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Day 85: COVID-19 The Natives Are Getting Restless
In the screengrab above is both the IHME prediction for yesterday — one day since peak deaths/day in US and a prediction of 2,150 deaths — and the Worldometers report from yesterday. 1,535 deaths actually reported yesterday, ~70% of the prediction and another day in which real experience is performing better than predicted. And so it is not surprising that even as deaths decline and economic carnage mounts, the natives are getting restless.
Fox News has a report out: Coronavirus stay-at-home orders stir protests nationwide amid fears of economic collapse. The article references protests in Michigan, Ohio, and Wyoming. Governors are already mentioning plans to implement at least a partial reopening. Yes, there will likely be an uptick in COVID-19 cases where restrictions are eased, but this was supposed to be about preserving the health care system and not keeping everyone at home until the virus died out. Or at least that was how it was sold to the public.
That “bait and switch” was the subject of Tucker’s monologue last night. An urgent idling of the economy of the nation was needed to preserve the health care system lest deaths from all traumas and illnesses run out of control. That’s what we were told. “Flattening the curve” delayed but did not necessarily reduce the number of people who would ultimately be infected, becoming ill and possibly die. But it made it possible for our health care system to meet the challenge and not break which would have made deaths from all causes more numerous. And while there were some places where the health care system got pretty dented, it held. It held so well that in some places health care personnel are being furloughed. And irony of ironies, the income of certain health care providers is getting hit pretty hard as procedures were canceled to make capacity for COVID-19 patients that never showed up.
@MISTERBITCOIN shared on our COVID-19 Trackers Group a piece from David Henderson: Liberation From Lockdown Now. It reviews the sad litany of failure by our leadership to correctly assess what was coming and to handle this epidemic in the manner that we have been able to do for the past several decades without destroying the country. I do not particularly fault the humans involved. China lied and people died. Italy was scary — particularly if it had been replicated in our country. But the “cure” (if cure it was) is worse than the disease. And so Henderson concludes:
It’s time to let us wash our hands and go to work.
Austria, Denmark, and the Czech Republic are now opening up. Sweden, South Korea, Japan, and even China have opened. Right now, in the United States, a thousand politicians are looking for political cover to reverse course. Let someone brave and bold step forward. History will consider that person a hero. A liberator!
And let’s not forget the fact that so many of us are losing social interaction. “Man is, by nature, a social animal,” said Aristotle and man, are we ever seeing how true that is. We are thinking, acting, creative beings. We have the capacity to achieve remarkable things, including responding to the enormous challenges of pandemic disease, but we must be free to do so.
Re-open the free society right now!
Today the President formally kicks off that project. We need to take this as seriously as we took the pronouncements of the virus task force. We need to be as aggressive with re-opening as we were with closing if for no other reason than only a sense of impending normalcy will break the grip of fear.
Tomorrow I will take a finger prick antibody test. No it’s not going to tell me a lot even if I am positive for the virus antibodies. If I don’t have any it will tell me that infection in my county — one of the initial Bay Area 7 that shuttered on March 17 — is not that rampant. As of this writing, we have under 600 cases and only 11 deaths in a population of over 1.1 million. There are more hairdressers that have gone without income in this county for a month than persons with enough symptoms to be tested and confirmed as having COVID-19. If I do have the antibodies it will not tell me that I am immune. I don’t know the minimum titer that the test requires. If I am positive for the antibodies it will mean I am at the minimum for the test, but won’t give me a count. But I feel like going out and having it done is the first step in the right direction — gaining knowledge and not just sitting back and waiting for something to happen.
I am the only one in our household taking it. I am assuming that if I am positive for antibodies so are they. Mrs. Rodin doesn’t think the test is worthwhile. She would wait for a blood draw test that actually calculates a titer number. Who knows when that will be available for anyone walking in off the street? But I know it should be as quickly as possible and there should be some information now about the titer scores for those who have recovered. This article includes some titer scores for donors and recipients of recovered patient plasma treatments. But I do not have the expertise to interpret it.
This is the way forward: Get the data on people exposed/infected so we can realistically calculate the odds of anyone getting seriously ill or dying. Get data on the level of comorbidity of those who died so we can fine-tune the identity of the truly vulnerable. Give people information. Give people choice. And then, just get on with it.
