Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The Cure Is Worse Than the Disease
In terms of serious problems being created by COVID-19, the financial and political ramifications of the panic (bankruptcies, lost income, instability in the financial system and the governments misguided attempts to shore it up) are going to be worse than the death toll.
Also, when a more dangerous pandemic comes along (and I believe what I’m told that someday it will) people will be much less likely to take the government’s and the media’s advice seriously. It’s the “boy who cried ‘wolf'” syndrome.
This panicked reaction is doing more harm than good now and sowing the seeds for a bigger disaster in the future.
Published in General
PA has 41 cases in the entire state, 5 in my county. Last night, our County Council issued the following restrictions:
We are by no means a wealthy county and this will decimate all of our small business, put our lowest wage earners out of work and it will wreak havoc on our families, many of which may never recover. Working from home is dandy if you can work remotely from a PC but is impossible if you work in the service industry, manual labor, anywhere where warm bodies need to show up,
I’m sorry but I think this is shameful and and smacks of martial law. I go back to the fact that we are a missing a key component in all this – there aren’t and won’t be any reliable numbers on this supposedly very contagious virus: the millions that came into contact with virus yet didn’t contract it, those who got it, suffered no or very mild symptoms, those who did get sick and got better, 99% of which will never be tested and included in the numbers.
I’m watching several of my neighbors traumatized by panic, anger and uncertainty, not about the virus itself, but wondering how they and their families will survive this.
Among the reasons why I prefer to teach high school is that my students know how to wash their hands, use tissues, etc. :) The little ones are darn cute and they are germ balls.
These measures appear to be very aggressive. Stores & gyms are open in Los Angeles but gatherings are limited to 250 people. I went to an exercise class at my physical therapist’s gym/office this morning and there were fewer participants. This is a small practice and I’ve observed how they clean their equipment, tables after each patient. I trust my pt and as long as I have no reason to believe I’ve been exposed to CoVid-19 and feel healthy, I will go to classes.
You’re missing the point.
20% of those who get sick and diagnosed are requiring hospitalization with 10% in the ICU for extended periods.
The number of those patients is expanding exponentially. It doesn’t matter if millions get infected and don’t get ill.
If the number of sick continues to expand exponentially our hospitals will be crushed and the death rate will sky rocket.
The only way we have of slowing that down is social isolation. No vaccine. No treatment..
Thank you, that finally makes sense to me. I said I didn’t understand the mathematics behind the dire numbers and you’ve presented it in a way even I can understand.
One more question, I assume the the “20% of the people that got sick”, represent the ones that showed symptoms and were tested? In any event, I finally grasp the seriousness that 20% require hospitalization with 10% of those needing long stays in ICU.
It was only through the grace of G-d and all his saints that I obtained an undergraduate degree in Sociology without having to take a statistics course, something I would never have been able to pass. That’s why my avatar used to be (and still is on most platforms), Barbie, the “I don’t like math” edition.
Yes.
Kozak, do you know why they have to stay in the ICU? Are they being intubated? My impression is that the main issue is pneumonia. Is intubation necessary for pneumonia treatment, or is an oxygen mask sufficient? Does a patient have to be in the ICU in order to be treated with an oxygen mask?
I disagree. Kids out of school, like my grand kids, will not “self isolate,” they will party with their friends. I think they would be better in school with sensible precautions. like checking temperatures.
Not enough testing of asymptomatics.
We have learned a lot about government health care. CDC and FDA are political bureaucracies that follow the laws of bureaucracies. Empire building, sloth, make work like gun safety and the rest. If you want the DMV delivering health care, you have the model.
That was the days when we had control of our own economy. Globalization moved that to China.
I think those numbers are way too high. I would estimate 10% requiring hospital care at most.
Remdesivir may end that ICU number as the index case recovered completely in 24 hours.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2001191
<i>Treatment with intravenous remdesivir (a novel nucleotide analogue prodrug in development10,11) was initiated on the evening of day 7, and no adverse events were observed in association with the infusion. Vancomycin was discontinued on the evening of day 7, and cefepime was discontinued on the following day, after serial negative procalcitonin levels and negative nasal PCR testing for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.
