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Day 64: COVID-19 “Shelter-in-Place”
Today the screengrab is featuring a different data site: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus. I am also focusing on the death count because, to the first order, the fear of catastrophic death counts is what is driving the politicians to restrict liberty for their various populations. While politicians seek praise, they fear blame.
The President at the virus press briefing yesterday squarely addressed the issue of trade-offs between fighting the virus and killing the economy. Of course, the press wants to act incredulous that he would even consider “money” versus lives. But the reality is that impoverishment kills. I don’t know that the President is the most articulate spokesman for the economic arguments. But if you were watching and have concerns about trashing the economy in the process of fighting the virus, you took comfort in his words. The press wants to believe that Trump just wants to preserve his economic record, is just throwing a tantrum over what the necessities of fighting the virus have done to his singular achievement.
Maybe Sen. John Kennedy put it better when he highlighted that we love our children and our grandchildren and are concerned about what kind of America we are leaving to them. That, as a senior himself, he would far rather take the risk of death than to destroy the country in the name of preserving older citizens. If that is the trade-off what is the question? Why would we condemn our young to a life of impoverishment to add a few days, months, years to us who are superannuated?
And this assumes that the projections for the pandemic are true. If, as Richard Epstein has capably argued, the virus is not as deadly as supposed by those who are tanking the economy, we are making a mistake of incredible proportions if we persist in shuttering Main Street for an extended period. President Trump accepted a 15-day period of extreme measures, but he is clearly worried about letting it go on much longer. Never bet against this man’s instincts.
The press wants to lock him into following the most conservative medical advice he is getting. The press wants to portray him as cavalier about the lives of so many. The press are idiots, ideological idiots. And the climbing numbers will support them in the short run. If we wait for an undisputed “all clear” signal, we will emerge only to see desolation. The call needs to be made while the risks still remain. President Trump will do that, but we need to have his back.
[Note: Links to all my COVID-19 posts can be found here.]
Published in General
New daily cases today in both NY and in the country were slightly down from yesterday’s totals. That’s good news. Daily deaths nationwide up 145 today, only 5 greater than yesterday’s total. Again, a positive sign.
Good news is welcome, however small.
Cuomo said this evening that NY now has the highest per capita testing rate in the world, so even with lighter testing of mild cases going forward, we can be reasonably sure that NY’s higher case numbers as compared to other countries at a similar stage reflect in part superior testing capability.
Which is why deaths are the more telling measure. The trends of that lagging indicator will become more meaningful in the week ahead.
Kinda makes you wonder if doctors have started jumping the gun on HCQ treatments – from what we’ve been hearing, it’s basically an overnight cure for a lot of folks. Bayer and Teva are shipping a ton of the stuff over here right now (1800 kilograms of tablets, from a quick calculation), and you can bet some of it’s in the hands of medical staff in the hardest-hit areas.
There were supposed to be studies kicking off today (Tuesday), and I wonder what we’re going to be hearing by Friday or so…?
…..to God’s ears.
Trump’s approval rating for his handling of this is at 60% despite a deluge of unbelievably negative, vicious coverage. Every press conference brazenly misquoted, idiots predicting deaths in the millions, and now the Pelosi-Schumer stunt for which they are desperate to pin blame on McConnell.
Trump’s instincts to cut off China travel and push back on China’s lies, his hands-on style (with the usual malapropisms that everybody but the MSM and their Twitter followers ignore) have been positive. His decision today to provide a target date to get back to normal was also precisely in tune with what most of us wanted to see.
I don’t fault Trump and the governors for what may seem to be a costly overreaction because the process clearly failed to include voices providing a cost perspective to push back and shape the plan. Trump seems to have intuited that needed balancing discussion. We desperately needed an end game for this war (unlike, say, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Poverty, Drugs…).
I think the death rate is the wrong metric. It will likely be a fraction of normal flu losses (God, I hate being cavalier about such things —my inner Buck Turgidson has been quite active during this crisis). The scarier metric was whether our medical system would be overwhelmed, ICUs full, staff all sick etc, some estimate of expected critical cases. If that is not happening then isolation of the sick, being prudent and protecting the vulnerable as best we can is the best strategy.
I agree. I’m not an expert on this, if anyone is, there is no time for a lot of uninformed debate. Philosophical musings about politics and the nature of man don’t apply. We can do but one thing for the moment, most of us anyway, and that is to trust (it hurts to say that) the people we elect to be in charge and hope they don’t screw it up. We just have to make it clear that if they abuse this trust, such as Pelosi’s stupid games, then they will pay for it in a manner appropriate to their level of misfeasance or malfeasance. We won’t know that for quite some time. I’m pretty sure that as a country we will be quite understanding of decisions made in good faith that turn out to be wrong, but not for stupidity or power grabbing.
I’ve said for decades that doing business with China is like being married to the mob. If China were to do something we don’t like, we can rattle our sabers all we want, but businesses in the US will put so much pressure on the government to cave in rather than lose their business, that we can only rattle and never cut.
On the other hand, China’s leaders have shown again and again that any pressure on them will be borne by the people, dying from starvation if necessary to keep the rulers in power. It’s a contest we can’t win.
But the good thing about this virus (if it’s possible to make such a claim) is that we can now clearly see as a nation that we must divest from China for our own national security. We need to bring manufacturing back to the US. I’ll happily be a manufacturing engineer again, I don’t much like lawyering in comparison, and I’d love to help build things again. We can’t continue to have our entire nation dependent on the good will of a communist regime. What were we even thinking to do that?
