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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
@rodin
Sorry. I didn’t see your post. Didn’t mean to leapfrog you like that.
Am I on track that the unquantified illustration that underlies national policy today can be quantified this next week:
Put those together and we get the beginning of a real strategy.
No problem. The more mentions it gets, the better.
I dunno. Maybe in that some nurses and doctors have to stay home with their kids now. That is a problem.
But is there any better way to spread the virus between multiple families in a community than cramming all their kids into the same gym class? It’s not without reason that people call the schools “germ factories.”
You can shut down all the face-to-face classes and have all the teachers work hard at learning to do some online teaching. We’re paid to teach, and in a credible viral threat we can learn some new ways to do it. There are school staff who aren’t teachers but are paid to support the business of teaching; they can learn how to promote Zoom competency in the presence of a credible viral threat.
Now this is the Hong Kong model. I like Hong Kong. I like the Hong Kong model. Maybe I’m biased. (And let’s admit that having to stay home with your kids is much less a problem in HK because most families with kids have two parents with jobs and already pay a Filipino maid to clean the house and take care of the kids.)
I would direct your attention to the part of Aaron Ginn’s article that cited data that children are more likely to contract the virus at home from their parents than from fellow school children. I accept that this is counterintuitive and that Ginn’s source for this should be examined and verified. The issue really isn’t the risk to the children because, as a group, elementary school children either don’t get sick or have only mild cases. But are the children virus vectors? That is the real question. Ginn believes that they are not. That belief is based on some sources he credits. That claim needs to be verified.
And then there is “herd immunity” development. Isolating healthy people does nothing to add to a society’s herd immunity that ultimately stops epidemics or at least minimizes the consequences of the disease to the group. Shelter in place — to the extent effective — depresses herd immunity until people can move about and come in contact with the virus. Sheltering vulnerable people makes sense, sheltering healthy people is generally self-defeating. Aren’t we picking “winners and losers” when government decides that someone is essential enough to get a paycheck? We all know where the redistribution of wealth merry-go-round ends: badly.
Well said on all points.
I think that we saw this data, in the Imperial College report, and it showed that the catastrophic projections were so far beyond the healthcare system’s capacity that nothing that we do will help much. A full national lockdown, for 5 months, would just postpone the day of reckoning by about 5 months.
Personally, I continue to think that the pessimistic projections are greatly overstated, perhaps by 2 orders of magnitude, but we’ll have to wait and see about that.
One can take some comfort from the fact that the most pessimistic projections usually prove to be inaccurate. At this point I don’t think there’s any way to know where this is going to peak out. So far there has been no effect on the rate of growth of numbers of infected people. I expected to see some effect by now.
The first 6 to 12 responses in the discussion thread to Ginn’s article convinced me that my gut-instinctive reaction to it — “This is gussied-up BS, notwithstanding the author’s good intentions” — is correct.
And that’s just where the reactions to Ginn’s modeling (or alleged lack thereof) and analysis are concerned.
Look, the CCP/PLA dictatorship didn’t just trash the Chinese economy for fun, or even simply because of comparative shortcomings in the PRC’s public-health management resources and anti-contagion “toolkits.”
They took the approach they did because they know that this coronavirus is not merely “from” China but is also in fact “*Made* in China,” if you catch my meaning.
If I’m correct, that takes a blowtorch to just about all the suppositions and data (mistakenly configured/presented or not) that ostensibly inform the Ginn piece.
Folks, please stop promoting the Ginn article!
The link to the Ginn Article now goes to an error page saying that the article has been withdrawn for not meeting site standards or for investigation of same.
@sisyphus, thank you for bringing that to my attention. I have updated the post with an alert to its removal. As I have no information on the basis for its removal I am disinclined to pull down the post. I only regret not discussing Ginn’s evidence for Ricochet’s consideration. I will see if I can find an archived copy or alternate location and, if so, correct the link.
Ginn writes:
This data is total hospital beds; IIUC the US has more ICU beds per capita than do many of its “competitors.”
If we had that SK level of hospital furniture? We. Don’t. Have. The. Doctors/Nurses/PAs/EMTs/NPs/Respiratory techs/hospital supply chain management people (or in many cases the supplies)/etc., etc., etc.
What we do have an excess of is tort lawyers who will be all over any death in which staff without appropriate licensure and certification is involved.
I don’t expect to see an effect this soon. The information that I’ve seen puts the incubation period at 2-14 days, a pretty broad range, but if you use the midpoint of around 7-8 days, we wouldn’t expect to see much of an effect for about a week. Perhaps more like two weeks, because it might take another week or so for a case to progress far enough to cause a person to go to the doctor or hospital, and then get tested.
I have found an archived copy on the Waybackmachine.org and have updated the link to point to it.
I had the opposite reaction. I was able to read Ginn’s article before it was censored. Most of it seemed quite sensible and well-supported, and the bulk of the data was in line with what I have learned (at least, as far as I remember it).
My impression is that this is the DISC at work. The DISC is a term coined by Eric Weinstein, an acronym for Distributed Information Suppression Complex.
A friend sent me this:
I have been assuming that the rate of increase in “infections” is largely due to the rate of increase in tests administered. Is there a good source for total numbers of tests each day? It would be enlightening to be able to graph the percentage of positives over the course of days.
I read it and found it compelling and well documented.
