Just to keep track of the nonsense that has wrecked our economy and generally made our politicians run around as if their fool heads were on fire, each day I publish the corona virus total death toll in the US based upon the latest data I can find. A single death is an immense tragedy if you love the person. However, we are not talking about love, but rather public policy, which should always involve a sober analysis of risk and cost. Please recall that in a bad normal flu year our death toll in the US can be as high as 90,000.
Note: this will be a total death toll since the beginning of this bad farce, and not a daily toll. As of the beginning of April 11 the death toll is 18,761. May the Perpetual Light shine upon them.
11 April 2020: NY Gov. Coomu reports ICU admissions change rate now net negative.
The US is just shy of 20K deaths from this virus, looks like the US curve is plateauing at about 1000 per day. Judging from the way the curve has tailed with a slower slope down in countries ahead of us we probably have about 40K deaths left without reemergence. We’ll probably end with 70K dead total.
Is it possible the death toll I’ve been 2, 3, 5, 10, 20 times that without the herd immunity from shutting down parts of the economy and social distancing?
I know things with varying degrees of assurance. Somethings we know beyond a reasonable doubt that in light of the evidence and argument it’s reasonable to think something is true or not true. There are very few things we actually know with absolute certainty.
I/we don’t know how many deaths still would’ve been without social distancing.
I get the feeling that we’re missing about 800 pieces of this 1000 piece puzzle. For instance, here in the Buckeye State, they had a story yesterday about those who have died in nursing homes from this and that it isn’t being reported. For an example, they showed two nursing homes from two separate counties. They didn’t name them, but said that a combined total of about 30-40 people are believed to have died in those two nursing homes alone from Covid-19. Ohio has had 231 deaths statewide (despite being the 7th largest state population-wise). But that’s 30 or so out of 231 total from just two nursing homes. The report suggested there were dozens of other nursing homes as well in this story (the map showed about 1/3 of our counties highlighted). If each county had only 1 nursing home with 5 deaths each, that would be about 2/3 of all who have died in our state from C19 in nursing homes.
It just seems that there’s more to this than they’re reporting. Perhaps they don’t know. But some places seem to get plastered, others barely fazed. And then you have things like this where some venues seem magnets for problems. It just seems more complex than X number of cases, X have died, end of story. Yet almost all that we’re being called on to do is based only on those couple of stats repeated daily.
David G:
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This right here pretty much explains Michigan:
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https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2020/04/michigan-is-doing-the-right-things-on-coronavirus-so-why-is-the-caseload-so-high.html
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Michigan is (last time I heard) the #3 spot for this mess, and frankly, it is almost all Wayne County (Detroit) with 10.5K, Oakland with 4.5K, and Macomb with 2.9K cases. The next biggest is Genesee County (Flint) with 828 cases. Ann Arbor/Washtenaw have roughly 670.
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Incidentally, hospitals in Michigan are laying people off, because they are not need to fight Covid19
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https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2020/04/02/tenet-detroit-cuts-dmc-benefit-health-care-pandemic/5110135002/
“It just seems that there’s more to this than they’re reporting. Perhaps they don’t know. But some places seem to get plastered, others barely fazed. And then you have things like this where some venues seem magnets for problems. It just seems more complex than X number of cases, X have died, end of story. Yet almost all that we’re being called on to do is based only on those couple of stats repeated daily.”
It’s not all about luck – hygiene is important – but there is an element of luck to it. Any blackjack player will tell you that if you play the game perfectly, in the long run, you’re going to lose slowly. You’ll have some really bad sessions, and some days you’ll make money doing the exact same thing. In the long run, you’ll do a lot better than the sloppy player. So skill is important. But over the short term, it’s unpredictable.
It’s not like bad hygiene will get you killed. But bad hygiene in the presence of the virus will kill a small percentage of the population, and result in the likely spread of the virus to an unknown number of others. You can’t predict individual paths. When you aggregate it, though, it’s going to look smooth.
The number of deaths per resident in the Detroit commuter belt is about 275 per million. In the Flint commuter belt, it is 155 per million. Around Saginaw, about 45 per million. The rest of the state’s belts are comparatively quiet.