16 ★ FINANCIAL TIMES Monday 6 April 2020
more than the young, one would expect
Germany’s eventual mortality rate to be
higher than in France, which has a
younger population. If this turns out not
be the case, it will either be due to the
quality of emergency care or to factors
we may not yet fully understand.
In the meantime, be wary of forecasts.
Statistics is one of the most potent tools
mathematics has made available to
other sciences. But like any power tool,
it can cause havoc in the wrong hands.
We should rely on experts, but the
experts in question are not economists
and armchair virologists. They are bio-
statisticians who understand not only
the statistical methods but also the
many subtleties behind the data.
Anyone prone to drawing big conclu-
sions from popular online virus data
trackers should heed Robert Grant, a
British medical statistician who tweeted
last week: “I’ve studied this stuff at uni-
versity, done data analysis for decades,
written several NHS guidelines (includ-
ing one for an infectious disease), and
taught it to health professionals. That’s
why you don’t see me making any coro-
navirus forecasts.”
In that spirit, we should take note of
the German statistics and resign our-
selves to the realisation that their main
usefulness at this point is to raise ques-
tions, rather than provide answers.[email protected]cluded that we still lack agreed methods
to measure mortality rates. Given differ-
ent rates of testing and inconsistent
ways of measuring fatalities across
countries, we should avoid real-time
cross-country comparisons. Statistics
purporting to tell us how many days one
country is behind another are humbug.
Lothar Wieler, president of the Robert
Koch Institute in Berlin, the federal gov-
ernment’s health agency, has said the
true mortality rate in Germany is proba-bly higher than the officially recorded
number. He reported on some tentative
evidence that the number of new infec-
tions might be slowing down, but said it
was too early to make firm conclusions.
It is possible, but yet to be proved, that
Germany has managed to control the
spread of the virus better than others
through its policy of mass testing. But I
would be very surprised if the final Ger-
man mortality rate turns out to be dif-
ferent from others’. Germany has so far
reported a third of France’s absolute
level of deaths, despite a bigger popula-
tion. Yet since the virus affects the oldmore people, you will catch many with
mild symptoms, or none. Your recorded
mortality rate will be lower compared to
countries that do not test as much.
In Germany, the virus did not spread
from the young to the old as quickly as
happened in Italy. My own experience
from having lived in Italy is that older
Italians are more integrated into their
communities than older Germans, most
of whom live away from their families,
often in care homes. The virus took a
while to spread in Germany, but this is
now starting to happen too.
Nor can we conclude from the data
that Germany is on a different trajec-
tory than other countries. All we know is
that it did a good job getting ready. In
particular, Germany started the lock-
down well before mortality rates shot
up. Schools have been transformed into
makeshift hospitals for the avalanche of
cases they are expecting this month.
Germany also has more critical care
units and ventilators than other Euro-
pean countries. I would expect it to be
better at maintaining a functioning
health system for non-Covid-19-related
illnesses and emergencies at the same
time. But German doctors are no better
at treating the disease than doctors else-
where and German healthcare workers,
too, suffer from a shortage of masks.
A study on the 2009 swine flu epi-
demic found that real-time mortality
estimates were all over the place. It con-G
ermany has one of the best
healthcare systems in the
world — so good that some
expats abroad fly home
when they get sick.
There is no doubt that the Germans
got one big thing right during the early
stages of the Covid-19 crisis: they tested,
tested and tested again. By doing so,
they managed to prevent their own cri-
sis hotspot, the district of Heinsberg to
the west of Cologne near the Dutch bor-
der, from turning into another Bergamo.
Germany is now conducting Covid-
tests at a rate of 350,000 a week, having
tested close to 1m out of a population of
80m so far. The numbers of tests that
have been carried out in France, for
example, are only a tenth of that.
