Are the testing numbers real?
So much of what’s happening in finance capitalism right now depends on whether it looks like the pandemic is stopping.
The ruling class has eyes glued on these numbers. The case numbers, death count, number of new cases, etc. determine confidence and sentiment and basically whether things can open back up.
I heard on a finance podcast that traders are calling their home office setups “RonaRigs” with lots of screens, but they get pissed when their internet bugs out and they don’t get up to date numbers.
But the numbers are…not exactly real.
The blue and red lines look pretty similar right? That’s because the reported number of cases is very closely linked to the number of tests.
Only 1% of the US population has been tested, and not randomly. And the tests are actually decreasing! So how do we know things are getting better? It’s not clear.
Cathy O’Neil wrote this great piece listing ten reasons why we should be skeptical of the numbers.
Then we see the number of at home deaths increasing exponentially:
In Middlesex, Massachusetts’s most populous county and home to Cambridge, Somerville and Lowell, officials reported 317 at-home deaths in March. That’s about a 20% increase from the same time period for the past three years, in which deaths ranged from 249 to 265.
But in some ways, the capitalists think about numbers in the mode of production isn’t in terms of reference to reality. It’s much more game theory. It’s about the available information (flawed though it may be), then what other people think about that information.
These capitalists have to think about what other people are thinking about what other people think is happening.
Doug Henwood posted this prophetic quote from John Maynard Keynes:
we have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.
This echo-chambering is called a Keynesian beauty contest. Only in this case, beauty is sickness.
PS. Thanks to Carrie Messner for this helpful point:
Most testing is occuring in people with obvious symptoms- until we are testing more widely- we just don’t quite have the data to make informed decisions. Iceland has very widespread testing- easier to see asymptomaric cases and better estimations of actual fatality rates, etc. Their fatality rate doesn’t necessarily transfer to US population though. More detail about number of US tests administered here.