Monthly Archives

September 2020

Coronavirus

Covid-19 case mortality data from ICE facilities and the knuckleheads thing

September 17, 2020

United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement — the dastardly ICE, for those of you left-scrolling from home — has a surprisingly detailed Covid-19 dashboard (Tab 4). Notwithstanding our obsession with such things, we had not seen it before clicking through a link in an otherwise irrelevant Vox post.

The upshot is that ICE has been testing the heck out of the detainees in its facilities. As of September 11, there are only 20,138 detainees in ICE facilities (down from an average of >50,000 in 2019), and ICE has administered more than 35,000 Covid-19 tests. Recognizing that people cycle through these facilities at varying rates, it is safe to assume that ICE has tested a solid majority of its detainees during the last six months, and possibly the vast majority.

The agency has found 5,810 cases of Covid-19, for a “positivity rate” from testing at an ugly 16.6%. That is the sort of rate that gets journalists screaming at governors, fun banned, and schools firmly virtual.

But only 6 detainees have died of the Covid. That is a case-fatality ratio of… 0.1%. Compare that number to the observed case fatality rates in various countries, which are massively higher. The Covid-19 case fatality rate in ICE detention centers is right in line with the seasonal flu. That made us curious.

There might be several explanations for this. ICE facilities might have excellent health care. Well, maybe, but that would be a narrative-buster of the first order. Indeed, a recent whistleblower has contended that at least one ICE facility has under-reported Covid-19 cases, which would suggest an even lower case-fatality rate than indicated by the dashboard.

Perhaps ICE is under-counting Covid-19 deaths. Again, anything is possible, but the official ICE tally is qualified by a footnote which, again, points the other way: “Detainee deaths” includes detainees who have died after testing positive for COVID-19 while in ICE custody; COVID-19 may not be the official cause of death. That seems like a risk of overcounting, rather than undercounting.

Perhaps ICE detainees are in excellent health in general, and thereby better able to resist disease. The American Medical Association would not agree with that theory, but what do they know? Coastal elite experts, probably.

What about the demographics of the ICE detainee population? Those figures are hard to come by — ICE apparently does not provide them — but an outfit called Freedom for Immigrants came up with data on the age distribution of detainees in 2019 that provides at least a clue:

Through the same link, there seems to be data that says that the median age of people deported from ICE facilities is 30. By comparison, the median age in the United States is about 38. The population in ICE facilities, therefore, is almost certainly significantly younger than the United States in general.

Furthermore, eyeballing that chart above, the ICE facilities seem to have very few people over the age of 70, which represents the preponderance of Covid-19 fatalities in the general US population.

We lack both the inclination and the data crunching skills to line up the ICE fatalities against the US population case fatality rates, and in any case that is a fool’s errand, because (i) we don’t know the ages of the six ICE detainees who have died of Covid-19 to date, and (ii) it is obvious that most ICE detainees have been tested for Covid-19 while perhaps a quarter of Americans have been even now. We can say this, though, looking at the CDC data: As of a couple of days ago, only 1802 Americans under the age of 35 had died of Covid-19, out of 182,095 total dead for whom data had been collected. That’s out of 79,890 deaths from all-causes in the under-35 population of 149,554,018 during the same time.

In other words, if you are under 35 you had a 0.053% chance of dying of anything in the last six months or so, and a 0.0012% chance of dying of Covid-19. Your chances of dying of anything were 44 times your chances of dying of Covid-19.

Under 35ers may be anti-social — there’s a surprise — but they are not knuckleheads, no matter what Phil Murphy says. At least insofar as they have accurately assessed their own risk from Covid-19. From the very legitimate point of view of somebody under the age of 35, the policy and social responses to the pandemic have come at enormous cost in both fun and opportunity for virtually no direct benefit. To the extent that young people are trying to slow the spread of Covid-19 — and a great many of them are — they are sacrificing themselves to save the most vulnerable in our society.

From that perspective, willing or not, today’s young are the new greatest generation, not knuckleheads.

3 Comments
Ugliness

Nikola Corporation, and how not to deal with short sellers

September 11, 2020

The shares of Nikola Corporation (NASDAQ: NKLA), thought to be a Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) killer, shot up a couple of days ago on news that Nikola had cut a deal with General Motors. This was very painful for the many speculators who had sold Nikola stock short.

