My wife follows “Wechat” discussions, and tells me that among the Chinese there are a lot of eyebrows being raised about the US decision to eliminate tariffs on medical equipment from China. Needless to say, the US is currently held in pretty low esteem among the Chinese people.
Matthew Rowan, president of the Health Industry Distributors Association, which represents wholesalers supplying physicians’ offices, hospitals and nursing homes, testified that “health-care products are essential to the nation’s pandemic- and emergency-readiness capabilities.”
“The risks to health care and public health from tariffs outweigh any benefit to trade or economics,” he said.
Of course there is almost never any “benefit to trade or economics” from tariffs on imported goods. I hope this epidemic makes people understand that there is only one world, and we are all in it together. (Check out Pierre Lemieux’s post.)
Some will say that this case shows the need to be self-reliant. In fact, the opposite is true. China is rapidly ramping up production of facemasks and other goods, while our manufacturers are simply not capable of doing so as quickly as the Chinese. Of course the first best solution would have been to stockpile supplies of essential equipment, as other countries did. But apparently that’s too much to ask of the country that was ranked best prepared to meet the epidemic.
Here’s a question for commenters who are better informed than I am. Last time I looked, there were over 2000 coronavirus cases in Northern Europe, and only 4 deaths. Is that death rate just due to the fact that they are relatively new cases, and more will eventually die, or is there some other explanation? Perhaps testing is more complete in Northern Europe? I ask because the death rate appears to be an order of magnitude higher in places like France, Spain and Italy (and the US), and for reasons that are not clear to me.
PS. In the past, I’ve argued that taxing Bill Gates at a higher rate effectively transfers money from the world’s poorest people to average Americans. Thus I enjoyed this tweet:
HT: Eliezer Yudkowsky
READER COMMENTS
Liam
Mar 7 2020 at 11:59pm
How many of these people are as philanthropic and enterprising as Bill Gates?
https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires
Also, how about the average Americans that innovate, provide services, and donate money to the world’s poorest people?
Alan Goldhammer
Mar 8 2020 at 9:48am
Scott – what countries are you defining as in ‘Northern Europe?’ The largest outbreak is in Italy (maybe southern central Europe): over 5800 cases with 233 mortalities for a case rate of 3.9% Again, the mortality figure needs to be taken with some caution as the background rate of infection might be much higher as I have not seen the number of tests administered.
Scott Sumner
Mar 8 2020 at 11:59am
North of the Alps, but not including France.
Mark Z
Mar 8 2020 at 10:09pm
My guess would be more extensive testing is why you see lower mortality rates. In China, the survival time of patients that died has generally been about 2-3 weeks after general admission (and 1-2 weeks after ICU admission). This is a fairly small window so death rates shouldn’t lag too much behind detection rates. It’s possible of course that people who ultimately die in more developed countries (no offense, Italy) will tend to hang on longer. As it stands though, the fatality rates in SK (which has the largest ‘n’ next to China) seems pretty stable, and the government seems to think the spread is starting to slow (could be premature celebration of course).
Also, it’s hard to find some country-specific time series graphs, but it seems unlikely that it’s spreading faster in Northern Europe than in Italy.
Scott Sumner
Mar 8 2020 at 11:31pm
Good points, but the big disparity between say Germany and France still seems a bit weird. I wonder if the northern people infected are mostly young people who traveled to Italy.
Niko Davor
Mar 9 2020 at 10:10am
The US and its citizens are held in low esteem by Scott Sumner more so than the Chinese.
Hazel Meade
Mar 9 2020 at 11:25am
On the contrary, criticism of the US means one holds it in high esteem. One expect us to do better.
Phil H
Mar 9 2020 at 8:57pm
I agree with Scott on the tariffs business, but in terms of Trump’s agenda it makes perfect sense. Trump apparently disagrees with having international institutions. He believes that international relations should be a wild west of constant competition. In that state, what incentive is there to do anything other than extract the maximum immediate gains?
Chris
Mar 10 2020 at 5:01pm
The number of people being tested seems to be wildly inconsistent:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/covid-19-testing/
I can’t find an up-to-date source on the current numbers but have.
Comments are closed.