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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
I live in a remote corner of New York. Last I heard (a couple of days ago) we had three cases in town, two in the hospital and one self-quarantined at home. I don’t know how recovery is tracked, nor how anything is reported; I heard it via word-of-mouth from medical friends.
I’m glad to see this point made. I’ve been reading a lot of pieces in the last couple of days that seem to be assuming that the strategies currently in place will remain in place until we reach some poorly-defined “end of the crisis”. This is not necessarily so. The arguments put forth by Ginn and many others are useful to the discussion, and at the very least allow thinking to be kept a bit more flexible as we chart our course forward. Government and bureaucracy always generate a lot of inertia, but policies are not actually cast in concrete. I am hopeful that we’ll find a way to avert the worst outcomes for our health and for our economy.
Actually, some people do get to keep the canoe. I’m currently reading Illiberal Reformers, and am learning about how after the emergency of World War I, the Progressives kept the canoe.
And Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong.
Japan?
Have you gone here? This is the local health departments.
https://www.nysacho.org/directory/
Well, since Singapore is 1/3 the size of Bossier Parish, LA (where I live) and only has 3 main points of entry. Contact tracing and individual quarantine, plus additional measures in place since SARS and activated when the first cases showed up made it work for them.
We are the 3rd or 4th largest country on the planet (depending on how the coastline is counted) with innumerable ports of entry, no contact tracing, and an FDA that had barriers (since removed by President Trump) to developing widespread testing. We, unfortunately, are in the community spread phase and have to undergo more drastic measures.
But 3M is ramping up production for N95 masks (35M per month), testing has passed 250K people with the last day getting 50K people tested (per US surgeon general statements). Things are moving in the right direction.
I think we will be able to get back to less restrictive measures once we have evidence that the community spread is under control.
That’s a pretty weak take-down, actually. I’ll take-down the take-down, on just one point. The thread states:
It happens that I’m working on a post about projections, and I am citing this same JAMA article for Farr’s Law. The author of the Ginn take-down post mocks the use of Farr’s Law. It turns out that the projection was incorrect, but not really because the incidence didn’t follow Farr’s Law. Rather, the peak was a few years further out than they thought.
Here is my graph of AIDS diagnoses for 1981 to 2001 (data source here, from UC San Francisco):
Looks pretty much bell-shaped, doesn’t it. Maybe ol’ Farr wasn’t such a fool after all — and maybe the guy who did the Ginn take-down isn’t telling us the whole story.
It is true that the JAMA article missed the AIDS peak — it predicted a peak in around 1988-89, and the actual peak was around 1992-93. Their estimate was off — the JAMA article predicted about 200,000 total cases, while the actual total (through 2001) was around 800,000. Off by a factor of 4.
To finish off the AIDS picture, it appears that cases have stabilized from 2005-2014 at around 40,000/year (per the CDC, here). This is an increase from the graph above, probably reflecting increased risky behavior after the main epidemic had passed and treatments were developed, and perhaps an increased prevalence of homosexuality. As of 2015, male homosexuals were about 65% of new cases, heterosexuals around 25%, and IV drug users around 10%.
Back to Farr’s Law and the WuFlu. The AIDS projection was off by a factor of around 4. But remember that the most catastrophic WuFlu projections, right now, are predicting about 267 million US cases over the next 4 months or so, and about 2.2 million deaths, while we currently have about 27,000 cases and Italy has about 54,000. That’s an increase of about 10,000 times in the US.
I did see one minor error in the Ginn article. He reproduces the Johns Hopkins “red circles” map, which he criticizes as alarmist (rightly), but incorrectly reports that it shows “the total number of . . . cases per country.” Here is the Johns Hopkins map (from Ginn’s paper, with some of his comments):
I don’t think that those are circles by country. They appear to be by city, or region.
Yet Ginn’s point is correct. This map makes it look as if almost the whole world is infected — actually, it makes it look as if the whole world has been destroyed by nukes (like the “Global Thermonuclear War” scene from War Games)
The global infection rate is 0.0043% (about 335,000 cases, 7.8 billion population)
Yes, they’ll play Capture the Flag in the playground area: half the kids, thrice the space, in the open air.
The kids are dangerous as carriers of coronavirus, not as victims.
Yes, prioritize caregivers! Very yes!
That sounds about right.
There are a lot of people out there who think it’s a shame to let a crisis go to waste. I’m starting to wonder if Fauci isn’t one of them.
I was just listening to Dan Bongino saying how all his YouTube posts were demonetized last week and he’s pretty sure it was for putting some responsibility for this on the Chinese handling of the initial outbreak.
The Chinese certainly seem to have benefited from the Russia Collusion hoax. Just sayin’.
They are by country and in some cases (U.S., China, and Canada come to mind) by political subdivision within the country, but not city or other region. I’ve been checking that site a few times a day for the past week or so, and they have never presented the data otherwise. However, they have changed the scaling by which they determine the size of the circles, so that it now doesn’t look so dramatic and it’s easier to study the map. I think the scaling of the circles stays the same, even as you resize the map, so it also matters on what size of display you view the map.
They’ll probably have to re-scale again sometime.
I’ve been wondering the same thing all along. On the Worldometrics site where they put all the World stats on Corona, it seems that the column marked “Total recovered” is extremely haphazard to say the least. It gives nearly the entire Chinese cases the stamp of recovery, and shows hardly anybody else in the world recovering, despite the fact that plenty of time has elapsed for that to happen. It would seem that many people have carried this sickness for two months or more.
