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Day 136: COVID-19 Is There Really An Epidemic Anymore?
COVID-19 was an epidemic. But is it anymore? What characterizes an epidemic is its growth and effect. It moves quickly through a population affecting a disproportionate number of individuals and is of public concern because of the impact that that number of illnesses on society as a whole.
Early on we knew little of what was going to happen and scenes from China and Italy genuinely panicked us all. The media, fresh off its disappointment over the failure to remove Trump and the termination of that drama quickly picked up the epidemic as its means of driving views and clicks. First, we had the drama of disease growth. And even though the clinical approach to treatment was basically the same regardless of the cause of respiratory distress, the first cudgel with which to beat upon Trump was the lack of testing to confirm that these cases were in fact caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Once the testing was ramped up it confirmed that there was a fast-moving virus loose in the country. This became the headline as we watched the “new cases” scoreboard totals mount.
The next thing was pressure for a strong governmental response. Like bowling pins toppling, state after state-imposed restrictions on liberty and the economy. The story was that response, not the disease itself. Initially deaths did not mount quickly enough to satisfy the media and, ironically, it was only with the heavy hand of government in place that the death toll rose significantly. Turns out a lot of people died because of government rules, e.g., mandating sick people be put back in nursing homes. The tension between a President abiding by the federal scheme set out in the Constitution and the governors of Blue States made for a delicious storyline as everything from personal protection equipment, to ventilators, to hospital ships, to potential therapies for COVID-19, was mined for drama.
And then, when victory over the disease was in sight, the story shifted to the dangers of reopening the economy. Never mind that the data was moving in the right direction, except for that reliable alarm bell: new cases. Hospitalizations were down, incremental death was slowing. The only drama for the news was to pit the people restive with loss of liberty against the local government and fearful people. All that was going nicely until a new story arose: The riots!
The media characterize it as “protesting” but the re-opening protests did not involve looting, arson, and murder of law enforcement. Nevertheless, re-opening protests were bad because they threatened to spread disease. But the riots are good because America is racist; businesses flattened by the epidemic-induced economic shutdown and now damaged and emptied of inventory did not deserve to re-open anyway. But somehow the shibboleth of social distancing that characterized the good people who cared about their neighbors when the story was the epidemic, can now be ignored. No danger here, the media said.
So is there an epidemic anymore?
Yes. It is not the SARS-CoV-2 virus, it is the disrespect for human liberty and property, the uneven application of law. It is the Progressive Virus that has infected too much of our culture and institutions. It whispers in the ear to inflame grievance and to justify demands for unequal treatment under the law. It victimizes people by robbing them of their name — their special and unique identifier — and substituting it with a government-approved designation as part of a group. They are to be treated as a group, both for good or ill, and denied their G-d given individual rights. They are to be dependent upon government patronage in every aspect of their life. Some will learn the game and play it so well that for a time they can be part of the slaveholders and not the slaves.
Progressivism gains its adherents through the belief that they will be the slave holders and not the slaves, just as lotteries pull in marks with the promise of riches that anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of math should know is elusive. Although few get the grand prize, the lesser prizes are sufficient in number to extend Progressive power. And that combination of frequent although lesser payouts keep people in the game. Just like a slot machine, payouts timed to keep focus on the game and off of the environment around them. And so it is that the Progressive Virus enslaves us all.
Personally, I prefer SARS-CoV-2. I’ll take my chances. Just let me be me, and free.
[Note 1: I will be arbitrarily ending the daily COVID-19 posts on Day 150. It is clear now more than ever that this is not a public health crisis, it is a public policy crisis dressed in whatever garb best suits those that promote government control over our lives. That will be the constant battle of the remainder of my life. But it has nothing to do with the disease we labeled COVID-19.]
[Note 2: Links to all my COVID-19 posts can be found here.]
Published in General
Thank you for yet another great post.
It is clear now more than ever that this is not a public health crisis, it is a public policy crisis dressed in whatever garb best suits those that promote government control over our lives.
AMEN!
The shutdowns are not about a virus, just as the riots are not about a dead black guy. All of it is about an attempt to destabilize the U.S. As to the virus continuing to be an issue, what worries me is the growing investment so many have in its continuation. From news media to pundits to companies who have spent a fortune on commercials with sad piano music and narrators saying “in these trying times” to companies who have switched to manufacturing masks to cottage industries making them. Each day that goes by, more people have a stake in wanting this pandemic hysteria to continue.
