I don’t think many people in New York would agree with you.
I should be clear that Ben appears to be right that there will not be 100k deaths in the USA by the end of the summer as predicted. I’ve already mentioned the lowered predictions.
What I meant by saying New Yorkers would likely disagree is that his claim that it was simply fear mongering and that the shutdown is unnecessary has not been vindicated by the numbers in New York.
There is always uncertainty in models, and more so because this was a new disease, but we did have examples from Wuhan, Italy, Spain, New York, etc. of what happens without early shutdowns. To call the shutdowns unjustified on the basis of a death count lower than originally forecasted seems like some Ninevites complaining that the command to fast and wear sackcloth was oppressive and the result of fearmongering because the city wasn’t overthrown as prophesied.
I think a healthy skepticism about elevating modeling to canonical status is in order.
An engineer doing a project builds what they call a safety factor into all their projects. I have a CE brother-in-law and an ME son. Both very sharp and accomplished in their fields. They’ve explained to me that all the factors cannot be accounted for. And while cost factors into the mix, projects do get over engineered.
Now the projects they work on are relatively small and deal with physical properties.
These current virus models are trying to take into account vast amounts of variables and are dealing with biological, social, political and many other factors on a global scale. The first models which came out and scared people to deathly panic and stampeded governments into the draconian measures they’ve taken sounded like the trumpet of the four horsemen of the apocalypse had sounded.
Please note this is not a comment on the seriousness of the disease.
I was listening to Governor Cuomo’s live news conference this morning and he said,
“The number [of deaths] is down because we brought that number down. God did not do that. Fate did not do that. Destiny did not do that.”
So foolish. I would not want to be a resident of New York at this time. It reminded me of @jtbayly’s comment:
It is now apparent that our initial information was incomplete. The pandemic is not what we all thought it was going to be. This is understandable. It was new. We all thought it was a dire threat and we all responded to protect the lives of our citizens, and our congregants, as we should have.
This is all true.
It is now clear that the stated rationale for these temporary, emergency actions, “to flatten the curve”, has been achieved,
This is true in most places in the US.
and that these temporary measures are no longer necessary.
This might be true in some places, but is certainly not a given. Certainly some of the measures are unnecessary at this point in time in some of the places.
If we continue on the current course of action of extreme mitigation, things may get much worse, as we fear they most certainly will.
Definitely true.
While Covid-19 is among us and members of our churches have been harmed by the disease, the much larger damage to our members has been done by cutting off the means of supporting the lives of their families. In our churches, we have few Coronavirus cases, hospitalizations or deaths.
This is precisely because the social distancing worked to prevent the disease from doing what it would have otherwise. I know I’m in the minority, but I don’t think it’s nearly as straightforward as this letter implies and most here seem to believe: that we just need to let things return to normal.
Normal means letting the disease run its course until we have herd immunity and it’s not a problem anymore. About 70% of the population must get it before that happens. The big question is what percent of people who get it will die. The original estimate was 0.9% Infection Fatality Rate (IFR).
330,000,000 * 70% * 0.9% = 2,079,000 dead in the US.
Thankfully, it seems the 0.9% IFR estimate was too high. The latest two estimates I’ve seen are 0.66% and 0.37%. That’s wide range, but let’s look at the lowest current estimate: 0.37%. What would that mean in terms of deaths?
330,000,000 * 70% * 0.37% = 854,700 dead in the US.
It’s true that the majority of those deaths would be people over the age of 60. It’s also true that even with the lockdown we’ve been unable to keep it completely out of our nursing and assisted living homes. However, the lockdown has kept the deaths extremely low compared to what they would be otherwise, even in nursing homes. I don’t believe that returning to normal right now we are ready to protect the elderly in nursing homes, much less the millions of people above 60 that don’t live in assisted living or nursing homes.
But let’s give this a bit more perspective. New York has only suffered 11,500 deaths so far. They would be looking at about 39,000 more deaths before they hit 0.37% IFR. In other words, they are less than a quarter of the way there. In New York. Where they are burying people in mass graves by the hundreds. Most other places in our country have hardly even gotten started.
