YouSaid · the spoken record

Glen Weyl

lines on the record: 75
first: 2020-04-29
most recent: 2020-04-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I don't think so because I think that, first of all, we will not make that available. The immunity certificates or these ones that you're talking about, the frequent negative tests, until we've already managed to really control the disease enough that we feel comfortable for people going back into most public amenities just based on the fact that we're tracing down most of the disease. So really the only reasonable purpose of those types of things, either immunity or frequent negative tests, would be for jobs in extremely sensitive professions where you're close to people who are in a very vulnerable part of the population.”
2020-04-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Glen Weyl on Fighting COVID-19 and the Role of the Academic Expert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For both of those cases, so both for immunity and for if someone takes frequent tests, we don't think people should have the right to do that until we have enough tests to do the more basic regime for the whole population. But eventually, we would like to make them available through a more standard price mechanism like you're describing. And then especially in essential sectors, I expect, yes, there would be a certification process like you're describing for people who are either known to be immune or for people who get frequent enough negative tests.”
2020-04-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Glen Weyl on Fighting COVID-19 and the Role of the Academic Expert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, we believe that taking the test frequently enough, and I don't think once a week is enough, it should probably be twice a week, that that should give you an equal status to someone who's been shown immune.”
2020-04-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Glen Weyl on Fighting COVID-19 and the Role of the Academic Expert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's fair. I mean, I think the Pandemic Testing Board should have some authority to set guidance about that. And my guess is under standard common law approaches that there would be a fair bit of deference to that by most reasonable courts. I can't say that that would happen everywhere, but that would be my guess.”
2020-04-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Glen Weyl on Fighting COVID-19 and the Role of the Academic Expert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think that they should have a negligence requirement to use the best tests available, but I don't think that they should have a strict liability requirement that if anything goes wrong, it's their fault.”
2020-04-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Glen Weyl on Fighting COVID-19 and the Role of the Academic Expert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think it's going to be many different things with many different roles. But if you're talking about the pandemic testing board that would be the coordinating body, it could be a national form or it could be an interstate compact. But I prefer it to be an interstate compact, in which case it would be consortium of governors who would be the final authority, but they would appoint the pandemic testing board, which I think would be mostly staffed by retired generals and business leaders, as well as probably someone representing labor and so forth.”
2020-04-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Glen Weyl on Fighting COVID-19 and the Role of the Academic Expert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somewhere on the order of a few hundred thousand, precisely how many depends really on how quickly you want to follow up on the cases, because you can have one person on each case or you can have multiple. But somewhere in that range. And by the way, the Australian government managed to train 20,000 people in a week who had been laid off from Qantas. So we definitely have examples around the world of this being done. And I'm hopeful that we can replicate this in the US, even accounting in rural East Texas has managed to do this quite rapidly as well as the state of Massachusetts. So we already have some success on that.”
2020-04-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Glen Weyl on Fighting COVID-19 and the Role of the Academic Expert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think surlogical tests, if we get them working and they're not really working very reliably yet, can be quite helpful for that because there's one of the antibodies, I always forget which one it is, MMM or MMG, but one of them is an indicator of convalescence and at least temporary immunity. So serology is very useful in that case. It's also widely believed that if you've had a period of symptoms and no longer have symptoms and this is not known for sure because we have seen some returns of it in South Korea, but it's believed that during that period when you don't have symptoms, the amount of the virus that you're shedding is low. So I don't think we can quite say that those people are immune until they get a serology test, but I think at least they can go back to sort of being in the same condition as the rest of the population.”
