CoViD-19 Michigan Spring '20

The corona virus SARS-CoV-2 has been spreading here seriously now since the begin of March. Without discussing how this pandemic affects the USA and what measures are being taken to reduce its impact, I just follow the daily postings of the total number of confirmed infections and the daily additions of new cases in Michigan. The data are displayed in a semilogarithmic plot where an exponential change with time appears as a straight line, both increasing or decreasing. From the slope of this line the infection rate can be calculated in terms of the time it would take to double the number of infections, the doubling time, if the infection mechanism doesn't change. For daily new cases the numbers can also become smaller than the previous day so that a "halfing time" can be calculated that describes how fast the pandemic subsides. 

The cumulative number of covid-19 cases, and the daily additions, are plotted in this graph. 

Confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Michigan after Monday, 4/9/20. (Last data point from Monday, 7/6/20.) Blue circles are for cumulative numbers with the vertical scale on the left; orange triangles represent the daily cases added (omitting values for the first seven days) for which the scale on the right applies. The four regimes in which the cumulative cases increase exponentially are identified with least-square-fitted lines. They are described by exponential growth rates of 0.444, 0.257, 0.0297, and .00876 per day.  The daily new cases increase initially also exponentially (day 10 to 25) with a rate of 0.157/d.  Between days 21 and 28, the new cases begin to decrease with an exponential decay rate of  –0.0326 per day; the least-squares fitted line is calculated from the new cases of days 23 to 65. Between days 63 and 70 a change in the spreading rate occurs described by a faster decline of –0.0500 per day. After day 98 the number of daily new cases increases again at an exponential rate of 0.0378 per day.                                         Data from: https://www.michigan.gov/coronavirus/

The table shows the data for the least-squares fits of the slopes. The doubling or halfing times are calculated from the slopes of the linear least square fits to the natural logarithms of the cases as a function of the time in days from ln(2)/slope; a negative number indicates the time to reach half the number of cases.  

The growth regime over which the cumulative number of cases increases exponentially with a constant growth rate reflects a particular mode of interaction of the people who get infected, and the way testing procedures reach the infected persons. The initial growth rate corresponds to a doubling time of cases of only 1.6 days. The transition between regimes 1 and 2 occurred rather abruptly around day 13, continuing with a doubling time of 2.7 days. Between regimes 2 and 3 the doubling time improves substantially; the transition appears to follow a quadratic function in the semilog plot as indicated by the fitting curve labeled "quadr.fit" in the graph, covering the range of ~17 ... ~33 days. During this period, the daily decay rates, over a 3–day running average, appeared to decrease linearly (correlation factor 0.975) giving rise to the curvature.  The regime 3 which then follows this transition increases somewhat linearly again (in the semi-log plot) but with substantially lower rate of 0.0297 per day, more than a factor of 8 lower and equivalent to a doubling time of 23 days. The fourth regime continues this levelling off for cumulative cases with a doubling time of 79 days and more beyond day 80. This is more clearly seen by looking at the table's "new cases" rows which show a transition between halfing times from (-)21 to (-)14 days. This improvement is indicative of a change in the interaction patterns of Michiganders. However, after the strict 'stay–at–home' rule was lifted with day 84 (6/1/20) a flattening of the decrease is observed, followed by an exponential increase in new cases with a doubling time of 18 days, see fit regime lsqft-d-3 row. The delay time between cause and effect is roughly two weeks. 

It is interesting to speculate what kind of change in the social interactions of Michigan's population gave rise to such a change-over characteristic, particularly in light of the observation that after day 30 the new rate appears to be somewhat constant again for about 3 weeks. Of course, the restrictions on assembling, working, and leaving the house, issued by Governor Whitmer around that time, initiated the change over. The effect appeared to set in after day 16 and took a little less than two weeks to get to a clear exponential decline in new cases. This is similar to the delay time after lifting some of the restrictions after day 84 so this may be characteristic of the spreading mechanism and the behavior patterns of people in their understanding of the measures implemented. 