Another way to look at it is simply to ask yourself what would it look like if the percent of people who have already died in NY state died in the rest of the country. We would be at 196,000 deaths total instead of 27,641. Or go even more local. Take Cincinnati, where I live. The greater metropolitan area has 2.1 million people. So far there have been only 59 deaths in the metro area attributed to Covid-19. On its face, shutting down the city when there have been so few deaths seems absurd, yes. But if we had people dying at the rate the NY state does, we’d have already seen 1,273 deaths, with more happening every day. The hospitals, morgues, and funeral homes are just as unable to handle that here as they are in NY.
I think this is something to be thankful for. I think that we are much better off having taken this course of action.
Do I have proof that it is the shutdown that has prevented all of those deaths? No, but I have a lot more evidence than those who assume that opening the economy back up would not lead to those results.
Yes, we probably know enough now and have done enough work preparing (producing more personal protective gear, for example) that we can start to make changes, and some of the rules in some of the states have been just plain dumb. Some of the rules (as always) have been abused, and a few of the rules have undoubtedly been wicked (such as allowing abortions to continue).
But a simple appeal to “open” the economy is foolhardy in my judgment. What I’d like to see is any evidence that the IFR is actually much lower than the current estimates. Failing that, we could decide that those numbers of deaths are acceptable and necessary to prevent worse problems. However, even then I’d like evidence that we know how (without a lockdown) to slow it down so that what is happening in NY doesn’t happen in the rest of the country. It’s bad enough having one state going through it that quickly. It would truly be terrifying if it was happening in 20 or 30 states at once.
I’m hoping that the powers that be can rollout large-scale antibody testing. Not only will it help determine what the true IFR is but it will allow us to know who has already been exposed and could therefore who could more safely be allowed to return to work.
Without good testing, then deaths is our only sound metric. And given the progression of Covid-19, it looks like deaths trail acquisition of the disease by 2-3 weeks. Everything else metric-wise (CFR, IFR, total cases, total recovered, on and on) is garbage, which means that models are garbage, and any experiment that anyone runs on opening the economy has to wait 2-3 weeks before we even begin to see the results of the experiment.
At this point, it seems to me that the priority should be on good tests, including antibody tests. Get those rolled out to health care workers, then to other critical workers like grocery store workers. PPE for folks like this is a close second.
Figuring out a way to keep people from hard-hit areas like New York from infecting less-hit areas like Wyoming is also pretty important as we start to look toward taking our foot off the economy’s brake. At this point, it looks like Wyomingites don’t have much to fear from each other, but have quite a lot to fear from New Yorkers.
Something that has surprised me is that my state, California, has had substantially fewer deaths per million than New York and even some interior states even though California has many major urban areas and close connections to China. Perhaps our very early shutdown helped, or the fact that many people and business were already social distancing weeks ahead of the official shutdown, but I wonder if there are other factors coming into play. It would be useful to find out what these are.
My expectation is that we will move to a middle-of-the-road solution. People will return to work, but they will maintain more distance, and many will still work from home. Smaller gatherings will be allowed, especially with distancing measures, but Disneyland will remain closed and there won’t be any professional conventions. Restaurants may reopen, but they won’t get as much patronage as before. Schools and colleges will stay closed until fall.
I’ve concluded that the U.S. simply doesn’t have the institutional capability to aggressively test, trace, and quarantine, so for the next year or so there will always be the danger of cases exploding again. We will have more testing than before, but not enough, so any time it looks like cases start rapidly rising again in some region, that region will be shut down again. I would not be surprised to several cycles shutdown and opening occur until a vaccine is developed or most of the population will have been infected at one time or another.
Most areas of Wyoming probably won’t have an explosion of cases, but they shouldn’t think it can’t happen to them. All it takes is for a Wyoming native to visit family in New York, develop an extremely mild form of the disease after returning home, then go to a local business roundtable meeting and infect thirty others (this sort of thing seems to have happened), who then go on to each infect several of their own family members, all before anyone has any idea what is happening. And now a town in Wyoming has many more people in serious distress than the local hospital can handle.
