Spring thoughts

Just a few random thoughts on a spectacular spring day here in God's Own (wine) Country. I promise they're not all about COVID.

Vaccinations....my wife and I had our first Pfizer shots this morning. Booking the two appointments (actually four as we also have dates for the second shots) took eight minutes on the much-criticized Ontario online portal. Delivery of the shots took thirty minutes from the moment we entered the testing site until the moment we left -- and that included the fifteen-minute wait after the injection to make sure we didn't have an immediate anaphylactic reaction. 

I mention this because the Province's COVID response has been viciously slated in the media almost from Day One of the pandemic. It's true that Premier Doug Ford has vacillated about locking things down and been too willing to reopen, with the result that we are now starting our third lockdown. But that hardly makes us unique;  you don't even need the fingers of one hand to count the number of politicians who have really shone in this crisis -- there's Jacinda Ardern and...that's about it.

Ford is getting the gears for the Province's vaccine rollout even though Ontario is actually slightly ahead of the rest of Canada in terms of the proportion of people who have been vaccinated.  Ford is an unlovable oaf who I would never dream of voting for, but in the eyes of most of his vocal critics (led by the Toronto Star), his biggest crime is that he's a Tory. I'm not sure who I think would have done a better job over the past year, but I'm quite sure that the owners and columnists at the Star and elsewhere would not be the first people I would turn to. 

Modelling....I have talked about the COVID modelling from Ontario and the Federal Government here before. Today I saw a tweet from a journalist that began "Models are not projections". This is true, but as I responded to him, as a former business economist I know that models are used to make projections. Economists might relish the insight that models provide into how variables interact, but the people who pay economists aren't interested unless the models generate some actionable information, which means a forecast or projection. 

Canada's tallest free-standing economist John Kenneth Galbraith reportedly once said that economists don't make forecasts because they think they know the future. They do it because someone asks them to -- or, if you were a private sector economist like me, because someone pays them to.

The journalist I am riffing off here is clearly getting comments from readers saying that actual case numbers are lower than the "models" suggested, so this latest lockdown is not needed. We are currently at around 3300 cases per day in Ontario (population of 14.4 million). Back in January the models were predicting 20,000 cases per day, something seized on by both Premier Ford and the all-knowing media. As I wrote at the time, that wasn't a model, it was just an extrapolation of the worst single day's rise in infections in the pandemic to date. That rise was 7 percent, which meant that cases would double every ten days (rule of 72). It doesn't take long at that pace to go from 2000 cases per day (the rate at the time) to 20,000, or even higher.

Projections based on models are only as good as the underlying assumptions. Journalists (most, but not all) are not very good at that kind of subtlety. If you didn't stress the assumptions when the forecasts were first published, you don't really have the right to criticize your readers if they don't understand the numbers later.

Ever Given....all credit to Egypt for freeing the ship that launched a thousand memes in just six days. The vessel is still in the Great Bitter Lake while the government of Egypt negotiates compensation from the owners. Now I don't for a moment begrudge Egypt the right to shake as much money as it can out of this situation, but I must take issue with some of the grounds it is using to bolster the bill.

Egypt makes about $15 million a day from transit fees from vessels transiting the canal. If media reports can be trusted, it is claiming recompense for the loss of that amount as part of the compensation deal. But the money wasn't really lost, was it? All 300 ships held for six days at Port Said or Port Suez have now completed their transit (well, all except the Ever Given), and presumably paid the standard fee for doing so. The payment was delayed, not cancelled -- but as I said, Egypt has every right to get while the getting's good here, as I've no doubt they will.