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And look what that got us!
Interesting thoughts from Brit Hume: “Brit Hume: Time To Consider Lockdown Possibly ‘A Colossal Public Policy Calamity’”
Sisyphus, I think that you’re misinterpreting the CDC chart. It does not show flu activity by month. It shows the months during which the flu reached its peak. It never reached the peak in April, in the months charted, but this does not mean that there was no flu activity at all in the month of April. This Wikipedia article has some useful graphs on the issue.
The general band shows that pneumonia & influenza account for about 5-6% of all deaths in the lowest months (around July/August) and about 7-8% of all deaths in the highest months (around February). So there is some seasonal variation, but it’s not zero in the low months.
Ok, lets lose most of the readers and get into the weeds about the first model that caught everyone’s attention, the Imperial College model. The complexity of the models and their inherent uncertainty has given rise to misunderstandings.
When the Imperial College group’s projections were published the news media seized on the most extreme of dozens of different projections they published in the same paper. (The report I link above was mainly about the UK, but that group also released figures on other countries including the US. I can’t put my finger on that link right now.) This was the one that predicted that 2.2 million would die in the US, but that was what would happen if nothing was done about the virus. The other projections were based on various levels and methods of virus suppression and also on different rates of spread. The lowest estimate of deaths in the US came out in the news later, 60,000 dead, and was based on maximum suppression efforts. People thought this was a revision of the higher number and seized on this as evidence that the first estimate was an error, but it was not. It was one of a range of estimates going from 60,000 to 2,200,000. They were very clear about the large number of uncertainties involved.
As it is the actual number of US deaths in this wave will hit in the range of the IC lower projection.
Other projections out there have been similarly mangled and misinterpreted. The IHME projections include colorful graphs with plainly displayed confidence intervals. They have been revising their estimates as we go, but all of the subsequent estimates have overlapped the previous estimates, so none of them can be said to be in disagreement, but that’s what some people are saying. The estimates are ranges of values within a given probability, not a single number.
I think we are missing the point – economically – when we focus on the question of whether or not the response to the virus was calibrated precisely correctly. Whether it was or not, a truly robust economy – “the greatest economy the world has ever seen” – should be able to shrug off four or six weeks of idleness without an existential crisis. Unfortunately our “greatest economy ever” is really a fragile house of cards built on historically unprecedented, ever-increasing debt, money-printing, a brittle global supply chain of just-in-time inventories, and misallocated capital from years of central bank and federal government interventions. Our responses – including an avalanche of money printing by the Federal Reserve, a parabolic rise in the rate of debt accumulation in the form of “stimulus packages”, and direct payments to citizens (“helicopter money”) – will only make things the worse, just as the government made things worse in the Great Depression. The fact that so-called conservatives cheer these massive central planning initiatives makes the situation all the more depressing.
Usually when governments intervene they make things worse rather than better. Whether that has happened with respect to the virus is an open question. I don’t think there is an obvious answer either way. What seems obvious to me is that the prior twenty years of government interventions in the economy set up a situation in which any disturbance of the normal flow of events would likely lead to an economic and financial crisis. Our economy was an accident waiting to happen.
Roderic, responding to your #64.
The ICL study made predictions with so little specificity that it is not possible to even evaluate them, particularly for the US. Their predictions for the UK were such a wide range as to be useless. For example, their Table 4 shows predicted deaths in the UK ranging from 5,600 to 550,000. The low estimates, incidentally, assumed a 2 year lockdown, and naturally did not account for the other deaths that would result from such a policy.
The IHME predictions offered such a wide error range as to be nearly useless, though with such a wide range in their cumulative totals, the ultimate result was extremely likely to be within their range. I think that the IHME utterly failed at its real purpose, which was to predict medical needs, as they predicted the medical system being overwhelmed in many locations, and this did not happen even in New York.
That makes more sense than what I was getting. This casts doubt on the “warming weather will save the day until Fall” meme. The ratios you give are anti-intuitive to flu sufferers used to a November to March free-for-all with some off-month activity. But most of us thankfully don’t face the death levels season in and season out.
Thank you for setting me straight. My epidemiology degree is still in the mail.