2020-04-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Glen Weyl on Fighting COVID-19 and the Role of the Academic Expert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a little bit extreme, but I'm certainly inclined in that direction. The problem, Tyler, is that if we reopen under the current conditions, we're going to see, and this is expected by all the epidemiological models, a resurgence of the disease probably sooner rather than later, and we're going to have to lock things down again. And I think as problematic as it is to keep things closed for another month plus, it's going to be much more problematic to suddenly and unexpectedly every so often have to shut everything back down again. It will completely destroy the capacities of businesses to plan if that is looming out there. Whereas if we can plan for some period of bridge loans, some period of the Fed bailouts, et cetera, then at least we can get that into a bill and get ahead of it rather than relying on people to just have to deal constantly with new”
2020-04-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Glen Weyl on Fighting COVID-19 and the Role of the Academic Expert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the end of June. And once that's accomplished, I think we can over the course of July reintroduce most of the rest of the economy and have the confidence that because we haven't seen re-emergence of diseases within the essential sector, that reintroducing everybody else will proceed in a similar fashion.”
2020-04-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Glen Weyl on Fighting COVID-19 and the Role of the Academic Expert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's one really critical element of this plan that I don't think has been widely discussed, which is that there are 40% of people in the essential sector who are still out there doing their jobs. And there may have been some improvements in sanitation. There probably have been, though there have been a lot of issues with getting the PPE required to do that. But those people are basically transmitting the diseases they always have been. And so by far our first priority has to be not, quote, reopening the economy, but rather stabilizing that sector of the economy so that transmission is not taking place within that sector. Once we've accomplished that goal, it will actually be relatively easy to reopen the rest of the economy because it will, you know, given that that's 40%, it's just a doubling to get to everybody being in a disease stabilized situation. I really think the focus has to be on stabilizing the essential sector by building up this regimen. I think we can do that.”
2020-04-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Glen Weyl on Fighting COVID-19 and the Role of the Academic Expert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, look, I think you can certainly achieve a lot if you don't yet have the disease in country that way. There are not that many places in the US that have low enough prevalence that I think that that would really succeed. But it would probably succeed for some localities. I just think it's not a comprehensive strategy for most of the population centers of the U.S. were prevalence is already high enough that trying to treat yourself as an island is not really going to accomplish a lot.”
2020-04-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Glen Weyl on Fighting COVID-19 and the Role of the Academic Expert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While there's plenty of islands that have restricted travel, at least at some point, and have failed. So the UK has had a terrible experience and is also an island. So I don't think.”
2020-04-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Glen Weyl on Fighting COVID-19 and the Role of the Academic Expert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think so. I don't know if it will come to that. There's a possibility that we get very successful here in a very uniform way. But for the reasons that you're saying, because of the federal structure, I think we're going to face a choice between centralizing power more than I think we should want to and in a way that would reduce the scope for desirable experimentation and allowing some restrictions on travel across localities.”
2020-04-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Glen Weyl on Fighting COVID-19 and the Role of the Academic Expert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I think that there is likely going to need to be some capacity for states or localities probably through some sort of identity certificate or something like that, to potentially limit travel across jurisdictions. In Canada, they've done that across provinces.”
2020-04-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Glen Weyl on Fighting COVID-19 and the Role of the Academic Expert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the truth is, I haven't followed the Singaporean case recently closely enough to figure out what went wrong recently. My impression is that they put too much confidence into a particular digital tracing system, which turned out to get very low take-up. And they pulled back on their manual tracing efforts before there was reason to be confident that they had the ability to pull back on them. There's also a big problem, which is that manual tracing efforts do a poor job of covering public spaces. And I think that the Singaporeans believe that these Bluetooth-based tracing technologies would cover those public spaces as well, and they failed to do so. And they therefore allowed re-densification of their public spaces too quickly. And I think that's something we need to be very careful about.”
2020-04-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Glen Weyl on Fighting COVID-19 and the Role of the Academic Expert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think that that's true. I also think that we're not getting a huge drag net coming out of these PCR tests in countries where prevalence rates are low. And you would expect to see that if the false positive rate were non-trivial. So, you know, in Korea, they're administering a lot of these tests and they're getting about two percent of tests coming back positive. If you look at countries where we know that there's very low prevalence, you would expect that even if there's zero prevalence, you would be getting a significant false positive rate. The fact that some”
2020-04-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Glen Weyl on Fighting COVID-19 and the Role of the Academic Expert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that even a relatively low rate of false positives could create a huge problem here because the disease prevalence is not that high. And so if you start getting a lot of false positives, pretty much everything that's going to come up is going to be a false positive. Luckily, the PCR tests have shown a very low rate of false positives so far.”
