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 13 the death toll is 22,115. May the Perpetual Light shine upon them.
One question I have is why can’t we just admit the earliest predictions about infection rates and death tolls were simply wrong? Everyone says it’s Social Distancing that saved us. Isn’t it possible that SD has helped and done some good, but even without doing anything, we never would have been close to those earlier concerns about people dying by endless millions? It just seems as though so many are reluctant to say that. It’s SD or people would have died by the endless millions. Either/or.
Dave G,
Pride.
.
And if they did admit they cried wolf–even innocently–can you imagine the political fall out?
One question I have is why can’t we just admit the earliest predictions about infection rates and death tolls were simply wrong?
Politics plain and simple.
This is a question that can’t be answered except by looking at different cases. What country or region exercised no enforced mitigation initially : Italy? Great Britain? Sweden? What country exercised strict, non-voluntary controls initially: China? Japan? S. Korea?
And besides considering voluntary vs enforced mitigation the following factors have to be considered: rural vs urban, heterogeneous ethnicity vs homogeneous ethnicity; class structure; climate.
So I doubt that it’s a question that can be answered. And if it can’t be answered, why fuss about it?
Donald:
It’s not just politics. Good researchers are not always good teachers or communicators. Those are separate talents, as I can attest from forty years in the science classroom. Fauci may know his onions as a scientist, but he hasn’t done a first-rate job talking about this issue of the clash of the models and the data. A sample of a good answer would be something like this:
“I don’t like models but in the absence of data, it’s the best we can do. We took the behavior of other viruses in other epidemics and came up with equations, then we stuck some numbers that seemed reasonable at the time into those equations. These predictions are the results. As we get better numbers, we get better equations. Yes, it looks like we overdid it, but the politicians keep pressing us to err on the side of caution, because the public has more confidence in you if you follow bad news with good news than the other way around.”
He might get fired for the last sentence.
It’s not just politics.
It is for the politicians.
“And if it can’t be answered, why fuss about it?”
Because we’re skating dangerously close to a time in which people say there is nothing but defeating Covid-19. Only SD has reduced this from endless millions dead to being what it is. Therefore, everyone will be prepared to sacrifice anything, surrender anything, and do anything since that’s the only thing keeping humanity from dying. That’s why it’s a question work asking. At best, you answered it by saying it may be more than just the SD, and therefore the stopping C19 as ‘priority one, all other priorities are rescinded’ approach might not be warranted.
One question I have is why can’t we just admit the earliest predictions about infection rates and death tolls were simply wrong? Everyone says it’s Social Distancing that saved us. Isn’t it possible that SD has helped and done some good, but even without doing anything, we never would have been close to those earlier concerns about people dying by endless millions?
See Japan, which has had only modest problems in spite of close quarters and the extensive and intensive use of mass transit. They had the protective equipment and acquired habits to prevent the ‘superspreader’ events which have made New Orleans, New York, and Detroit such disasters. It’s what we need. Until we have that, we remain vulnerable.
Note, the median lapse of time between infection and illness is about 5 days. For a fatal infection, the median lapse of time between the onset of illness and death is about 18 days. So, 23 days is roughly the median from infection to death. It appears tentatively that the peak death toll in this country was on 10 April. Twenty-three days earlier was the 18th of March. Trump declared a national emergency on 13 March and issued his social-distancing advisory on 17 March. New York City went on lockdown on 22 March.
The models will always be wrong. They’ll still be more reliable decision-making aides than consulting your Magic 8-Ball. You can adjust your response as more data arrives.
The model problem here parallels the model problem in AGW, except that extreme AGW models have been disproved by data. Art cites Japan (and you could add Taiwan and S. Korea to that example). But then you have the question of cultural and ethnic homogeneity to factor in. In Pennsylvania metropolitan centers have been hardest hit, and one of the hardest, Hazleton, which has a large hispanic population. Now correlated with ethnicity is economic class distinctions, and I hope I won’t be accused of racism in citing this. So are those factors in Japan, S. Korea and Taiwan that differ from us the important ones in achieving different outcomes? If they are, then is there any way we can compensate for those differences?
And Dave G., the question you’re asking is different from the question “did enforced mitigation achieve a downturn or did it happen irregardless of the mitigation?” Your question is worth answering and can be answered, independent of data. The question in quotation marks can’t be answered.
Many of the models took into account social distancing and were still off dramatically. See the following site for some examples:
https://www.theblaze.com/news/what-all-the-coronavirus-models-say
Factoring for social distancing, the Imperial College of London model predicts 1.1 million US deaths, the Coronavirus task force predicts 100,000 to 240,000 deaths, and the IHME model predicts 81,766. With the way things are currently going we might approach the IHME prediction but we shouldn’t get into the range predicted by the Coronavirus task for and we will be nowhere near the Imperial College numbers.
Again, these models already incorporated social distancing into their numbers, so they can’t be saved by saying social distancing lowered the number of cases.
The earliest predictions were never intended to forecast infection rates and deaths. They were intended to stampede policy makers into adopting the preferred policies of a single set of policy advisors, and devil take the rest.