I suspect it is just hard to keep track of people who are sent home on their own to recover. From what I’ve read, that would be about 80 – 85% of patients, because of the mild nature of most cases.
Try this site: https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/en
Nice sets of data there.
The JAMA article had cases going to essentially ZERO in 1994. Didn’t happen. You also put the goalpost at 800K by the year 2000, yet provide data to 2014 – which by my math has the total caseload at closer to 1.4M or off by a factor of 7 and getting worse (I mean if it stabilized at 40K per year then we are at 1.8M which is off by a factor of 9-ish).
However, looking at this site, you can see that the growth of cases in the US (I highlighted the numbers for you) is following the same slope (after 100 cases) as every other country depicted except for Singapore. Although Singapore has 3 ports of entry and is 1/3 the size of Bossier Parish, La (where I live) – so they have an easier time getting a handle on it.
Some solid points but a lot of snark. A self-described (and I have no reason to doubt) expert in epidemiology in effect says that the reality is too complex to rely on the modeling offered by Ginn. However, allegedly better methods apparently do not yield much certainty. So he is sure the optimists are wrong but doesn’t know by how much. We are told in conclusory fashion that the experts are better suited to understand and model how complex everything is—once they have enough data. Thanks a pantload, experts. Your papers in the next year or two will be awesome, I’m sure.
Back down here on the uncertain empirical plane, we can’t expect to follow the Korean curve because (a) our testing capability sucks in comparison and (b) we cannot match the level of intrusive tracking methods they used to isolate the infected. We won’t follow Italy because of enormous demographic differences, their huge initial infection input via a large ethnic Chinese community dealt with by political correctness and because the baseline of Italian overall health care for seniors apparently sucks.
New York will tell us soon where we are headed. Explosion of cases, big, dense city, lousy local government, lots of people who already try to use ERs as GPs but lots of good hospitals and professional resources. If we can stop it there, we can stop it anywhere. This week will be critical.
I would also like to see some modeling that tracks the health downside of an extended shutdown. The lack of certainty about whether this will work and for how long is stressful. And we can’t evaluate policy choices without some insight in that area.
If we all agreed to hold our breath for two weeks while we went about our business, the bug would die out but obviously we can’t do that. Can we do the economic equivalent of that and survive? The country cannot stay shut down for much more than before violence, suicide, malnutrition etc start to offset the gains from reducing rates of contagion and establish some adverse longevity trends.
One last unrelated point: Various analysts of the Italian date showed that all but 1% had an underlying serious health issue and most had two or more. But has anybody tested for regular flu as a complication? In other words, given that “regular” flu is going to kill hundreds of thousands this year, are there any deaths being attributed solely to COVID where “regular” flu was present and in which the patient happened to test positive to that which did not in fact kill him?
Thank you for linking that website. As far as Ohio is concerned, they are accurate as to the exact number of hospitalized (as confirmed by our Goobenor in Press conference today) and number of dead. However, it is off by a gazillion in numbers of people being tested. I know this because my wife and her colleagues are testing in Cleveland at one of the largest hospitals in the state and she told me that on a particular busy day last week, they had nearly 1,000 samples to test. So many, that they had to farm most of them out to other labs. The website claims only 491 tests for the whole State, most of which came up positive. The normal rate for positives is only about 5%.
New York:
I love that. ;)
Tonight they decided to make a liar out of me and present the U.S. data by county instead of by state. (I’m talking about that map on the main page.)
So true. I hope you get everything up and running again soon . . .
They rate the “data quality” from Ohio as a “D”.
Oh, thanks. I thought the rating was for our Governor!
My daughter and her husband are right in the middle of it. They are living in Manhattan while my daughter completes a three-year residency at the Animal Medical Center. She posted this paragraph this morning on Facebook:
Yesterday she told me that it’s eerily quiet in the city.
I have the same questions.
I hope we are getting vials of blood from deceased “flu” and “Covid-19” patients that we can study for years to come. We really need hard data on the nature of the viruses and bacteria that are in circulation in this microbiological storm we are living through.
Undoubtedly there are some cases. The instructions associated with the CDC PCR test for COVID-19 specifically state that the presence of the virus does not exclude either the presence of other viruses and bacteria or an illness caused by the other viruses or bacteria.
As of today, US testing has surpassed South Korea.
See here for US testing stats. 355K currently
Here for S. Korea stats. 348K currently.
20 days ago the US had tested 969 people with ~100 tests pending
5 days ago we had tested a total of 103K.
For the last 2 days we have tested 64k+ each day and we have surpassed S. Korea.
I figure another week and we could be back to individual quarantine and contact tracing, particularly if our experience with the anti-malarial drugs works out.
Prayers up!
A note on chloraquine drugs — there’s a potentially lethal drug interaction with antidepressants (Lexapro called out in particular). They cause heart arrhythmia. Given that over 10% of Americans take antidepressants, this bit of information needs to get out there. I’ve started tapering off (low-dose) Celexa, just in case. . .
Mr. C was screened with a Kinsa thermometer on the way into work today. They added a “Trend” map which shows the uptick in flu-like illnesses in a stripe of counties running through Colorado and New Mexico. Our governor just issued stay-at-home orders starting tomorrow. But, the rest of the country is measuring a downtrend in fevers. See here:
https://healthweather.us/
Distancing seems to be working. Let’s keep it up!