Macro is for chumps
For years, one of my pet sayings has been “Macro is for chumps." Used in the context of business or economics, it means that one should not depend too much on national and global statistics when charting your path. This could extend to all kinds of human matters, such as politics, where most macro polls showed Trump losing but if one were to have examined individual jurisdictions at the micro (state, local) level, the race would have polled closer in some areas—indeed, this is where Trump won it, in the electoral college.
I also use it to screen business prospects. I almost never use global statistics for the movement of goods or services, but rather try to drill down into what is going on in very specific silos of opportunity and regions. I can say that approach works most of the time, providing the idea and the actions are valid.
The same goes for the current COVID-19 situation. It does almost no good to keep looking at only global statistics, or even national stats. Particularly now that movement between countries and states is severely restricted, the real action is at the local level. One of the tenants of the "chumps" theory is that human interaction in the world, related to business or other, is "lumpy." Put simply, things happen "more" in some places, and "less" in others. There are islands of opportunity and points of disaster, all at the same time. The object of the game is to ferret out what works where, and try to avoid the places that turn out to be quicksand.
Today we can see hot spots of COVID-19 activity in New York. It would be a mistake to extrapolate what is going on there for your own community unless conditions are similar. For instance, London could indeed extrapolate pretty accurately from what is happening in NYC. Both are crowded, both populations primarily use public transport, etc.
However, here in Austin, we live differently, have less interaction with the global community, our housing and jobs are more spread out, a good deal of our population uses private transportation, and much of our workforce can more easily work from home. For us, extrapolation from Seattle’s situation might be more accurate. What we can see in Seattle is that even though they appeared to get the virus very early, it is not rapidly spreading in the exponential way as in other cities. Why is that? We don’t know for sure, but it appears that natural social distancing might be in play, and also technology-based economies might also be less vulnerable in that many people can work in place, rather than having to travel to their work. Potentially as importantly, there has been swift local government action combined with very disciplined public response. Those two things vary from community to community; macro stats will not pick up on factors like those.
When the history of this thing is written, it may become apparent that powerful local response—including fairly early testing, which indicates even more micro-locations of hot spots—is the key to defeating the pandemic. There are already clear signs that informed and resolute social response works. But you couldn’t pick up this trend just by watching the international numbers continue to go up.
For these reasons, let’s find communities that are ahead of us on the curve but seem to be managing their situation better and adopt their best practices. Franklin Roosevelt said it best: "Do something. If it doesn’t work, stop. If it works, do more of it." This requires extremely agile visioning and action, most likely on a daily or even hourly basis.
More importantly, the agility of our responses must be at the local level. Let us find the resources, the will, and the way forward by, for, and with our own neighbors. This seems to be the most favorable path, based on micro statistics coming in from around the world.
Macro is for chumps. Micro is for champs.