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COVID-19: It’s Over, But How Do You Convince People That It’s Over? Part 2
The title to this post is a reprise of Day 104: COVID-19 It’s Over, But How Do You Convince People That It’s Over? posted on May 3. The key graphs in that post for my purposes today is:
[T]he epidemic has definitely slowed in this country.
But do people really see that? Yes, a lot of people are anxious to get back to life. But are they feeling confident that doing so is the right decision? How do you persuade those that remain fearful that the “quarantine breakers” are actually common-sense individuals not just recklessly selfish?
This is going to be tough. The public has been fed a lot of data where the numbers rise steeply. As the body count mounts, and it will continue to do so, how do you get people to realize that things are winding down?
The main technique that governments and media have used to continue to stoke fear are rising rates of “confirmed cases.” The problem with this data as I have pointed out before is data aggregation when data disaggregation is called for. That is, the way cases are confirmed is through testing. There are a variety of testing protocols: testing symptomatic and others in close contact with symptomatic persons, testing hospital admissions or other patients undergoing procedures for which there are no COVID-19 symptoms. There are a variety of tests even though they only fall into two categories: PCR and antibody. PCR tests directly look for an active virus, but there have been reports that some testing methods identify RNA fragments of viruses that are not active and may reflect that someone has recovered from COVID-19 rather than being actively ill. Antibody tests have a variety of sensitivities and may also respond to coronavirus more generally than SARS-CoV-2 specifically. All of this calls into question whether confirmed cases truly reflects a level of current disease-specific to active SARS-CoV-2 or is simply an echo of a seasonal illness that is already past for 2019-2020. It is the latter possibility that Professor Dolores Cahill from Ireland discusses starting at about 3:30:00 in the video at this link. (The entire video is fascinating for the international resistance to government actions being taken in response to the epidemic. The video is one of a series of live stream recordings made by the German Stiftung Corona-Ausschuss (Corona Committee Foundation). The video moves back and forth between German and English to ensure that the expected audiences in Germany and elsewhwere can follow the discussion (if you are hearing them speaking German just wait a few minutes and they will talk in English).
That could be easily verified if positive tests are going up but hospitalizations and deaths specific to symptomatic COVID-19 are going down. But our official data is not tracking it in that way. And thus we are deprived of key knowledge that should be informing our local health policies and government action.
Speaking of key knowledge that should be informing our local health policies and government action, let me give a hat tip to @misterbitcoin for reminding us of the Gompertz curve and Professor Michael Levitt, Nobel prize winner for “the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems” and professor at Stanford University. According to Professor Levitt, the US epidemic should essentially be over on August 25. As of this writing, the deaths attributed to COVID-19 are 162,423. Professor Levitt is calculating less than 170,000 reported deaths as of August 25, but for reasons stated above the count is likely to be higher whether that is real or not.
Is Professor Levitt right? Well, he is more right than Governor Cuomo, Governor Newsom, Governor Whitmer, Governor Inslee or any of the other Blue State executives. On June 2 Professor Levitt predicted that Sweden would have around 5,000 deaths before their new deaths dropped to zero. They recorded 5,763 total deaths before reaching zero new deaths. Certainly within the order of magnitude that Professor Levitt predicted.
Notice the Gompertz curve?
Although this narrative is not favored by the media and centralized government proponents, voices are starting to assert themselves. As discussed by Professor Cahill (and others) in the aforementioned video this is a time to take back control of our lives.
One by one, we emerge into the light.
[Note: Links to all my COVID-19 posts can be found here.]
Published in General
This is all true. However, if my boss said meet your new work partner, Mohammad. I would not clutch my pearls unless Mohammad gave me reason too.
On the one hand I am to love my neighbor. But on the other what would clutching one’s pearls look like?
It would be palming my Seacamp 32 in my pocket . And get this. The serial is
TRUMP 010. A hundred were made with Trump in the serial.
Well, then no, I wouldn’t be clutching anything. But it looks nice, though. Do you put it through its paces regularly, or do you keep it as a collector’s special.
It looks like my North American Arms .380 Guardian. Not that I clutch it.
I never met your coworker. When I worked in Pakistan I had a number of Islamic coworkers who meant us no harm.
Less age, but the degree of “intellectual” / “academic” focus people have is a big determinant.
Second time I’ve seen that reference today, on posts about completely different subjects.
If you have a
hammerdunking stool, every problem looks like anailwitch.Don’t forget honor killings.
What is Jihad’s biggest motivator? Islam’s heavenly whores
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/08/islams_heavenly_whores_jihads_biggest_motivator.html
In other words, where do they buy their clothes
Somehow this thread veered wildly off topic!
Sheepishly slinking away.
It won’t be over until we have (at least) an entire year’s worth of data so we can compare the Coronacrisis to a typical year of flu.