But it would be a mistake to conclude
from the recorded number of infections
that Germany has the virus under con-
trol when others do not. Or that Ger-
mans are less prone to die from the dis-
ease. Its low recorded mortality rate —
15 per 1m people, lower than most of
Europe — is influenced by its sheer
number of tests. If you test 10 timesCompanies are right to
batten down the hatches
Instead of being cross that companies
are stopping dividends, retail
shareholders should be pleased they
are battening down the hatches in
these extraordinary times. If retail
shareholders need cash, then just sell
some shares, which should be worth
more with no dividend (“cum
dividend” and “ex dividend”).
Sadly, the whole investment industry
peddles the dishonest idea that shares
held for the “long run” are like “magic
bonds” — paying an (increasing)
annual cash dividend, and can then be
sold at more than the original cost.
Perhaps stopping dividends will force
retail investors to realise the risk of
holding equities versus bonds —
dividends may be cut and the capital
value may fall. Investors should also
ask their fund managers exactly what
they are doing to earn their generous
fees. And anyone who still thinks
equities always outperform bonds “in
the long run” should look at Japan,
where the Nikkei index is less than half
its peak value over 30 years ago.
John Ralfe
John Ralfe Consulting,
Nottingham, UKWhole and complete lives
embrace goods of all kinds
David Wilson and Ian Cheung (Letters,
March 30 and A pril 2) disagree over a
question that much preoccupied
Aristotle, namely: “Is wealth necessary
to living a good and fulfilled life?”
Aristotle distinguished between
external goods, that is, goods that
derive from our material, social and
political lives, such as wealth and
honour; and goods of the soul, which
accrue from what he calls “activity of
the soul in accordance with reason”
and would include things like
knowledge, love and serenity. He
regarded the latter as more important
for the good life than the former —
“Money can’t buy me love”, as Lennon
and McCartney, admittedly more
catchily, put it. But he did acknowledge
the value of material goods as
facilitators of those, more valuable,
activities of the soul. A good life is
whole and complete, he thought,
embracing goods of all kinds.
That does not tell us how we should
prioritise them, either collectively or in
pursuit of our individual conceptions of
the good life. But it does allow us to
consider them in less antithetical
terms, which may be helpful as some of
the binary distinctions we have known
for so long are reframed by current
events.
Owen Kelly
Doctoral Researcher, Philosophy,
University of Edinburgh, UK2020 will go down as the
year of deglobalisation
Martin Wolf (“The tragedy of two
failing superpowers”, April 1) is right to
argue that the US and China should co-
operate on mitigating the global
coronavirus pandemic, but they will
not. Unlike during the global financial
crisis, the G20 has not come together to
orchestrate a co-ordinated economic
policy response — let alone a basic
public health response — and instead
an international blame game has
ensued. The liberal international order
is nowhere to be found.
Covid-19 originated in China, and the
government squandered its chance to
contain the outbreak by covering it up
instead of intervening sooner than it
did. Yet assigning responsibility is the
job of historians; policymakers today
must act in the present with adequate
healthcare measures first, financial
bazookas second — not vice versa.
Chief executives have been forgiven
over the last few decades for relying on
fragile, cost-cutting, just-in-time global
supply chains, per the wisdom of David
Ricardo’s theory of comparative
advantage. But as public health
deteriorates needlessly without proper
government responses, the virus’s
broader victim will be globalisation.
If 2019 is remembered as the year of
US-China “decoupling”, 2020 will go
down as the year of “deglobalisation”.
The global financial crisis, the great
populist movements of 2016, and the
US-China trade war may come to
represent a cascading course of events
for globalisation culminating with
coronavirus killing it. Company leaders
and world leaders would be wise to
ditch their reliance on vulnerable
supply chains in favour of more
resilient, self-sufficient means of
delivering health, economic, and
business outcomes for their
constituents and shareholders. The
ship of globalisation is sailing away.
Arjun Kapur
New York, NY, USComparing the data
needs a new approach
Accurately comparing how Covid-19 is
affecting mortality in different
countries is important to evaluate
different approaches taken by
governments.
Data that are unaffected by
differences in how countries are testing
for the virus is highly desirable.
Although valuable, the widely reported
counts of deaths from Covid-19 have
limitations. These are influenced by
variation across countries in testing
coverage and often exclude persons
dying in the community.