The Presidential Election

Until the Indiana primary two days ago I saw a fair chance for the GOP traditional candidates to keep sufficiently up with Trump so that the candidacy could be decided at the GOP's National Convention in Cleveland in a couple of months. But then Cruz had such a weak showing that he decided to get out of the race. That move prompted the third candidate, Kasich, to give up as well, leaving Trump the only contender and thus the obvious choice for the official GOP nominee.

This dramatic development occurred despite the fact that Cruz had already—and in hindsight prematurely—announced his running mate, Fiorina. When he did that I thought this was tactically a smart move: it gives the voters a clear(er) picture of the political orientation to expect from him so the right wing GOP voters would lift him up a bit more ... It didn't work, possibly for the very same reason; perhaps also because strategically it wasn't a smart move to make this choice without knowing who his Democratic opponent would be (although it is somewhat predictable).

Another noteworthy development came the next day, Thursday, when House Speaker Paul Ryan announced that he would not support Trump as the presidential candidate. Does this mean that even if Trump collects more than the minimal number of delegates for his nomination that the National Convention will propose a counter candidate and vote Trump out? In view of the fact that both former presidents Bush have also voiced their non-support for Trump this is becoming likely.

But in this case, how will the GOP voters feel who voted for Trump in the primaries? Will they be disgusted by the GOP's internal inconsistency and support the Democratic candidate? ... who most likely will be H. Clinton. And now GOP leaders are saying that the voters should unite behind their leadership again and

This whole disorder may develop into an unexpected result: not only will the next president be a Democrat again but also Congress will have a Democratic majority in the House and the Senate.

April 20, 2017 — I am back from Germany since end of February, and now back from Philadelphia since last week. Looking at the thoughts from before the election now, it's clear that my usual optimism was totally misplaced. There is no need for further analysis; we've got to live through it and at most hope for a change after the mid-term elections.

It is October 2017 now, and most things Trump promised to achieve did not happen – partly because so far he didn't even attempt to go about it but also because the GOP and Congress couldn't get the votes together.  In particular this was the case with the repeal of Obama's ACA (aka Obamacare) where some GOP senators felt the consequences of the proposed new health care act did too much damage while others felt it didn't go far enough ... (How laughable is that?)

And not only most of the world leaders but also the American people have come to the conclusion that Trump doesn't know what he is doing, that he cannot express himself adequately when he addresses topics in public that require presidential comments.  The latest example is his visit to Puerto Rico after hurricane Maria had devastated that island, and where he went two weeks after the event and had only trivialities to say and added insults to the victims, including the mayor who had asked for help, pointing out that people were dying because of federal inactivity or delays.  In short, Trump can't rise to the occasions, clowns around with his hyped promises and statements, and neglects his presidential duties.

Not that we should get rid of him – any talk about impeachment (for instance for unsuitability for the office) has subsided; i think we should keep him because that does the least harm to the society.  The GOP members in Congress think perhaps the same, and in addition the current status allows them to get some of their agenda done ... behind the scene.  There is a mid-term electing coming up in 2018 where the GOP will have (I hope) a tough time.

Obamacare

Since the beginning of this month, the government has been partially shut down due to the intransigence of the Republican Party which controls the House of Representatives.  This appears to be specifically aimed at forcing the abolishment of the Available Care Act which provides health care to a large fraction of the uninsured in the USA.

In another week, an additional impasse will become an acute problem: The debt ceiling will have to be raised in order to for the government to keep borrowing money and serve its financial obligations, and the GOP will probably prevent it, essentially forcing the US economy to declare bankruptcy.

