Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
[UPDATE—
Well, I got up today and fired up the weed wacker and went out to sweat a bit in the sun. You can see the mowed part at the bottom and the much larger unmowed part behind … I limit my fun to one tank of gas per day, makes my hands shake afterward.
And while turning tall grass into short grass, I thought …
Rats! I asked the wrong question!
The question is not “Do Lockdowns Work”? The answer to that is obviously yes. All different types of those restrictions, from the mildest to the most draconian, will have some effect on the speed of transmission. So “Do lockdowns work?” is meaningless.
The real question is, “Is Extending Lockdowns Worth The Cost?”
That is to say, will any further extension of the lockdowns make any difference? From what people say below, we don’t see the effects of the lockdowns for three weeks or so after the imposition of the sanctions. Now, thanks to a most interesting site provided by my generally aggravating friend Steve Mosher, the future of the US looks like this (the site also has individual states):
If the peak is in two weeks, and the effects of what we do today won’t be visible for two weeks, and at this point the possible changes are small, is that worth the huge damage this lockdown is doing?
The problem that I see is the cost. One week of lockdown has cost us two trillion dollars, along with thousands of failed businesses, people unable to retire because their 401Ks are in the toilet, hundreds of thousands unemployed, a big uptick in domestic violence, and lots of jobs lost.
Now, I estimate that something on the order of 80,000 people will die in the US from this virus. (Curious me, I also looked up the estimate from the model above … 93,000.) Suppose the “flattening the curve” saves 10% of them. By all indications, it won’t, but let’s use that number.
That means that we have spent two trillion dollars to save maybe 8,000 people.
And that, in turn, means that we’ve spent a QUARTER BILLION DOLLARS PER PERSON, most of them over 70 like me but unlike me with other diseases, and put our economy in the crapper in the bargain. I may be wrong, but somehow I don’t think my life is worth a quarter billion dollars.
Now, think about the alternative—voluntary self-isolation, particularly of geezers like me, along with putting two billion into field hospitals, quarantine hospitals, accelerated doctor and nurse training in quarantine procedures, ventilators, masks, quarantine ambulances, drug production of antibiotics, chloroquine, and whatever drugs we need, instructional videos on social distancing, and the like.
I’d say there’s a good chance that we could save more than the 8,000 people by that method, and no matter how many we saved, we’d end up with a) a medical system second to none, b) a humming economy that just had two trillion poured into increased production, c) on-shoring our drug-production industry, d) no business losses, unemployment, or job losses, and e) no uptick in domestic violence.
Call me crazy, but I do NOT want to spend another two trillion dollars to prop up a mostly “feel-good” lockdown ..
Given the general ineffectiveness of these various lockdown-type interventions in the Western countries, and given that a couple weeks of lockdown have already cost us a trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of vanished jobs and failed businesses and unemployed workers …
… given all of that, I have to ask … is yesterday too soon to end the lockdowns?
Don’t give up. Just end the stay-at-home shelter-in-place regulations. Leave a strong VOLUNTARY self-isolation on geezers like myself, retired folks. Test incoming visitors to the US. Keep washing hands. START WEARING MASKS!.
Let’s get the country back to work before any more people go bankrupt or are unable to pay their rent.
Anyhow, that was my morning. How was yours? I’ve changed the title of the post, and left the original title as well, for searching purposes. And now, here’s my original post.
Best wishes to all for good health,
w.]
Before this $%^&* lockdown started, I said “SPEND THE $1 TRILLION ON OUR HEALTH SYSTEM AND DON’T LOCK THE UNITED STATES DOWN”!!!
(See, back then they were only talking one trillion. But it’s politicians spending OPM, so of course now it’s two trillion.)
And from everything I’ve seen up to now, I was right. Near as I can tell, the lockdowns in various countries have done little & our health system is still inadequate. However, that’s just anecdotal. So here is some harder data on the question.
First, almost every country has implemented some forms of health interventions, ranging from the mild to the Chinese-style totalitarian clampdowns.
And as the Koreans have shown, this can work … but only if people are willing to have quarantines enforced with GPS locations and a surveillance state and GPS contact tracing that shows everywhere you’ve been in the last two weeks. As far as I can see, you have to be Korea or China to pull that one off, and no western country has even tried it.
And as a result, there is very little difference between the spread of disease and the concomitant rate of death in any of the western countries. Figure 1 shows the tragic trajectory of death in the 14 countries with the highest death rates.
Figure 1. Coronavirus deaths versus the number of days since the country went over 10 deaths per million people.
As you can see, there is very little difference in the death rates between the various countries, despite the fact that they all have differing levels of health interventions to try to prevent the spread. They’re all following the same trajectory.
Now, other than lockdowns, what kind of health interventions am I referring to? Glad you asked. Over at ACAP you can download a dataset of the different kinds of measures used by different countries. They list no less than 33 different types of health interventions being used to fight the coronavirus, viz:
- Additional health/documents requirements upon arrival
- Amendments to funeral and burial regulations
- Awareness campaigns
- Border checks
- Border closure
- Changes in prison-related policies
- Checkpoints within the country
- Complete border closure
- Curfews
- Domestic travel restrictions
- Economic measures
- Emergency administrative structures activated or established
- Full lockdown
- General recommendations
- Health screenings in airports and border crossings
- Humanitarian exemptions
- International flights suspension
- Introduction of quarantine policies
- Limit product imports/exports
- Limit public gatherings
- Lockdown of refugee/idp camps or other minorities
- Mass population Testing
- Military deployment
- Obligatory medical tests not related to COVID-19
- Partial lockdown
- Psychological assistance and medical social work
- Public services closure
- Schools closure
- State of emergency declared
- Strengthening the public health system
- Surveillance and monitoring
- Testing policy
- Visa restrictions
So I used that to see if countries with more of those restrictions fared better. Here, for example, are the restrictions imposed by South Korea over time. Some are listed twice because they were expanded or made more rigorous over time:
- Health screenings in airports and border crossings
- Limit public gatherings
- Visa restrictions
- Visa restrictions
- Introduction of quarantine policies
- Schools closure
- Introduction of quarantine policies
- Additional health/documents requirements upon arrival
- Surveillance and monitoring
- General recommendations
- Additional health/documents requirements upon arrival
- General recommendations
- Partial lockdown
- General recommendations
- Introduction of quarantine policies
- Psychological assistance and medical social work
- Introduction of quarantine policies
- Surveillance and monitoring
Quarantine, then surveillance, then more rigorous quarantine, then even more rigorous surveillance and quarantine. I don’t believe that Americans would put up with that.
However, being a graphically minded sort of person, I then made a scatterplot of the number of distinct kinds of restrictions a country has imposed versus the number of deaths per ten million in that country. Figure 2 shows the result:
Figure 2. Scatterplot, number of kinds of restrictions to try to prevent viral spread versus coronavirus deaths per ten thousand.
As you can see, the number of restrictions seems to have little to do with the number of deaths. For example, here’s what Switzerland has done. These are the different restrictions they’ve applied.