However, analysis of weekly excess
deaths from any cause would provide
an additional and highly comparable
public health index. These are obtained
by comparing the observed weekly
deaths to values expected based on
previous years. This approach
sidesteps the challenge of consistently
counting deaths attributable to Covid-- The problem is that few countries
(the UK and the Netherlands excepted)
publish weekly counts by age and sex
rapidly.
We propose that national statistics
agencies rise to this challenge and
make data public domain with
minimal delay broken down by sex,
age group and subnational region. This
well help beat the current pandemic
and formulate lessons for future
outbreaks.
David Leon, Chris Jarvis and Liam
Smeeth
London School of Hygiene & Tropical
Medicine, UK
Vladimir Shkolnikov
Max Planck Institute for Demographic
Research, Rostock, Germany
France Meslé
French Institute for Demographic Studies
(INED), Paris, France
Per Magnus
Norwegian Institute of Public Health,
Oslo, Norway
Markéta Pechholdová
University of Economics, Prague, Czechia
With his habitual insight Janan Ganesh
shows how the coronavirus reveals a
“non-polar” world with troubling
similarities to the 1930s (“The power
vacuum in today’s non-polar world”,
April 1). But we are no longer in the
early part of last century. We’re in two
21st-century versions of Marshall
McLuhan’s global village. Instant
communication has created two
increasingly separate psychological and
social states that span national
boundaries.This is most apparent in North
America and Europe. In their
sociopolitical outlook exemplified
by attitudes to science, religion, fake
news and the response to Covid-19, the
blue US states, and Canada, are closer
to the older European democracies,
while the red US states have
similarities to the European populists.
On both sides of the Atlantic,
communication between the blue and
red villages has been increasingly
difficult.The big question now is whether the
pandemic will drive the western
villages further apart, while
strengthening the hand of autocrats in
the world’s east and south; or whether
the importance of science in beating
the pandemic will strengthen the blue
village, close the divide with the red
village and create the outlines of a new
transatlantic pole.
Paul Strebel
Professor emeritus, IMD,
Lausanne, SwitzerlandTwo versions of McLuhan’s global village
Letters
M O N DAY 6 A P R I L 2 0 2 0Email:[email protected]
Include daytime telephone number and full address
Corrections:[email protected]
If you are not satisfied with the FT’s response to your complaint, you can appeal
to the FT Editorial Complaints Commissioner: [email protected]OPINION ON FT.COM
Gavyn Davies
A very sudden stop has occurred. But do not
count on a fast global economy bounceback
http://www.ft.com/opinionThe election of Keir Starmer as the new
leader of the Labour party heralds a
significant moment in British politics,
offering the prospect of the return of a
competent opposition party. That
Labour has not only dispensed
with Jeremy Corbyn, but also roundly
rejected his preferred successor will be
applauded by voters. Britain has suf-
fered too long from the lack of a credi-
ble opposition.
Sir Keir arrives at a time when the
country has no appetite for partisan
point scoring. Yet few should doubt
that the restoration of an efficient
opposition will change the political
dynamic, even if the task of winning
the next election remains Herculean.
Labour’s new leader has shortcom-
ings. He can seem lawyerly and dry. His
association with the Remain cause, key
to his victory, will alienate Brexit sup-
porters. Having run as a unity candi-
date promising implausibly to try to
meld the best of the Blair government
and the Corbyn leadership, Sir Keir
leaves questions about which direction
he will take. But his victory heralds a
more professional and less factional
approach, while his forensic skills will
hold a patently sloppy government to
account.
We can also expect a swift departure
from the most egregious failings of the
previous leader, namely the failure to
tackle anti-Semitism and the almost
pathological sympathy for autocratic
enemies of the west.
That said, Sir Keir is no centrist. He
hails from the soft-left of his party and
is closer in outlook to Ed Miliband than
Tony Blair. He has not challenged fun-
damental Corbynite policies. Allies say
this is merely a recognition of the exi-
gencies of the leadership contest but
triangulation between the wings of his
own party is a political cul-de-sac. It is
not enough simply to put a managerial
veneer on the same product.
