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When Will Your Governor Declare the WuFlu Crisis Over?
What is the COVID response endgame in your state? Does anybody know? Ricochetti have discussed at length the issue of the moving goalposts since the implementation of a two-week curve-flattening. But where are we now?
The politics of the matter are increasingly detached from the relative effectiveness of past and present official actions and policies and especially detached from the actual state of the pandemic. So now, under what circumstances can officials foster an impression of success, take credit for it and stop saving us?
The trick will be (a) to prevent voters from asking why we could not have re-opened a lot sooner; (b) not merely deflecting blame for the economic carnage but to secure additional authority and power to “solve” that crisis as well, and (c) to make sure the timing yields the most partisan electoral advantages.
The single largest political obstacle appears to be a vested political interest in lockdown policies. We have known at least since April that this disease carries little risk to non-elderly persons with no existing co-morbidities. In my home state of Maryland, for example, the Governor issued an order on April 29th authorizing state health authorities to fashion detailed (mandatory) guidance for nursing homes. (The CDC did not fully spell out its current recommendations regarding nursing homes until May 18th. ) The Governor Hogan’s order was seven weeks after the initial lockdown order thus by then too late politically to concede that (a) lockdowns had had little effect with respect to protecting the vulnerable (b) the focus needed to be on the vulnerable and (c) a return to normal with prudent awareness of risks and best practices was possible without significant additional risk to the vulnerable once prudent precautions were in place to protect the vulnerable. If you told everybody we could all die without these restrictions and you then lift them before there is a cure, will everybody think you were lying?
Gov. Whitmer in Michigan just successfully pressured the school system into canceling high school football. (Whitmer reminds me of that one hyper-religious relative who wishes it could be Lent all year long—she seems to revel in punitive actions against normal life.) The risk of additional COVID deaths from playing in or attending a high school football game is probably more than offset by the risks of adverse risky behavior by teens done in lieu of football, by downstream personal losses such as the loss of scholarship opportunities and by not saving the lives that would have been saved by hastening the onset of herd immunity. The average age of a Michigan COVID fatality is 75.4. There have been 600 deaths so far this year among the two million school and college-age persons in Michigan. Eight of those are COVID-related. Lockdowns directed at the young are utterly asinine. But politically useful perceptions much be served. To the bitter end.
Taking credit for success. The execrable Gov. Cuomo is taking victory laps because the COVID crisis is about over in NY. Cuomo is responsible for this decline in the same way it could be said that effective air defenses at Pearl Harbor eventually caused Japanese warplanes to return to their carriers thus resulting in an American victory. The truth in NY is that the disease just ran out of targets.
Cuomo can be forgiven for the initial error of focusing so completely on hospital capacity that the order to return infected persons to nursing homes was issued. He was relying on the same experts that prompted President Trump to dispatch a US Navy hospital ship to NYC. However, it is an open question as to whether Cuomo’s error was corrected in a timely manner. It is also undeniable that his administration fudged reporting to hide nursing home deaths and his subsequent partisan handling of the issue is a disgrace.
But Cuomo’s absurd self-congratulations will be the norm as the disease recedes. My seat-of-the-pants estimate is that by mid-September, there will be no US state in which the daily number of cases is increasing, the national running fatality rate will approach that of usual flu and thus continuing the lockdowns will be harder to justify. But there is probably enough political momentum behind innumerate politician- and media-driven fear, mask-enforcement mania, and incentives to depress Trump’s re-election to keep the pain in place in blue states well into November.
The Swedes dropped a turd in the political punchbowl. I would argue that nothing done by any government had any significant positive effect on the incidence and lethality of COVID-19. There are indications that improper use of ventilators and the political barriers to the use of some medications had an adverse effect but overall, the bug spread and killed everywhere in a very similar fashion no matter what anybody tried to do to forestall or prevent it.
