More social distancing keeps even more people healthy, and people can be nudged away from public places by removing their allure.
“We control the desire to be in public spaces by closing down public spaces. Italy is closing all of its restaurants. China is closing everything, and we are closing things now, too,” said Drew Harris, a population health researcher and assistant professor at The Thomas Jefferson University College of Public Health. “Reducing the opportunities for gathering helps folks social distance.”
To simulate more social distancing, instead of allowing a quarter of the population to move, we will see what happens when we let just one of every eight people move.
On March 1, the day after the first coronavirus death in the United States was announced, brothers Matt and Noah Colvin set out in a silver S.U.V. to pick up some hand sanitizer. Driving around Chattanooga, Tenn., they hit a Dollar Tree, then a Walmart, a Staples and a Home Depot. At each store, they cleaned out the shelves.
Over the next three days, Noah Colvin took a 1,300-mile road trip across Tennessee and into Kentucky, filling a U-Haul truck with thousands of bottles of hand sanitizer and thousands of packs of antibacterial wipes, mostly from “little hole-in-the-wall dollar stores in the backwoods,” his brother said. “The major metro areas were cleaned out.”
Matt Colvin stayed home near Chattanooga, preparing for pallets of even more wipes and sanitizer he had ordered, and starting to list them on Amazon. Mr. Colvin said he had posted 300 bottles of hand sanitizer and immediately sold them all for between $8 and $70 each, multiples higher than what he had bought them for. To him, “it was crazy money.” To many others, it was profiteering from a pandemic.
Now, while millions of people across the country search in vain for hand sanitizer to protect themselves from the spread of the coronavirus, Mr. Colvin is sitting on 17,700 bottles of the stuff with little idea where to sell them.
“It’s been a huge amount of whiplash,” he said. “From being in a situation where what I’ve got coming and going could potentially put my family in a really good place financially to ‘What the heck am I going to do with all of this?’”
Mr. Colvin is one of probably thousands of sellers who have amassed stockpiles of hand sanitizer and crucial respirator masks that many hospitals are now rationing, according to interviews with eight Amazon sellers and posts in private Facebook and Telegram groups from dozens more. Amazon said it had recently removed hundreds of thousands of listings and suspended thousands of sellers’ accounts for price gouging related to the coronavirus.
Amazon, eBay, Walmart and other online-commerce platforms are trying to stop their sellers from making excessive profits from a public health crisis. While the companies aimed to discourage people from hoarding such products and jacking up their prices, many sellers had already cleared out their local stores and started selling the goods online.
Now both the physical and digital shelves are nearly empty.
Mikeala Kozlowski, a nurse in Dudley, Mass., has been searching for hand sanitizer since before she gave birth to her first child, Nora, on March 5. When she searched stores, which were sold out, she skipped getting gas to avoid handling the pump. And when she checked Amazon, she couldn’t find it for less than $50.
“You’re being selfish, hoarding resources for your own personal gain,” she said of the sellers.
Sites like Amazon and eBay have given rise to a growing industry of independent sellers who snatch up discounted or hard-to-find items in stores to post online and sell around the world.
These sellers call it retail arbitrage, a 21st-century career that has adults buying up everything from limited-run cereals to Fingerling Monkeys, a once hot toy. The bargain hunters look for anything they can sell at a sharp markup. In recent weeks, they found perhaps their biggest opportunity: a pandemic.
As they watched the list of Amazon’s most popular searches crowd with terms like “Purell,” “N95 mask” and “Clorox wipes,” sellers said, they did what they had learned to do: Suck up supply and sell it for what the market would bear.
Initially, the strategy worked. For several weeks, prices soared for some of the top results to searches for sanitizer, masks and wipes on Amazon, according to a New York Times analysis of historical prices from Jungle Scout, which tracks data for Amazon sellers. The data shows that both Amazon and third-party sellers like Mr. Colvin increased their prices, which then mostly dropped when Amazon took action against price gouging this month.
At the high prices, people still bought the products en masse, and Amazon took a cut of roughly 15 percent and eBay roughly 10 percent, depending on the price and the seller.
Then the companies, pressured by growingcriticism from regulators and customers, cracked down. After the measures last week, Amazon went further on Wednesday, restricting sales of any coronavirus-related products from certain sellers.
“Price gouging is a clear violation of our policies, unethical, and in some areas, illegal,” Amazon said in a statement. “In addition to terminating these third party accounts, we welcome the opportunity to work directly with states attorneys general to prosecute bad actors.”