On hospital day 8 (illness day 12), the patient’s clinical condition improved. Supplemental oxygen was discontinued, and his oxygen saturation values improved to 94 to 96% while he was breathing ambient air. The previous bilateral lower-lobe rales were no longer present.</i>
Kozak, I don’t think that this is your graph. This graph looks designed to mislead, to me.
I’m doing some of my own calculations on this, and will post them separately, probably tomorrow. Interestingly, South Korea was also on same track during the relevant period (compared to the US, Germany, France, and the UK). Spain is actually on a disturbingly higher trend.
Notice how the graph is designed to give the impression of a 33% daily increase. The graph runs through March 9, on which Italy had 9,172 reported cases.
Carry out that projection of a 33% daily increase. If it is true, Italy should have had 28,699 reported cases yesterday, March 13. The true number of reported cases in Italy, as of yesterday, is 17,660.
That is an erroneous overprojection of 62.5% in just four (4) days.
We’re expecting the number of cases graph to be S-shaped (though the graph above is logarithmic, so it won’t look like an S on this scale). If Italy is around its inflection point, its number of cases will be around twice the current total — i.e. somewhere in the 35,000 range. South Korea appears past its inflection point.
Here is my own graph, on a linear scale, beginning for each country on the day its WuFlu count surpassed 200:
Notice that almost all of the countries are on the same general track as both S. Korea and Italy were at this point. The UK (dark blue) is running a little lower, and you can see the troubling uptick in Spain (light blue).
We closed them on Thursday here too and I feel we only days away from a complete shutdown. I’m in favour of this and I think it’s a matter of prudence not panic. I don’t know about the US, but I know that the Irish Health service will be overwhelmed very quickly. It’s chaotic at the best of times. Older people will not get the care they need. It will not be a peaceful death either if they are gasping for breath.
And it may very well be that some of what people now fear may be over-reaction, is what will CAUSE IT to end up a nothing-burger. But there’s no way to know that in advance, and likely no way to really know it in hindsight either.
The graph (which almost certainly wasn’t made by Kozak) is not designed to mislead, it’s designed for professionals who are adept at reading logarithmic scales and who understand that the 33% growth line is provided as a guide, not a projection.
With those two caveats in mind, the graph shows exactly what yours does as well: most countries enter a logarithmic phase of spread, and Italy (as well as a few other countries not depicted on the graph) has already started to slowly plateau (a trend which will hopefully continue).
In these situations, lots of laypeople access professional research and reports to try to inform themselves and discuss with others. It’s good that laypeople aren’t blocked from accessing such materials (as is done in some other countries), but it requires the laypeople to respect that professionals will often use lay-unfriendly conventions when communicating with each other. Don’t interpret that as bad faith.
It’s way too early to be making assessments like this. COVID-19 has not run its course. We don’t know how bad it will get.
Ironically, if the measures being taken now do manage to mitigate this crisis people will be saying that we over-reacted. I dearly hope that they get the opportunity to say that.
I am not a doctor. Kozak is.
We need to rely on Ricochet’s medical doctors, and follow their medical advice.
Going out on a limb here and speculating that your assessment of the crisis is more a function of emotion than data.
That like I said too, about Y2K and other crises apparently averted.
I have to agree with the title. This is crazy. We have to isolate seniors, not the entire world population.
A great deal of computer coding was done to avert the Y2K crisis.
Chloroquine is probably curative and preventative. It is a common drug going back to WWII as a malaria treatment/preventative. Hydroxychloroquine is a common drug for rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases. Its brand name is Plaquenil. Both are reported as successful in South Korea and China. Remdesivir is still coming along in a clinical trial.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTi-g18ftNZUMRAj2SwRPodtscFio7bJ7GdNgbJAGbdfF67WuRJB3ZsidgpidB2eocFHAVjIL-7deJ7/pub
Self isolation is still a good idea but I have acquired a small supply of these drugs.