QUIZ: (a) Match each graph to the COVID death data to the right jurisdiction. Choices are Italy, Michigan, New York, and Sweden. (b) Explain how any the varied approaches of these jurisdictions could have made possibly any difference given the remarkable similarity in outcomes.
So when is it over?
Published in General
But the question is – “to where?”
That’s a problem with the emergency powers that a lot of states have granted to their governors.
The disease isn’t over. The power of governors to execute emergency orders, unilaterally, without legislative approval, should be declared over. That doesn’t mean all restrictions should end. It means people should take responsibility for them.
It’s not flat. It’s a downtrend from a pretty low peak.
I guess that I’m ready to declare “victory,” meaning that we’re past the peak and can get back to life as usual. We’re unlikely to eradicate the disease, but that’s not a reasonable goal.
Arizona is 3rd highest in the nation in cases per million, 11th in deaths per million. The number of deaths is about 0.06% of the population. We seem to be past the peak.
Kinda like a bad flu, actually.
It’s time to call on the fat lady to sing.
I wish some state had done this two months ago–it was obvious that it was information the country needed desperately. Take a city and draw a circle around it to make a large group of 100,000 people. Test them at the same time every day. For those who test positive, start testing them every day for antibodies. And keep testing those who test positive over a month-long time period. You’d be able to see when the test became positive and then negative. You’d see how long it took for the test subjects to develop antibodies. We could establish an accurate quarantine period for those infected. Testing often would also help us get a handle on the accuracy of the test. The biggest problem with this virus is that it can hide. That’s why a lot of people get false negatives.
I think the sewage tests may prove helpful eventually for metropolitan areas, but they won’t provide the kind of specific information we would get from the test I’ve described above.
We’ve been spending money on all kinds of stuff for the last few months when the information in my grand experiment is what we have really needed. This is where government consistently falls down. They suffer from sticker shock. They spend money in small amounts because that’s how they think about money and budgets. Large amounts scare them. If we could just get them to embrace the get-the-job-done-right-the-first-time way of working, they would save trillions of dollars ultimately.
I remain hopeful that the instant stick test that MIT is developing that can be read in ten minutes will answer all our questions. I can’t wait to see the results. They are cheap and fast. We could absolutely set up some valuable experiments in sample populations. And it will enable us to respond to outbreaks with flexibility and keep infected people out of settings such as nursing homes where there are vulnerable people. We need millions of these instant tests.
Ricochet is broken again. It won’t let me give this enough likes.
I live in Texas, and am annoyed by some of Gov. Abbott’s orders, but there’s enough county executives and others pushing him to lift restrictions that I’m not concerned about the long term.
But we are concerned about New Mexico, where our grandchildren live. Will we ever be able to see our grandchildren again? The governor continues to paint the virus as something that kills everyone who has the slightest contact with it. This is her justification for continuing to impose house arrest on the residents of the state, and for all practical purposes, prevent people from visiting the state. There is no way she can withdraw those restrictions without looking foolish for her exaggeration of the dangers and risks, and for the ridiculousness of her continuing orders. She has put herself into a position that makes it politically nearly impossible to change. And, because such a large portion of the state economy is derived from federal spending, commercial business interests have less sway than businesses do in most states, so she is under relatively little pressure to allow business to operate. Finally, she clearly does not even think about the collateral damage that her house arrest orders might be causing, so she sees no downside to continuing those orders indefinitely. She just reissues the proclamation each month.
Remember the cruise ship experiment of nature. It ended with 20% infected and 8 deaths. That is about the way this will end. The frail elderly were always at very high risk, of flu if not Covid. There are thousands of deaths attributed to the virus for financial reasons. I was in Tucson Medical Center having surgery a month ago and mentioned to the nurses that I thought the hospital got $19,000 per case subsidy. They corrected me. It is $40,000 per case.
The better question is when will my legislature end the “emergency” powers? If they enact something, I’m okay with it. But there needs to be an end to the seemingly perpetual emergency powers.
