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Gretchen Whitmer Doubles Down
Last week, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer doubled down, extending the Michigan lockdown until mid-May. The new executive order is in modest ways an improvement on its immediate predecessors, which I described two weeks ago in a post entitled “The Wicked Witch of the Midwest.” One can now operate a motorboat; buy paint for one’s house and seeds for one’s garden; and even travel to a second home. In other ways, however, ”the temporary requirement” that everyone “suspend activities that are not necessary to sustain or protect life” is pure idiocy. It still rules out elective surgery while allowing abortion – presumably because, in the world of Gretchen Whitmer and today’s feminists, the not-yet-born are not really alive. Our governor has even had the effrontery to defend abortion as “life-enhancing.” In Michigan (and in some other states), some must die so that others can enjoy themselves.
Given what we knew and what we did not know, when the lockdowns began, it may have made sense for a brief time to systematically minimize human contact. The Wuhan coronavirus is exceedingly contagious, and we then possessed no herd immunity. On the Diamond Princess, virtually everyone was exposed, 18% of those on the cruise contracted the virus, and nearly 10% of those who did contract it died. In Wuhan, China and in northern Italy, the epidemic overwhelmed the health system – and there was reason to fear that the like might happen here. The aim of the lockdowns was not to prevent the spread of the virus. Given how easily it could be contracted and the absence of a vaccine, it was not even possible to impede it for long. Our aim was modest: to delay its onset and slow down the spread in the hope that our hospitals and health professionals could cope.
We know a bit more now. We know that most of those who contract the disease are asymptomatic; that the asymptomatic are, nonetheless, contagious; and that those most apt to die are elderly individuals and others with underlying health conditions. In Michigan, the mean age of those who die is 76 and the average age is 74.5. In Italy, where half of the population is over 47, I read that 99% of those who died suffered from other comorbidities. In New York, 94% suffered from at least one comorbidity and 88% suffered from more than one. Those who go on cruises on ships such as the Diamond Princess are, as one wag put it, “the newly wed and the nearly dead.” It was the presence of a great many old folks on the voyage that explains the high mortality rate.
We do not have a precise fix on the mortality rate among those in the larger population who contract the disease. Estimates based on real evidence vary between .1% and .8%, but it is clear that fewer than 1% of those who become ill die, that the age-structure of the population determines the morbidity rate, and that we are better situated than the Italians. In the United States, half of the population is under 38.5.
We also not have a precise fix on the rate of contagion. In Santa Barbara, it may be as low as 15%. In the city of New York, it may be as great as 25% — and, of course, if the lockdowns really did slow the spread, those figures may understate the real rate. Moreover, the disease is apt to spread more slowly where the population is not dense.
Nor can we be certain regarding the price we will pay for the shutdown. How many will die or be permanently damaged because surgery was delayed? We do not know. How many businesses will collapse? How many individuals will go bankrupt? We do not know. Will the federal debt grow to a level that will cripple the country down the road? We do not know. The only thing that is clear is that the price will be exceedingly high and that the longer the lockdowns go on, the worse things will be. A policy that may have been rational to begin with is surely irrational now.
There are four things wrong with Gretchen Whitmer’s latest executive order. First, time tells, and her extension of the shutdown greatly compounds the damage already done. Second, if it had a legitimate purpose, the shutdown long ago served that purpose. Our hospitals and our healthcare system were not overwhelmed, and we are now better equipped for the onslaught to come. Third – and perhaps most important – the latest executive order is predicated on a patently false premise. Its aim is not only “to prevent the state’s health care system from being overwhelmed.” Its purpose is also “to suppress the spread of COVID-19.” This last aim is beyond our capacity, and the time will never come, even if a deus ex machina were to deliver to us an effective vaccine next week, when we will “suppress” its spread. After all, there are flu vaccines, and every year the flu nonetheless infects something like 10% of all Americans. If the lockdown is not to end until the coronavirus is suppressed, it will never be lifted. Utopian ends inevitably give rise to tyrannical measures.
The fourth defect requires further discussion. Gretchen Whitmer’s executive orders apply with equal force to every county in the state. But what might make some sense in Detroit, the county in which it is situated, and in the nearby counties makes no sense elsewhere. Take a look at this map of the state and run your cursor over the various counties.