The near-instant-read paper strip test for covid-19 has not been perfected yet. Apparently it gives a lot of false negatives, which is dangerous. However, the idea a good one and I hope they get the bugs out. It will open the airlines, for sure.
I also hope Massachusetts can gather useful data over the next year on containing outbreaks of the virus. This state is research central for biology, we count everything :-), and we are embarking on the South Korean contact-tracing system. The idea going forward to quarantine individuals who are carriers. It will be interesting to watch. Its success will depend on whether or not having had the covid-19 virus confers durable immunity afterward. And we need to establish effective antibody levels to be confident of immunity based on the antibody test.
One area of concern for me is that both the flu and the covid-19 death rates this year are contaminated statistics for a couple of reasons. It is possible that many of the flu deaths this year were actually covid-19 deaths, it’s possible some of the covid-19 deaths were the flu, and the early covid-19 tests were thrown out because they were picking up other viruses and bacteria. This has been an unusually active year for all kinds of bacteria and viruses because of the unusually warm winter we have had globally.
The only way we will ever sort out this microbiological storm is to reexamine the blood and secretion tests. I hope we have been taking some test tubes of bodily fluids from deceased people that we can examine in a calmer scientific moment than the one we are in now. The 1918 flu, for example, was accompanied by a particularly virulent pneumonia virus or bacteria. So the death tolls we see from that flu are somewhat muddied by the categorization of all the deaths that looked like flu at the time to the flu when actually many patients would have recovered had they not had secondary infections.
Right now, it seems like the deadly secondary infections we are used to seeing attack people weakened by the flu are going off on their own to attack everyone rather than just people weakened by some other health problem like the flu.
The Lefties certainly believe that epidemiologists, who are chosen by them, should indeed run the nation. After all, as long as the report from their scientists indicate that the economy needs to continue its downward spiral, if merely to save a single life!! with their leader Nancy Pelosi assuring the public that continual 2.2 trillion dollar bailout programs can assist people in staying afloat, just what could go wrong?
I mean, that one life is important. (meant sardonically)
It is also important to be aware that as Laura Ingraham discussed with Mike Pompeo over the last few evenings, we have so much money that mayors in American cities are ordering Chinese drones to spy on American citizens who are not obeying the illegal shut down orders.
So when the world press grabbed the higher number, did anyone anywhere in Great Britain insist on a presser handled by the “legit news media,” then get that press conference and then speak clearly into a mic: “Remember, the higher ‘millions of dead’ is the high value and not necessarily reliable. In fact it is quite possible that only 20k to 60 k people will die of COVID here in Great Britain.” ?? No of course not.
It’s actually the alt media that first scoffed at the high numbers. In part because some of those in Great Britain who’re part of the alt media were once legit, until they tried to bring common sense into the great Mad Cow pandemic scenario created by the same ivory tower edjit Neil Ferguson.
I for one disagree with the idea of how the reason the lower number ended up being the more accurate one had nothing to do with the “precautions” that have been laid down upon us.
When researchers back in 2009 or 2010 were trying to figure out the Swine flu illness of that time period, they asked for and received tissue and blood samples from some of the patients who had died. Then they examined those samples and found n-o traces of that illness.
So there is a need for a big wakeup call, that the entire fear that we the American public
hypnotized by, as the media has overblown the entire scenario.
We need to especially examine that part of the earliest fears the COVID pandemic “experts insisted upon: fear that COVID will lead too many sick people and those numbers will overwhelm the health care system:
1 Some health workers state this has been the case in recent years when the regular old flu brought about a surge in serious illness, including the flu evolving into pneumonia.
2 Now with this illness, the big story has been the ventilators. However if the health community at large would move into accepting the use of hydroxychlroquine
the illness would not progress to the point that the ventilators were needed. There are countless stories from areas all across the nation, that a family member sought out testing, only to be told to come back after they had had symptoms of COVID for at least a week.
What? How does that make sense. So then they finally get tested, and then they need a ventilator.Whereas the experiences of people getting HCQ immediately once the doctor realized it would help turns the entire illness around. The patient often gets relief within hours.
This whole illness is one dominated by fear, by the oppressive force of one man, Bill Gates with too much money and too much influence across the world. He basically owns a health agency that is supposedly under the purvey of the UN over in Europe. In Jan or early February, he openly bragged about his desire to make a 100 million dollar donation to the many projects under the purview of WHO.