- Limit public gatherings
- Border checks
- Visa restrictions
- State of emergency declared
- Schools closure
- State of emergency declared
- Border checks
- Visa restrictions
- General recommendations
- Strengthening the public health system
- Awareness campaigns
- Testing policy
- Limit public gatherings
- Border closure
- Limit public gatherings
- Economic measures
- Limit public gatherings
- Partial lockdown
- Full lockdown
- Partial lockdown
- Economic measures
- Economic measures
- Limit product imports/exports
- Military deployment
- Limit public gatherings
- International flights suspension
- Limit public gatherings
- Strengthening the public health system
- Visa restrictions
- Economic measures
So the lack of visible effect is not from a lack of restrictions. Nor is the lack of visible effect because the restrictions haven’t been in place long enough. Switzerland imposed the first restrictions forty days ago, on the 21st of February. They closed the schools. On the 24th of February, the government declared an “extraordinary situation,” and banned all private and public events and ordered restaurants and bars to close. At that point, they had no coronavirus deaths. [UPDATE: A couple of people said that Switzerland’s restrictions had not been in place that long. Upon rechecking my sources, I find they were right and I was 100% wrong. However, my point remains—the different restrictions haven’t made any detectable difference to date, and the crunch is coming in one or two weeks for most countries. So any effect will be minimal, if not detectable, and meanwhile the economic and human cost is horrendous.]
They currently have 433 deaths from coronavirus. Forty days of sanctions with no effect.
Meanwhile, the Swiss have about the same number of deaths per ten million population as say Netherlands, and here’s all that the Dutch have done:
- Introduction of quarantine policies
- Limit public gatherings
- Schools closure
- Public services closure
- General recommendations
- Economic measures
- Emergency administrative structures activated or established
No lockdown, neither partial nor full. No limitations on import/export. No suspension of flights. No visa restrictions. No state of emergency. No border checks.
And despite that … they are on a par with the Swiss, despite all of the Swiss containment measures.
Or you could look at it another way. Germany, the US, Portugal, France, and Spain have all instituted the same number of restrictions … but their deaths go from low to high.
So it seems that my intuition was correct. Unless you are willing to impose a full-blown police and surveillance state, these measures do very little. The problem is that this bugger is so insidious. It has a long incubation period when it is infectious but asymptomatic. And it can live on surfaces for days. As a result, in terms of government restrictions, nothing but a major Korean-style full-court press, with surveillance and strict quarantine and a populace willing to follow restrictions to the letter, will cut down the number of cases.
And Americans simply won’t do that. In fact, it’s impossible to get Americans to just shelter in place. If you go out into the streets of the US, there are lots of people working, lots of people going from place to place, grocery stores full of people … control the virus?
I don’t think so.
But regarding controlling the virus, here’s another graph. It’s exactly the same as Figure 2, but it contains Japan as well.
Hmm … they’re in the danger zone, near to Korea and China, so what extreme health measures are they practicing? Here you go …
- Health screenings in airports and border crossings
- Visa restrictions
Whaaaa? That’s all the restrictions? … my only conclusion from that is simple.
WEAR A MASK.
The one virus health practice that distinguishes Japan from most of the world is that they all wear masks in public. Even the liberal US news media is noticing the effectiveness of masks—a CNN story is headlined “Face masks and coronavirus: Asia may have been right and the rest of the world is coming around” … seems the US specialists were wrong again. Go figure.
A mask cuts transmission down in two ways. First, it keeps you from touching your mouth or nose. This both protects you until you can wash your hands, and if you are infected it keeps you from spreading the virus onto hard surfaces to infect others.
Next, it keeps you from sneezing or coughing a billion virus particles into the air. It’s less effective at preventing you from inhaling such particles, although it helps with that as well. And it is that sneezing and coughing that is the major way that the virus is spread.
And overall, as Japan is showing us, wearing a mask cuts the transmission rate way down.
We’re starting to get there, but it may be too little too late. I see that the genius medical experts who recommended the ineffective drastic lockdown are now thinking about recommending that Americans wear masks. The headline in Politico says “Fauci: Mask-wearing recommendation under ‘very serious consideration’” … under consideration?? They’ve destroyed the American economy without looking back, but a simple recommendation to wear a mask in public requires “very serious consideration”?
Sigh …
We can see above that there’s very little upside to the American lockdown … so let’s look at the downside. First, the economic damage from the current insane “shelter-in-place” regulations designed to thwart the coronavirus is already huge—lost jobs, shuttered businesses, economic downturn, stock market losses. This doesn’t count the personal cost in things like increased suicides and domestic and other violence. The people who made the decision obviously were led by doctors, which was good, but they did not listen to economists or social scientists, which was lethal.
To partially compensate the populace for those stupendous economic losses, we’ve just thrown two TRILLION dollars in the general direction of the problem. That’s trillion with a “T”. Most people have no idea how much a trillion dollars is. Consider it this way.
Suppose you were an immortal who made so much money that you were able to spend a million dollars a day forever. In the first week, you buy 350 ventilators at $20,000 each and give them to the various states. The next day you buy 200,000 face masks at $5 a pop, epidemic prices. Then you decide to take a year and buy a field hospital every day, 365 of them at a million dollars each. That feels so good that you decide to set up full hospitals. They’re something like 1.5 million dollars per bed. So you can buy a 250-bed hospital per year. You spend the next two hundred years doing that, two hundred new hospitals, 50,000 new beds.
Now that’s only about a hundred years of spending a million bucks a day. Suppose further that you started spending one megabuck per day, that’s a full million dollars each and every day including weekends, back on January First way back in the Year One. And imagine that you spent a million dollars a day every day right up to the present, buying medical equipment, expanding medical schools, purchasing test kits, a million dollars a day from the year 1 right up to the year 2020.
Guess what …
…
… you still would have spent far less than a trillion dollars, only about three-quarters of a trillion. And to spend two trillion, you’d have to spend a million dollars a day for 5,500 years.
Can you imagine what our medical system would be like if we spent a million dollars a day on it for fifty-five-hundred years?
Instead, we’ve pissed the two trillion away on repairing the damage caused by the lockdown without getting the economy started again, plus wasting it on all the pork that got loaded onto the bill.
Consummate financial idiocy that only politicians could ever think was reasonable, logical, or practical. Mark Twain was right when he said “Suppose that you were a Member of Congress. And suppose further that you were an idiot. But I repeat myself.”
So … how about we all put on masks, keep washing our hands, give up our steamy midnight rendezvous (rendezvous?) with pangolins, increase testing particularly of our medical personnel, start testing for antibodies, and end this stupid lockdown? The pluted bloatocrats in Congress are already dreaming up a new appropriations bill to waste another trillion dollars or so that we cannot afford. Me, I say, let’s quit while we’re behind and get back to work.
Here on my forest hillside where the redwood trees scratch the sky, it’s my great fortune that my daughter, her husband, and my infant granddaughter have come to spend the lockdown in the woods … and both I and my gorgeous ex-fiancée are overjoyed that they are here. They’re working from home, and we’re retired, so all is well chez nous.
So stay well in these parlous times, dear friends. I see that Chloroquine has been approved in India for Covid-19 treatment. I had malaria four times, so I know that drug up close and personal. Plus I took it once a week for a year as malaria prophylaxis. And I used to take three weekly doses per day for three days in a row if I felt malaria coming on, and that would stop it in its tracks. So I’d take it again in a minute.
And I also saw that the advisor to the Italian Health Minister has said that only 12% of the Italian deaths were actually deaths FROM Covid-19, and the rest were deaths WITH Covid-19. So things may be looking up.
Regards to everyone,
w.
The Usual: When you comment please quote the exact words you are discussing, so we can all be clear who and what you are referring to.