My brother is a retired Neurologist. I am having a follow-up colonoscopy tomorrow and need a ride. He declined to give me a ride due to COVID-19. He is taking this very, very seriously, and is waiting for the vaccine.
The key is that he is making decisions that he feels necessary to protect himself. He is not asking someone else to give up their life and livelihood to protect him. All the more important because other people cannot be relied upon anyway to do consistently what may be required to keep themselves well or protect others. The best we could ever do was to provide good information for individual decision-making and to make sure the health care providers had what they needed to provide care. That care, of course, involved protection of the elderly or infirm in group care facilities in addition to hospitals.
If he is retired, he is surely in the group that needs to be concerned the most.
What people need to know now is the significance of a positive test. How long does it take to produce effective levels of antibodies? And we need an effective test to determine innate immunity to this virus. Something like the old TB skin sensitivity test.
It is like the flu in that we need management tools. Once those are in place, once people have a sense of who needs to stay home and who doesn’t, all of this fright will go away.
I don’t understand what is taking the world so long in ascertaining these important facts about this virus. I look at DNA research and how exhaustive it has been and how quickly the knowledge evolved once the key elements were known. We need a similar renaissance for the immune system.
We Christians and Jews do not need to be dangerously radicalized in order to be destructive of the Muslim world.
One of our recent wars managed to quickly de-stabilize the nation of Iraq, whose people did nothing against us on Nine Eleven. For whatever reason, although Saudi Arabia was the home of so many of the 19 hijackers, we found it necessary to go after Iraq…
Within 8 yrs, 1/5th of all Iraqis fled Iraq. Some 900,000 civilians had been killed. We had no Marshall Plan after our Shock and Awe. We claimed that our whole goal was to capture Saddam Hussein, a man our own CIA had installed over the Iraqis. Iraqis themselves hated this man.
The example we’ve set is not a very decent one.
I look at the Iraq war, in its simplest viewing, as an extension of Bush 41’s New World Order: this started with Somalia; the first time in modern history when a country was invaded not because it was waging a war on others, but ostensibly because a group of the world nations didn’t like its government and found it to be not up to modern standards of internal democracy and goodness.
Whether or not there were current WMDs in Iraq is beside the point; Bush and his political allies around the world wanted to displace Saddam Hussein for reasons other than WMDs. Then came displacing the Taliban. And then Khaddafi. None of which revolutionary interventions turned out well for the inhabitants of these countries or for the establishing of stable let alone democratic governments.
In fact, years afterwards these countries have no effective unified government. The Bushes’ NWO has not brought greater peace or stability, but increased lawlessness and death. The third or fourth time the NWO does this it should show that this is not the result of gross incompetence but rather the goal.
Oh brother. That is very serious. I drove my friend, in cancer treatment in my car. We both wore masks, and I wiped down the armrest and sealtbelt. She sat in the back. I in the front. We joked I was driving Miss Daisy.
That kind of consistent record could result in the election of an outsider. An actual maverick. That isn’t cowed by Candy Crowleys. Just sayin’.
It will be over by August 25
— Michael Levitt
In Texas I’d say we have close to normal economic activity. The automobile traffic is back up to close to 90% of normal. Stores are open. People are out. Using masks in stores is mandated, and people do seem to be trying to keep their distance. There are still people working at home. Schools are closed. Hospitals are screening people who enter and are still restricting elective cases. Otherwise it looks pretty normal.
What isn’t normal is travel to the rest of the nation and the world. Hotels have low occupancy. Use of air travel and other transportation to major cities is still depressed. I’m traveling myself right now, and I notice that most people traveling are young. Almost no older people, and older people who travel appear to be business people. Not much we can do here about the rest of the world being hunkered down.
I”m not one of those who thinks that case numbers and deaths from COVID-19 are being exaggerated for nefarious purposes. Criteria for a COVID-19 case are more stringent than any widespread infectious disease one can name in modern times. Compared to pneumonia, seasonal flu, strep throat, etc., the COVID diagnosis is being made with mathematical precision. I see that every day. In spite of the occasional SNAFU here and there the numbers are true, most likely understated if anything. I agree that some of the increase in new cases we saw starting two months ago was due to increased testing. I know that a lot of mild cases were not being tested before that. As more tests became available mild cases were added to the total.
The excessive caution we see in the Yankee media is, I think, a cultural difference. They are just a lot more risk averse when it comes to COVID, which probably comes from seeing bodies being loaded into refrigerated trucks pulled up at the nursing homes all over New York. I was startled to read that one couple in New York had only now accepted friends over to their home for a visit. My wife and I have had friends over occasionally all through this thing. I guess we just trust our friends not to show up on our doorstep with a fever.
Speaking of Texas again, I”m not seeing any change of activity that would result in a reduction of virus transmission, and yet it’s happening. Daily new cases have been declining for three weeks and new deaths are also down. Similar declines are seen all across the land. I wish we could point to something we did right about that time, but if we did I have no idea what it was.