Excellent analyses on this state of affairs are published—I read some in the liberal press—so I won't duplicate any of this.  One should point out, however, that two aspects are not enough emphasized:
(i) the actions of the right-wing section of the GOP, i.e. the Tea Party members, appear to be motivated by racism because President Obama is black—that's enough to be against healthcare ... ;
(ii) the Tea Party (and many others in the GOP) lack a basic understanding of the way the economy works, deriving their financial and economic programs from the requirements a standard household has to comply with, that is, the expenses cannot exceed the amount of money that comes in on a monthly basis by way of a paycheck—here they overlook fact that obtaining money by going into debt the economy and the government create more value than the debt amounts to.

On the second point one can say that the factual statement is correct: One cannot spend more money than one has.  The problem is that there are situations when this statement does not apply.  

Well, on the last day before the deadline a compromise appears to be emerging.  There is a small concession on eligibility testing with Obamacare by requiring income verification (this was probably an oversight in the first place), and now the government shutdown is nearing its end ... and the debt ceiling will be raised, at least until early next year.

Here is another look at the deficient reasoning encountered with the conservative mindset which I found from a facebook contribution. The article is by Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and discusses the reason why the government got shut down.  The factual statements are all correct.  The problem is that they don't apply to the current situation, in this case also because the value of Obamacare, or the ACA, for the general population as well as the fact that a majority of the (voting) population wants it lifts the discussion onto a different niveau on which those simple facts become irrelevant and different goals and ways to achieve them need to be considered.

Election politics

Well, this is Wednesday morning after the 2012 election -- and President Obama was re-elected for a second term.  It appears that sufficiently many voters have had sense enough to reject the Romney-Ryan ticket.  (And it worked despite efforts to thwart the voting process by deploying malfunctioning voting machines in several voting stations, as was reported occasionally.)

So what is below is only of historical interest ... maybe with some suggestions for changing the voting system here.

The Romney-Ryan ticket came out with some data saying that "Nearly half of all publicly held debt is held by foreign countries, led by China. When countries that don’t have our best interests at heart own this much of our debt, our independence is threatened." 

The "debt held by public" numbers increased from 1970 from 0.28 tr$ to 2.4 tr$ in 1990 and reaching 11.1 tr$ mid-year 2012.  It is interesting that starting with Nixon in 1969, Reps had 7 four-year periods and Dems so far only 4 in office, and Clinton ended with a budget surplus.  What does that tell us about reckless spending?

There is another thing, unrelated to this but equally indicative of misdirection, that strikes me as curious:  In the proposal to change Medicare and Social Security benefits, Romney states that the excellent system he will implement as president will not be applied to seniors above the age of 55 -- so that no one who is already, or soon going to be, using the current system will have to change.
Well, why not?  If it's so much better, then especially those people who are using it should be the first to benefit from the better system ... Why deprive them of the advantages of the voucher system under which public health would improve?  Can we get any specifics on that -- perhaps tonight at the first presidential debate.

Well, that debate was sort of a flop for the Dems. The vice-presidential debate was much better, and the second and third debate clearly showed that Obama is the superior person one would like to have as president. His reposte to Romney's suggestion that the state of our Navy had declined since there are now fewer ships than there were in 1916 has become a classic: "We also have fewer horses and bayonets. ..." (I paraphrase - it's on the interent) and went on to explain that there are airplane carriers where planes can start and land, and there are submarines -- it was a beautiful moment.

And then there came Sandy, the hurricane that was downgraded to a huge tropical storm(more than 1000 miles in diameter) by the time it made landfall on the New Jersey shore. She put nearly 10 million households in the dark and later flooded Manhattan with seawater 4.2 m above normal. The best effect was that for the first time after such a disaster commentators and analysts on radio and tv talked about the neglected infrastructure of the country: Why can a storm cut so many power lines? - Why did the emergency power generators malfunction? And for the first time the USA was compared to a a third-world country that is helpless after a natural catastrophe.