There are opportunities. Coronavi-
rus will change the political landscape.
While Boris Johnson still maintains
support in a national emergency, much
of it will be shallow and shortlived.
While Labour must work construc-
tively with the government, it should
resist being drawn in too tightly. There
is no need for a national government
and more benefit to be gained from the
scrutiny of a reasoned opposition.
Aside from the crisis, Sir Keir must use
the first weeks to take a firm grip on the
party and rid it of some of the factional
Corbynite officials who so damaged its
reputation. Sir Keir was right to apolo-
gise to the Jewish community for
Labour’s failings on anti-Semitism but
he must act to root out the problem.
Secondly he must restore credibility
and competence to his front bench. His
early appointments are encouraging if
not overwhelming, with an emphasis
on new faces from the soft-left and a
clear out of some mediocre (or worse)
Corbyn apparatchiks. But against a rel-
atively weak cabinet there is a need for
some of the more experienced figures
who would not serve or were not
wanted under Mr Corbyn. The return
of Rachel Reeves to shadow Michael
Gove at the cabinet office and Lisa
Nandy, his leadership rival, are wel-
come. But others, like Yvette Cooper
and Hilary Benn, would add gravitas.
The coming years will be tough and
the post-crisis consensus will be
defined by huge debt, by a recognition
of the value of public services and of the
contribution of some of society’s lowest
paid. Labour has space to fashion a new
prospectus while more immediately
engaging in constructive opposition.
The public may not be paying attention
now but a time will come when it is
ready to listen. Sir Keir must use this
period to ensure his party has some-
thing worth saying when that moment
comes.Britain’s Keir Starmer has the chance to fashion a new prospectus
New Labour leader must
restore sound opposition
US president Donald Trump has been
struggling to make his mind up about
falling oil prices. Last month he
described the prospect of lower petrol
prices as “the greatest tax cut”. On
Thursday, he said that a possible agree-
ment between Russia and Saudi Arabia
to cut production — and lift prices —
was “GREAT for the oil and gas indus-
try”. His conflicting messages reveal a
truth: the price collapse, possibly the
biggest in history, has the power to
force a rethink on even the biggest
advocates of cheap oil.
The collapse in prices will not deliver
much of a boost to rich economies. The
fall below $20, the lowest level since
2002, reflects a plunge in demand as
the US and much of Europe went into
lockdown and economic activity
ground to a halt. There is no boost in
spending power from cheaper oil when
few are still burning it: planes are
grounded and drivers are staying in.
With large parts of the western world
shut down, the effect of these lower
prices will be felt most in poorer coun-
tries. Big importing — and populous —
nations such as India and China will
benefit, with cheaper oil potentially
ameliorating some damage from coro-
navirus. Others, like Nigeria, will be hit
twice: via a public health emergency
and economically, as the price of its
main export drops.
The first fall in the price came in Jan-
uary when China put the city of Wuhan
under quarantine, subduing demand.
The ensuing price war between Russia
and Saudi Arabia only exacerbated the
drop. Further falls reflect the collapse
in economic activity: demand is down
by roughly a quarter already. That is
almost the entire output of the 13-na-
tion Opec group. The millions of extra
barrels being pumped by Saudi Arabia
and Russia are relatively insignificant
in the face of the 25m-barrels-a-day fall
in demand due to the shutdowns.
Both countries appear to have badly
miscalculated. Russia, opportunisti-
cally, saw the coronavirus as a chance
to launch a broadside against Ameri-
can shale producers and the US econ-
omy. If demand was falling anyway,
why not rely on others to make output
cuts and hurt a geopolitical rival in the
process? Saudi Arabia did not play ball.
A shock-and-awe strategy of increasing
its own production sent oil prices tum-
bling and wiped billions off the market
value of western majors. The price of
oil initially dropped at its fastest rate
since the Gulf war in 1991; it went on to
have its worst quarter on record.