Mr. Colvin, 36, a former Air Force technical sergeant, said he started selling on Amazon in 2015, developing it into a six-figure career by selling Nike shoes and pet toys, and by following trends.
In early February, as headlines announced the coronavirus’s spread in China, Mr. Colvin spotted a chance to capitalize. A nearby liquidation firm was selling 2,000 “pandemic packs,” leftovers from a defunct company. Each came with 50 face masks, four small bottles of hand sanitizer and a thermometer. The price was $5 a pack. Mr. Colvin haggled it to $3.50 and bought them all.
Hand sanitizer that Mr. Colvin is keeping in a storage locker.Credit…Doug Strickland for The New York Times
He quickly sold all 2,000 of the 50-packs of masks on eBay, pricing them from $40 to $50 each, and sometimes higher. He declined to disclose his profit on the record but said it was substantial.
The success stoked his appetite. When he saw the panicked public starting to pounce on sanitizer and wipes, he and his brother set out to stock up.
Elsewhere in the country, other Amazon sellers were doing the same.
Chris Anderson, an Amazon seller in central Pennsylvania, said he and a friend had driven around Ohio, buying about 10,000 masks from stores. He used coupons to buy packs of 10 for around $15 each and resold them for $40 to $50. After Amazon’s cut and other costs, he estimates, he made a $25,000 profit.
Mr. Anderson is now holding 500 packs of antibacterial wipes after Amazon blocked him from selling them for $19 each, up from $16 weeks earlier. He bought the packs for $3 each.
Eric, a truck driver from Ohio who spoke on the condition that his surname not be published because he feared Amazon would retaliate, said he had also collected about 10,000 masks at stores. He bought each 10-pack for about $20 and sold most for roughly $80 each, though some he priced at $125.
“Even at $125 a box, they were selling almost instantly,” he said. “It was mind-blowing as far as what you could charge.” He estimates he made $35,000 to $40,000 in profit.
Now he has 1,000 more masks on order, but he’s not sure what to do with them. He said Amazon had been vague about what constituted price gouging, scaring away sellers who don’t want to risk losing their ability to sell on its site.
To regulators and many others, the sellers are sitting on a stockpile of medical supplies during a pandemic. The attorney general’s offices in California, Washington and New York are all investigating price gouging related to the coronavirus. California’s price-gouging law bars sellers from increasing prices by more than 10 percent after officials declare an emergency. New York’s law prohibits sellers from charging an “unconscionably excessive price” during emergencies.
An official at the Washington attorney general’s office said the agency believed it could apply the state’s consumer-protection law to sue platforms or sellers, even if they aren’t in Washington, as long as they were trying to sell to Washington residents.
Noah Colvin, Mr. Colvin’s brother, moving boxes of hand sanitizer from his brother’s storage locker on Thursday.Credit…Doug Strickland for The New York Times
Mr. Colvin does not believe he was price gouging. While he charged $20 on Amazon for two bottles of Purell that retail for $1 each, he said people forget that his price includes his labor, Amazon’s fees and about $10 in shipping. (Alcohol-based sanitizer is pricey to ship because officials consider it a hazardous material.)
Current price-gouging laws “are not built for today’s day and age,” Mr. Colvin said. “They’re built for Billy Bob’s gas station doubling the amount he charges for gas during a hurricane.”
He added, “Just because it cost me $2 in the store doesn’t mean it’s not going to cost me $16 to get it to your door.”
But what about the morality of hoarding products that can prevent the spread of the virus, just to turn a profit?
Mr. Colvin said he was simply fixing “inefficiencies in the marketplace.” Some areas of the country need these products more than others, and he’s helping send the supply toward the demand.
“There’s a crushing overwhelming demand in certain cities right now,” he said. “The Dollar General in the middle of nowhere outside of Lexington, Ky., doesn’t have that.”
He thought about it more. “I honestly feel like it’s a public service,” he added. “I’m being paid for my public service.”
As for his stockpile, Mr. Colvin said he would now probably try to sell it locally. “If I can make a slight profit, that’s fine,” he said. “But I’m not looking to be in a situation where I make the front page of the news for being that guy who hoarded 20,000 bottles of sanitizer that I’m selling for 20 times what they cost me.”
After The Times published this article on Saturday morning, Mr. Colvin said he was exploring ways to donate all the supplies.
For more than two months, global health and government officials have been trying to stem the coronavirus outbreak, quarantining citizens, locking down towns, regions and even the entire country of Italy and creating triage protocols in hospitals where the contagious, deadly novel virus has taken root.
As of early March, the coronavirus outbreak had infected more than 100,000 people and killed more than 3,000 globally, the majority in China, where the illness was first detected in December. More than 750 people in the United States have been diagnosed, including at least 25 people who have died.
Both the coronavirus and influenza are respiratory illnesses. Both have similar symptoms. Both are contagious. Both can be deadly.
So why the nationwide coronavirus frenzy?
The key difference between the novel coronavirus and influenza, said Melissa Nolan, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of South Carolina, is this: We know what to expect from the flu.
Covid-19, the disease the coronavirus causes, has plunged us into the unknown. We don’t know how severe an outbreak might be and how many people it would kill. We don’t know if we might be forced into quarantine for two weeks. We don’t even know if we will know if we get it.
The numbers only tell part of the story — largely because flu season has been going on longer than the coronavirus has existed and because researchers simply don’t have enough data yet to accurately assess which is more deadly.
Further complicating health officials’ ability to control the spread of the coronavirus is that, unlike influenza, there is no vaccine for it.
Though it remains to be seen whether the virus can be contained worldwide, deliberate quarantines and other health and travel precautions can slow its growth and help ensure hospitals aren’t overwhelmed with coronavirus patients — especially at the same time health-care workers are trying to manage seasonal influenza.
What are the symptoms?
The known symptoms for influenza and covid-19 are nearly identical: fever, cough, body aches, fatigue and at times vomiting and diarrhea. Both illnesses can manifest in mild or severe ways or even cause death, according to Lisa Lockerd Maragakis, senior director of infection prevention at Johns Hopkins Health System.
As of now, there are “no unique clinical signatures” that distinguish the onset of covid-19 from influenza, Nolan said. Research on the known cases so far suggests that the vast majority, some 80 percent, are mild. Health officials have urged those experiencing mild symptoms to self-manage from homewith over-the-counter cold and flu aids, rather than crowding hospital emergency and waiting rooms.
Those experiencing more severe symptoms, such as trouble breathing, lethargy or a fever that won’t break, should call a doctor. Both the coronavirus and influenza can cause pneumonia, an infection of the lungs that can be life-threatening in infants, children and people over 65.
Who is at risk?
So far, it seems those most at risk for severe complications from covid-19 are the elderly and those with compromised immune systems or underlying health conditions.
The same goes for influenza, though young children appear to be more susceptible to the flu than they are to the coronavirus, data shows. Children younger than 5 years old, especially those under the age of 2, are at a high risk of developing serious health complications from the flu, according to the CDC.
Which virus is more deadly?
That’s a difficult question to answer for many reasons. First, health officials are not comparing analogous data sets between the viruses. They have years of influenza data but just months of covid-19 numbers — which are evolving by the day. It’s possible the estimated death rates for the coronavirus might be inflated because a considerable number of people likely have or had the virus but were not diagnosed because their symptoms were too mild to see a doctor.
“There is also a number of asymptomatic infections we don’t know about,” Nolan said.
World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a news briefing March 3 that the global case fatality rate for the coronavirus is believed to be about 3.4 percent, higher than the 2.3 percent reported in a China CDC study released in February. But a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine last week found a death rate of 1.4 percent among a group of 1,099 patients, suggesting the rate could be lower than those reported by the WHO and Chinese officials.
“By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1 percent of those infected,” Tedros said of the global flu caseload during the news briefing.
Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has said that the mortality rate for seasonal flu is 0.1 percent.
“You know, the risk is this: We have a brand-new virus in a completely naive population on Earth; we’re all susceptible to it. Everyone is potentially infectable with this virus,” said Christopher Mores, a global health professor at George Washington University. “Even with a high transmission rate and the low case fatality rate, that still becomes a massive number of ill and fatal cases.”
As The Post’s Joel Achenbach and Laurie Mcginley reported, data from China shows that covid-19 has a significantly higher case fatality rate than seasonal flu. A recent World Health Organization report by an international team of researchers, including from China, found that the case fatality rate for covid-19 patients over the age of 80 in China was 21.9 percent.
What about vaccinations?
For decades, the flu shot has been a critical preventive measure to inoculate the nation’s most vulnerable populations. Though just 62.6 percent of adolescents and 45.3 percent of adults in the United States got the vaccine last flu season, according to the CDC, it still provides front-line health-care workers protection while they treat ill patients, a shield the nurses, doctors, home health aides and other medical workers involved in the coronavirus containment do not have right now.
There will be no coronavirus vaccine for at least another year, health officials have said, which is why governments across the globe have been scrambling to prevent and track the infection as it inches toward a possible pandemic.
One of the few mercies of the spreading coronavirus is that it leaves young children virtually untouched — a mystery virologists say may hold vital clues as to how the virus works.
In China, only 2.4 percent of reported cases were children and only 0.2 percent of reported cases were children who got critically ill, according to the World Health Organization. China has reported no case of a young child dying of the disease covid-19.
Meanwhile, the new coronavirus has proved especially deadly on the other end of the age spectrum. The fatality rate in China for those over 80 is an estimated 21.9 percent, per the WHO. For ages 10 to 39, however, the fatality rate is roughly 0.2 percent, according to a separate study drawing on patient records of 44,672 confirmed cases. And fatalities and severe symptoms are almost nonexistent at even younger ages.
That means the new coronavirus is behaving very differently from other viruses, like seasonal influenza, which are usually especially dangerous for the very young and very old.
“With respiratory infections like this, we usually see a U-shaped curve on who gets hits hardest. Young children at one end of the U because their immune systems aren’t yet developed and old people at the other end because their immune systems grow weaker,” said Vineet Menachery, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch. “With this virus, one side of the U is just completely missing.”
Figuring out why children are so unaffected could lead to breakthroughs in understanding how and why the virus sickens and kills other age groups, said Frank Esper, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Cleveland Clinic Children’s. Among the questions Esper and others are exploring: Is the severity of infection related to what patients were exposed to previously? Does it have to do with how our immune systems change with age? Or could it be due to pollution damage in the lungs that people accumulate over years?
“Or maybe it has nothing to do with the virus and has to do with host, like underlying conditions in the lungs, diabetes or hypertension. After all, few 7-year-olds or newborns have hypertension,” said Esper, who studies viral respiratory infections and new diseases. “Figuring out what’s at play here could be helpful in so many ways.”
Previous coronavirus outbreaks have also mysteriously spared the young. No children died during the SARS outbreak in 2002, which killed 774 people. And few children developed symptoms from the deadly MERS coronavirus, which has killed 858 since 2012.
To find out why, Menachery has been giving mice at his Texas lab SARS — which is a very close cousin to the new coronavirus. Baby mice at his lab have shaken off the infection, while the older mice have had their lungs and bodies ravaged by the disease.
Menachery found the older mice’s fatalities were strongly related to not just weakness in their immune systems but also a “disregulation” that caused their immune systems to overreact to the SARS coronavirus. That’s similar to how humans die of infections from the new coronavirus, called SARS-CoV-2.
“It’s the aggressive response from their immune system that is damaging them, even more than the infection itself,” Menachery said. “It’s like police responding to a misdemeanor with a SWAT team crashing through the door.”
The question he and others have still struggled to answer, however, is why the baby mice escape unscathed.
Some experts have floated a theory that because children are so heavily exposed to four other mild coronaviruses, which circulate every year and cause the common cold, that may give kids some kind of strengthened immunity. But many have doubts about that argument because adults catch the common cold coronaviruses too, and the immune systems of children — especially under the age of five — are underdeveloped, which should make them more vulnerable, not less.
“If it bears out that kids are less prone to infection, then I suspect there’s something more mechanical than immunological going on,” said Esper, the pediatric infection expert. “Something about the receptors in children’s bodies or their lungs is interfering with the virus’ ability to attach itself.”
“It just shows you how much we don’t know about this virus,” said Stuart Weston, a virologist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine who has been testing anti-viral drugs that could help treat the new coronavirus. “The focus now is on vaccines and treatment, but there are all these big questions we’re going to want to answer in the long-term if we want to really understand how these coronaviruses work.”
So given all that, does it make sense to close schools?
Because so few cases have been found in children, there’s been speculation children are simply less likely to get infected.
But many epidemiologists suspect mild symptoms may simply be masking that children are getting infected the same rates as adults. New data published last week by Chinese researchers showed authorities searching for coronavirus cases based on symptoms found lower rates in kids. But when they relied on contact tracing — testing people who come in contact with a confirmed case — children seemed to be getting infected at the same rate as adults.
“We know from pandemic research that closing schools can be effective in slowing down transmission because children are often a driver of infection. They spread it to parents, relatives and the wider community,” said Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
Some districts may find themselves closing schools because it will be tough to stay open as teachers, principals and janitors get infected, said Rivers, who has children herself. “We may end up closing schools in part to protect the adults and staff.”