Then Mayor Bloomberg from NYC declared himself a supporter of Obama because he now feels the current president can handle the effects of global warming, man-made or other, better than Romney. The unspoken thought behind it was, of course, that the majority of Republicans and their 'leaders' do not think that (i) global warming is really happening, and (ii) if it does, it's certainly not man-made, and even if there were some effect there, it is really (iii) not related to the burning of fossil fuel and the generation of carbon monoxide. The rest of the world is sadly amused.

What the world thinks though about which US leader it would prefer to deal with in the next four years has been dug up by a poll conducted by BBC World News in 21 countries: Only in Pakistan more people would like to see Romney than Obama as the next president. The link is to one of NPR's blogs where the results and source information is available. Here is one salient result:

Typically, Poland gives Romney the second most points, directly behind Kenya.  

The economy

With the Republican candidate for president of the United States of America, Mitt Romney, and his running mate, Paul Ryan, the candidate for vice president officially announced in late August, and the elections coming closer—6 November 2012—the possible consequences of a Republican takeover of the government appear to be more and more detrimental, even dangerous for life and prosperity. One reason for this dire outlook is the general misunderstanding of the free-market economy that the Romney–Ryan team displays.

This misunderstanding is on a level with the Republican mantra of reducing taxes for corporations, and also for the rich, in order to create jobs and to stimulate the economy. It has been widely shown that this doesn't work anymore when taxes are already low compared with other industrial countries. There is another angle to this: the extremely high salaries and bonuses chief executives of companies are paid, increasing the gap between common employees and executives ever more. 

There are several examples why CEOs are not doing their jobs here despite the extraordinary remunerations they receive. One is the comparison of effort by the work force to generate a country's GDP. In the US, employees work longer hours, have fewer holidays each year, and much less vacation days for comparable seniority than, for instance, in  Europe.  France has a 35-hour work week,  Germany about twenty holidays per year. Vacation is 5 weeks per year, at full pay; this is a legally required minimum, not set by individual companies. Yet the economic efficiency in Europe is higher than in the US. Obviously, those highly paid managers here are not doing their job in optimizing the work force efficiency even though the pay gap between management and work force is about a factor of 20 in Europe while in the US it is about a factor of 350.  

The high pay scale prevalent in in the U.S. appears to be a consequence of an escalating effort by companies to retain their top executives, as was discussed by Gretchen Morgensohn in an article that appeared in The New York Times on 23 September 2012 in the Sunday Business section on page 1.

One can well imagine that the exorbitant amount of money a top executive takes home every month provides a small incentive to make long-term decisions that are beneficial for the company, or consider any far reaching projects at all, since their need to maintain a steady income after a few years of work is essentially nil and their personal retirement package usually in excellent shape. Therefore, the drive for innovations to improve efficiency of open new markets with attractive products is low and the executive mentality is complacent.

My conclusion is that American top managers are just incapable of organizing the manufacturing and service industries in the US in an effective way so that the gross domestic product is generated efficiently. One contributing factor which is widely ignored is the level of benefits the work force enjoys; good mental and physical health combined with an attractive work–life balance would by itself improve morale substantially and increase output.

In Morgenson's article another factor is discussed that is seen as a cause behind the inflated salaries of top manageres: Peer-group benchmarking of executives' compensation.  This applies to hiring managers away from companies with attractive financial offers in the assumption that those managers can improve the performance of a company in their new jobs. However, studies cited by Morgenson have shown that this "theory of transferability of talent" in the peer group is false. (See the work published by Charles M. Elson and Craig K. Ferrere.) It was found that "CEO skills are very firm-specific. CEOs don't mover often, but when they do, they're flops."

In any case, the economic health, jobs and unemployment along with GDP, appears to be bad not because the President doesn't create jobs (is this really part of the job description, as Republican candidates for this job claim ... despite their insistence that government interference in public and economic endeavors needs to be reduced?) but because management is ineffective, and even incapable, unsuitable for the task. Along with the dire state into which our educational system has manoeuvered itself—so that in the long run there is no supply of a capable and well–trained work force—all this spells doom for the economy of the USA.  We will sink to the level of a third–world country during this century.

