A Master Class in COVID Policy Delusion

The Wall Street Journal has launched a column, Science of Success. It Sucks.

There was a time in another universe and in another geological epoch when I had subscribed to The Wall Street Journal.  There were even times during that same epoch when I had subscribed to The New York Times, The Financial Times, and The Economist.

The New York Times, the self-anointed “paper of record,” always had its obvious, self-important editorial orientation, but it was during the reign of editor Howell Raines (early 2000’s) that that orientation became more passive-aggressive.  The Times would assume an orientation with respect to a given topic and then, as Raines explained, would “flood the zone” with stories crafted to manipulate the reader into adopting that same orientation.  The manipulation was obvious and obviously patronizing.  It was the responsibility of the correct-thinking reader to allow the flaccid twenty-somethings who generated the copy and the feckless forty-something editors who approved the copy to lead one down the one shining path to enlightenment.

Then someone over at The Economist died and every piece subsequently opened with the phrase “Because of climate change” …  Here is a random example:

What of The Wall Street Journal?  …  I don’t know that anyone died, but perhaps everyone had become wearied, fatigued.  Perhaps, the Journal had been grinding through a kind of anemia brought on by grazing on an unassertive, mealy 1990’s neo-con-ism.  Perhaps illuminating the predations of the administrative state is hard to do when that neo-con business is wrapped up in parts of it. 

In any case, the Journal has rolled out a “new column” titled “Science of Success.”  One of its early installments is a paean to Nordic management of the coronavirus phenomenon.  Well, … not to Swedish management (bad) but rather to Norwegian management, which is not merely good but exemplary.  “Norway Was a Pandemic Success,” the headline blares.  And, “Then It Spent Two Years Studying Its Failures.”  Those two years of thoughtful review yielded “a playbook for the rest of the world.”

Right there one can see the three structural features of the essay.  First, the claim, backed up by ersatz evidence, that Norway “succeeded.” The implicit contrast is that other countries failed and could have done better.  The implicit conceit, meanwhile, is that the experts can channel and control viruses. Even so, Norway’s success was incomplete.  It could have been better.  Hence the second point: The experts in Norway had the intellectual humility to look back on their imperfect performance and to identify improvements in their processes.  And, thus, the third point: The Norwegian retrospective yields wisdom about how to deal with such matters as the coronavirus phenomenon.

Oddly, the essay doesn’t relate what that wisdom is, but it does illuminate the evidence of success.  It all comes down to one graph:

 The evidence is that, to date, Norway has suffered fewer fatalities per million attributed to COVID then the other Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Finland and Sweden).  More than that, Norway has suffered far, far fewer fatalities per million than Britain and the United States.

What to make of this?  Five points:

(1)   Counts of COVID fatalities can be very misleading.  Evidence on excess mortality can be illuminating.

Anywhere one looks, the median age of deaths attributed to COVID has exceeded the median age of deaths from plain old death.  COVID has mostly taken away people who were not long for this world.  Harsh, but true.  Even more harsh and genuinely tragic, however, was something like the Spanish Flu. The Flu took away healthy people in their primes.  According to the CDC, the median age of death in the United States attributed to the Spanish Flu was 28.

Now, consider the following graph:

As a measure of performance, excess mortality illuminates quite a different picture. Yes, Sweden had been faring far worse than Finland, Denmark or Norway in the early going, but after COVID had burned through its population, it slowly smoldered in the populations of other countries, including Norway. On top of that, COVID policies may have imposed nontrivial death tolls on the populations of these other countries. Over time, we may find, the performance of all countries may prove to have converged. Performance across countries may not appear very different. Stated differently: performance may prove to have been largely invariant to “non-pharmacological interventions” (COVID policies). Worse, such policies may prove to have induced much harm.

Meanwhile, note that Denmark appears to have performed better than Norway when one examines excess mortality.  So, perhaps, Denmark should write “a playbook for the rest of the world.”

(2)   Only comparing Norway to other Scandinavian countries is silly.