Willis
I’ve recently been troubled by the same concern about the effectiveness of public isolation. I think that something that would be instructive is to compare the shapes of the curves on semi-log graphs for the current epidemics, with quarantines, with past recent flu epidemics. I would expect that if the current quarantines are effective, the downturns should be more abrupt today than they have been for past historical flues with no exceptional attempts to curb the flu beyond vaccinations and palliative care for those who become sick. [Actually, there is a difference in that probably the most serious complication in flu is secondary bacterial pneumonias that respond to antibiotics.] That is, the natural controls on epidemics, notably the reduction in infectable hosts, might be the dominant control, not poorly executed quarantines.
In summary, does the Gompertz Curve for past flues differ substantially from what we are observing today with COVID-19?
Clyde, we’re talking two different things—one is the flu, and the other is a novel virus that nobody has been exposed to. As a result, the coronavirus epidemic is ramping up far, far faster than the annual flu season does. I fear this makes comparisons both difficult and uncertain.
w.
Willis
There doesn’t seem to be anything unique about the method of transmission that distinguishes COVID-19 from the several flu strains. The difference would be in the susceptibility of those being exposed to the virus, as characterized by R0. One would expect something new wouldn’t have any resident antibodies in the population. However, the large percentage of people who are asymptomatic, or only experience mild symptoms, suggests that there is some native or inherent immunity in the general population. The graphs that I have seen suggest that seasonal flues start showing up in September or October, but don’t become really bad until about December, peak about February and then decline rapidly after April. That is, there is an exponential part of the curve that lasts about 3 months and then declines without intervention. That also seems to be the case with COVID-19, except that world health organizations are purposely trying to extend the length of the epidemics to give the medical community time to prepare for the delayed peak.
I was suggesting a method to establish that the seasonal flues differ significantly from COVID-19, or not.
It appears that we do not as yet have sufficient reliable data to determine whether the virus is very contagious and/or very harmful. Apart from a very limited number of isolated relatively sizable cases (e.g. Diamond Princess) we have no clue as to the total number of infected people, the number of asymptomatic ones thereof, the number of true Corona induced deaths, etc. So far it is hard to distinguish (for instance here in The Netherlands) whether the countrywide total number of deaths and the number of seriously hospitalized people are significantly above normal levels. Impossible to assess the necessity and effectiveness of draconian government measures.
Americans – or better: CONUSians
Feel free to keep off any lockdown, and to do so as if nothing can happen to you when you won’t do anything more than to wear a mask.
Probably due to a certain isolation compared with Europe (UK excepted for the same reason), you are just at the very beginning of the pandemic.
Between March 23 and yesterday, the COVID-19 death / case ratio published daily on the page
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
has moved in the US as follows (the case/death lag is not considered here, as it is invariant in the ratio over such a short period):
23.03.20 | 1.26 ( % )
24.03.20 | 1.42
25.03.20 | 1.51
26.03.20 | 1.52
27.03.20 | 1.63
28.03.20 | 1.80
29.03.20 | 1.74
30.03.20 | 1.93
31.03.20 | 2.15 ( % of 4,053 / 188,530)
We all know: it is in fact not very useful to calculate estimates for such a short time series!
But nonetheless, we might notice that the predictions for April 6, calculated by different estimates, are as follows:
– linear: 2.5 %
– quadratic: 3.0 %
– cubic: 5.4 % (!)
We will see on next Tuesday at 9 AM GMT+2 how Worldometers’ numbers look for the US… and see which estimate is the nearest to reality.
*
In Germany, France, Spain and Italy, no one is happy about the lockdown.
We know: Japan and South Korea as well as Sweden did not impose it.
But we all understand its necessity as explained by renowned health care specialists.
And, with all due respect: we understand that the opinion of a few persons all around the world – most of them lacking any real experience in medical statistics – and who doubt about the usefulness of lockdowns, counts way way less for us than that of specialists.
Best wishes to the US, whose president, after having deliberately underestimated, if not even ignored the danger of telling to its nation:
‘Oh… It’s no more than a little flu, the spring soon will blow it away’
now seems to become peu à peu aware of what will inevitably happen.
And, oh surprise! The bad Russian Communists are helping you with lots of masks! Be happy!
J.-P. Dehottay
Bindidon April 1, 2020 at 1:17 pm
I can only conclude from that that you know very little about “renowned specialists” and how often they are wrong in all walks of life.
For example, one of your precious “specialists”, Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist at Imperial College, London, told the UK that if they did nothing they were facing half a million deaths, and that they had to lock down immediately … YIKES! So they locked the country down, because foolishly, like you they trusted him because he’s a “renowned specialist”.
Then a week or so later, after they’d put in place all the emergency regulations, he came back with his new prediction, which was that the UK was facing …
…
… wait for it …
… 5,700 deaths.
From half a million deaths to 5,700 deaths in a couple of weeks. And here in the US, the “renowned specialists” are still debating whether wearing masks is a good idea or not.
So if you want to trust “renowned specialist” folks like that, be my guest. Me … not so much. Been there, seen that, not impressed.
w.
The most reliable numbers come from South Korea and they have a death rate of ~1%. With no drug for treatment and no vaccination that means for herd immunity (60-70% of the population got the virus to achieve this) at least 1.96 million deaths. Sounds great, let’s do it! *sarcasm off*
Yet the death rate on the infected cruise ship, with an older population than South Korea, was also about 1%. So something seems off here.
The numbers of the cruise ship have been to low to make any general conclusion. People with a number of comorbidities are also less likely to go on a cruise so the sample might be just not representative for the whole population.
South Korea’s and Singapore’s numbers are the only ones which I would trust right now bc of how they are testing, how much they are testing and their quarantine regiment.
Both are quite open about that w/o SARS and the swine flu’s lessons they would have not been as prepared as they are now. Both as countries as well as societies.
W. Eschenbach
I keep away from this Ferguson polemic (he is unknown to us here in Germany, we trust in the staff of our Robert Koch Institute), because it seems to me that the guy is intentionally misinterpreted.
He wrote
As far as I can read, he did not say ‘by end of April’ (or May or June). The German RKI as well did never predict anything the like within such a short period.
We will see, Mr Eschenbach, what the next 6-9 months will tell us.
UK just bypassed France today evening at daily death toll, so what!
J.-P. D.
I think you mean London, that`s where most of the deaths have occurred, thankfully no deaths where I live Mansfield Nottinghamshire UK.
Not quite true, Willis. The 5.7k number was not Ferguson’s.
The Imperial College group provided a range of projected death figures which related to different intervention scenarios. The IC paper is in the link below.
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf
expect no mercy from Willis when he is attacking modelers.
oh wait.
he predicted ~8100 cases for Korea and ~100 deaths.
Opps, and he still won’t own it.
Steve, that’s a pile of reeking horseshit. How could I possibly “not own” a prediction I made very publicly? I made it, I own what I wrote. How could I not? It’s right there for anyone to read.
However, once again you are LYING about what I predicted, because you don’t have the balls to actually quote my words or link to my prediction. So here they are again.
And yes, Steve, things happened to bend the curve. Deaths in Korea are up to 165, big whoop. And Korea jacked its testing through the roof so they’ve gotten more cases than I estimated. So what? Seriously, don’t you have better things to do than to whine and bitch endlessly about a very early prediction of deaths?
