Turned Off by Trade-Offs
I’ve come to the realization that everything in life involves some sort of trade-off. For example, I’m currently experiencing a trade-off between my dignity and the decision to marathon Gossip Girl for the third time in 2020 alone. You can imagine what I chose. In my defense, I could have opted to talk about my deep dive into risk aversion back in MBA investments class, but I thought I’d spare you the gory details.
On Saturday night, I took a metaphorical trip to Seattle to view the projections carefully drawn out by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Now of course, said projections are circulating all around the Twitterverse. At that time, I’d only heard about the site from my mom, an expert in cybersecurity.
What this site offers is the ability to see each U.S. state’s projections for daily deaths and hospital resource usage. As a country at large, we are nine days away from peak resource usage and ten days away from the peak of daily deaths. This, of course, is an average flanked on either side by states ahead of their peaks and states with weeks left to go. On Saturday, Louisiana was to peak on April 6th, four days from then. However, when I checked the data again this morning, the peak date had shifted to April 1st - a date in the past. On the flip side, Texas, where many of my family lives, is not set to peak until May 3rd.
What’s the trade-off here? States like Louisiana, hit hard by the onset of the virus, were not equipped to deal with the massive amount of cases per capita that flooded in with little warning. However, what resulted from this situation was a steep and narrow curve. Texas’s cases may be more spread out, resulting in less of a resource crisis. However, Texas will also be slower to see a return to normal operations given its far-off peak date, provided that those in the states past-peak continue to social distance. Notice I am making no comparison between these states’ respective death tolls - merely the time frame in which cases have occurred and resources spent.
New York and Louisiana are both on lockdown until April 30th, a date more than two weeks from IHME’s peak projections. This could play out in a gradual resumption of operations for these states at the beginning of May. If this is case, we may see a slight resurgence in cases as our reintegration into society attempts to create herd immunity. Therein lies yet another trade-off between eradicating the virus as effectively and permanently as possible and saving our economy - now hanging by a thread.
You’re all probably thinking this, but I’ll be the one to say it: How can we trust the accuracy of these projections? We can’t fully. Plus, the new forecasts released in Louisiana’s favor are based on weekend data, which as Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards said in his live update today, “is sometimes not as clear as what you get during the week.”
When I saw that Louisiana might be past its peak, I couldn’t help but get exhilarated. Images of my favorite New Orleans bars fluttered through my head and I had to quickly stop myself from beginning to mentally pack for my next trip to New York. This may be good news, but there are still a large amount of people in grave danger. And if we can trust this data, we aren’t even necessarily near to recovery - only past halfway. Edwards explained, “The data points we’ve been are only going to be a trend if we continue social distancing. It’s not the time to lax up - we need more compliance and not less.” It will be a critical week for Louisiana, but the statement applies to all states approaching their peaks as we shake off the understandable temptation to emerge.
What trade-offs are you facing in your lives right now? Perhaps scrolling through IHME’s platform will spark in you your own musings. And if so, feel free as always to share them with me on Twitter at @dikayodata or via email at dikayo@dikayodata.com to keep the conversation going.
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