Perhaps it flies too boldly in the face of current dogma, ie, to panic.
The Ginn article can now be found at Zero Hedge:
https://www.zerohedge.com/health/covid-19-evidence-over-hysteria
Ouch.
So obviously we need some people to do this e-learning thing more sensibly.
Thanks, @jro! And Zerohedge has the embedded graphs missing from the Waybackmachine.org. Guess I will update the link (again).
Thanks so much, Rodin! I read 90% of the article before it was taken down, and now I have your newly linked site to finish it. I really think it is one of the most intelligent and well reasoned pieces I’ve seen. That isn’t saying much because nearly everything out there is hyperbolic junk and fear mongering.
The article is also meticulously sourced which is a big plus for further investigation.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^T.H.I.S.^^^^^^^^^^^^^
It is going to be a manpower issue.
Hold tight a little. Give our medical staff time to prepare people, equipment, materials, and get our OWN data.
Definitely don’t believe what is coming from China, unless the dead truth telling doctors have something to say.
I shudder to speculate given that its a pay site and I’ve never seen a sample of an article that passes their standards. Maybe he forgot i before e except after c, which was always a bit weird in my book but we must have standards!
I scanned the piece, I can’t vouch for the sources and I haven’t seen the data carved up by age and other risk groups yet. But it ain’t my field and I would just as soon that Richard Epstein and George Savage and this Collins guy and an actual practicing epidemiologist from a top institution kick it around.
I do like that only a few percent who think they have the Covid-19 have Covid-19. And the graphs don’t tell us the date cutoff for the data. The country by country compare with the logarithmic x scale shows that while South Korea is not continuing to climb at the insane rate of Italy and Iran, that curve is still trending upward at a troubling rate.
I certainly hope that NIH and CDC and Johns Hopkins and a huge chunk of the world’s epidemiologists are doing a much better job of capturing, slicing, packaging, and publishing the stats across the web for each other than the stuff we are seeing. And China’s data should just be filtered out. We’re going to wake up next week to the Lawyer’s in Love lyric where the Russians are all gone, only it’s the PRC. They’ve lied about everything up to now, stop pretending that data is real.
It’s just the fate of the world, no pressure.
The disconnect between “it’s going to kill fast swaths of the population and crash the health care system” and “it’s not the Satan Bug and the stats give us good reason to hope” is so wide and profound you do not know what to think. We’re all Jack Nicholson slapping Faye Dunaway here.
I do not get a gut-grip over the number of cases increasing, if that’s a result of increased testing. I watch the mortality stats. Likelihood of contraction from asymptomatic carriers, length of time between infection and manifestation of symptoms, and likelihood of how many infected will have anything other than a crappy fortnight of aches and weariness – that’s what I want to know.
Even if we add more ICU beds and ventilators, the expertise and skills needed to keep the critical care spaces are not everyday doctoring and nursing.
Go find doctors and nurses in hospitals, and ask them what they are doing to get ready for this tsunami.
Now, in two weeks, with the mass isolation of all, and American preparation and data, hooefully less stringent more informed quarantine criteria will be rolled out.
And would we be grateful? I hope so.
This article, linked over at Watts Up With That, makes the sensible case that antibody testing — so that we can determine who had the virus and recovered — would be extraordinarily useful. It would allow us to return people to the working, functioning population once they were no longer a source of contamination risk. We really have no idea how many Americans have been infected and have recovered, just one more critical datapoint we still lack and that we’ll need in order to make sensible decisions.
And I found the Ginn article as plausible as most others I’ve read.
Ok, Jim’s marker, which I bolded above, makes a lot of sense. We have two Covid deaths in Massachusetts. Two. In a state that has an airport which until recently took in 10 or 20 direct flights from Europe a day.
Wuhan Flu has been a problem in the US for about 6 weeks. We have had more than 30,000 seasonal influenza cases in MA since October, according to the Mass Board of Registration in Medicine newsletter two Fridays ago. That’s 1500 a week. That’s 9000 in six weeks. At 0.1% mortality, that’s 9 deaths. Nine. Nine is greater than two.
My first wife died of seasonal flu in December 2004, so I know the reality of those nine deaths. I gave her CPR for 10 or 12 minutes while the ambulance rolled down route 5, and I never got the flu that killed her.
Have we shut down all of civil society, bankrupted hundreds of small businesses and suffered the enormous secondary medical costs of a sudden recession because of those nine deaths?
My employer is building a respiratory urgent care unit out of the ObGyn clinic (good), shutting down all routine outpatient services (bad), keeping us decently well informed (good). But they are failing to take advantage of innumerable Docs who are not trained in pulmonary or ICU care, who have asked for a weekend crash course in ventilator and pneumonia management so we can be of some earthly use if the sh*t ever really hits the fan here (bad). Maybe 20% of working Docs are competent to handle a bad viral pneumonia, maybe 5% can manage a patient on a ventilator. I’m not one of them but I would like to be.
The bigger and more obvious problem is that in just about every country with significant Wuhan virus exposure, the schools were closed down before businesses. That would heavily skew the “infections by family” numbers.
It’s fairly well-established that, overall, schools are one of the biggest infection centers for any disease – mostly due to a typical kid being within arm’s reach of at least a thousand different people per day, with extended exposure in multiple classes and in multiple classrooms, sharing things like bathroom facilities and desks.