Now, as far as I know, you didn’t make any prediction of deaths back then about Korea. And considering how early I made my prediction, and that there were fears of huge numbers of deaths in all countries, I’d say my prediction wasn’t bad.
So give it a rest. You just look terminally vindictive with your endless lies about my prediction. You’re a smart guy. Act like one.
We’re in this stupid lockdown in part because some “expert” predicted that 2.2 million would die in the US … how about you devote your skills and energies to getting on the case of the guy who made such a disastrous prediction?
He’s the same guy who got the UK to lockdown by saying that they’d have a half-million deaths. They locked down, only to see him change his prediction to 6,000 or so. You want a bad prediction to get your knickers in a twist about? Go bother him, and leave honest folks alone.
w.
Willis, that would be more than close enough for government work, except you didn’t do it as part of a $1 million contract.
UNTRUE, no such ratio is published on that page. That is something you made up all on your own and pretended it meant something.
As I have pointed out previously to J-P you have two exponential growths: eg. C=exp(c*t); F=exp(f*t)
when you take the instantaneous ratio C/F you get exp((c-f)*t)
You should not be surprised if your exponential ratio does not stay constant.
And cases slow down before deaths as I know you are aware, so their ratios will not remain constant.
The case exp will break before the fatalities exp ( unless some effective treatment is developed ) . At that point the F/C will show a sharp up turn. That is the good news, presumably bibendum will that that is even worse than the current climb which is just the result of two exp growths.
Japan got hit early, like June, and is a hermit society where very few elderly go out anymore.
So they engage in social distancing as wrote lifestyle the same as they engage in food cleanliness and wearing masks.
It is very much an anti-viral culture. I’d say the chart needs to include these facts even tho they aren’t government enforced.
I’ve been in Japan and I could see a good number of elderly people out and about.
I would note that Japan has performed an amazingly small number of tests: 34,508
I really wonder if anyone knows just how much COVID-19/nCOV is actually in Japan, given this figure. (from Wikipedia COVID-19 testing page)
When you look at cumulative totals on a log scale it is pretty much a forgone conclusion that they will all head upwards and to the right. That is not informative and neither supports nor affirms whatever conclusions you may be wanting to put forward.
Also you are looking at deaths. That can take up to two weeks after symptoms show which is 2-12 days after contact. So how many of the plotted countries have been in shutdown for more than 3 weeks ?
I have previously pointed out that case numbers are where the first sign of change, if any, will be seen. Those data have problems too but that is where you can look at this point. One needs to look at daily new cases not cumulative because the eye will not easily see a slight difference is slope caused by restrictive measures: it’s not going to magically kill the exponential in its tracks.
In this graph of US new cases per day. There is a slowing of the exponential: doubling time from initial 2.3d to 5.8 days. That’s pretty good news if you’re on the front line.
There I did the break in fitting the slopes 3 days after NYC shutdown which is minimum you could expect to see an effect because of incubation period. There is a slope reduction but it appears to start BEFORE that date. However, with noisy bumpy data, it is not clear where the turn starts.
Same for France. Again , could have been turning before but difficult to make a definitive turning point:
Similar analysis for Italy, seems clearer.
So , I’m not pushing any conclusion, just putting the numbers up there is a way which will expose any changes as clearly as possible in the time we have data for since various countries put measures into force.
There has been notable and useful reduction in the rate of exponential growth. Attribution of that to the measures in place or possibly other factors is less clear.
As a closing note Italy , Spain , Belgium and Netherlands have now all cleared the peak in daily new cases in recent days.
Prof Didier Raould at Marseilles has now tested hydroxychloroquine plus antibiotic on over 1500 patients for 3days ( not definitive result ) with only one death. Remaining patients on other care showed 15 deaths in same period.
I agree with Willis that we need to play the way to unwind this mess ASAP before we create a second crisis on top of the health care crisis we are already suffering from.
If all the imposed restrictions were effective, how long should it take before the reduction in spread should be evident? Would death numbers as in these graphs be hiding improvement? It seems to me thaty with the proposed incubation period reported for this virus the number of new cases should be dropping like a rock by now. What is it about the spread of this virus has been totally misunderstood by the people in our governments?
Interesting analysis and I agree with you that the measures taken are unlikely to make much difference. It’s good to see these important comparisons being done.
However, the basic problem with your argument I think is it is based on the figures for reported cases and deaths. Yet these figures are basically meaningless since the reported cases understate the reality and really only show how many tests are being carried out (and what kind). The reported deaths on the other hand, as you note at the end, overstate the reality since (in most places) they include all deaths with Covid-19 and not just deaths from Covid-19. See Dr John Lee in the Spectator here https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-to-understand-and-report-figures-for-covid-19-deaths-.
The most important recent piece of information to come to light is that the proportion of test-positive individuals in any given population in all countries analysed so far, including the US, is constant at between 5 and 15 per cent depending on the country. It is not increasing over time. The exponential increase in the number of reported cases that we see in the news every day results from an exponential increase in the number of tests rather than a rise in the proportion of individuals who test positive. This suggests that the virus is not currently spreading exponentially in these populations at least. The analysis by Dr Richard Capek is here https://coronadaten.wordpress.com/ with an explanation here https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/ (scroll down to the more recent updates).
In addition, you say ‘It has a long incubation period when it is infectious but asymptomatic.’ You may be interested to know the WHO disagrees with this: ‘Transmission in the first 3-5 days of illness, or potentially pre-symptomatic transmission – transmission of the virus before the appearance of symptoms – is a major driver of transmission for influenza. In contrast, while we are learning that there are people who can shed COVID-19 virus 24-48 hours prior to symptom onset, at present, this does not appear to be a major driver of transmission.’ https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/q-a-similarities-and-differences-covid-19-and-influenza
The other important thing to be aware of is that overall death rates for March so far (up to 25 March) in Europe remain well below average despite coronavirus. This speaks against Covid-19 being an unusually deadly virus that warrants the kind of extraordinary, costly and illiberal responses we are seeing. More info here https://faith-and-politics.com/2020/03/31/european-death-rates-remain-below-average-in-march-despite-coronavirus-whats-really-going-on/.
Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow postponed until 2021
Is that called a COP-out ?
Vuk
I guess the adage in English: “it’s an ill wind indeed, that doesn’t blows some one good” applies here.
The link:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52122450
Like the famous quip about lawyers, it’s a good start.
The logarithmic nature of the first chart is visually hiding some pretty substantial differences. For instance, France is at roughly half the death rate as Italy at this point in its curve, and a much smaller fraction of that compared to Spain. As for the scatter graphs, they only serve to show the number of CURRENT health interventions, which tend to correlate with how far along each country is on their own infection curve. I don’t see how much useful information can be gathered from these graphs, with the exception of tracking the first graph as it continues to develop.
I agreed, I’ve posted above in more detail but it’s held in moderation because I linked three graphs.
here is the US one without further comment. ( Hopefully the full comment will appear soon ).
Hydroxycholoquine tests , 1500 patients:
https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/covid-19/
Again I say, measuring cases is worse than nonsense, it is actively misleading! Cases are a factor of testing. For example, here are new US cases.
Now, if you think that your graph shows that the lockdowns are working … why the sudden surge in new cases yesterday? I say it reflects testing levels, not case levels …
Suppose we cut testing in half tomorrow. “New cases” would drop precipitously, “total cases” would depart from the exponential growth … and that wouldn’t mean one dang thing about actual cases of the disease in the real world.
