RWL #168 - lots of stuff edition
Greetings from the University of New Hampshire - Forward Operating Base Last Homely House (FOB LHH)! We’re hunkered down here. I made it through my first week of teaching online - mostly live lectures through Zoom. Did some discussions with my honors students also through Zoom. It’s weird how quickly I feel like I am adjusting to this new normal. My wife and I just attended a birthday get together with some college friends last night, also over Zoom. That was actually kind of nice because in other circumstances, that probably would not have happened.
Also from the Coronavirus Kitchen here at FOB LHH, I’m sharing chocolate “roses cake” this week. My wife and I took our girls to Rome last summer, and one of the last things we did was go to a cooking class at the home of a local Roman chef. You can check out her facebook page Magic Franchesca’s here. Anyway, her cooking class business has been on hold, so she’s been posting some of her recipes on her Instagram account. The roses cake is basically homemade cinnamon rolls. I like the idea of calling it roses cake - the pan does look like a bundle of roses. Check out her website, and if you’re in Rome, I recommend spending an evening with her. She was brassy and lively - my girls loved her. Here’s her instructions for the roses cake. I made mine with chocolate and pear filling instead of cinnamon and sugar.
I usually limit myself to three links each week, but I’m feeling a little feisty being cooped up, so I’m going to dump a whole bunch on you with my thoughts. I hope you find them useful.
From FOB LHH to yours, stay safe out there!
Read
What: BI, As the coronavirus spreads, Americans have to flatten the misinformation curve too
Why: Misinformation has the ability to spread at an exponential rate, just like a disease, and we need to flatten that curve too:
With so many users seeking and sharing information online, the spread of misinformation about the pandemic can overwhelm social platforms, impede the government's response, and enable bad actors online. Every American must therefore do their part to flatten the misinformation curve.
Worth a quick read. Thanks for the pointer from my Army buddy, Sarah Albrycht, who is currently a fellow at the Center for A New American Security.
What: Detroit Free Press, Henry Ford Health officials confirm letter outlining life and death protocols for COVID-19
Why: This story reports on a draft policy that leaked from the Henry Ford Health system. If they become overwhelmed, triage and rationing of care would go into effect. Specifically:
3. Some patients will be extremely sick and very unlikely to survive their illness even with critical treatment. Treating these patients would take away resources for patients who might survive.
4. Patients who are not eligible for ICU or ventilator care will receive treatment for pain control and comfort measures. Some conditions that are likely to may make you not eligible include:
severe heart, lung, kidney or liver failure
Terminal cancers
Severe trauma or burns
Having spent my career in military medicine, I am used to hearing about triage and rationing of care in mass casualty situations. It’s a bit haunting to think of it being done on a prolonged basis in a civilian context. But this is part of the new reality we have to consider. It’s great to see private sector companies are going gangbusters to produce ventilators and tests. If we can marshall the resources of the American economy, we can get through this. It’s also awesome to see that more than 9,000 retired soldiers with medical backgrounds have responded to the Army’s call for volunteers to return to service to help with the pandemic response. We can do this!
What: Fast Company, See famous logos get reimagined for the coronavirus age
https://www.fastcompany.com/90480780/see-famous-logos-get-reimagined-for-the-coronavirus-age
Why: I know this is basically clickbait, but it’s fun. And as things get scarier with COVID-19, we need to be able to laugh a little in the dark. There are some clever reimaginations here that will resonate with most of us.
What: Mercatus COVID-19 Policy Brief Series, The Case against Bailing Out the Airline Industry
Why: I saw this pointer from John Cochrane’s Grumpy Economist blog. Cochrane says:
Bankruptcy of a large corporation does not leave a crater behind. Bankruptcy is reorganization and protection, not liquidation. The point of bankruptcy is precisely to keep the business going. When a corporation files for bankruptcy, the stockholders are wiped out, bondholders lose a lot and become the new stockholders. The company rewrites a lot of contracts -- union contracts requiring a plane to fly even with empty seats, contracts to buy fuel at high prices, gate leases, and so forth.
