? How much effort is expended to prevent those infections, by the asymptomatic individual and others?
"We first use the Department of Transportation (2016) guidance on value per statistical life (VSL) and severity/injury estimates as a basis for our non-fatal valuations by category. After updating the figures for earnings and inflation the DOT guidance recommends using a VSL of about $11 million in 2019 dollars. We use the severity classifications in the DOT guidance as a basis for our non-fatal valuations. DOT (2016) recommends using six different severity categories in benefit-cost analyses including Level 1 (minor), which corresponds to using a 0.3 percent amount of the VSL, Level 2 (moderate), which uses about a 5 percent amount,Level 3 (serious), which uses about a10 percent amount,Level 4 (severe), which uses about a 27 percent amount fraction,Level 5 (critical), which uses about a 59 percent amount,and Level 6 (unsurvivable) which uses a 100 percent amount(the full VSL). We therefore value asymptomatic cases at about $11,000 (in 2019 dollars) each which corresponds to using a 0.1 percent amount of the VSL in DOT (2016)."
0.1% of a statistical life is about a month? It's also a third of the "minor" classification.
How would you value it? $0? Clearly, that's not right.[1] Less than $11,000? More?
[1] Consider a new infectious disease which has only minor symptoms immediately, but may have unknown health consequences in the future.
Despite the criticism, I think you’re asking a great question. These figures do appear surprising and I think a lot of people will feel the same skepticism. I’d hope that someone can help us understand the paper rather than chastise you for being impertinent. Thanks for reading past the headline and provoking some discussion on the details.
Why not? The US GDP dropped by over 2 trillion in just the second quarter. That's over $300,000 per infection right there. And that's if we don't count future quarters, Q1 2020, or any of the trillions in stimulus that has been pumped into the economy. It doesn't seem these numbers are out of line with the back-of-the-envelope math.
Ah, I was looking at an annualized dollar amount. Still, it would be a reasonable back-of-the-envelope number considering that the economic impact is still present and is going to continue into the future at least a year.
This isn’t an attempt to estimate a typical bill for an asymptomatic individual. It’s an attempt to set an expected value for the costs that will eventually be incurred across the population of asymptomatic patients. They are using a mean to describe how costs will scale with the size of that population (asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 positive) and NOT as a way to describe the typical costs of individuals in that population. The cost distribution is almost certainly a power law. I’d guess the median is zero and the mean is many thousand dollars.
As others have said, there are unknown but already detected cases of asymptomatic impacts. One football team doc said he thought 1/8 had some impact on heart function long term. Those who see this as no big deal for some reason are stuck on arguing the exact percentage of impact.
Several studies have shown that asymptomatic infections may have long-term impact. The valuation may be taking that into account -- you might not get that bill today, but maybe you (or your insurance) will pay that over the course of your lifetime
Sure it is. If 5% of asymptomatic cases require care that costs $200k, you come to $10k a person. This is entirely plausible in the US, particularly if you are amortizing the cost over the lifetime of the patient.
Can you cite any paper that suggests serious complications for asymptomatic patients is anywhere even remotely close to 5%? All I've seen is a handful of rare anecdotes, nothing to suggest it's a remotely likely outcome.
You're looking at actuarial estimates. Overestimating unknown-unknowns is more pragmatic than underestimating them. No, the article doesn't show how that particular sausage is made; we're all out here guessing.
My understanding is to assume the premise you are trying to prove in the act of proving it.
The one being accused of begging the question said construction is a necessary activity because society says it is necessary. But that doesn't mean it is necessary, which is what the law would seem to require.
The conclusion was that just because being a Tesla worker and being a construction worker are roughly equally safe doesn't mean that both automatically should re-open.
Construction being more valuable for society than a Model 3 was part of the premise.
You took them to mean "Construction is more valuable for society -> Construction is more valuable for society" but that was not the claim.
This 100%. I also grew up poor and having a certain amount of money alleviates a ton of problems and people don’t realize how taxing day to day survival can be in the modern economy with not enough. It is pure survival mode until you reach a threshold.
It's the same power dynamic that will be in place forever, incumbents unable to recognize talent outside of their narrow perspective. The penalty is paid by the candidate, and the company will usually go along just fine, but it is a sad broken system for a lot of qualified people.
> The penalty is paid by the candidate, and the company will usually go along just fine, but it is a sad broken system for a lot of qualified people.
i don't understand how people don't get it: if this were a malfunctioning system companies' margins/bottom lines would be affected and they would correct course. the fact that not only does this trend persist but grows signals that it's actually effective.
A company I used to work at made ~$10Bn in profit per year and employed 300k people this does not mean that all its practices were profit making, some were demonstrably not profit making, even admitted to be so by SVPs. I don't mean some investment that would pay off in the future, I mean cost cutting exercises that went so far as to go past the fat and into the bone (SVPs words when we got a new CEO)
Another company I used to work at, this one employing 20 people, had a shockingly bad product. It looked dated, it was slow and it had all manner of process issues, in a word: Dysfunctional. The company was pretty profitable as it had excellent sales people. Working here really made me question a lot of things. How could a company with such a shitty, outdated, slow and unmaintainable product be so successful (for its size)?
The point is that the relationship between qualified people and financial success is far from linear.
If this were correct startups wouldn't have a chance to dethrone an incumbent, because companies would adjust course long before.
The thing is: Some people may even see this. But then they have to convince their boss. And maybe that boss has to convince their own boss. Or HR. Or both. And then you get into "but does this mean a part of our workforce is incompetent" territory and so on.
Something doesn't get corrected just because it affects the bottom line. Someone has to fight for it and with a topic like that you probably won't win many friends by doing it.
I suspect it's really difficult to tell from within whether your bottom line is being hurt or helped by the interview process.
The effects are not immediate, and you rarely have the possibility to see how the numbers would've looked if you had done everything differently.. of course, that goes both ways.
There's a lot of luck and a lot of pareto distributions for software development. There is no straightforward relationship between effectiveness and profit like there is for other careers (e.g. sales).
> but it is a sad broken system for a lot of qualified people.
The positions get filled. The candidate who gets the job is also qualified.
There is way to much bias from people who go through these interviews and don’t get hired not because they weren’t competent and not because the system is broken. It’s just simply the case that someone else was better.
Someone who has talent in a way that the incumbent is unfamiliar with is far more likely to be able to demonstrate that talent in a coding test (where the interviewer can't deny that their code works, even if they don't understand it) than in a conversational interview (where the interviewer can easily dismiss anything they don't understand as bullshit).
Very much in the same boat, I've been doing something similar and trying to pursue some long-term lofty objectives without compromising my current work/life situation. Making steady progress on personal projects helps a ton.
this kind of marginal cost-cutting at the expense of medium/long-term productivity is commonplace yet baffling to me. even if it doesn't increase productivity, surely it increases retention to some degree, I just don't get why you wouldn't make a small investment here as an owner/manager.
Surely hardware is such a miniscule cost compared to the bodies using it 8 hours a day.
I have never encountered a carpenter whose boss tried to get them to use the cheapest possible tool (especially the wrong kind of tool) for their job. Why would we be different, other than having bosses unfamiliar with the work they are managing.