Forget about measurements of cases, they’ll lead you astray.
Which is why I deal with death numbers. They still have problems, but not as bad as case numbers.
w.
Thanks for the reply. I agree deaths are probably more reliable but the delay means you don’t get any input for another two weeks after changes in case load.
I doubt anyone is going to cut testing in half tomorrow and I would not place any weight on one blip yesterday.
The problem with the kind of rocket flare graphs you are looking at it that they will not show any down turn if one is present, so it seems rather weak evidence of the absence any effect.
What change would you expect to see on those graphs if one was present and at what point in time would you expect to see it?
Maybe fake a down turn in some of that data and develop a method would detect it. Until you establish that you have a means of detecting any down turn , you have no reason claim absence of such an effect.
Hey Willis, I think you’ll like the following video about a similar graphical approach to compare countries in this pandemic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=435&v=54XLXg4fYsc&feature=emb_logo
Here is an interactive chart as described in the video. https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/
A similar approach and equally uninformative for the same reasons.
Worse the effect of animating the ‘rocket flares’ makes it even more alarmist.
gifs with no explanation of method are worthless anyway.
Greg, these graphical tools are useful if used appropriately. The narrator of the video gave a few precautions and discussed limitations, etc.
I agree Willis, active/cases/recoveries have several ambiguities related to testing not the least of which is that New cases are more related to the wild population than the confined (active cases) population. So for example you can’t compare viral spread on the basis of New Cases/Active Cases between countries because the ratio of Active Cases to In the Wild cases can be wildly different. I have found the only reliable metric of viral virulence is deaths per unit population, or the probability of dying from COVID-19 in your country.
Sadly, all of those ‘reliable’ stats can only be assessed when the crisis is over.
That is why we have to try to do our best with unreliable ones.
The protocol is hydroxychloroquine and azithromycine early.
The European “multi-centric” pure sciency “Discovery” blinded test SCAM is hydroxychloroquine only and late. It’s pure Horseshit Based Medicine as usual.
Yes, the EU “Discovery” study is rigged from the outset and it is clear that they are only interested in finding which of their big pharma patented antivirals get a milti-billion order.
One of the clauses anticipates being flexible and eliminating any of the treatments which don’t perform well. If anything gets eliminated early , I know which it will be .
HCQ (hydroxychloroquine) has an effect on the virus by being a Zinc Ionophore. That is, HCQ allows more zinc to get into the body’s cells.
QCT (Quercetin), an over-the-counter “food supplement” acts as a Zinc Ionophore as well.
This matters because, in vitro but not yet in vivo, zinc has been shown to inhibit SARS-CoV-2 reproduction.
Perhaps HCQ works better than QCT. Or not. No one knows the level of zinc in vivo that works. No one knows what dosage is required to get the desired level of zinc inside cells. To my knowledge no one has trialed QCT alone or in combination with HCQ.
Masks are hard to come by. I got some dust masks at the hardware store. Keeps me from itching my nose etc. but that’s probably it. Close relatives don’t like the masks for various reasons.
So is this pandemic going to be worse that the novel H1N1 “Swine Flu” pandemic of 2009/10?
“So is this pandemic going to be worse that the novel H1N1 “Swine Flu” pandemic of 2009/10?”
Are you serious?
Simon it is a yes / no question.
I know it’s more serious than H1N1. I’m shocked anyone at this time would ask that question.
Japanese have a way better average hygiene than Americans and Europeans. Sad fact but true. They are also way more considerate about trying to not infect anybody else and educated in washing hands very frequently. That is the benefit of social pressure and conformity in their society. Therefore relating the slow spread just to masks is utter nonsense. It’s multi-factorial and founded in their society. Just wearing masks will never have the same impact though of course it’s better wearing them than not.
So given that wearing masks is better than not wearing them, what’s your point? Yes, the Japanese do other things as well. So what? We still should wear masks and forget about lockdowns, which is my point.
w.
Just wearing masks alone w/o any additional change in behavior will not suffice. And I haven’t seen people changing their behavior at all w/o the lockdown in New York City.
How could lockdowns influence the total number of deaths? I have seen two explanations, both based on the assumption that lockdowns slow the spread of the virus. The assumption looks quite reasonable.
1. We will have fewer infections every week. Fewer sick people can get better care than when hospitals are overwhelmed.
2. It buys time. There is always a hope that a new treatment – or even a vaccination – will be developed.
Do we know other reasons why lockdowns could decrease a total mortality?
Curious
Could the virus slow itself down naturally? I mean at first, it picks off the weak and then people get it and recover?
Simply telling people over 65 or with underlying conditions to stay inside for a couple of months while the rest of population became herd immune would VASTLY cut down on deaths at little economic cost. Grocery stores and other stores could have first 3 hours after opening just reserved for those people. This is a reasonable measure that would not destroy economy. Destroying the economy has so many consequences to everything and everyone, many of the consequences we cannot even see, there are ripple effects everywhere.
Willis asks:
“Can you imagine what our medical system would be like if we spent a million dollars a day on it for fifty-five-hundred years?”
To which the answer would be that it would be a lot worse than it is now. In 2018 the total amount spent on
health care in the US was 3.6 trillion. Which works out to about 9.8 billion dollars a day. So Willis is actually
proposing reducing the health care budget by a factor of 1000!
A couple of things, Izaak. First, that is the amount spent on health care, NOT the amount spent on health care infrastructure. The total spent on health care EQUIPMENT, on the other hand, was $93 billion, or about 2.5% of total expenditures. And the critical shortages today are of equipment.
Next, regarding my EXAMPLE of a million dollars a day for 5,500 years, the reality is we could have should have spent the two trillion over the next year or so, as you well know. And that would be $5.5 billion per day … I’m reminded of Salena Zito’s famous comment about Trump, “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”
We just blew two trillion taxpayer dollars on things that will NOT help our health system much, and I’d like for folks to take that monumental economic stupidity very seriously. There are 330 million people in the US, so that’s a new debt for a family of four of $24,000 on top of the current US debt, which $275,000 for a family of four. That two trillion is gone with little to show for it, and you want to make jokes and divert the conversation?
Pass …
w.
you aren’t suggesting socialising healthcare are you?
Like Italy?
you aren’t suggesting socialising healthcare are you?
Pardon?
You did just read the below didn’t you?
“We just blew two trillion taxpayer dollars on things that will NOT help our health system much and I’d like for folks to take that monumental economic stupidity very seriously.”
Lock-downs work, but they have to be done a) early and b) properly.
New Zealand locked down early (before first death), and it has been done properly here, and the results are clear.
If this trend continues (yes, I know…) then NZ should be free of new cases by around 12 April.
However, I don’t believe this is the best way to deal with the virus.
Dr Didier Raoult has been getting some excellent results at Méditerranée Infection Hospital in France over the past week, using Hydrocychloroquine (HCQ) and Azithromycin (Z-Pak).
He has reduced the fatality rate from around 1.4% to 0.07% with this treatment.
A possible path forward could be:
1) Immediate treatment of anyone with flu-like symptoms with HCQ, even before test results come back;
2) If tests are positive, add Azithromycin and Zinc. This will stop the progression to ARDS, which is the real killer;
3) All older people (65+) locked down as much as possible;
In this way we will develop herd immunity for the general population, but not destroy the economy.