[Note: Links to all my COVID-19 posts can be found here.]
Published in General
I like the smoke shack as well. But Yakima has much to offer. Having come here from Seattle, I’ll never go back. Try to not even visit. But you’re not in Seattle proper, correct?
Just messing around with some numbers for cases for capita for the top ten and the states with the greater number of cases, and whatdayaknow a whole different picture emerges.
——State————–total cases——————-case per capita
One needs to ask what is going on in the States other then New York/New Jersey like Massachusetts ? Why is their per capita numbers so high?
Another anomaly : if you look at LA County communities, except for Little Armenia which has a ton of cases, almost all the other places with a high per capita count are reasonably wealthy or very wealthy communities: Hancock Park 1/341, West Hollywood 1/362, Palos Verdes 1/375, Bel Air 1/401, Beverly Hills, 1/454, Century City 1/473, Brentwood 1/564, Hollywood 1/564 ( not so wealthy) , Hollywood Hills 1/641. Why is that? Is it because they are more likely to be tested or that perhaps they have older wealthier residents that are more susceptible to the virus?
Remember the virus travels along personal networks, and it was brought to this country by international travelers, the famous jet set. Maybe those California numbers makes more sense in that light?
With no disrespect to your son’s situation, can’t his caregiver just say he was retrieving the eloped autistic person, as a plausible denial for being out?
For all your trials, I would applaud such civil disobedience, just for the sake of your son being permitted out.
I’m sorry about the TV. 😭
People need to protest right. Jump ropes tied to a 7′ length, connecting protesters holding ropes in gloved hands, and face masks. Making a giant circle.,
Follow all of the rules, and make our “keepers” look like a-holes.
Just need a theme song running on portable Bluetooth speakers.
There has to be a way to do it now. Later will be too late.
Clearly @Hammer is not a Michigan resident. :)
Things are hotting up in the Philadelphia area I think. Pennsylvania and NJ both exceeded their max daily predictions for April 14.
The problem with daily reporting is that it doesn’t necessarily reflect the actual number of deaths on any given day. Especially on a Monday/Tuesday following Easter. Maybe things are heating up over there, but I’d wait for a few days of averages.
Rodin: “Unsure what your question is, @unsk. The higher the denominator the smaller the number of cases relative to the populations for that state.”
The chart begs the question of why? Why is Massachusetts so high? Why do the wealthiest LA neighborhoods have such a high concentration of the virus? What I didn’t show was the traditional Chinese neighborhoods that are almost all with a low concentration including very wealthy heavily Chinese neighborhoods like San Marino.
The reason for some of this questioning is that it would seem to me that we need better answers why some neighborhoods are more concentrated than others, just as we need better info on those infected, those who are recovered and those who are dying.
It may be that many more people than thought have contracted the disease and also have recovered. If that is true the lockdowns may not be as effective are once thought.
I’m with Roderic (Comment #29): Waaayyy too early to declare victory; indeed, if enough of the jet-setters have attempted to ride out the 1st Wave in their vacation residences in non-remain-at-home states (per recent WSJ reportage), keep an eye out for “unexpected” spikes in those locales.
We simply still do not know enough about the Wuhan Virus, to say nothing of the far-off moving target that is vaccine availability.
For example:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/04/researchers-report-wuhan-coronavirus-could-attack-immune-system-like-hiv-by-targeting-protective-cells/
Unless conducted using an iterative and incremental approach, economic “re-opening” could be lethal — even for ostensibly “healthy” people.
Clamor for iterative and incremental, not for immediate status quo ante restoration; if you don’t, and if virus caseloads and fatalities rocket up following such a big-bang approach, the ensuing clampdowns will further squeeze civil liberties and our Constitutional rights with a vengeance.
In such an aftermath, you might not have an argumentation leg to stand on, even if you do have compelling supportive evidence. I would even fear for President Trump’s re-election prospects in such circumstances.
Take ‘er easy, gang — iterative and incremental.
Here’s a twitter feed worth following:
from a doc on the front lines in San Francisco. Today’s posts include a good explanation of why we are nowhere near a ‘herd immunity’ exit. See here:
https://www.journalofinfection.com/article/S0163-4453(20)30154-7/fulltext
for estimates of immunity levels that will be required for herd immunity.