In Pennsylvania metropolitan centers have been hardest hit, and one of the hardest, Hazleton, which has a large hispanic population. Now correlated with ethnicity is economic class distinctions, and I hope I won’t be accused of racism in citing this. So are those factors in Japan, S. Korea and Taiwan that differ from us the important ones in achieving different outcomes? If they are, then is there any way we can compensate for those differences?
One factor appears to be proxemics, but it’s only one factor. The close-talking Arabs are not suffering much. Latin Americans tend to get about 4″ closer to each other in conversation than do North Americans, but they’re not suffering severely, either. Social kissing is unknown in Japan. It’s uncommon in Britain (which is suffering badly) but common in Russia (which isn’t suffering much at all).
One puzzling factor is the comparative death toll among blacks. It’s severely elevated in New Orleans and Detroit (a 6-fold difference) but only mildly elevated in New York (a 1.2-fold difference). Conversation among blacks does incorporate more variation in dynamics and register (and, one might expect in aspiration). That can’t be the only factor though (It’s not my impression that blacks are more tactile than the general run of the population).
I suspect a great deal of this is driven by random-strike superspreader events e.g. as Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Albany, Ga. has been suffering badly. There, the epidemic has been traced to a pair of well-attended funerals. There was a contextually large outbreak in a small town in Washington state traceable to a single choir practice.
The earliest predictions were never intended to forecast infection rates and deaths. They were intended to stampede policy makers into adopting the preferred policies of a single set of policy advisors, and devil take the rest.
Stop it.
“If we don’t shut everything down, a million people will die.”
That’s not a prediction intended to inform decision makers. That’s a prediction intended to achieve a desired result.
You can attempt to model the impact of social distancing, but there’s no guarantee you’ll be right. I think everyone expected us renegade Americans to be defying the rules left and right. So there’s a question for you: are Americans social distancing because (a) we’re sheep, (b) we’re worried about ourselves, or (c) we’re worried about others? Obviously, it’s a combination, but I think that last choice is something that people have underestimated. I hear some people worrying inordinately about their own health, but I’ve run across a lot of people who are mortified at the idea of spreading the virus.
But back to my main point. Did anyone expect this level of social distancing? Maybe the closed schools. Not the 6 foot rule, the disappearance of social interaction, the near-zero travelling.
African Americans as a group tend to have more obesity, more Type II diabetes, more high blood pressure, more kidney disease, more strokes than Caucasians. Is it the high fat, high sodium, high sugar tasty Soul food diet, or genes or both that causes obesity which in turn causes the other underlying diseases which make the African-American population more vulnerable to COVID-19?
If the defense for the models is that when they were made there was too much unknown to make an accurate model, there’s a fix for that: model for all possible values. For example, if you have no information on the infectivity of a new disease you can include in your model a range of all plausible values and then calculate out the expected infected/death tolls from all of them. It is true that in the early stages this will lead to models that make predictions like “There will be somewhere between 100 and 30 million deaths from the disease in the US”. But if we do not have enough information to be accurate than that, then giving such a wide range of possible values is the only honest thing that we can do.
To clarify on the last post I meant a range of values of one hundred, full stop, to 30,000,000. Not a range of values from 100 million to 30 million.
749,493 people from China entered the US between December and February. – Scott Rassmusen’s #Number of the Day.
There’s speculation that Italy is so hard hit with COVID-19 because many middle class Chinese visited China for Chinese New Year and returned to Italy with the virus. The community of Chinese people in Italy, especially in Lombardy and Tuscany, has grown rapidly in the past ten years. Official statistics indicate there are at least 320,794 Chinese citizens in Italy, although these figures do not account for illegal immigration, former Chinese citizens who have acquired Italian nationality or Italian-born people of Chinese descent.
The earliest predictions were never intended to forecast infection rates and deaths. They were intended to stampede policy makers into adopting the preferred policies of a single set of policy advisors, and devil take the rest.
Sadly, yes, and there are folks who are cheering that on–I’ve had to get rather blunt about bearing false witness being evil. It’s depressing.
Which rolls into the related issue of inflating the numbers– New York has started declaring folks who go into cardiac arrest at home, and can’t be revived on site, as COVID-19 deaths if there is any signs around the house they may have had pneumonia. This was in response to a massive jump in the number of folks dying at home, because they are no longer allowed to take people to the hospital unless they can be revived on site. They went from 20-25 a day dying at home, to over 200 a day, as soon as that policy was put in place.
Did anyone expect this level of social distancing?
Most Americans can’t seem to stand each other, so I don’t know why sd is hard to accomplish at the level we have.
Most Americans can’t seem to stand each other,
People are congenially standoffish with their immediate neighbors to a degree they were certainly not 50 years ago. That aside, nearly all the rancor in this world is in, or related to, public life. (And in my experience, the left is the aggressor about 95% of the time).
The community of Chinese people in Italy, especially in Lombardy and Tuscany, has grown rapidly in the past ten years.
If I’m not mistaken, that population is predominantly in Tuscany, a part of Italy which hasn’t suffered much from this disaster.
It’s surprisingly hard to find information on where the Chinese nationals in Italy are mostly located; the only thing I’ve been able to find is “Northern Italy,” Milan and Prato.
Prato is northern area of Tuscany, and Milan is Lombardy.
I know Lombardy is noted for the high number of Chinese tourists.