There have been 56 hospitals in the New York state – and now many of them have been offered monies to use hydroxychloroquine only inside the use of a “managed study” which ensures for the sake of Mr Gates the result he wants: that chlorqouine is not effective.
Here is Laura Ingraham’s totally brilliant take on HCQ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RexUJeWmzSE&t=207s
Turns out he was slightly better than Carter. A win is a win.
The main value of the IC study was that it showed that if there were no effort to suppress the virus that the results would be catastrophic and that greater efforts to suppress the virus would result in fewer deaths and avoid crashing the health care system, and that was correct.
Again you are using the success of the virus suppression policy to criticize the policy. The IHME projections provided an estimate for the worst case scenario, and that’s what policy makers tried to prepare for. They had little choice but to do so. Better to be caught with too many ventilators than too few. Better empty hospital tents in Central Park than people dying in the hospital hallways. Yes, the medical needs were not as great as was feared. That’s a good thing! It’s a big success!
That “single life” metaphor used by New York’s governor was an unfortunate choice of words because what they were really pondering was the loss of thousands of lives, not just one.
Leadership is ignoring the science and following policy that protects the pecuniary interests of some people while ignoring public safety? I don’t think so. Can you imagine the political price they’d pay for following such a policy?
I think that politicians did consider the economic impact of the virus suppression policy and figured that because it would be temporary that the economy could take the hit and pick back up when it’s over. I think that will prove to be right. Besides which, we were going to take an economic hit no matter what the government did, and that hit would be a lot worse with 2 million dead than with 60,000 dead.
This is how I see it too.
The fault for this winter’s sad story lies with the virus.
The problem is they’re moving the goalposts. Originally it was a short-term “flatten the curve” so the medical system would be overwhelmed. Now it’s turning into a longterm stay locked down until we have a cure. The health commissioner (or whatever his title is) in Virginia said yesterday that he expected “phase one” of the lockdown to last TWO YEARS! That’s [redacted] insane, and I see today the Governor is backing off from that. Of course, that’s the same Governor who a few weeks ago extended his lockdown order to Mid-June when everyone else was still in April or early May.
I think that it has morphed into a long term lockdown in the minds of some pols, but the experts have been consistent about it. The Imperial College group said back in mid March that efforts to suppress the virus would have to continue in some form until a vaccine was developed, but that didn’t necessarily mean a lockdown. They wrote:
By home quarantine they mean voluntary quarantine of symptomatic people. Closing businesses was not a consideration, and school closure has only a marginal effect. So I take it from this that it’s possible to open businesses and schools safely, especially since some businesses have been open the whole time. Surprisingly, they also wrote that stopping mass gatherings would not have much effect on virus spread.
The tiniest little tip of the iceberg coming at us–the jobs which are being destroyed is truly sickening–(from Twitter this afternoon.)
Harmeet K. Dhillon
@pnjaban
One of my/husband’s favorite restaurants in San Francisco, Bistro Aix, closed permanently this month as a result of the shutdown. It was cosy, always busy, great food, waiters who knew your drink right away. An estimated 50% of San Francisco’s restaurants will go the same way.😢
4/25/20, 2:06 AM
Dr. Strash
@DrStrash
@pnjaban This is thanks to #FireFauci who started this self-inflicted slow death as a result of his faulty models. In any other industry he would be fired and in medicine sued for malpractice. #DeepStateFauci has zero credibility.
4/25/20, 6:06 AM
Please, again with all due respect, as I try to phrase all my comments here and elsewhere, try to get these workers–it is hard to fathom the number of families who depended on 50% of all the restaurants in San Francisco– really interested in a deeply technical discussion about the validity vel non of this model or that model or that projection or probably anything Dr. Fauci has to say. This is quite simply heartbreaking.
PS: as a former Plaintiff Trial Lawyer, let me note my wholehearted agreement with the comment about the remedy for any medical professional who was this wrong for this many times; whatever one may think about whether we should even have malpractice suits or not, the fact is that he would have been sued long ago with this kind of record.