Yesterday, Hindenberg Research — a simply spectacular name for a short-side research firm — published a scathing and, it must be said, hilarious report with an awesome title: “Nikola: How to Parlay An Ocean of Lies Into a Partnership With the Largest Auto OEM in America.” There’s a lot of great stuff in there, for those of you who enjoy that sort of thing. Nikola’s founder, Trevor Milton, comes in for some, er, arresting allegations. The authors make him sound like the Elizabeth Holmes of his industry, for those of you who chortled over the Theranos saga.

Regardless, Nikola responded this morning with a press release that purports to “refute” Hindenberg’s rather detailed allegations. It actually does no such thing, other than to deny them wholesale and to announce that the company had purchased the services of the big law firm Kirkland & Ellis LLP. Nikola also promises to “bring the actions of the activist short-seller, together with evidence and documentation, to the attention of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.”

Oooh. Hindenberg must be quaking in its Cole Haans.

This is, of course, the worst possible response to a short attack. In addition to activating the Streisand Effect, Nikola and poor Trevor — we refer to these electric car dudes by their first name, apparently — have only persuaded the normal reader that the short claims must be true, or substantially so.

So what should Nikola have done? Well, we have some experience in this realm, including a first response, 25 years ago, along the lines of the Nikola “refutation” and the retention of a scary law firm. Driven as it was by the founder’s ego and our own youth and inexperience, the Nikola approach didn’t work, and it only made the public relations problem worse.

Our advice to companies under short attack consists of the following precepts:

  • Never let them see you sweat, because they will think they are on to something. The company’s line at all times should be “we will prove our value by executing and delivering on our commitments.”
  • Respond to alleged facts with factual responses in an appropriate forum after considered deliberation.
  • Skip the big legal threats. The First Amendment protects analytical research, and short sellers usually write their reports with a smooth sophistication that sustains their 1A defense.
  • The board should consider hiring Big Law not to threaten, but to do an “independent investigation” of the allegations, and promise transparency.
  • Finally, remember that the only people who absolutely must buy your stock some day are short sellers. The smart executive smiles and answers their questions just as if they were supportive longs. Calm execution and confident humility will rattle the shorts back.

Of course, this excellent advice — trust us, we’re right — is not even slightly useful if your company actually is a steaming pile of fraud.

0 Comments
Coronavirus

The Sturgis “super spreader” kerfuffle and what it says about contact tracing

September 9, 2020

Nothing irritates the Covid-era chattering classes more than redneck mask deniers, so you damn well knew that the annual Sturgis motorcycle rally was going to attract Karens in the professoriate like, well, bikers to Sturgis. Faster than seems possible, a German think tank called the IZA Institute of Labor Economics pumped out a 63 page study, which we may read some day, that purports to show that 266,000 cases of Covid-19 stem from that rally. The study looked at anonymized cellphone location data, tracked the Sturgis migration and subsequent diaspora, and then calculated excess cases in the parts of the country to which the bikers dispersed. The study also estimates that all those Sturgis cases will end up costing more than $12 billion to clean up.

Here’s the more accessible write-up from The Hill for those of you who are as disinclined to read 63 pages as we are.

We have our doubts about cellphone location data studies — the University of Texas epidemiologists have been relying on such data for their own projections, which have been systematically overstated — but that is not the point of this post. Rather, we were riveted by this tidbit:

Health officials have linked at least one death to the rally: a male biker in his 60s with underlying conditions. At least 260 cases in 11 states have been officially connected to the rally by government officials.

Wait, what? Our many thousands of contact tracers have found a grand total of 260 cases, notwithstanding the headlined projection of 266,000 cases?

We respectfully suggest that either the IZA Institute of Labor Economics cellphone study is wildly wrong — by three orders of magnitude, seemingly — or our many thousands of contact tracers are a complete waste of time and money.

If you can think of a third explanation, please suggest it in the comments.

6 Comments
Austin controversies Coronavirus

Modeling panic in Austin

September 1, 2020

We do not have the data science skills to answer a question that troubles us, to wit the extent to which epidemiological models have over-estimated risk of Covid-19 and thereby influenced suppressionist responses from politicians. We can, however, peek at a couple of proximate examples and ask a few questions.