Correct.
My wife and I got into an argument over the terms “epidemic” and “pandemic”. I told her I thought use of “pandemic” was the same as the use of the term “superstar”.
Or, to use SAT analogy:
Superstar is to star as pandemic is to epidemic.
A thousand dead a day.
109,000 dead since Feb 29, about 100 days.
20000 cases a day.
And it’s over?
Madness
Again, my usual quibble. This is not a one size fits all virus. I know and understand that some are opposed to government measure strictly on principle.. But, if you live in a heavily-populated area that is still problematical from the perspective of the virus spreading, you might see things a bit differently. I note, FWIW, that there have been 100,000+ new cases in the U.S. since May 30.
(Graphic source: http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/)
If case counts rise without a corresponding rise in hospitalizations, then the question is whether the infection qualifies as an “epidemic” from a societal impact standpoint. Hospitalization growth is not rising along with cases. (Graphic source: http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/)
Is some of this indicative of greater success in treating the virus? I’ve been following new cases for a couple of weeks and they’re mostly holding steady in the 20-23,000K area.
Could be a variety of factors. Certainly the system may have optimized treatment protocols now with 10-12 weeks of experience. The health care system does not appear to be stressed in any location, so there are not as many people who may be dying from suboptimal care.
Cases are recorded whenever there is a positive test result for SARS-CoV-2 virus without regard to severity of symptoms. My County is offering to testing to anyone who asks whether or not they are presenting with symptoms. Positive test rates are less than 10%, but new infections are being identified.
Unfortunately, many of the tests have been found to give false positives, so the numbers of “new cases” can’t be trusted. In addition, too many people and institutions have been fudging the numbers to make it look even worse than it is, so we can’t even tell how scared we’re supposed to be. Doctors and nurses both here and abroad have come forward to say they were told to list Covid as the cause of death whether it was true or not. One Israeli doctor who went to Italy to help – because of all the dire headlines. Remember that? – said it turns out that a huge percentage of the dead, while they did have the virus, died WITH it, not OF it. Might as well take a guy who was run over by a truck while he had a cold and say he died of a damn cold.
I get it that this bug is more contagious than others have been. I get it that we should be aware and be careful. But I am sorry you do not shut down the entire economy of a world superpower for a virus with a 99% survival rate. And the motives behind the shutdowns, well, I think in most cases they don’t have much to do with caring about people. My income has been pretty much destroyed by this stupid thing, this year and now stretching into 2021. And for what.
I have to disagree that the number of new cases is lacking in value. One sees a consistency across the board in terms of the numbers from day to day. I’m admittedly not knowledgeable enough to know why we should be more wary of false positives than false negatives, but I think it’s a legitimate question. Furthermore, we’re missing a certain number of new cases. The U.S. has an excellent record, relatively speaking, of conducting tests, but there is still a huge amount of people who aren’t tested. If only a very small percentage of those untested have the virus, it provides numbers that could make up for any false positives.
From what I see, it does not matter whether there is any more lockdown.
The number of people who are already immune apparently because of past exposure to other COVID variants is well over 80%. The Diamond Princess and Teddy Roosevelt indicated something like that despite intensive close-quarters exposure exposure. The Swedes‘ surprise at how few have the antibodies despite their herd-immunity Strategy seems to confirm that take.
For whatever reason, treatment appears to be more effective than two months ago. Earlier intervention? Meds?
Kids don’t get the bug not are they asymptomatic carriers.
The bug is already widely out there and will neither go away nor increase wildly.
It is long past the time to pivot to maximum protection for the vulnerable while otherwise opening all the way.
The ‘lockdown until there’s a vaccine‘ strategy was always nuts and based on an insanely pessimistic model and a magical belief in distancing.
This moment in the course of the pandemic or epidemic feels like every other moment that has preceded it: we don’t seem to know whether we’re coming or going. :-)
Where I am on Cape Cod, the number of new cases as measured by positive tests has slowed down. That is interesting since we have had an influx of summer visitors and second-home owners these past two weeks.
I don’t believe it. There may be 109,000 dead people, but the people doing the counting and tabulating have many reasons – including financial – for ascribing as many as possible to Covid. And no reasons to count honestly.
We finally got a case, after all this started, of a person who tested positive, but who’s death was not attributed to Covid – George Floyd.
So who knows? – maybe the tide is turning.
