Monthly Archives: March 2020
This is no virus for old men
Statistics Canada has just released a dataset with detailed anonymized information on all confirmed COVID-19 cases in Canada, available for download here. Unlike many of the available trackers, the Statistics Canada data reports cases by date of onset, defined as "earliest date available from the following series: Symptom Onset Date, Specimen Collection Date, Laboratory Testing […]
Relative supply shocks, Unobtainium, Walras’ Law, and the Coronavirus
Here's the basic idea: A temporary 100% output cut in 50% of the sectors (what the Coronavirus does) is very different from a 50% output cut in 100% of the sectors (what our intuitions might expect from supply shocks in aggregate macro models). The former can easily lead to deficient demand in the unaffected sectors; […]
Regional disparities in hospital bed access across Canada
Thank you to Kayle Hatt and Kevin Andrew for generating some of the numbers and charts behind this post, and for helpful suggestions. The number of acute care hospital beds per capita is an imperfect measure of a health care system's ability to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. After all, beds are easy to acquire, […]
Covid-19, Italy and Lessons for Canada
by Thomas Barbiero, Ryerson University and Livio Di Matteo, Lakehead University As Italo-Canadese and members of the large Italian diaspora throughout the world, we have found the COVID-19 situation in Italy truly heart-wrenching. As we write, Italy is the hardest hit country outside of China with over 60,000 confirmed cases and over 6,000 deaths. The […]
How prepared is your hospital for COVID-19?
I've written a blog post for the Institute for Research on Public Policy (IRPP). It begins: One widely touted response to the COVID-19 pandemic is to “flatten the curve” — to spread COVID-19 infections over time, so that the medical system can cope with them. Yet a cold hard look at the numbers suggests our […]
Postmodern Economic Measurement: There is no number, only numbers
National income accounting distills a nation's economy into a single number: gross domestic product. GDP has been critiqued many times for its neglect of household production, environmental degradation, income distribution, and so on. Many alternatives have been proposed, such as genuine progress indicators, happiness measures, the Human Development Index, the Better Life Index, well-being indexes, […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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