In Austin, the celebrated University of Texas epidemiologists have effectively driven the local policy response to the pandemic, because what politician in this town can say “I don’t believe everything UT scientists say?” Not gonna happen, no way, no how. We do not always, or even frequently, agree with Austin’s Mayor Steve Adler, but our unqualified commitment to intellectual honesty compels us to feel his pain. In this “we believe science and definitely Hook ’em” town, Adler’s got to do what the UT epidemiologists recommend whether or not he privately worries that they might be wrong.

The main page for the UT projections is here. Anybody can scroll around and look at current projections for cases, hospitalizations, and deaths from Covid-19 over time. There also seems to be the archived data necessary to see past projections, but that requires the aforementioned data science skills we do not have in our otherwise vast armamentarium.

We do, however, have a few examples of historical predictions that make us worry that the UT disease forecasters have pushed Mayor Adler and Texas Governor Abbott toward pandemic response policies that were and are more restrictive than necessary or healthy.

On March 24 the team at UT presented this report to the Austin City Council and other learned local officials. On page four one finds a summary of the forecast for the key metrics we were all worried about in late March lined up with the policy response:

The “Austin-Round Rock MCA” includes Travis, Williamson, Hays, Caldwell, and Bastrop counties in central Texas. As of August 17, the aggregate deaths attributed to Covid-19 in those counties over five months was 581 (link) out of a population of roughly 2.2 million (for those of you keeping track at home, that is roughly 9 days of all-cause deaths for a typical US population of 2.2 million). Given that the death estimates in the bottom row of the table above are median projections at various levels of social distancing since March 23, one might conclude that the five counties in question have done a rather extraordinary job of social distancing, having reduced aggregate human interaction by between 75% and 90%.

Then again, one might be an idiot.

We do not believe that outside of a few highly compliant affluent neighborhoods in Austin itself the regional population has reduced its interaction by anything close to 75%, much less 90%, in the last five months. Any late-spring tour of Williamson County (“Wilco” is the second largest in the metro area with more than 500,000 residents) revealed virtually no mask game until the mandate and very little regard for the hazards of the disease or the case counts over which the media obsess. This is not just our impression, but the observation of our astute scientist daughter, who lives in Wilco and has been known to vent to her father on the topic.

Then there is Austin proper. Beginning in late May and for weeks thereafter, Austin hosted massive public demonstrations, which were masked up but not much distanced and naturally flowed in to the reopened bars. Grabbing a few beers after screaming at cops in 95 degrees is, actually, completely understandable and predictable. We were there. We saw no end of cute young people with neo-Marxist signs and colorful hair packing in to our favorite craft breweries after (actually) mostly peaceful demonstrations.

And never mind the insouciant youth in the parks. Egads.

Yet we are to believe that Austin and its environs have been 75-90% socially distant?

Not a chance on God’s green earth.

Now, you might say we should cut the UT team a break, insofar as nobody knew much about SARS-CoV-2 in the third week of March. Fair enough. So how has the UT team done more recently?

On August 10, we captured UT’s death projections for the State of Texas on August 31.

As of August 10, the UT epidemiologists projected that 23,460 Texans will have died from Covid-19 by August 31, within a range of 20,665 to 26,726.

Oops.

To be completely fair, the actual August 31 number will probably rise by 100-200 as the death certificates for the last few days trickle in, but UT still will have overshot its three week forecast for Texas by 80%.

What about more recently? We also grabbed an August 18 screenshot.

Once the UT team got within a two week window, they did hit the forecast range. Giving them full credit for late death certificates they hoisted their chin above “Min Projected” 12,602 deaths. We cannot resist noting, however, that the UT scientists gave themselves a massive 64% difference between that the high end of their range (20,672) and the low end (12,602) a mere 13 days out. Plenty of us dashboard doomscrollers could have hit the side of that barn without all that UT computing power.

Believe science, indeed.

Now, notwithstanding the fun we have had with this post, the serious point is not to castigate these epidemiologists or epidemiologists in general. No doubt they are working hard to improve their forecasts, and indeed they are contributing importantly to the policy debate. However, the demands from the media and the political left to “believe science” ought not actually mean “believe models.” Because many models, including the models much relied upon to inform pandemic response policies, are wildly wrong even when developed by the actual best people.

Models of anything, unleavened with judgment forged in honest and open debate, are not “science” at all. Unfortunately, we have of late had very little honest and open debate, and that is a huge problem.

10 Comments