I took a quick, free COVID-19 test; NYC subway nearly empty; Hubris: a case study; Under fire from many, Samaritan's Purse finds an unlikely champion
1) I'm feeling fine right now, but have been eager to get tested for the coronavirus.
Considering all of my volunteering over the past few weeks (see below for a nice article about it) in the world epicenter of the pandemic, New York City, I've had a lot of exposure...
Early this morning, as I was scanning my Facebook feed, I came across a post by my old friend, Chuck Veley, who hired me for my first job out of college at the Boston Consulting Group in 1989. In it, he described how he got a quick, free COVID-19 test from a business called OneMedical – a part of 1Life Healthcare (ONEM) – which has locations in the following areas: Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles/Orange County, New York, Phoenix, Portland, San Diego, Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Washington, D.C.
I registered (you can do so here), using code GETCARE30 to get the first 30 days free (rather than $199, meaning I can cancel before being charged – thus, the test is free if I wish). Then I downloaded the app, signed in, and booked a test by selecting "Treat Me Now" (not "Book Visit").
Within 30 minutes, I heard from a staff member at OneMedical via the app, answered a few questions (including disclosing that I have no symptoms, which was fine), and they scheduled me an appointment an hour later at a testing tent a few miles away at 35th Street in Hudson Yards.
Here's what I saw walking in – I was the only person there:
The person you see in the photo above met me and confirmed my appointment. I then walked into the tent, met a nice young woman, and pulled my mask down:
She inserted a long, thin cotton swab two or three inches up my nose for a half second (which was mildly annoying, but not painful), and I was done – it couldn't have been faster or easier!
She said results might take a week, but she knows people who were tested on Tuesday who had already heard back.
I'll let you know what I hear...
2) I rode the subway home after getting tested and was pleased to see that, even at a peak time of 10 a.m. on a weekday, it was a ghost town.
This is especially important in light of this study: The Subways Seeded the Massive Coronavirus Outbreak in New York City. Here are three pictures I took:
3) No, companies aren't humans (sorry, Mitt Romney)...
But nevertheless, tonight's NFL draft is a lot like investing: smart people, aided by lots of hard and soft data and supercomputers, trying to make multimillion-dollar judgements about the future. And, in both, overconfidence will play a key role in bad decisions. Here's David Leonhardt of the New York Times on the NFL draft: Hubris: a case study. Excerpt:
Many people – including experts, with great resources at their disposal – are shockingly overconfident about their ability to forecast the future.
About 15 years ago, two economists, Richard Thaler (who has since won a Nobel Prize) and Cade Massey, set out to study the history of the draft. They analyzed where in the draft order different players were chosen and then compared the order to the players' later performance.
Thaler and Massey discovered that, despite the time and money that football teams devoted to studying players, the teams weren't very good at predicting who would be the best. Those chosen early often had less impressive careers than those chosen later. The chance that a player at a given position turns out to be better than the next player drafted at that same position is only 52%, not much better than a coin flip. Predicting the career paths of 22-year-olds in any field is hard.
4) It's nice to get some good press for a change – LOL! Under fire from many, Samaritan's Purse finds an unlikely champion. Excerpt:
Volunteer Whitney Tilson pulls mulch through the Samaritan's Purse field hospital in Central Park, March 31, 2020, in New York.
Whitney Tilson and his wife, Susan, were out walking their dog early one Sunday morning when they noticed workers unloading trucks and stacks of blue tarps in the East Meadow of Central Park, right outside their Fifth Avenue apartment building.
Later that afternoon, Tilson saw some white tents rising up out of the ground bearing a name he had never heard of: Samaritan's Purse.
After learning the group was setting up a series of tents for a 68-bed field hospital to treat overflow coronavirus patients from Mount Sinai Hospital, Tilson agreed to lend a hand.
He hasn't stopped since.
Best regards,
Whitney