“Cuomo can be forgiven for the initial error of focusing so completely on hospital capacity that the order to return infected persons to nursing homes was issued.”
I don’t think so….the hospital capacity had been increased by the hospital ship and also a land-based facility provided by the federal government, and he made little if any attempt to use these facilities.
Why would that make them declare it’s over? They will still want control over us. I submit that the government will never declare it over. If Trump wins, Democrats will continue trying to control us, daring the President to use federal powers against the states. If Biden wins, they’ll use those federal powers against the states. It’s lose-lose no matter who wins in November.
The people are going to have to decide on their own that it’s over. When people just stop wearing masks (no matter what the government mandates) that’s when we’ll know it’s over.
It will be over once we have a vaccine.
Actually, scratch that, it will be over when we have a 100% effective vaccine (most flu vaccines have roughly a 50% effective rate).
Actually, scratch that, it will be over when everyone is mandated to take the 100% effective vaccine.
If it saves only one life, it’s worth it…
Declare victory and everyone can go back to work and school. If you are afraid or are old then you know what to do.
I dunno if we’ll ever be allowed to declare “victory”, but we won’t be able to throw statistics in the faces of the covid-hysterics until we have (at least) a full year of data with which to compare it to the seasonal flu.
Oh, so it’s not an urban legend.
17%, not 13%. One out of six.
except they stopped tracking flu.
17% unemployment in Massachusetts.
Holy cats. That’s horrifying.
It is to me too. Wow.
The people behind all of this have made so much money they no longer even need to bring about the 132 billions in profits vaccine for the USA:
[Redacted CoC]
sometime in November, after Election Day but before Thanksgiving
The daily death charts from worldometer empirically demonstrate covid 19 is not exponential and dissipates after 8 weeks
“Exponential” is not a binary yes/no thing. Graphs of cases on worldometer and elsewhere often show the typical exponential growth in the early stages of an epidemic wave, but the exponent gradually decreases as the curve levels off.
Don’t know if anyone’s still following this, but….
There actually is some evidence that lockdowns can be beneficial if done properly. Specifically, if a country locked down very early in the course of its epidemic and used the “breathing room” during lockdowns to rapidly ramp up other control measures (like testing, contact tracing, etc.) to keep transmission from bouncing back once the restrictions are eased.
Here is the best graph suggesting that early lockdowns might actually be useful in preventing deaths:
What this shows is that countries that locked down “early” in their local epidemic (i.e. when only very few people had already died of Covid) indeed have much lower total deaths rates than countries that locked down later. Although it’s just a correlation, the degree of correlation is close enough that a causal element is very plausible. It also comports with epidemiological theory.
Another example pointing to the importance of testing and contact tracing can be found in the border regions between France and Germany: Alsace (specifically Haut Rhin) in France and Baden in Germany are neighboring regions, and thanks to open borders and lots of cross-commuters are essentially one contiguous area. Haut Rhin was the most heavily hit area of France, but Baden saw very few deaths (less than 1/5th as many as in Haut Rhin). There are no major biological or epidemiological differences between the two regions; the main difference is that Germany had a robust testing/contact tracing program in place when the virus hit, while France had nothing of the sort.
Here’s another good example: comparing Sweden with Denmark, it’s closest neighbor (in terms of metropolitan areas) and arguably the country it’s demographically most similar to. The two countries took much different approaches to Covid. As another reference point, we’ll throw in Great Britain as a country that was hit relatively late and had enough time to choose which path it preferred to take.
Sweden:
Lockdown: Partial, voluntary lockdown with no major testing/contact tracing efforts
Excess deaths/million during spring epidemic: 550
Q2 2020 drop in GDP: 8.6%
Denmark:
Lockdown: rapid tight lockdown followed by comprehensive testing/tracing
Excess deaths/million during spring epidemic: 30
Q2 2020 drop in GDP: 7.4%
Great Britain:
Lockdown: late start to lockdown, long lockdown followed by bungled testing/tracing campaign
Excess deaths/million: 950
Q2 2020 drop in GDP: 20.4%!!!!! (that’s not annualized, that’s one quarter!)