Neither country could have pre-
dicted such a fall in demand. Coronavi-
rus has spread much more rapidly than
expected and the lockdowns that dem-
ocratic governments have launched in
response have cut demand for the
world’s most important energy source.
Attempts to force US shale producers
out of the market will work only in the
short term. Drillers may be forced to
close and those that lend to them will
take some losses. Once prices start to
recover — and many Opec govern-
ments require higher levels to balance
their budgets — new ventures will
spring up. Few expect Russia’s strug-
gling economy to be able to cope with
such low prices for an extended period.
Mr Trump’s intervention boosted
prices. That might reflect wishful
thinking and the lobbying of the shale
industry more than anything else. But
Saudi Arabia did very quickly convene
a meeting of the Opec+ group, which
includes Russia. There are growing
signs of an acknowledgment of the
need for co-ordinated cuts but markets
will need clarity before prices stabilise.
An extended period of volatility may
accelerate debate about the merits of a
shift away from oil to cleaner fuels. But
in the meantime, it is hardly what a
struggling global economy needs.Lower revenues exacerbate the damage for poorer producer nations
Why the oil price shock
is nothing to celebrate
Be safe, if perhaps not as stylish as a supermodel— Naomi Campbell/InstagramMake personal protective
equipment mandatoryfor everyone in the UK
Prof Julian Peto proposes using
universal testing to end the pandemic
(“How to ramp up Covid-19 mass
testing immediately in the UK”,
FT.com, March 31). However, there is a
simpler and cheaper way to get us back
to work and to get ahead of the virus.
This is for the government to mandate
the use of appropriate personal
protective equipment (PPE) for all —
for every man, woman and child living
in the UK or arriving at its borders.
This simple step, requiring no
innovation, might cost £10 per person
and so total £660m, a snip compared
with the cost of current strategy.
Why would this work? Wearing PPE
means I will be protected from others
but also that I will protect others when
I am infected. Consequently, in the
population as a whole, the virus will
find it far harder to get into a new host.
If, on average, I infect fewer than one
other person, then the pandemic dies
out. PPE-for-all would achieve that
goal.
The best PPE would be a hazmat suit
like the protection worn by Ebola
healthcare workers. But I don’t need so
much protection if everyone else has
protection. Gloves and a mask that
keeps out Covid-19 may suffice. This
“Covid-19 PPE” should aim to stop the
pandemic: stopping every single new
infection is not necessary. Therefore,
the UK should still comply with the
World Health Organization’s appeal to
“test, test, test”. If, today, we had
Covid-19 PPE-for-all, then nearly all of
us could go back to work tomorrow.
The social and economic crisis would
end.
Of course people who are already
infected will stay infected for some
time. Some will be asymptomatic.
Others will have a fever and cough, or
get pneumonia or risk dying. They all
need appropriate treatment and
government must ensure they all get it,
while keeping all staff safe. Meanwhile
the uninfected, the asymptomatic and
the immune could all get on with their
lives largely as usual. The wheels of
industry could turn again.
Getting appropriate PPE-for-all
made quickly will require the
government to order relevant
industries — clothing, plastics and
paper come to mind — to switch
production immediately.
Until all nations heed the UN call for
a global, co-ordinated response, we
can’t rely on imports. Nationwide
distribution of appropriate PPE will
take time. So the first places to get it for
everyone should be the Covid-
hotspots.
So far, we have all been slaves to a
narrative whereby “health” only means
treatment. In fact “health” means
prevention. It means reducing the risk
of infections and the risk of other
epidemics like diabetes.
Dr Martin Yuille
Honorary Reader
Prof William Ollier
Emeritus Professor,
Centre for Epidemiology, Division of
Population Health,
University of Manchester, UKGermany’s testing success looks real — for now
We lack agreed methods
to measure mortalityrates, with inconsistency
across countries
europeWolfgang
Münchau
APRIL 6 2020 Section:Features Time: 5/4/2020 - 17: 51 User: nicola.davison Page Name: LEADER USA, Part,Page,Edition: USA, 16, 1