Otherwise, (even if lock-downs are successful) we won’t have immunity, and will not be able to interact with people from other nations, and we’ll have to self-quarantine after every trip abroad.
NB: I’m not a medical doctor, see your own for prescriptions.
I’ve looked at both of Raoult’s studies – they are both highly flawed.
The first study: there was a skew towards younger people. We already know younger people are less affected by nCOV. A bigger problem is that the “conclusive” hydroxychlorquinine (HCH) plus azithromycin (AZT) treatment that was so good – neither the control group nor the placebo group had the same types of lower respiratory nCOV. The control group which only got HCH didn’t perform that well at all. The 26 study people were scattered across 3 hospitals in 3 regions. And lastly, the detailed findings – there are many examples where a NEG (negative) result was followed by 1 or more positive results.
The 2nd study: again, very young skew. No control group. 43% had pneumonia, 1 person died and 3 went into ICU – which about what the present epidemiological breakdown would say for a group of 80 symptomatic nCOV sufferers.
Both studies are supposedly about HCH – but the age skews and other oddities make these study results not reliable, in fact somewhat suspicious.
The Netherlands were late in their reaction on the present outbreak. Our small country now ranks nr. 7 for total deaths, while we only knew our first death at March 6. This means that we have not been good in prevention. https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6
In the ranking of graphic 2 of this post it seems the Netherlands did not take many measures. But important measures have been taken: closing schools, no shaking hands, restaurants and bars closed, closing of beaches, no public gatherings of more than three persons, working at home if possible and most important: social distancing of 1.5 meter FOR EVERYONE. The last one is put well into practice. Police controls and you risk a fine if you did not comply with the rule. What I see everywhere is that on streets and everywhere people keep distance to each other. Stay home is another advice. We don’t have face masks (general shortage) so we have to do it this way.
And what is the result?
First, to see how Amsterdam looks now see the short video in https://www.iamexpat.nl/expat-info/dutch-expat-news/video-coronavirus-quarantine-has-turned-amsterdam-ghost-town I must add that there is some more traffic in my own much smaller town but I read that the turnover of gas stations halved, which gives an indication for the total effect of the measures.
Second, what is the result in numbers? The aim is to bend the curve(s), necessary because with only some 11,000 official cases (at very restricted testing) the health system is already stretched and near max. capacity (the number of ICU’s has to rise nowadays from 575 originally available to some 2400 next week). But the graphic for daily new cases shows a down going trend: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/netherlands/
Furthermore it is suggested by government service RIVM that the important number R0 already went down to below 1 which means that the number of new cases soon strongly should go down. RIVM said that the R0 already went down to only 0.3. The black line in the next graphic is the R0:
?itok=xRRY5FUU Today this graphic has been shown to the Parliament. I must honestly say that I was surprised and I want to see in the next two weeks whether the effect will be what the graphic suggests.
What we actually see happening in an epidemic (number of cases, hospitalisations, deaths) is what in fact happened one or two weeks ago. What does not happen NOW because of the measures taken will first be shown in the graphics one week (for cases) to two weeks (for hospitalisation) from now. The effect on the number of deaths will follow some five days after hospitalisation.
Lockdown is term bandied around as any restrictions on citizens movement but it does mean that-it specifing a total isolation and very few countries have that. A large area lockdown needs martial law or immense social pressure. South Korea’s COVID-19 response isn’t totally working but than other– its health system is on the verge of collapse cant work professionals indefintely hard and they are missing lots of carriers young people testing is bad for their futures. Lockdown when you test is too late- gotta to lickdown and test the general population. People can’t wear.masks for the rest of their lives. South Korean restritions will collapse. Hardly any country has a real solution.
On the Netherlands: “No lockdown, neither partial nor full. No limitations on import/export. No suspension of flights. No visa restrictions. No state of emergency. No border checks. ”
No idea what your source of information is for this, but it is a completely wrong assessment of the situation in the Netherlands.
This is information from their government site:
https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/coronavirus-covid-19/veelgestelde-vragen-over-de-aanpak-van-het-nieuwe-coronavirus-in-nederland
Extract:
– only go outdoors if needed for work (and if telework is not possible), for (food) shopping, for sporting (walking or cycling) or helping someone in need
– all gaterings of more than 2 people that are less than 1,5m apart are forbidden
– all bars and restaurants are closed
– all professions involving contact are closed (that includes red light districts 😉 )
– all schools and universities are closed
Have a look at the departures page of Schiphol airport, hard to find a flight that is not cancelled.
One can debate about the definition of (partial) lockdown, but this pretty much feels like one.
“despite the fact that they all have differing levels of health interventions to try to prevent the spread. They’re all following the same trajectory”. Actually all countries in Europe apply very similar measures (Sweden is a notable exception). A few measures have most of the effect, those are applied in similar ways by all countries. That is the reason that they follow the same trajectory, not because the measures have no effect. The differences are in side measures that have little impact and that are often just instored by politicians to satisfy the public.
It would be very interesting to be able to plot a country that takes no measures at all. I am very sure it would be a big outlier on the left side of the plot (Belarus is doing an effort, curious what will happen there, but then again their information is probably even less reliable than Chinese data)
Yep I don’t know where Willis got that idea almost all the countries in his graph have done the same thing. Sweden is the stand out test case they can still have gatherings of 50 people down from 500 but there is growing descent as the death toll is climbing and they close in on 5000 infected.
LdB April 1, 2020 at 6:16 pm Edit
LdB, can you read? Here’s what I wrote:
But noooo, LdB is far too important to follow a simple request. And as a result, he’s run afoul of Mark Twain’s quote:
I didn’t say that “almost all the countries have done the same thing”. I said they’ve done very different things but the outcomes are all very similar. Next time, quote what I said.
Eddie, you’re as bad as LdB is:
Dear heavens, PLEASE read the article before exhibiting your infinite wisdom. I both named and linked to my source of information, viz:
I can explain it for you, I can identify sources for you, I can link to the sources for you, but I can’t read it for you. Step up or get out. I’m tired of picking spitballs off the wall.
w.
Dear Willis
I’ve read your source. Our dispute comes down to which source is most credible: the official website of the Dutch government (which I also provided the link for, may I ask you to read my source too, google translate does a pretty good job) or the ACAP website which does not seem to have any representative in the Netherlands – their closest link seems to be a fundraising coordinator in Belgium.
The other example I quoted is very clear: you say (probably based on ACAP data): no flight restrictions. This is the page with departures in the main airport of The Netherlands: https://www.schiphol.nl/en/departures/ Almost all flights are cancelled.
ACAP is some organisation, specalised in developing countries, that is trying to collect a dataset, but clearly their data is insufficient.
Eddie, I fear you’re not being clear. I gave a list of the imposition of the various measures in the Netherlands. You seem to think it is wrong. But that goes nowhere unless you tell us exactly what is wrong and where. Here’s the ACAP data. You’ll see that most of them are sourced to … wait for it … the Dutch government.
w.
Take a deep breath Willis … you are a little worked up on this topic. Personally I don’t know why we have to have virus junk on the climate website every 3 posts but just breath and lets walk thru what I said.
You say “I said they’ve done very different things but the outcomes are all very similar”, It is that I am totally disagreeing … so are we clear I disagree on the point they did different things. Now it is probably needed a comma between “idea” and “almost” or phrased better but that is what you get when people don’t really give a rats about the subject. So you are carrying on like a pork chop about the wrong thing I disagree with you on (which is mildly amusing).