Conclusion: lockdowns actually can work reasonably well if done right. But:
Competent lockdown > Swedish approach >>>>>>> incompetent lockdown.
The problem for people on the right is their inability to admit that lockdowns can work as well as the Swedish approach if done right. This continuous denial in light of clear evidence is one major reason why their advice keeps getting ignored.
The problem for many on the left is their inability to admit that they will never be able to imitate northern European social democracies no matter how hard they try. The inability of governors like Inslee, Newsom, and Cuomo to recognize that their states are clearly unable to stand up effective testing/tracing regimes is quickly driving their states into ruin.
And yes, I also know which one of those is worse.
This is mostly cherry-picking. Belgium locked down early in mid-March and their outcome was about the worst in Europe. Attributing any of these outcomes to policy rather than demographic variants or COVID variants or different social practices or dumb luck is a stretch. Massachusetts acted weeks ahead of New York in almost every way and category but still suffered an almost identical outcome.
“Early lockdown” doesn’t refer to calendar date, it refers to how many Covid deaths had been registered at the date of official lockdown. And as my second point mentioned, there are plenty of examples in Europe of regions that straddle political borders which are demographically nearly identical, but which were subject to different Covid policies and experienced different outcomes. That also points to effects resulting from human interventions.
And if anything, your original charts in the OP are cherry picking, not this graph. The graph in comment #55 includes ALL European countries that went into full lockdown. Your “analysis” in the OP consisted of four charts from four states/countries that happened to fit your hypothesis.
Note that I didn’t say lockdowns are always effective or even good. They appear to have helped lower death rates in a small number of countries. Even then, it doesn’t mean they were cost effective. It’s also not possible to clearly separate lockdowns from other interventions like widespread testing and contact tracing.
Nonetheless, the evidence is strong enough that blanket statements about lockdowns never being effective are not justified. Like so many things in biomedicine, the truth is messy and complicated.
The only certain outcome from a lockdown is economic disaster.
Fair enough. Great comments.
A few comments in reply:
My graphs were representative of the fatality pattern in just about every jurisdiction in Europe and the northern half of the US. They were not the only available examples of that same curve. I picked those four because of the disparate policies in play.
Your chart about countries with early lockdowns could just as easily been an inverse correlation with income tax compliance, Northern Europeans are more inclined to queue and rule-follow. I don’t doubt that a complete, non-porous lockdown would flatten the curve, I just don’t think it happened to any great extent or is feasible in a lot of places. And I second your doubts as to whether it could be considered cost-effective even if demonstrably numerically effective.
I wonder if Italy and Spain got hit so hard because they may have marginally more vulnerable old people because unlike Denmark, there is a stronger cultural and moral aversion to encouraging Grandpa to just pull the plug.
However, the suggested correlation you offered is by far the most interesting and persuasive I have seen on the point.
There is also the timing of the outbreak in different places. The Italians had no way of knowing what hit them or how to treat the disease. In this pandemic, two or three weeks was (or should have been) a big difference in the learning curve. When the dying started in earnest in different places should have made a difference in the nature, speed and quality of the response.
Given the extraordinary correlation between age and fatality, a tight economic lockdown but with a cavalier approach to nursing home biosecurity was less likely to be effective than no lockdown while putting Granny in a lab-quality clean room. Death rates from COVID are almost entirely a function of how widely and how fast the bug got to concentrations of old people. Lockdowns, masking etc by the non-vulnerable address that risk indirectly and necessarily imperfectly.
My suspicion is that (a) there will turn out to be significant variants in the bug–early version more lethal but less contagious than later ones and (b) it will turn out that policies that kept COVID away from Granny (even if by accident or pre-existing practices and arrangements) will prove to be most determinative.
Cheers.