Well, let’s move forward, get back to living, open up, get back to work,but don’t be surprised if this novel virus has more in store, since we are just learning about all of its features.
I’m just saying, a bit less arrogance, an more humility may be in order.
But are those new folks getting tested? If not, why would their presence change your local stats?
That’s what I’m trying to say. They are arriving, and our case numbers are not going up. So it seems to me it must be quieting down both in the places they are coming from and here on the Cape too.
The stats would change if they were arriving and they had some symptoms that their doctor here would want to investigate. That’s why I believe the infection rate is quieting down. If more and more people were becoming infected, a certain percentage of them would be symptomatic and therefore they would be tested and if their tests were positive, it would show up as new cases on the Cape.
The problem is that there are myriad possibilities as to what is going on at this moment with the virus as it is active in our community (that is, the United States) because in some places where the virus has been very active, a lot of variables have changed in the last month such as the heat and humidity.
We’re not going to stop people from traveling and leaving their homes for the summer. Especially families with kids. So we might as well relax for the summer, do as much research as we can, and grow our food and our bank accounts for next year. And it may never come back again in the way we saw it this year. It is very possible that it has already mutated into a less virulent microorganism, which is what happened with the first SARS outbreak in 2003. In that case, it took 18 months, and the Spanish flu lasted 18 months too. It’s an educated guess that it will be back next fall. However, the virus might die out sooner. It could happen.
We need answers to a thousand questions. Meanwhile, it’s getting hot and the kids want to go to the beach and get an ice cream. I don’t see any reason to stop them for the rest of the summer.
For a little perspective, this amounts to one out of every three-thousand three hundred people in the United States getting infected over the last five or six days. If you did a random search, you would have a hard time finding any one of these people. Granted, the “real” infection rate is always presumed to be higher because not everybody who is infected goes to be tested or even knows that they are because symptoms are so mild.
There are a few recent factors that actually inflate the number of positive tests compared to a month or two ago. For one, most places now have enough test kits to test the people who need it. In the past, many patients who were suspected of the infection but had milder symptoms were not tested in order to preserve tests for the truly sick, especially in the New York City area. That is no longer the case, at least in my area. Second, over the last several weeks, hospitals have been admitting a wave of patients who were put on hold during the lockdown, and many of these, especially surgery patients, are tested whether they have symptoms or not. In a similar vein, healthcare workers and first-responders are now being tested more often because of the surplus in test kits, and a lot of positive cases are found there. You would be surprised at how few hospital workers were tested during the first few months of the Pandemic.
Exactly.
It is also evidence of a weakening virus, which is a good thing, and which would also mean that an increase in cases is not a bad thing.
This is also happening in my county. Of course, we still have a 24% positive rate, and our governor’s arbitrary benchmark for “phase II” is <2%. I wish I could have 5 minutes alone with the man and no consequences…
Of course, we are very close to the saturation point, so there should be a natural steep decline very soon. Unfortunately, corresponding to the health authority’s “urging” everyone to wear masks in public. Cue the self-congratulation when it happens to rain just after you did the rain dance…
Public health professionals are keeping quiet as the riots go on, even if they are worried about a second wave. Antifa apparently outranks them. Some have even decided to endorse the protests, and toss a molotov into their credibility. If the antifa goons get COVID-19, I hope they die from it.
Meanwhile the number of COVID-19 patients in the hospital is falling, so that the isolation wards are being returned to service.
The Lancet’s original horse puckey study that “proved” that HCQ was not effective against COVID and was instead quite dangerous and harmful has now been retracted.
On our local FB scanner and neighborhood news group, the same people who 10 days ago were all over those of us who want our freedoms back as we “obviously” desired to kill granma, are now out adjacent to the roadways, holding signs in support of Black Lives Matter.
Of course, almost everyone of them has an “in” with someone profiting from the COVID affair. They all seem to be related to county workers who want the contact testing to come about.
According to the CDC we still are (6.6% of deaths from P&I above a 6.4% target). However their threshold of an Epidemic is very low. Only around 20% above the baseline. Its so low you actually have to look for a year were there was not at lest a few weeks they said we were not in an Epidemic. So take it with a grain of salt.
The worst part, yes. There will continue to be deaths, but now the rate will be such the medical community can handle them. Remember, all of these actions were about flattening the curve, not eliminating it . . .
Especially if we stop putting infected people into nursing homes. That accounts for what, 1/3rd of the total deaths?