In some of these counties, as you can see, the number of fatalities exceeds 1,000. In quite a few others, no one at all is known to have died from the Wuhan coronavirus. In counties where the spread is still rampant (if there are any such counties), a brief extension of the shutdown may make some sense. Elsewhere, it is patently absurd. And where there is no public health rationale for maintaining the lockdown, Gretchen Whitmer’s policy is nothing less than tyrannical. Thanks to the lady’s punitive instincts, her penchant for posing and preening before the cameras, and her desire that Joe Biden make her his running mate, we in Michigan are committing suicide for fear of death.
Published in Domestic Policy
Your statement was in response to mine which says “all data”.(emphasis added below)
I don’t think I am mistaken.
What is most revealing is the sheer mediocrity of our rulers. Instead of aggressively looking for solutions that let us live and produce and earn as quickly, safely and fully as possible, the great minds (who by virtue of government careers are among society’s the least qualified to analyze economic activity) are compiling lists of what they think is “essential”, even down to idiocy of banning selective purchases by persons already in stores to buy “essential things.” In the Detroit area you can buy items at a hardware store but not the exact same item from Meijer or Walmart—or is it the other way around? And would not staying at home gardening be the perfect activity to keep people at home, in the healing, COVID-killing sunshine?
The lockdown program has already become an end in itself. Unsafe groupings of cops are arresting people in similar sized-groups even as jails are being emptied. Here in Maryland, policemen actually stood and watched the checkout at Home Depot and fined a woman $250 for non-essential purchases. Shouldn’t they have stopped her from scanning the item(s) and thus prevented the heinous crime?
There are a lot of bright people doing marvelous work on vaccines, medications, testing methods, the details of the virus itself and useful statistical analyses. Very few of them are government employees. And none them are journalists.
Meanwhile our rulers are fighting over the politics of “helping” us and becoming addicted to the new controls they have taken for themselves.
Snort!
You’re modifying your post retroactively rather than simply conceding an error. What follows is precisely what you posted:
As I explained in #28, there is nothing erroneous in the paragraph you quoted. It is obvious that, if testing is performed disproportionately on those who reported what they believed to be COVID-19 symptoms, then it is obviously going to disproportionately reveal symptomatic cases. Here in New York, tests were routinely refused for people who were asymptomatic, or whose symptoms were not sufficiently precise as to justify, in someone’s opinion, expending a test.
That would create a lot of problems for me.
You said “present with disease” and I showed you that only 1/6 actually had the disease.
Read what you said again. “…present with the disease” does not equal ‘present with symptoms similar to the disease’.
I’ll take “Things Detroit and I Have in Common” for $300, Alex.
Congrats on the link to Instapundit. Now sharpen the comments even more than usual so Ricochet looks good. 😉
It was conducted by a man at Stanford named Ioannides. Where is your South Korea study?
Here are my sources.
1.”Up to 30% of cases are asymptomatic”
2.”Asymptomatic and Presymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 Infections in Residents of a Long-Term Care Skilled Nursing Facility — King County, Washington, March 2020″
3.This source talks about the incubation period and symptom onset times Note, they they identify a mean time of 5.5 days for symptom onset, other places I have looked asserted the median as 5.5 days.
4. This study examines the Diamond princess data and estimates that the asymptomatic percentage.
From the article penned by Ioannides on March 17.
Well, as of today we are at 61K US deaths. So just about to the third exponent he referenced.
As to his question, “How can we tell at what point such a curve might stop?”
The IHME model is well within their 95% confidence interval.
Again, you’re mistaken. I said that testing was skewed heavily toward those who present at the hospital with the disease. That’s true, and the fact that most people who think they have the disease do not actually have the disease is irrelevant.
Let me make this very simple:
What that describes is a testing biased that favors symptomatic COVID-19 cases over asymptomatic cases.
Q.E.D.
This piece is pertinent to the question what proportion of those who get the coronavirus are asymptomatic. This piece also. There is reason to suspect that something like 80% of the children whom become infected are asymptomatic. The age-structure of the population sampled may be determinitive.
The issue of children and their response to this thing is particularly interesting. I’ve cited on a few occasions an NIH-published paper from a few years back that suggests that novel influenza-like diseases tend to spread first among grade-school children, presumably because of their high contact, low hygiene mode of interaction.