#40 Unsk
I’m in Massachusetts.
For one thing, Google “Biogen conference coronavirus” — that will provide a vivid picture of one the key “eruptions” in this state and how it’s traced out.
In a similar vein, there are a lot of very recently arrived Chinese nationals in the eastern part of the state who work in the life sciences sector, many of whom may have interacted with Biogen counterparts or simply picked up the virus due to their own travels to/from the PRC.
Also, pay no mind to Spinal Tap’s manager’s assertion that Boston is “not a college town” — it very much is, and one of the earliest publicized known cases here involved a 20-year-old college kid who arrived back here after having visited relatives in I think Hubei province (maybe even in Wuhan), realized that his physical condition potentially indicated his having contracted the coronavirus virus he was starting to hear about in the media, and voluntarily got himself tested (positive) at a downtown hospital. He went into home-based self-quarantine in the Boston area — but who knows what transmission may have already occurred by then on his flight back to Boston and how many fellow passengers (if they picked up the virus) may have also been attending universities here.
Lot of nursing home fatalities here as well, sadly. A particularly scandalously large number were at a veterans’ nursing home in Holyoke, MA: staff/administration there allegedly hid the nature and extent, possibly in such a way as to inadvertently worsen the situation and increase the fatality count; that particular scandal has been escalated to a Federal investigation.
Moreover, early on, people generally tended to be horses arses in this state about voluntarily engaging in social distancing and other precautionary behavior that requires a modicum of consideration for others; this is a longstanding attribute of many Bay State denizens, which accounts for the “M[REDACTED]” sobriquet — hence the need for compulsory, governor-issued strictures.
Speaking as a Massachusetts resident, one reason is the high number of schools in the Boston area who are part-time homes to high numbers of foreign national Chinese students. Boston had something like 3,400 people in self-quarantine right after Christmas. And there are a lot of research and development efforts going on in the Boston area that are joint projects of Chinese schools and businesses and Boston schools and businesses. To give some idea of how close the Boston area is to China in terms of back-and-forth, there’s the new Harvard Center Shanghai. :-)
I say this with love and affection for the Chinese people (and loathing for the CCP). My grandmother was a suite mate of Madame Chiang Kai-shek at Wellesley. The cultural bonds between the Chinese people and Americans are good to have in place. Except when there is a virus on the loose in China. Or when a Harvard professor is selling his soul to the CCP. That was a one-in-a-million occurrence. For the most part, the relationships have positive results for both countries. :-)
#44 MarciN
A friend of mine, while an undergrad at MIT, briefly dated a girl at Wellesley who kept a framed photo of Gen. Hideki Tojo on her bureau; when he inquired, she informed him that the photo was of her maternal grandfather.
Ironically enough, both Tojo’s daughter and this granddaughter married gaijin — I think maybe both of American nationality.
Note – yesterday’s numbers, no pending updates for April 14.
The max predicted daily deaths are:
NJ +362 > 272 projected max for April 8.
PA +106 > 88 projected max for April 18.
Both these numbers exceed the highest daily deaths actual and max daily predicted for both states. NY for April 14 was 778, less than the highest reported of 800 on April 10. The common factor for NJ & PA is the Philadelphia area, where my brother lives. It might also be useful to look at the death graphs, which do update with actuals up to a few days back. Visually plot the new deaths for yourself against the projected/actual state graphs. NJ should be past their peak, but PA is expected to peak April 18. PA should be watched up to the 18th and don’t remove social distancing for the five state region until PA is confirmed to be on a down slope for daily deaths.
Wealthier usually means older?
Unsk and OldPhil
Beverly Hills might be particularly a problem due to its sizable Persian population: Dual passport holders making business and/or family trips to Iran are surprisingly numerous among Iranian immigrants to this country, including those living in Persian-concentrated neighborhoods not only in LA but elsewhere across the US as well.
As an aside, I used to go to a dentist here in the Boston area who is an Iranian immigrant; eventually started to consider switching to a different dentist for cost-saving reasons, and pulled the proverbial trigger when I learned that her husband frequently travels back and forth to Iran on business — it just made me too uncomfortable. Fortunately, I made this switch a couple of years ago, but I have to wonder whether my former dentist and her husband have been infected.