Welcome to Plugging the Gap (my email newsletter about Covid-19 and its economics). In case you don’t know me, I’m an economist and professor at the University of Toronto. I have written lots of books including, most recently, on Covid-19. You can follow me on Twitter (@joshgans) or subscribe to this email newsletter here.
A little bit of a light post today. I have to admit that I am struggling to find topics to fill three newsletters a week so, this is just to forecast, that the cadence of these newsletters may start to slow down and become more variable.
Nonetheless, there have been some great pieces written by others about some of the topics I have been looking at here. I thought I’d take the opportunity today to highlight some.
First of all, masks. Tim Taylor takes a look back at what epidemiologists and others were saying about masks back in March. Zeynep Tufecki looks at why mask advice hasn’t changed even though the supply of better masks has. Bottom line: it is time we gave workers better masks.
Second on vaccines. Tim Harford hosts a new podcast series on How to Vaccinate the World. Alex Tabarrok writes about how we could expand the supply of the Pfizer vaccine by 20% (!!!!!) right away by switching out the syringes being used for ones that do not retain part of the dose and are effectively being thrown out.
Third, Emily Oster reviews the evidence on the riskiness of School Reopening. Bottom line: we can probably be more flexible in opening up schools especially for younger kids.
Finally, a couple of pieces on rapid testing. I missed this piece on the different responses to potential outbreaks at Orthodox Jewish Communities in New York and New Jersey. New York went for restrictions on holiday services to little effect. New Jersey negotiated with rabbis about widescale testing which worked, allowed the services and appears to have prevented outbreaks. Meanwhile, Nova Scotia has been using rapid tests for some months now with clinics for anyone to get tested. They are basically at Covid-Zero.
Here is the great minute physics on the value of rapid testing.