Another interesting factor to consider is something reported in, if I remember correctly, the analysis of the Diamond Princess infections, which is that less-symptomatic patients tended to generate more false negatives in testing. This would suggest that even broad testing might tend to understate asymptomatic and low-symptom cases.
I’ll answer your points in order
And if all the data in the world came from your testing description you would be right.
But it didn’t.
Ignoring the great body of evidence doesn’t help.
Q.E.D.
I appreciate your tenacious insistence that the goalposts be moved as often as necessary.
With about 5.8 million tests administered, the United States accounts for more than half of all global COVID-19 testing performed to date. So, even allowing for that enormous body of NBA and celebrity exceptions you cite, the US selection bias for symptom-positive testing is enormous.
Deep in the Vox piece is this tidbit.
So if 25% of the people remain asymptomatic after having tested positive, then that falls right in the 95% confidence interval of the study I showed you earlier.
Strange that the articles talking about COVID in prisons don’t seem to have revisited their positions to see if they are still valid.
Your second link is a CNN piece reporting on a Study out of Iceland by a group called deCODE.
I commented on their study a while ago one another thread. Here is what they found.
They tested a random sample of 9000 people from the general population not already diagnosed with SARS-COV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19). They found 1% positive or 90 people. Of those people, 45 were asymptomatic at the time of testing. No mention was made of those who subsequently developed symptoms.
Quit being a phallus by insisting that I am moving the goalposts. I am not.
None of the studies I have cited use the “US selection bias” you have a rabid grip on. So either engage the substance or bugger off.
I’m still responding to your comment #24, in which you bluntly (almost brusquely, even) told me I was mistaken while making the nonsensical point that I was incorrect when I observed that the United States testing strategy naturally understates asymptomatic cases.
So you’ve argued all sorts of other things, amounting essentially to an argument that it doesn’t matter that the United States understates asymptomatic cases, since other places, you argue, do not.
But my point, that the United States does, was the thing you told me was mistaken.
What you should do is say “Okay, okay, I was mistaken in my post #24, because what you said is true. But it doesn’t matter, because etc. etc.” Because otherwise I’m eventually going to get bored trying to bring you back to that comment and trying to extract this long-overdue mea culpa from you, and I’ll shuffle off and harass someone else.
One of my sons, many years ago, had developed a bad habit of brusquely correcting people when he thought they were in error. He’d say things like “so your statement is incorrect,” rather than “I disagree” or “I think you’re mistaken.” Not a big deal, but occasionally annoying. But the real problem with it is that, aside from ticking people off, it leaves one open to embarrassing return fire: when you bluntly contradict someone who turns out to be correct, you end up either having to eat crow or, if you aren’t quite up to that, trying to reframe the argument in such a way that you appear to have been correct.
I think that latter is what’s happening here.
There is no doubt that testing results currently understate the proportion of asymptomatic cases. We do not have enough large scale random testing to assess the percentage of exposed, asymptomatic cases. There is also some variability among populations. Genetics? Blood type distribution? Past flu experience? We will be debating ballpark figures for quite some time.
I am still curious about the fact that over 80% of the populations of both the Diamond Princess and Teddy Roosevelt tested negative despite almost certain close quarters exposure. That raises the possibility of natural immunity in a significant portion of us all such that the bug does not sufficient purchase on the body to cause new antibody formation.
The rhythm and peak of the bug appears to be the same regardless of jurisdictional strategies. Population density and urban poverty appear to be far more determinative than which products and services are “essential.”
Social distancing was the only tool we hand initially. It is time to admit we squeezed about as much from that as we could without opening more lethal wounds from social breakdown and to adapt in other ways.
For once we agree on something.
You never mentioned the US in your comment. Then you shifted the goalposts. My original objection to Dr Rahe was that he said the majority of cases are asymptomatic. I responded with the 30% figure and you threw in your 2 cents worth.
When you say people “present with the disease” that is not the same as “present with symptoms of the disease”. The first example is what you said and what I responded to with my 1/6 fact. In the meantime you continue to conflate “present with the disease” (which assumes a diagnosis) with “present with symptoms of the disease” (which seems to be what you meant all along).
No apology necessary.
This is like demanding an apology from your computer for responding to your For-Next loop when you intended to write a While-Wend.