Some miscellaneous coronavirus reading

Three things I read recently which piqued my interest:

1.  We're being graded.  From the Chicago Tribune:

Residents of Chicago and the surrounding Cook County suburbs are now getting a D in social distancing from a New York City data firm that’s been grading the country on compliance with stay-at-home orders.

That’s a significant drop from late March, when the area got an A, but the difference is more about revisions to the grading system than a huge change in behavior. Unacast, the firm drawing the measurements from a sampling of cellphone data, toughened its criteria based on input from public health experts ...

Unacast decided to start measuring counties and states against what happened in Italy during the height of that country’s lockdown ...

Unacast is giving out A’s only to areas in the U.S. where travel has been curtailed by more than 70%. In Italy, travel dropped by between 70% and 80% during its lockdown.

Over recent weeks, Cook County travel reductions measured in the 25% to 40% range, as measured against the amount of travel that was occurring before Pritzker’s order. That earns a D under the new, tougher grading scale. Illinois earned the same grade ...

New York and San Francisco, by contrast, saw travel reductions of 55% to 70%, which earned those cities a B. Los Angeles earned a D, as did Michigan’s Wayne County, where Detroit is located.

2.  We can test more.  Whereas a month ago, the unavailability of coronavirus tests was one of the most urgent problems in the crisis, today the script seems to have flipped, and some states have unused testing capacity. From National Review's News Editor Roundup newsletter:

 “We now have more testing capacity than New Yorkers are using,” New York governor Andrew Cuomo wrote on Twitter on Sunday. “We need to use our full testing capacity as we reopen. If you have COVID symptoms or have been in contact with someone with COVID — get a test.” The same dynamic persists in California, which has the capacity to test 100,000 people per day but is averaging roughly 40,000 tests daily. Public health experts speculated in comments to the Washington Post that people with mild symptoms have proven unwilling to get tested because they are still heeding the weeks-old advice of public health officials who stressed the importance of saving all available tests for frontline workers and those with severe symptoms ...
Harvard researchers have estimated that the U.S. must test around 900,000 people daily, or roughly eight percent of the population per month, to safely reopen. But the country is currently testing just 330,000 people daily, according to the Covid Tracking Project. 

Now that apparently there is excess testing capacity, I'd like to see more states actively reaching out and testing random samples of residents, whether or not they are symptomatic; this would seem to be the best way to baseline how widespread the virus actually is.

3.  The Remotes against the Exposed.  In an astute bit of distinction-drawing, Bret Stephens in the New York Times groups us into the haves, whom he calls the the Remotes, and the have-nots, whom be dubs the Exposed:

A recent study by Jonathan Dingel and Brent Neiman of the University of Chicago found that 37 percent of jobs in the U.S. can be performed from home. The Remote are, disproportionately, knowledge workers, mostly well educated, generally well paid. Their professional networks, and many of their personal ones, too, are with people who also work remotely.
That leaves the other roughly two-thirds. Call them “Exposed.” They include everyone — shop owner, waiter, cabdriver, sales associate, factory worker, nanny, flight attendant, and so on — for whom physical presence is a job requirement. They are, typically, less well educated, less well paid.
For the Remote, the lockdowns of the past two months have been stressful. For the Exposed, they have been catastrophic. For the Remote, another few weeks of lockdown is an irritant. For the Exposed, whose jobs are disappearing by the millions every week, it is a terror. For the Remote, Covid-19 is the grave new risk. For the exposed, it’s one of several. For the Remote, an image on the news of cars forming long lines at food banks is disconcerting. For the Exposed, that image is — or may very soon be — the rear bumper in front of you.

I am one of the Remotes.  I would say that "irritant" understates some of the pain of the shutdown so far - the loss of mass and the sacraments is more than a minor irritant - but on the whole, it's not entirely off-base, either.  My wife and I are still employed, and my family is keeping our lives in flight from our home base.  We wish things were more open, but we'll be okay.  It's salutary to be reminded that we have it much, much better than many others.  We should be giving thanks every day.