We’re still married to the mob, but maybe we can divorce after all this mess.
It is really surprising to me that not only did the American pharmaceutical health care equipment companies and government health and human services agencies allow our country to be dependent on a single country for our supply chain, it never dawned on American leaders that the reason the Communists were able to underbid every other country in the civilized world was that any profits went to the wealthy Communists, not to the Chinese people.
The ChiComs paid a ton of people off including many of our most powerful politicians, that is why we are so dependent on the ChiComs. It just didn’t happen because of costs. For several years there have been cheaper places to do business.
What’s troubling to me is the amount of business we’ve been doing with China that has served to enrich only the Communists, not the Chinese people. The Communists take everything people earn and return very little:
That is the history of the Communist governments and other dictators. Power is the drug and boy are they addicted.
the US has now done 357,907 tests. That is good news! It appears we are starting to get a handle on testing.
NYtimes latest report: 52,215 cases. So only 14.59% test positive – that is also very good news. It also may mean there may be less people out there who have the disease and have not been diagnosed. Now that treatments are coming on line, finally we may start to turn the corner on this thing if we can get the proper treatment to those diagnosed and limit the number of people with the disease infecting others.
I did some investigation – hydroxychloroquine is somewhat more toxic (rat LD50 1240 mg/kg) than Tylenol / acetaminophen (rat LD50 1944 mg/kg) or aspirin (rat LD50 1480 mg/kg), while it is significantly less toxic than caffeine (rat LD50 192 mg/kg). Chloroquine is more toxic (rat LD50 330 mg/kg) than hydroxychloroquine, but it is still less toxic than caffeine.
It’s a proven and well-studied medicine. It has side effects, obviously, but there are not many medications without side effects.
I think Trump has the right idea:
If we are lucky, the spring warm and humid weather, which some people have speculated is what saved Vietnam from the virus, will give us a break and some time to develop effective treatments before the virus resurfaces in November. I think when we flip the switch on again for the economy, some of the resulting celebratory mood will translate into lots of reclaimed jobs and restarted commerce, although I hope not quite as much with China as we have in the past. I wish the Chinese people well, but I want a diversified supply chain from now on. :-)
I haven’t run the numbers but I’m guessing chloroquine is less toxic than coronavirus.
It’s warm in Australia and they are suffering too.
The virus has been in Australia all month and they have 8 deaths and 2300 cases. At that level, they likely wouldn’t even know it’s there if they weren’t testing for it. Fact is, the virus has not spiraled in any warm weather city anywhere on earth. Not once. And without the threat of spiral, coronavirus truly is just a flu-like issue that we could cope with.
We have every reason to believe spring will help significantly. But man, it’s taking its time. 40’s in Cleveland today.
Same on Cape Cod. Please, please, get up to 52. :-)
The 40s and low low 50s are normal for us for March and April. However, we get very humid but icy cold offshore winds here. We’re wintery in April. But we’re nice and cool in July.
It is early this year. The Nantucket daffodil festival is usually in mid-April. We picked these from our yard today, a good two to three weeks earlier than usual. What is with this weird weather this year? I know that is what has caused this virus to take hold.
But they have low humidity–today’s map:
We need temperatures above 52 and “high” humidity. Living on Cape Cod, I don’t consider the humidity to be high until it reaches 80 to 90 percent, which it has been all week.
Our population is significantly higher (330 million compared to 25 million) and our number of deaths is still quite low.
590/330,000,000 = 0.00018% of the US population
8/25,000,000 = 0.00003% of the Aussie population. It seems to be a pretty insignificant difference.
Probably not less toxic than a mild case. Probably worth a shot in a more (ah, how much more?) severe case. Unless you’re in Nevada:
It might depend on what other meds the person is taking.
My guess is if HCQ has good results in NY where they look like they are massively using it in treatments, Sisolak’s career is over. The way the report is written it looks like Sisolak was as motivated to take the action because it was Trump touting it as much as anything else. Yes, HCQ use is definitely “off label” for this purpose. And there can be adverse reactions and some possible deaths. But we’ll see how this turns out. My guess is that Sisolak is going to look foolish — or at least I hope so.
I wonder if the people who are screaming about Trump “telling people to take it” are going to be as upset about a Democrat governor ordering people not to?
Here’s the kicker: Does this twit even have the legal authority to order doctors NOT to prescribe a potentially life-saving treatment with a low incidence of side effects?
Talk about an idiotic order – does he think the data on antimalarial drugs is fake? There was a paper, which the US had nothing to do with, laying out the evidence. I might not pan out, but to deny residents of your state access to a potentially life-saving medication for the reason of Orange Man Bad?
The death I heard about (possibly not this one) was from an individual who self-medicated, and used a chloroquine phosphate, (NOT the medicine, but rather a sterializing agent for aquariums, that is a toxic chemical. One has to be sure that one takes is the medicine, and not a chemical in a family that is the wrong one.
Yeah, that kind of makes a difference.
From the news reports, the amount they took was about ten times the therapeutic dose – and well above the baseline lethal dose.
Bongino noted IIRC Brian Stelter praising Cuomo’s chloroquine pledge and then in the middle realizing he had ripped Trump doing it the day before.
There are non-medical aspects as well. From Bayou Renaissance Man (he’s not kidding, though he’s out of the bayous now.) RTWT:
[continued]
Ruh Roh #2. [Expletive’s] starting to get real.