Good comment. By the way, here are some recent data from covidtracking.com, where I check the Michigan death count every day.
6533 August 11
6526 August 10
6519 August 9
6520 August 8
6524 August 7
6506 August 6
Note that the total death count declined for two days in a row, on August 8 and 9. One possible explanation is that a few people resurrected, but it seems a little early for that. Another possible explanation is that some corrections were made in recording cause of death. If there was a conspiracy to count every sniffle as a covid death, I don’t think you’d see data like that.
Or possibly someone was inclined to score every death as a covid death, but there were others who corrected such mistakes. There are also other possible explanations, but I don’t think any of them point to a systematic overcount of covid deaths.
I may have contributed to an overcount of negative test results in Michigan. Two and a half weeks ago I came down with a nasty fever. It went down overnight, but kept bothering me at a low level for several days. I had no respiratory symptoms, but there were others.
Someone mentioned that some of the local pharmacies were offering free covid-19 tests. I had to fill out a web form explaining my symptoms, and went to a local drive-up window at the appointed time where I was given the swab and watched as I did the nasal swabbing according to directions. But I was told I wouldn’t get the results for 10 days. (The web site had said 3-7 days.)
The son who lives with us was working strictly from home while waiting for my test results to come back, so this was somewhat of a nuisance for him. I isolated myself in my office in the back of the garage, and used a mask on my rare excursions elsewhere in the house, but his employer (a university) probably doesn’t want him coming to work under such a situation. And as he explained to his mother, “Whatever he’s got, we don’t want it.”
But then I figured out how to get tested in the local health care system. When I called the covid number and told about the ten day wait, the woman on the phone thought that was ridiculous and said the local system would do it a lot faster. In fact, I got the results back in 40 hours, and also had a brief exam at a urgent-care center that is dedicated to covid-19 business and nothing else for now.
The doctor didn’t think I had covid-19, but told me I needed to stay away from people until I got my results back. The result was negative, and the first test was negative, too, when I finally got it back, ten days almost to the hour after I did the swab test. So I’ve probably contributed two negative test results to the Michigan total.
Things like that happen, but those types of errors tend not to amount to much in the big picture.
I got a relapse of the fever last weekend, but this time around it’s not so severe. I’m sleeping in my office again, because it seems I’m up every hour to drink more water, walk around a bit, and pee. At least I’m keeping it down this time around. Maybe tonight will be the last night of it and I can get back to my regular bed again.
If we could get the word out as these doctors have been trying to do, it could be over by August 20th.
https://www.theblaze.com/slightly-offensve/americas-frontline-doctors?rebelltitem=1#rebelltitem1
Slightly Offens*ve August 10, 2020
Hydroxychloroquine is SAFER than Tylenol: America’s most ‘dangerous’ doctors speak out
Dr Simone Gold starts talking about how if there had been more of a need for the HCQ remedy prior to this crisis, it would already be over the counter. But since the US lacks many malarial cases each year, it has never been in great demand. She makes many interesting statements at the 8:15 spot.
So you are having a reoccurring fever? What other symptoms? Any double vision?
Two bouts of fever, each several days long, including the muscle aches and headaches that tend to come with any fever. Each time the fever peaked early but then seemed to linger at a low grade. A couple days into the first bout I lost my appetite completely for a few days, and had trouble even keeping water down. No loss of taste or smell, No respiratory problems. And during this second bout I didn’t lose my appetite at all.
Usually when I’m sick with a cold or anything, my eyesight isn’t so good until I’m better. This morning at breakfast, I still had to wear my glasses in order to read. That’s the way it’s been since this whole mess started. When I’m feeling better I don’t usually have that problem unless the light is poor and the print is small. No double vision, though.
A few days before round #1 I did a 70 mile bicycle ride to northern Indiana. On the way I made a couple of gas station-convenience store stops to replenish my water supply and get a bite to eat that I took away to nearby town parks. I wore my mask inside, and most people inside were masked, too. (We have a mask order in effect in Michigan.) At the one stop the staff took it seriously enough to turn back customers who weren’t masked. When I got to my Indiana destination I saw that a little corner cafe located in a former bank building was open. I had always wanted to stop there, but in other years it’s always been closed when I got there. Ice cream customers were to use the back entrance, so I went in there to get a sundae. Nobody wore masks in that little village, but that’s Indiana, and I didn’t either. (A mask order may have come into place since then.) People waiting for ice cream kept their distance from each other, but the food handling techniques by the young woman behind the ice cream counter were, shall we say, inept and substandard. I took my sundae outside and ate it. (My wife later tried to tell me that at my age it’s sometimes necessary to be impolite.) Anyhow, I wondered if I picked something up there, because otherwise I’ve been fairly isolated at home. I wish I knew how all the other customers felt a few days later.