No, you are assuming the success of the mitigation policy (not suppression, which has not been adopted though was mentioned in the ICL report). The ICL study was speculative, and we have little way of knowing whether it might have been right, except that Sweden hasn’t experienced the overwhelming catastrophe that the ICL predicted in the US and UK, and states with fewer restrictions don’t seem to have experienced a catastrophe. It is a difficult thing to analyze, though, with little data on either side.
It would be a success, sort of, if the lockdown helped. The fact that around 22% of NYC residents tested positive indicates that it didn’t work very well, if at all. The “sort of” part is that it’s not much of a success if we prevent deaths in April, at very high cost, only to have them occur anyway in May. We have limited information from which to draw any reliable conclusions about the effectiveness of the lockdowns, thus far.
I do expect that there was some effect. I just don’t know how big, and it hasn’t been proven.
There is just no way to know now, or in the future, if this assertion has any validity.
The main problem is, the actual true numbers of infections and deaths will never be known. It’s impossible because they are not being counted accurately now, and those problems cannot be corrected later. And there’s also no way to know, or to prove, that not having a lockdown would not have resulted in much higher deaths AND much greater economic devastation. Assertions in either direction can only be based on opinion, not hard facts.
Well, as you pointed out in #51, a lot of that “hindsight” will benefit from the actions that were taken, while asserting that they were “obviously” unnecessary.
And that’s not counting the thousands of “essential” abortions.
Steve Hayward, on Power Line blog: https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/04/observations-on-the-great-hunkering-12.php
“It is not clear yet whether our response to COVID-19 will turn out to be the single greatest policy mistake in the nation’s history (not counting the Civil War, which shouldn’t be understood as a policy episode exactly), or just one of the top five. We await how soon we shall reopen the country, and what additional steps are taken to get the country moving again. Will we bail out profligate states like Illinois and reward the public employee unions? Will we elect Joe Biden or some other Democratic zombie in November?
It will take a long time to assemble the balance sheet, in part because a full accounting will need to calculate how many deaths from cancer, heart disease and other factors occur because we aren’t treating or screening for those much larger causes of mortality right now.
Another mistake is already apparent. We know from past recessions that extending unemployment insurance—to 99 weeks back in 2009-2010—actually delays recovery, as a lot of marginal workers delay entry back into the workforce, even when jobs come open. At the present moment, we have added an extra $600 a week to standard unemployment benefits, bringing the average weekly check to about $900. It was an understandably impulse amidst these circumstances, but it is already having some ill effect, as reported in yesterday’s note from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity:
$900/week? That almost $47,000/year. That’s nuts.
Actually, thanks to our penchant for keeping tissue samples around for a long time, it will be possible in the future to review cases that were declared Covid and at least determine if the virus was present. But the actual numbers aren’t politically significant now that we know we are being defrauded by politicians skewing the numbers. The political significance of the fraud far outweighs this bantam weight bug, worse than the flu but not likely to match even the Spanish flu, much less the plagues of history taking as much as half of a population in places like Rome, London, Paris, and Constantinople.
It is telling that owning the worst outbreak and arguably the worst handling of the outbreak has somehow made Cuomo somebody’s darling for the Vice Presidential nomination of the Democratic Party. Xi is doing his Doctor Evil dance.
I am less certain about whether the initial lock-downs were a mistake initially but there is zero doubt in my mind that when the history of this is written, experts will have concluded that the economic lockdown went on far too long in a way that cost many American lives, almost certainly more lives than will ultimately be lost to COVID.
The massive economic depression putting probably 50 million Americans out of work by the end of this and costing tens of millions of lives around the globe will be seen as being far more dangerous than a disease with a 99% survival rate.
By the time most people die of the flu, the virus is completely gone from their system and they’ve died of bacterial pneumonia. When researchers were trying to find a sample of the 1918 flu, they had to find people that died within days of getting sick, otherwise the virus would no longer be present in the lungs of the victims. Also, once the body dies, the virus dies within the body fairly quickly, so the sample has to be taken very quickly after death and preserved immediately, so for people that died in their home, we will probably never be able to positively determine one way or the other.
It is entirely possible that because this flu kills people so quickly that we will be able to positively ascertain a higher percentage than other flus, but even if we had lung samples from everyone that died, we would never be able to accurately count the total number of COVID deaths.