Bailouts are bailouts to stockholders, bondholders, creditors, unions. The first three all basically signed up to write insurance, and got a fee for doing so. Bailouts are not bailouts to "the corporation" which isn't a thing. Maybe maybe there was a case in 2008 that big banks were "systemic" and their creditors could not take the losses that they had signed up to take. Not so industrial companies.
Airlines and similar companies are in this mess because they took on way too much debt. If the government does bail out their stockholders and creditors, it makes a lot of sense not to let them take on so much debt again.
He then gives the pointer to the full article from Mercatus. I completely agree with Cochrane. The $2Trillion stimulus bill should give not cash to industrial companies. Just because a firm goes into bankruptcy does not mean that it has to stop operating. This is clearly an issue of capital structure that the firms chose. Ironically, I’ve been teaching capital structure in my finance class this past week, so I’ve been able to use the airlines as evidence of the dangers of financial leverage.
Two trillion dollars. That’s an insane amount of money. Not all of it is going to airlines, but none of it should be. Our federal debt is currently $23.2 trillion. GDP as of the end of 2019 was $21.7 trillion. We now have more than a 100% debt to GDP ratio, which is something of a watershed. Consider that at the beginning of 2008 we had only 63% debt to GDP. Then we had the financial crisis and politicians took advantage of it to spend and never turn off the spending. So now we are at 107% with no end in sight. See this graph I made on FRED https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=qyco The problem with getting deeply in debt for one crisis and never paying it off is when the next crisis comes (which it always does) you don’t have the debt reserves. We’re going to be handing this mess down to our children and grandchildren. When the need resources to combat climate change (one could make the argument that COVID-19 is a product of climate change), there isn’t going to be debt capacity to fund the response.
Watch
What: TEDxSMU, Coronavirus Is Our Future | Alanna Shaikh
Why: Not the typical TED talk. This is a good informational brief. She does tie together some themes such as economic development, climate change, and disease.
Listen
What: Longform Podcast, Charlie Warzel
https://longform.org/posts/longform-podcast-385-charlie-warzel
Why: Charlie Warzel is an opinion writer for the New York Times. An example of his work: Please, Don’t Go Out to Brunch Today https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/opinion/coronavirus-bars-lockdown.html?auth=link-dismiss-google1tap
In this podcast, Warzel talks about being a journalist during a crisis. It’s an interesting conversation.
How “The Media” deals with this crisis is going to be discussed for years. Already we have seen how a free press could have slowed the attack of this disease. If China had a free press, word of the disease and the Communist Party’s initial bungled response would have come out much sooner. And now the most-likely untrue statistics coming out of China now are not giving us a clear picture of how the disease progresses, or what actually works.
I like Longform because I like to listen to writers talk about their craft - and I often find good articles/books from the podcast. There are a lot of other good interviews, but I thought this one was relevant. .
What: Prognosis Daily, What Went Wrong With Testing
Why: The Prognosis Podcast is a Bloomberg product, though they seem to be downplaying the parent brand now that they have moved into daily production in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. This is the first of their daily podcasts, and I think they do a decent, but not hard hitting enough look at how the CDC and FDA got in the way of state, local, and private responses - especially as they slowed down the initial effort to develop testing.
I’ve been a fan of the Prognosis podcast for a while. It has been good quality and wide-ranging on a variety of health policy issues. It seems like they are bunkering down and focusing now on the COVID-19 outbreak for the foreseeable future. Worth checking out if you are an educator or student.
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
Also, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://tinyletter.com/markbonica
See you next Friday!
Mark
Mark J. Bonica, Ph.D., MBA, MS
Assistant Professor
Department of Health Management and Policy
University of New Hampshire
(603) 862-0598
mark.bonica@unh.edu
Health Leader Forge Podcast: http://healthleaderforge.org
'It is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk, that keep the darkness at bay. Simple acts of kindness and love.' - Gandalf (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey)