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Evidence over hysteria — COVID-19 [Updated][More Update]
Powerline Blog this morning included a link and summary of Evidence over hysteria — COVID-19, an article by Aaron Ginn.
The article is long but worthy of a complete read. Ginn sets out his evidence in a compelling manner. I won’t detail that here, but Ginn is raising some questions (and providing answers) that I have highlighted in some of my daily posts — how good is the published data? are we getting the right message from the data? have we gone overboard in our reaction?
Here are excerpts from some of his conclusions:
Local governments and politicians are inflicting massive harm and disruption with little evidence to support their draconian edicts. Every local government is in a mimetic race to one-up each other in authoritarian city ordinances to show us who has more “abundance of caution”. Politicians are competing, not on more evidence or more COVID-19 cures but more caution. As unemployment rises and families feel unbearably burdened already, they feel pressure to “fix” the situation they created with even more radical and “creative” policy solutions. This only creates more problems and an even larger snowball effect. The first place to start is to stop killing the patient and focus on what works.
The most effective means to reduce spread is basic hygiene.
The best examples of defeating COVID-19 requires lots of data. We are very behind in measuring our population and the impact of the virus but this has turned a corner the last few days. The swift change in direction should be applauded. Private companies are quickly developing and deploying tests, much faster than CDC could ever imagine. The inclusion of private businesses in developing solutions is creative and admirable. Data will calm nerves and allow us to utilize more evidence in our strategy. Once we have proper measurement implemented (the ability to test hundreds every day in a given metro), let’s add even more data into that funnel — reopen public life.
Closing schools is counterproductive.
With such little evidence of prolific community spread and our guiding healthcare institutions reporting the same results, shuttering the local economy is a distraction and arbitrary with limited accretive gain outside of greatly annoying millions and bankrupting hundreds of businesses. The data is overwhelming at this point that community-based spread and airborne transmission is not a threat.
The data shows that the overwhelming majority of the working population will not be personally impacted, both individually or their children. This is an unnecessary burden that is distracting resources and energy away from those who need it the most. By preventing Americans from being productive and specializing at what they do best (their vocation), we are pulling resources towards unproductive tasks and damaging the economy. We will need money for this fight.
These days are precarious as Governors float the idea of martial law for not following “social distancing”, as well as they liked while they violate those same rules on national TV. Remember this tone is for a virus that has impacted 0.004% of our population. Imagine if this was a truly existential threat to our Republic.
The COVID-19 hysteria is pushing aside our protections as individual citizens and permanently harming our free, tolerant, open civil society. Data is data. Facts are facts. We should be focused on resolving COVID-19 with continued testing, measuring, and be vigilant about protecting those with underlying conditions and the elderly from exposure. We are blessed in one way, there is an election in November. Never forget what happened and vote.
We have nothing to fear but fearful people driving fearful outcomes.
[Update: The article at the link has been removed by the website with the note “This post is under investigation or was found in violation of the Medium Rules.” Medium Rules can be reviewed at https://policy.medium.com/medium-rules-30e5502c4eb4. Apparently there were some readers that complained about the article. Not being privy to the complaints I have no idea why the article would be pulled. My own reading of the article revealed some startling claims that were sourced, but these days who knows why speech might be silenced. It was an opinion piece after all.]
[More Update: The link in the post now goes to ZeroHedge.]
Published in General
Some years ago, there was a study of ARDS cases. ARDS means “Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome.” At the time the study was done, about 30 years ago, the mortality was 85% in the best of hands, the MGH. A protocol was set up by Intermountain Health Systems, a hospital chain. These cases were mostly young trauma cases. The reason for the study was that ECMO was being considered (It has been mentioned with COVID 19). ECMO at that time cost $100,000 per case, no matter how short a time it was used (ECMO is Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenator). They found, by using an online decision support system in ICU, they could get the mortality down to 45% without ECMO. The point is that protocols are pretty easy and respiratory techs run these. It needs only a few docs to supervise.
Thanks for the link, @westernchauvinist! The challenge all along has been that since COVID-19 presented like flu that in a high flu year how would you be able to distinguish between COVID-19 and some other respiratory illness absent a test for the presence of the particular virus? Given the large number of flu cases in 2019-2020 it is hard to call out the COVID-19 data from fevers generally. Broader testing will likely confirm that COVID-19 is a small population amongst respiratory ailments. The sooner we get to a consensus on that and the media stops hyping the crisis, the better off we will all be and get about the business of establishing herd immunity against this new virus.
And each of us can do his part by self-isolating from the media.
If there was ever a case for a “Red Team vs. Blue Team” approach, this seems to be it. Western governments are making a lot of decisions seemingly based solely on a single report by the Imperial College London.
A report that (as of March 18) wasn’t peer-reviewed, one might add…
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/03/18/imperial-college-epidemiologists-report-projects-up-to-2-2-million-covid-19-deaths-in-us-510000-in-uk/
Breaking: Kansas and Missouri jump in to do the “stay at home” lockdown jig.
Sundance at The C Treehouse thinks this game is to start rationing and to exercise even greater government control:
“When you hear the words “non-essential” consider…. The food supply chain requires constant supplies of: oil, packaging (and all ancillary), cardboard (and all ancillary), paper, recycling, steel, plastics, stone, hydraulics, rubber, parts to repair machinery, fabric, cotton, mechanics, data analysts, communication experts, accountants, actuaries, refrigeration, coolant, glass, wood, barrels, tanks, trucks, and much more…
Whatever “it” is may seem “non-essential” until you start to realize it is part of a massive and complex ancillary input system into a very complex sector of the economy. Remove one component and the system, already under considerable strain, can freeze or slow….
That’s where “rationing” comes in.”
Whatever criticism of Ginn’s article that may be valid, this quote is right on:
G-d save us from those who do evil in the name of good.
One of the local drive time radio guys used to introduce his traffic reports “And now it’s time for more on traffic.”
Let your lips move when you read that one.
Now it’s time for more on medicine and the triumph of hysteria:
Whaaaaaat?! This is Bergen County for us folks that are not in that part of the country:
One wonders, how is Wendell Potter qualified to judge the “obviousness” of it? How does one judge the “necessity” for health workers to wear masks and/or gloves at any particular time? How come we’re only told to trust the decision-making abilities of the medical bureaucracy when those decisions err on the side of precaution?
I’m also curious how wide-ranging these hospitals’ directives about masks and/or gloves actually are. I presume the hospitals aren’t telling nurses and doctors that they can never wear masks and/or gloves. I presume the hospitals are actually telling nurses and doctors that they cannot wear masks and/or gloves 100% of the time.
The second Potter tweet includes important data. They are not being told not to wear protective gear. They are guidelines for use. The guidelines may be good or bad but they are not depriving the medical staff from protection in the presence of symptomatic patients.
I took a robo-call from Elder’s internist’s practice yesterday asking for donations of masks and gloves. This seems like a good idea to reach out to your contacts for help. Subsidiarity is always best.
Both my mother and godfather died of respriatory failure, complications of sepsis. Both in their 80s.
And that brings us back to the question: how reliable is the tracking for those sent home to self-quarantine? I don’t think we know.
There’s only one mathematics for the spread of contagion in a network, and those are known and pretty well understood. There is relevant literature in both the infectious disease and computer science categories. You’re always going to get roughly the same shape of curve when you run those equations.
What’s not known (and is likely a moving target) are the parameters driving each hypothetical future curve, including things like infectiousness (the famous r-zero), number of contacts per carrier, time to and duration of infectiousness, infections from asymptomatic carriers, degree of natural resistance. At best we’ve got some bounds on these under various conditions of testing, lockdown, etc., and the higher end estimates are damn scary. The experiences from China, South Korea, and Singapore are suggesting the best way to get the effective spread down is through social isolation, which has the effect of reducing the contacts per potential carrier, and isolating those with known infections. You want to drive the virus into smaller and smaller parts of the network of people, and eventually isolate and kill it off, since it cannot survive without a host organism.
In South Korea, it seems pretty reliable, at least the number add up.
From what I read from the the CDC this morning, they are leaving it in the hands of local officials to track most of the metrics.
Personally, I don’t care how well they track someone in Hackensack, NJ because I live about 23 hours from there by car. I do care about the 5 cases in my parish and the 16 cases in the parish next door.
Federalism at its best.
What is your local response and do you have the website that tracks it?
(added the word “care” to my 3rd paragraph)
Trump has responded well to many challenges posed by the COVID-19 epidemic. I’m beginning to wonder if Anthony Fauci, a long time Hillary satellite, isn’t achieving Hillary’s revenge for her.
Trump may be relying on the wrong experts.
That, plus this: (the original opens with the mandatory SJW disclaimer). Experts again:
This seems a good site for tracking how many tests are being done in each state and those results.
Plus deaths as well as hospitalizations, which is something I’ve really wanted to know. .
https://covidtracking.com/data/
For today, out of 220,490 tests, 30,128 were positive, and 2,519 of those cases required hospitalization.
(Assuming this source is accurate.)
Cumulative totals here: https://covidtracking.com/us-daily/
In most places they’re only testing people who show symptoms or may have been in contact with active cases, so we really can’t get an accurate number yet of how widespread this disease is or how fatal. But it seems that case fatality rate is falling as more testing is happening. Which is to be expected.
Doomsayers will be here in a minute to yell at me, I’m sure.
I have to say, I’ve been impressed by Colorado’s reporting:
https://covid19.colorado.gov/data
Thanks, @drewinwisconsin! Thanks for the website reference.
Here’s a thread taking apart Aaron Ginn’s article point by point by point by point.
It was an opinion piece which made several assertions, not all of which are correct, and asked questions while omitting others and which purported to be an informed analysis.
Not just “an opinion piece.”
Here’s an informed critique:
The basic premise is still correct. We’re forcing sweeping economic disaster on the nation without any real solid data — mainly because we don’t have enough data yet to make these sorts of decisions.
Here’s from the CDC’s pre-COVID-19 flu precautions:
Here’s their COVID-19 info:
What it looks like to me is there’s a shortage of PPE for the current and/or anticipated patient load and management may be trying to conserve supplies while saying YOYO, baby to the staff. Without acknowledging it.
The problem is that under the best circumstances (and even if they could have existed at one point if all the right decisions had been made on even less data than we now have that ship sailed weeks ago) decisions would have to have been made which were not made, and here we are.
The choices faced at the time the decision had to be made were not sunshine and rainbows vs sweeping economic disaster. They were the then and perhaps still well founded prospect of the total collapse of the medical care system on top of sweeping economic disaster vs maybe the medical care system collapses and maybe sweeping economic disaster.
Clarification:
the total collapse of the medical care system
on top ofresulting in and mutually reinforcing a sweeping economic disaster vs maybe the medical care system collapses and maybe sweeping economic disaster.ARDS was almost completely a young person’s response to sever trauma. It was originally called “Da Nang Lung” and you can guess the circumstances.
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/09/science/deadly-lung-ailment-has-battlefield-origins.html
It was not original in Viet Nam. In WWII it was called “Traumatic Wet Lung,” and the first examples of respirators using anesthesia machines were used by Lyman Brewer MD in North Africa. I knew Lyman and when he came back from the war, he got a tech from Good Samaritan hospital, in LA named Bennett to build a respirator.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S000296105490149X
@snirtler and @ontheleftcoast, thank you for the link. I am assuming that Carl T. Bergstrom is the theoretical and evolutionary biologist and a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. I read through the thread, I hope carefully. Professor Bergstrom highlights a number of valid criticisms without actually addressing the main point I got from Ginn’s article: Does the evidence support the governmental strategies being employed? A lot of the tweets involved a broad dismissal of Ginn’s understanding of epidemiological science and statistics. And I can understand why Professor Bergstrom may have done so rather than engaging some of the analysis directly. As a lawyer I have sometimes been asked questions the answer to which was only and ever evident to someone who had solid grounding in law and legal procedure. That is why we have specialists. But Bergstrom’s extended “point by point” refutation which often was a series of “he doesn’t know what he is talking about” and “this article needs a good editing for consistency and clarity” came off as a weak rebuttal. It suffers from what Scott Adams has described as seeking to strengthen an argument with a list. Adams technique when confronted is to ask the antagonist to pick one thing on the list that if it can be refuted they would change their mind. As Adams states, when you are successful the antagonist does not change their mind and simply goes down the list, and if you refute each and every item they start the list over again as if never refuted.
The last tweet kind of gives the game away: Ginn has no credibility because ZeroHedge is publicizing it and ZeroHedge has been banned from Twitter (for criticizing a scientist). Uh, that does nothing to debate the foundational question: Does the evidence support the governmental strategies being employed? So I am left in a bit of a quandery. Ginn alerts me to questions that, if answered in one way, suggest that the government strategies are tragically flawed. If answered in another way, suggest that the strategies are not flawed but risk doing more harm than good. If answered in yet another way, suggest that government is imposing a necessary cure against an existential foe for which the price we are paying is well worth it. Professor Bergstrom did not settle the matter for me.
< devil’s advocate mode = on >
In a situation where you have insufficient data to act with certainty and with potentially disastrous outcomes if you make the wrong decision, is it better to overreact with measures that you can fairly easily rescind once you get better data, or is it better to underreact with measures that you won’t be able to take back if things go from bad to worse?
I’m starting to take the view that even if the restrictions instituted by governments were an overreaction, they can still be rescinded. On the other hand, if governments hadn’t acted swiftly with extensive restrictions, and then things had gone south quickly, we would have been well and truly f***ed.
Our challenge is to make sure that governments know that their citizens are keeping a close eye on how they operate during this crisis. Governments need to know that their citizens have given their governments a lot of leeway up to now and that even though those citizens are comfortable with the amount of leeway so far, there are limits to what the citizens will take.
Basically, governments can’t be allowed to start thinking they can get away with suspending democracy indefinitely.
< devil’s advocate mode = off >
Yes. This is the nub of the problem. You can take somebody else’s canoe to paddle in to a lake to rescue a drowning swimmer — as an emergency measure. You don’t get to keep the canoe after the rescue just in case you need to paddle out again to effect a future rescue.
Thank you Lois, thank you Doc Bastiat. It was a horrible, life-defining quarter hour. Without my children and my faith, I could not have maintained my sanity.