Yes, and now it’s like people – people who didn’t really know anything about it, anyway – think it was always nothing to worry about. They don’t realize how much work was actually done. And the same kind of thing might happen with corona.
And I did some of that coding myself, too. The places where I worked in the 70s and 80s and 90s had never given Y2K even a first thought, let alone a second. But I was fed up with each new customer needing a few tweaks to the “standard” business management/accounting software that we offered. (I say “standard” because I’m not sure if any customer ever actually used the original/standard version.) And one reason I got into computer work to start with is that I hate doing the same thing over and over, that’s what computers are FOR! But we wound up having a slightly different version for each customer, which meant that any changes to tax policy or even bug fixes, had to be duplicated in each version. Perhaps with slight differences depending on the degree of previous customization… Which of course meant more headaches, especially for me!
So I set about making a truly standard version, where all of the previously-hard-coded “tweaks” – and some more that nobody had asked for yet – became configurable options. And I started with a “configuration module” that included a calendar system with 4-digit years.
It kinda sucks now that some people think all of that amounted to a “nothing burger” but I guess that’s just how life goes. It’s not a big deal for me, but I expect there are people working in epidemiology etc now, whose hard work protecting and saving lives will later be viewed as just another “nothing burger.” But not by me!
I hope you are right. But I’m hearing this from people with friends working on the frontline in Italy.
I wrote an essay for a women’s magazine around the time of the Y2K thing that argued “this is a problem that will be solved.” Not that it isn’t a problem—rather, that it is the kind of problem that affects the wealthy and educated at least as much as the poor and ignorant, so the chances were extremely good that it would be taken care of. And it was.
Not at all the same as saying “nothing burger!”
I hope, with all digits crossed, that this turns out the same way—that @jessemcvey will be saying, in a month or so, “see? Nothing!”
I’ve been thinking about the problem of the economy taking a hit—though I, like @jeannebodine, pilot my ship from a very different sort of wheelhouse (sounds better than “math is hard!”). And, like her, I’ve got neighbors who are going to get kicked in the teeth by this.
I remember reading, back in the mists of time, about the effect of the plague on the economy of Europe. Turns out that the plague —admittedly an extreme example—delayed the coming of the Renaissance by at least a century; contrary to the Bernie Bro’s assessment of things, glorious art and culture requires wealth, and wealth requires human beings to generate it.
And so, preserving human lives = preserving the economy, right? Future economic activity depends on there being people around to engage in it. It doesn’t seem as though “only” the elderly are getting truly sick, but even if this were the case, those so-called “old” people are not economically inert. My octogenarian mother provides jobs for a whole lot more people than I do—she’s propping up all the restaurants, yoga teachers, pet stores, veterinarians, hospice nurses and pharmacies within a ten mile radius of her home. So if we get this right, all those “old” folks who would otherwise have died will be out and about, spending their disproportionate share of the national wealth in restaurants, hotels, Walmarts, Rolling Stones concerts and RV campgrounds, flying off to see the grandkids and snowbirding between north and south. (Surely the economy of Florida would sink faster than its sinking soil if America’s geezers keeled over en masse?
By flattening the curve of the pandemic, we’ve got a shot at seeing an economy that comes roaring back, filled with pent-up demand for something other than funeral home services…right?
I would value if discussion of the “cure” (which currently looks to me like “eliminate human contact and crash the world economy”) would at least acknowledge that the “cure” will also kill some people and lead to serious negative health outcomes for others. Maybe fewer than the disease. But the “cure” is not cost-free in terms of human life.
Homeless people will die after being denied access to shelters. People who lose their jobs or are forced into bankruptcy will become economically poorer, which will statistically result in a higher rate of illness and death. Unemployed and bankrupt people will commit suicide. The exact numbers may be hard to document. Economically poor societies generally have poorer health than wealthy societies, and we seem to have decided to deliberately drive ourselves into being an economically poorer society. Some already lonely people will die when more thoroughly denied human contact.
We should at least acknowledge that the “cure” will result in increased deaths and poorer health of its own.
But they are. From this:
And Fauci continues to insist the “over-reaction” is necessary (from the same article linked to above):