Radical politics

Seeing the field of the GOP's presidential candidates evolve—or rather disintegrate, as it were—with several of the remaining ones proposing wild and seemingly simple plans of reducing the deficit or balancing the budget or reducing the federal government and its effect on people's lives, whatever the daily fad turns out to be, one cannot help but thinking about likewise desperate measures to demonstrate convincingly that those plans not only will not work but will ruin the country, set back the US in the sciences, advanced technologies, the economy, in personal health, and as a society, to name just the most visible aspects.

So what could be done? What is the problem with these proposals?  It is, of course, that all these ideas and measures touted as remedy for perceived ills in our nation are based on theoretical models of usually narrowly defined parts of society, or commerce, or economy, or finances, etc.  That is, of course, a general problem with theory:  It is hard predict what the outcome would exactly be, and difficult to make an estimate of the "unintended consequences" in other areas affected by the model.

There is, however, a general solution for deciding whether a theoretical model of reality is correct or wrong, a solution which has long been established in the sciences, in particular in physics. That solution is to do an experiment.  But how could this method be practically transferred from the sciences to politics, in this particular case, in this situation in which we currently find ourselves in the USA?  Well, it is actually quite obvious: Let's elect Santorum or Gingrich or Paul president and also make sure that the GOP has the majority in both houses of Congress. Then let's all support the motions for laws and acts and other political tools that the Republican Party puts on the table by not raising any rational objections, by resisting the urge to point out fallacies in their thinking or to extrapolate the effect of certain measures beyond a year or two.

The more support the whole nation gives the GOP the faster and more deeply the implemented measures will take effect. It can be hoped that before the second term of the new president comes to an end, so many people in our nation will be in so dire straits, demonstrably caused by the new policies that were implemented, that there will be either a revolution by the deprived masses that overthrows the GOP's government or at least a populist consensus on the reasons nothing in the society works anymore and a new political paradigm would have to be installed under which one could have a real democracy here as originally intended.

That means politicians will be completely independent from any interest groups, would have a proven capability to collaborate, would be well educated in the specific area of expertise they represent in the gremiums that propose laws (so that such gaffes as happened with accepting the fact of global warming and consequent climate changes would not take so long that affordable countermeasures would be coming too late).  Another desirable feature of the new politics would be a third party that could balance the political spectrum and represent the interests of the people rather than that of the establishment or of the backward religious right and that would not be afraid to look around in the world to find out how other countries with a much higher level of education, science, health, and societal structure are running their affairs.

Financial parallels

Considering the financial crises of the past years, it would seem that the collapse of banks, most notably that of Lehman Brothers, was also caused by a failure to understand or predict what consequences it would have if everyone worldwide did what a few "financial geniuses" had devised as novel tools for making money, namely derivatives.  Derivatives, like short selling, works well for a few who do it under the assumption that the financial markets follow their established habits of selling and buying stocks or bonds or, in particular, loans.  However, if everyone is doing that at the same time, there is no tangible value left in the objects of trade, and the market collapses.

In a way, this is the analogon of each country trying to maintain a positive trade balance -- at least one country has to collapse then, as discussed in the previous post.

It would appear that in a global market with a sufficiently short reaction time constant (as compared to local effects) or in anything global that involves some exchange of items such as money, goods, or ideas, the assumption of a predictable behavior is fallacious.  Like in congested car traffic on highways, new phenomena emerge that are fundamentally different from horse carriage traffic.  New rules needed to be established to govern road traffic, and new effects like traffic jams in the absence of road obstacles were observed.

The state of current affairs calls for the development of a systems theory that describes the new phenomena we have recently witnessed.  It looks as if those trained in traditional economics cannot deliver on this.  In view of the fact that the new financial tools that caused the recent collapse of global finance was to a large part developed by physicists, it might as well come from that community of scientific minds already used to developing complex models of intricate naturally occurring systems.