So clarifying bar Sweden, Singapore and South Korea almost every country in that graph went to a lock down situation so I disagree they did different things. If you want to argue semantics some like USA are partial lock downs. You can argue some went late some went partial but all went into lockdowns.
So my second issue is this isn’t something for a climate change blog. You can take it up with your government representatives or create or find an actual blog on the subject. The politics is locked in at each local level and even if I believe you an accept everything you say it’s meaningless it isn’t going to change the lockdown. Now as I understand 34 US states have now gone into at least partial lockdown so your head is probably going to explode. From my point of view that is just a fact and to some degree I couldn’t care a less, join the club. So what I am saying is you probably need to take a cold shower before writing articles or answering comments because you come across unhinged (which is unusual for you).
Couldn’t agree more. I have posted clear counter evidence on what Willis posted on the Netherlands. Yet Willis did not read it and instead launched some personal insults.
LdB April 2, 2020 at 7:17 am Edit
LdB, it’s clear from your comment that you are not interested in reading about this topic on WUWT, so please do us a favor and just SKIP THE DAMN POST if you don’t think it should be on WUWT.
w.
Yeah I don’t really give a dam about the topic and the 10 crazies who go around the same stuff in a jerk circle over and over and over again … it’s boring as hell.
Can I leave you with a something for you to think about …. you know you really sound like Zoe and her blog … it’s actually funny 🙂
LdB April 2, 2020 at 7:09 pm
If you truly don’t give a damn about the topic, you’d simply NOT READ THE POST. So I’d say you’ve only come here to complain. WUWT puts up a new post every four hours, eight of them a day. So whenever a post has a title that you “don’t give a dam [sic] about”, skip to the following post, duh.
Because coming here to proudly announce to everyone that you’re not interested in what you know people are discussing here is … well … bizarre behavior is the kindest term I can think of at the moment. Go someplace that interests you, is that too much to ask?
Sure … as long as you promise to actually leave and not come back.
w.
We need to be asking more questions like “Do Lock Downs Work?” Asking and demanding answers.
What is the mortality rate for healthy people outside the high risk groups? How dangerous is this virus to adults in their 20’s, 30’s 40’s, etc?
I don’t think that those questions can even be answered at this time.
China, for example, as I understand it, does not have any reliable system in place, to register even normal death rates. How can they be expected to, all of a sudden, have a reliable system in place to register a specific death rate, in a population for which they do not even have a certain system to register an ordinary death rate?
We don’t even know how many people are carrying the virus, which would provide a true baseline for measuring death rates. We only know “confirmed cases” as the basis for figuring mortality, and “confirmed cases”, as I understand it, could have different meanings in different countries, and so you might be comparing apples to oranges.
The number of articles about covid19 on a climate change site is growing tiresome but demanding answers on a climate change site about a virus pandemic … you do get how that looks.
I do not expect readers of WUWT to know the answers. We need to ask questions and seek answers.
The world’s media is not interested in asking questions.
Isn’t asking questions and seeking answers real important science stuff?
Data released by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene on Wednesday revealed that the vast majority of coronavirus patients, who were treated at NYC facilities but ultimately died as a result of the virus, had at least one underlying health condition.
https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-daily-data-summary-deaths.pdf
Food for thought
Yep, “food” for thought. Half of the US population is obese, and that is an underlying health condition….
It continues to shock me that people who smoke or who are obese are afraid of dying from a virus with a rather low mortality rate at all ages 65-. They should worry about other things than corona.
Willis,
I too am frustrated by the current strategies, and also that we may never have reasonably good data to figure out what works.
Two weeks ago on Saturday I wrote three Senators with an idea I thought would work better than shutting down the economy. I have had no response to date from two of them, and the third sent a form letter bragging about the stimulus. But I digress….
The idea is this. My wife’s family had a child who was an early test subject of transplant therapy. They lived in a city of 30,000. The city did not shut down each time there was an outbreak of flu or the cold to protect this person, and the family itself even suffered bouts of flu and colds — the mother even had a bout of bronchitis. Instead, they observed a strict protocol when disease broke out. Inside/outside shoes. Confinement of the vulnerable person, and confinement to room of any sick person in the family. Pretty strict flow of trash, dirty dishes, etc. Sterilizing lots of things using just using 4 hours of good old sunlight. The child was kept safe for nearly two decades, and went out on his own to college and then into society with care. Heck of jazz guitar player.
The Swedish approach seems very similar. Isolate the vulnerable. Let the economy run. We will see how it works.
Neil Ferguson actually had a very broad range of scenarios, and people simply neglected the low end. I got castigated by someone on another thread yesterday about this; but the second time I read the Ferguson study I noticed things I hadn’t first time. For example, he seems to think we can repeat our current strategies if the virus returns, and that we could tolerate the current regime for maybe 18 months. Neither is remotely possible. He also stated that this virus will not be among those circulating next cold season (a personal correspondence with another researcher), that banning mass gatherings has little effect, and finally that his simulations are intended to minimize mortality, which is far too narrow an objective for something this all encompassing, but is just exactly how an MD would think. I have a ton of criticisms about that report…The whole mess reminds me of that MD in “Apollo 13”.
I should clarify that the child was extremely immuno-compromised.
I see ‘social distancing’ as somewhat analogous to chemotherapy. Both are intrinsically destructive, but are advocated because they are (hopefully) less destructive against essential biological systems than against whatever is threatening those systems. With chemotherapy the threat to healthy cells is biological, and medical researchers pay a great deal of attention to these undesirable “side” effects. With ‘social distancing’ the threat is indirect, mediated by psychological and economic phenomena. I used this quote from the CDC in a comment several days ago, which I think bears repeating:
“Suicide…was responsible for more than 47,000 deaths in 2017…In 2017, 10.6 million American adults seriously thought about suicide, 3.2 million made a plan, and 1.4 million attempted suicide.”
A recent article published by the Pacific Legal Foundation claims that “…as the unemployment rate increases by one percentage point in a given county, the opiod death rate in that same county increases by 3.6 percent. Emergency room visits increase by 7 percent.” Unfortunately the writer cites no sources for these figures, and one can argue correlation vs. causation, etc. But though perhaps unproven these effects are plausible. The medical people may be too busy to investigate them, but there are plenty of intelligent people in other specialties who can. (Maybe even a politician or two.)
For those who dismiss the economic effects by incanting “human lives are at stake” we should remember that a society’s ultimate life support system is its economy. Take a look at what happens to the citizens’ health when the economy disintegrates. Venezuela comes to mind….
““SPEND THE $1 TRILLION ON OUR HEALTH SYSTEM AND DON’T LOCK THE UNITED STATES DOWN”!”
I disagree.
The reason for the lock downs is to prevent overwhelming the health service, but because the virus spreads so quickly there is no way on Earth that any amount of money is going to build up a well organised health service in so short a time.
America should have had a health service like the NHS years ago, and although I didn’t agree with Obama on many things, the universal health service is totally and absolutely necessary. Now America is paying the price for not getting it’s act together much sooner.
This is why America is seen as being like a third world country. As a Brit, it’s weird to hear stories of ambulance staff saying “how are you going to pay?” as the first thing they ask to a potential patient after a road accident or whatever. it’s like something from medieval times!
Let’s hope America learns from its mistakes, and spends the money on building up a health service AFTER the lock down has done its job.