2020-04-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Glen Weyl on Fighting COVID-19 and the Role of the Academic Expert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the best case, so swabs are more sensitive if they're correctly administered, but they're very easy to incorrectly administer because they're a very invasive and complicated procedure. The spit test is much less prone to that sort of human error. And so may actually in practice perform better, even though the nasal swab has the potential to do better.”
2020-04-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Glen Weyl on Fighting COVID-19 and the Role of the Academic Expert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably around 50 to 60 percent. Now, it depends a huge amount on whether those false negatives or what we call permanent false negatives or whether they're from poor administration of the test. If they're from poor administration of the test, you can just give a test multiple times. And it appears that most false negatives are currently from poor administration of the nasal swabs, which by the way is another reason why moving towards a spit test is so desirable because it's much harder to screw up.”
2020-04-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Glen Weyl on Fighting COVID-19 and the Role of the Academic Expert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I couldn't agree more that there's a systemic lack of trust, especially in federal government in this country, which is why we believe that the most effective way to make this work is by drawing on institutions that have a lot more trust. A lot of the leading businesses in this country have a very high degree of trust. The state governments, local governments have a very high degree of trust. So we need a strategy that has a role for the federal government in funding and coordinating the parts of this that absolutely need the federal government in terms of the supply chain, but beyond that, we want to empower those localities and trusted businesses to be the ones who both execute on and lead the public communication around the strategy. And there's a well-worn tradition of that and something called an interstate compact, where the federal government can provide funding, but it's actually administered by state government and often staff.”
2020-04-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Glen Weyl on Fighting COVID-19 and the Role of the Academic Expert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think a truck brings you anywhere. So the vast majority of people in the Asian countries that have been most successful in containing the disease of isolated at home, sometimes being isolated even from their families, but overwhelmingly at home. Now for visitors from abroad who have no clear residence in the country, there may be some dedicated facilities, particular types of hotels associated with isolation, but that's going to be a very small minority of all cases.”
2020-04-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Glen Weyl on Fighting COVID-19 and the Role of the Academic Expert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great point, Tyler. So that's the reason why the three pillars of our strategy are testing, tracing, and supported isolation. We need to ensure that isolation is accompanied by supports from the public that are sufficient to give people a strong reason to want to engage in isolation. Now, people have a lot of concern for their neighbors. They don't want to get people sick. They don't want to get their families sick. So there's already an inducement to isolation there, but especially for Americans who have more limited economic means, it can be a huge hardship to be away from your job for that long, which is why we need public support for people who need to be isolated so that they can receive the treatment that they need, so that they can receive the food and income support that they need, and so that they don't get detached from their jobs.”
2020-04-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Glen Weyl on Fighting COVID-19 and the Role of the Academic Expert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we've got two basic problems. One is a coordination failure along the supply chain, and the other is a lot of small innovations that require a lot of regulatory engagement to get rapidly deployed that need to be really accelerated and coordinated. So if you look sort of deep into the supply chains where they're producing the reagents, where they're producing the test kits, there is not been a clear demand signal to those parts of the supply chain that we're going to aim for a really high level of testing like we're describing and therefore there's a real unwillingness to make the fixed cost investments to repurpose manufacturing to supply tests at that level. And we can go into why that's the case in a minute. If you think of closer to the consumer, the issues are actually quite different. They're not really about money. They're much more about the fact that”
2020-04-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Glen Weyl on Fighting COVID-19 and the Role of the Academic Expert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thanks so much for having me on, Tyler, especially at such short notice. It's really great to be able to talk about these issues with you.”
2020-04-29 · Conversations with Tyler · Glen Weyl on Fighting COVID-19 and the Role of the Academic Expert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source