The implicit conceit here is that comparing performance across Scandinavian countries makes sense, because it controls for … Scandinavian-ness.  You know.  All those Scandinavians look alike, live in similar climes, and maintain similar lifestyles.  (Right?)  So, one should be able to map evidence of divergence in performance, by some measure, back to differences in COVID policy.  But, are the performances of Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway really distinguishable as of June 12, 2022?  Note how excess mortality across these countries has converged over time as COVID has burned through each country’s population.  Will performance, as measured by excess mortality continue to converge by the end of 2022?

Meanwhile, why limit comparisons to other Scandinavian countries?  Why not compare performance to African or Asian countries?

Unfortunately, data on excess mortality are not available for almost the whole of Africa, but counts of COVID fatalities are.  And data on excess mortality are available for a host of other countries.  Let’s start with a selection of those data on excess mortality:

If one uses excess mortality as a measure of performance, then one may conclude that Japan, Taiwan, The Faeroe Islands, and Antigua and Barbuda have outperformed Norway.  Perhaps Taiwan should write the definitive “playbook.” Or should we have those descendants of Danes on the Faeroe Islands write it up?

Now let’s compare Norway’s performance against those of a quasi-randomly selected set of African countries using the Journal’s preferred performance metric, COVID deaths per million:

Burundi, one of the poorest countries in the world, clocks in at 3.1 COVID deaths per million whereas Norway clocks in at 610.5.  In other words, Burundi appears to have performed almost 200 times better than Norway.  Should Burundi write the definitive “playbook?”

A wise observer might suggest that, before we compare Norway to Burundi—or Norway to any other country—we should control for important differences between countries.  Like, we should make some accommodation for differences in the age distributions of the populations of each country.  If COVID really does concentrate its toll on people over the age of seventy, then we shouldn’t be satisfied with a straight-up comparison of Burundi to Norway.  Norway, for example, clocks in with a median age of 39.7 years.  Burundi clocks in with a median age of … 17.5.  That might make for big differences in performance … differences that have nothing to do with COVID policies. 

Hmm.  Building on point (2) yields point (3):

(3)   The Journal should endeavor to compare performance across a representative set of countries.

I endeavored to do such a thing myself in a piece titled “Death-by-Expert – a Cross-country Study.” 

Death-by-Expert – a Cross-country Study

The reader does not have to prefer that study to what the Journal did, but I would urge the reader to consider what that study endeavored to do.  It took up various measures of performance and mapped them against differences in policy regimes while endeavoring to control for important differences across countries in a representative sample of countries.  To reiterate, important points include “controls” across countries, and not just any countries.  Not some judiciously selected set of countries, but rather an intendedly “representative sample” of countries.

Indeed, it would be nice to conduct analysis that captures data from all countries.  Why bother with a representative sample when one can look at the universe of countries?  Unfortunately, data reporting across all countries can be irregular and incomplete.  And neither is that incompleteness random.  That’s why, in my own study, I couldn’t really do the analysis I wanted to do: Map performance, as measured by excess mortality, against measures of COVID policy initiatives, while controlling at the very least for differences in the age distributions of populations.  That said, the analysis was able to provide evidence that “non-pharmacological interventions” (NPI’s) yielded no statistically positive effects on performance as measured by case counts or COVID fatalities after one controls for median age.  If anything, the data suggest that NPI’s diminished performance.  The best “playbook” might have been no playbook at all.  Just let the virus burn through the population; don’t make people stay at home where they’re breathing stale air; don’t bar children from socializing with each other in the schools and the playgrounds; and don’t make people breath through those dirty masks.

All of this goes far over the heads of the contributors to the “Science of Success” column at the Journal…  because the contributors to the column did not think to look, and they did not know better to look.  Hence the fourth point:

(4)   The Journal is in the thrall of the conceit that the experts can corral and manage viruses.

See the evidence above.  But, it gets worse:

(5)   The Journal ultimately presents its piece as a morality play.

The virtuous, far-seeing Norwegians have performed well and have demonstrated the capacity to look back on their performance so that they might learn from their mistakes and perform even better going forward.  Not like the United States.

Sophomoric. Disappointing.