Unfortunately our country is filled with a plethora of Patrick Henries.
If only they emulated earlier parts of his speech:
And what have we to oppose to them? Shall we try argument? Sir, we have been trying that for the last ten years. […] Sir, we have done everything that could be done to avert the storm which is now coming on. We have petitioned; we have remonstrated; we have supplicated; we have prostrated ourselves before the throne, and have implored its interposition to arrest the tyrannical hands of the ministry and Parliament.
Ten years. We’re tempted to go nuclear after less than ten weeks.
King George didn’t ruin the economy throwing millions out of work either and destroying small mom and pop businesses which won’t be back. Perhaps a bit more patience was warranted back in the 1700’s.
That’s exactly what I’m saying they should avoid. It’s not the Wyomingite they need to worry about per se, it’s the New Yorker. Anyone who has been to NY/NJ/CT/Detroit/New Orleans needs to be quarantined for two weeks before seeing other Wyomingites.
With good testing, you could just test people as they move around and skip the quarantine for the uninfected. But like you, I’m unconvinced that we have the capacity to develop and roll out that level of testing.
One thing I don’t think the “muh Liberty” crowd understands, is that during a pandemic, authorities have to govern to the lowest common denominator. Are you, Mr. Fiscally and Socially Conservative MAGA Hat Wearing Guy, capable of proper social distancing while working, recreating, shopping, etc? Probably (though I’m beginning to wonder…)
If the country was made up entirely of people like yourself, then things would be vastly different (in many regards.) The truth is, there is a large segment of the country’s population who are utterly incapable of even the most basic functions. Take my wonderful home state of Michigan for instance. All those people storming the Capitol yesterday were most certainly from the West side of the state. They completely forget about the East side of the state, which not coincidentally, is being overwhelmed by huge numbers of infection and death. Until that long awaited wall is built separating us, the state must be governed as a whole.
4,591 US deaths from Covid-19 yesterday
I’m rapidly arriving at the belief that there’s no way out of this situation without either a huge number of deaths or a huge economic disruption, or, most likely, some combination of both. There is a massive Covid sandwich, and pretty much everyone is going to have to take a bite.
I don’t think those all happened yesterday, John. There were a lot of extra deaths reported in NY from over the course of the last few weeks. So really, all the previous days should be somewhat higher and that number should be quite a bit lower.
I’m seeing 2,174 and 2,288 the two sites I’ve been watching.
That was according to the Wall Street Journal, who are using John Hopkins University as a a source.
Well, happily, as far as I can tell, it’s fake news combined with an odd choice to make the “day” go from 8pm-8pm.
Johns Hopkins University only updates daily at 8pm, according to their dashboard, but you can see numbers updated mostly live (complete with source links for that day’s data for each state) here: United States COVID - Coronavirus Statistics - Worldometer
And it’s worth noting that they say JHU is using their data.
Another site compiling their own data (a bit slower than the previous one, but still updated frequently throughout the day) is here: https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com
Both of them show a huge jump to over 6000 deaths on the 14th.
The Worldometers note on the 14th says the following:
30720 new cases and 6185 new deaths in the United States New York City today has reported 3,778 additional deaths that have occurred since March 11 and have been classified as “probable,” defined as follows: “decedent […] had no known positive laboratory test for SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) but the death certificate lists as a cause of death “COVID-19” or an equivalent" [source]. We will add these to the New York State total as soon as it is determined whether the historical distribution can be obtained.
The historical distribution is evidently not available, and this is clearly the cause of the overly high number for the next “day” in the JHU data. If you remove that day (as you must since its data is including additional deaths from many other days), then the highest deaths in a day (by date, rather than measured from 8pm to 8pm) is 2618 or 2796 depending on your source. And those numbers may also be slightly inflated by historical data adjustments. You can read more about it here: Changes in US Data following new CDC guidelines on "Case" and "Death" definition (April 14, 2020) - Worldometer
As I mentioned previously, even if the government ended the shutdown, that doesn’t mean the economy would go back to normal. One reason would be the threat of lawsuits. Here we see an example, though it looks like it won’t get far due to special laws governing this particular situation.