If the health service is overwhelmed, then the pandemic becomes unstoppable. The only thing that can tame it is a total lock down.
And lessons learnt from the Spanish flu show that those cities/countries that had the most stringent lockdowns fared the best:
“The authors estimate that cities which imposed tougher-than-average restrictions suffered 560 deaths per 100,000 people, on average, compared with 730 per 100,000 elsewhere. They also found that governments which implemented stricter policies, such as banning public gatherings and shutting down churches and schools, fared better than those which pursued more lenient ones.”
Link: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/03/31/lessons-from-the-spanish-flu-social-distancing-can-be-good-for-the-economy
“The authors estimate that ….”
I’ll stop reading that one at this point.
We did not even now about viruses in 1918, what is the point in the comparison? Also living in trenches during a war of attrition may have been “tougher than average” conditions. Did that help?
Anyone trying to imply lessons for the current situation by referring to the Spanish is not to be taken that seriously. We are living on a different planet now.
US has 1046 deaths today and per million has 15 deaths
But UK with only 60 million pop is having far more deaths per million: 35 deaths. And today death: 563
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
The brief time period UK decided to get virus so as to get larger immunity quicker, was an idea which seems to have wasted a few days {of doing the right thing}.
The herd immunity strategy is NOT intended to minimise fatalities *this week*.
Your stats are irrelevant to the point you think you are making.
gbaikie,
You’ve left out one huge factor – population density makes a huge huge huge difference. America is considerably more spread out and considerably less densely populated. High density areas are naturally a high risk because of the likelihood of spread.
Just look at New York where the virus is rampant, and MUCH higher than London which is of comparable area and population. As of today, New York has had 2000 deaths with London at 590.
That’s the reason for the UK’s high figures. What’s the reason for the USA’s high figures? Answer: a third-world standard health care system.
First, let me give you some perspective from a 2012 article which is old and cannot be biased by the current panic — this compares assets in the U.S. health care system vs. others. There is a lot more to the article, but the gist is that the private insurance system subsidizes the public systems like Medicare and Medicaid to a huge degree. National health care systems are in a sense cheap.
When this is all over we will see who fares well and who doesn’t, if we don’t have so much hiding of data that we can’t decide anything.
Now with regard to the “Economist” I once subscribed, but I finally got sick of their pompous editorializing when the writers obviously knew nothing about the U.S. I dropped my subscription 20 years ago. I am certain it has only gotten worse. The scatter diagram you posted has an enormous number of explanations. I view it as fake news until one can figure out how they handled the confounding influences.
Willis
1)Your point about Japan may be a good one. Have you tried emailing the White House about it? Use a title like” a better way to fight COVID-19″ or something that will get their attention.
2)Figure 1 may be a bit deceptive because the log scale on the left de-emphasizes the differences. So some of those practices may be more effective than they appear.
3)But definitely if wearing masks works better it is definitely the way to go. I’m sure the President would love to do that rather than crush the economy with measures that aren’t very successful. If it works the Prez might even give you an award.
Log scale is fine, it is the cumulative total that turns everything into amorphous ‘rocket flares’. Plus the fact that there is typically 2 weeks between symptoms and fatal outcomes, so hardly any of the plotted countries would be showing it anyway.
Willis seems to as freaked out by the economic impacts as many are about the virus and it seems to be clouding his usually incisive thinking. ( I agree with him about the relative importance of the two and I share his sense of urgency ).
I can see a difference between Belgium and Spain and on a log graph that means the exponential are quite different. Most of it us such a muddle of big fat ugly lines that it’s worth no more than “Mike’s Nature Trick” hockey stick graph.
I’m not arguing that there is a detectable effect. Though it would be surprising if such radical measures to not affect the spread of infection, I have yet to see conclusive evidence of such.
What I am saying is : show me a method capable of detecting an effect where one exists, before telling me “as you can see”.
Greg April 1, 2020 at 5:30 pm .
Greg, we just blew TWO TRILLION dollars ameliorating one weeks worth of lockdown, and the government is talking about it lasting months. The stock market is down by a third, so many people’s retirement 401Ks are in the toilet. And we have hundreds of thousands of people not working, unable to pay their bills, and in many cases those jobs won’t return.
If you’re not freaked out about that massive money loss you have no clue what a trillion dollars is.
And perhaps you don’t give a damn about hundreds of thousands of people who are not just in an epidemic, but unemployed and broke in an epidemic.
Some of us, however, do care about those things. And although obviously you don’t, trying to lecture those of us who do care just makes you look like … well … grab a mirror. It’s not pretty.
w.
Hey Willis, I think I have consistently said I share you opinion that the induced economic damage will be worse than the virus and that we should start unwinding the shut down ASAP.
You quote my words then cut off the very next sentence where I say I share your sense of urgency and start your saying I “obviously don’t ” care.
That does not mean I have to agree that a graph which would not show any effect if one was there is proof that shutdowns do not work.
I’m not “lecturing” anyone about who cares and who doesn’t , I was criticising your method as not being able to show the presence or absence of what you claim is shows is not there. You avoid even commenting on that, instead preferring to fabricate your ad hom attack.
I guess that means you cannot address my point.
I understand the state of panic but let’s try to remain civil and objective not bend the data presentation to support a priori oppinions of what needs to be done. That is too close to what everyone here has been battling for the last 10-20 years.
Greg April 2, 2020 at 2:11 am
Greg, you said that I was “freaked out” about the economics and claimed my work was like Michael Mann’s famous Nature trick … now you claim that you agree with my position on the economics? Say what? How does that work? Here’s your comment:
And now you’re all offended that I objected? Just what the hell did you expect after a broadside like that?
You continue:
Your point seems to be that you think you can see some small difference between Belgium and Spain, and thus my claim that the lockdowns haven’t made any discernable difference is wrong. I found that so illogical and so laughable that I ignored it.
Plus my blood was boiling because you had the arrogant stupidity to compare me with the known liar, cheat, and fraudster Michael Mann. If you want a civil and scientific answer, then keep a civil tongue in your mouth.
In any case, here’s Belgium and Spain. Please point out how they are “quite different”.
Since YOU are the one who came in the door swinging, accusing me of being a fraudster, and being neither civil nor objective, once again I find that laughable. Now you are accusing me of “bending the data presentation”?? Is there no end to your sleazy insults?
Perhaps you and your friends might bend your data presentations. Me, I try to be as clear and honest as possible.
Yes, there are differences between the countries. My point is that despite everything, despite different cultures, different lockdowns, different social customs, different starting dates for the spread of infection, different medical systems, different average ages in different countries, despite all of that, all of the countries shown in Figure 1 are following very similar paths. Yes, it’s hard to distinguish one from the other, as you point out, but that is an unavoidable result of them being so similar.
I find that extremely significant. It shows that in those countries, the infective power of the disease overwhelms our puny defenses.
Now perhaps you don’t think that’s significant, that’s why we have horseraces and science, differing opinions … but don’t compare me to a damn liar like Michael Mann just because you don’t find it significant. As you may have noticed over the years, I tend to hit back twice as hard.
w.
The COVID scare is a second bank bailout under another name.
As Rahm Israel Emanuel famously said: never waste a good crisis.
Willis, why no data from Canada?
I took all of the countries, sorted them by deaths per 10 million, and selected the top ones. Canada wasn’t among them. That’s a good thing.
w.