Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Around the world, both state and local governments looked at wildly exaggerated computer model projections of millions of virus deaths, declared a “State Of Emergency”, and foolishly pulled the wheels off of their own economies. This has caused pain, suffering, and loss that far exceeds anything that the virus might do.
The virus hardly affects anyone—it has killed a maximum of 0.1% of the population in the very worst-hit locations. One-tenth of one measly percent.
Ah, I hear you saying, but that’s just deaths. What about hospitalizations? Glad you asked. Hospitalizations in the worst-hit areas have been about three times that, about a third of one percent of the population. Still not even one percent.
But on the other hand, more than thirty million workers in the US are unemployed. That’s about twenty percent of the number of full and part-time employees. And that job loss affects the entire household, not just the workers.
And that doesn’t count the loss of life from increased suicides and from delayed medical diagnosis and procedures. Nor does it count the fact that some 20% of the lost jobs are not expected to return. And we have calls to mental-health hotlines skyrocketing, and domestic violence through the roof. In a most ironic outcome, we have hospitals and doctors going bankrupt, and thousands of nurses being furloughed, because “non-essential” medical procedures are forbidden. Then there are the huge financial losses, both to the economy and to the government.
And in a beautifully circular process, we have trillions and trillions of dollars borrowed by the government to try to offset some of the damages that the government just caused … these lockdowns are far, far more destructive than the virus. The virus damage is short-lived, but we and our children will be paying for decades for our stupidity in killing the economy.
It’s like … it’s like … well, about the only example I can think of which has equivalent idiocy is if a mosquito were to land on your head and you grabbed a sledgehammer to get rid of it …
So the first lesson of the emergency is, don’t kill your economy to try to delay or avoid a few deaths. It is possible to slow the spread of the virus without pulling the wheels off of the economy.
The next lesson of the emergency is, don’t put much trust in computer models.
The next lesson of the emergency is, don’t put doctors in charge of economic decisions. Especially Dr. Fauci. He’s been wrong about most aspects of this whole process. If you want someone to run a hospital, as a general rule you shouldn’t hire a doctor …
The next lesson of the emergency is the extreme importance of the ancient medical maxim of Hippocrates, a maxim that our dear Dr. Fauci apparently never heard of—“Primum non nocere”, which means “First, do no harm”.
The next lesson of the emergency is, quarantine the sick, protect the vulnerable, but do NOT quarantine the healthy. That’s madness.
Let me set aside what we’ve learned to return to the COVID19 emergency. The emergency everyone feared was exemplified by the reality that in some countries, the medical system was overwhelmed by the number of COVID-19 cases. The cause of this was that the cases came on too fast—the peak hospitalizations and deaths were packed into a week or two. Early on in the pandemic, this peak in the load on the medical system in Italy caused parts of the system to collapse under the weight of cases.
To prevent that peak load from crushing the medical system, it was decided in many countries to try to “flatten the curve” by slowing the spread of the virus. Note that the stated intention of flattening the curve was not to stop the virus. The declared goal was to decrease the number of new cases per day, not to decrease the total number of new cases.
Figure 1. The theoretical effect of “flattening the curve”.
In that manner, rather than having a sharp peak in medical need, the curve would be flattened out and hopefully the medical system would not be overwhelmed.
So … did this work? Hard to tell at this point. However, we do have one example of a modern country that did NOT shut down and kill their economy to fight the virus, which is Sweden. How are they doing? Here’s the comparison:
Figure 2. Deaths per ten million over time, for the hardest-hit countries.
As you can see, Sweden is in the middle of the pack—a bit better than the UK and Switzerland, same as the Netherlands and Ireland, and a bit worse than the US and France.
So if the lockdowns and the “shelter-at-home” orders are having an effect, you couldn’t tell it by looking at Sweden.
And to return to the question of lowering the peak and flattening the curve, here are the results from a number of countries. I’ll start with Sweden and the Netherlands, since per Figure 2 they are on the same path. I’m using the Complete Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (CEEMD) method to remove the fluctuations due to incomplete data reporting on the weekends. See here and here for a discussion of the CEEMD method.
Figure 3. Daily deaths. The black/yellow line is the CEEMD “residual”, which is the value of the data with the weekly and other regular fluctuations removed.
Figure 4. Daily deaths. The black/yellow line is the CEEMD “residual”, which is the value of the data with the weekly and other regular fluctuations removed.
Both the Netherlands and Sweden are past the peak load on the medical system. Neither one was overwhelmed by that load. The difference is … Sweden did not pull the wheels off of its economy and drive millions into joblessness and despair. I know which path I prefer …
Here are the daily deaths of a number of other countries. I’ll start with Belgium, which is the hardest-hit country, and roll on down from there.
OK, so much for the countries. All are about a month past their peak. How about the US states? Here you go.
The spike in the New York data is from a single day’s reporting of a bunch of “overlooked” deaths in nursing homes. Bizarrely, Governor Cuomo ordered nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients … so as you might imagine, the totally predictable nursing home deaths were concealed until their hand was forced.
I also note how resistant the CEEMD residual is to that single outlier data point of nursing home deaths. A better-guess solution would be to spread those deaths out over the earlier time, distribute by the number of non-nursing home deaths.
(In passing, let me note that Georgia started loosening the lockdown on April 20th, and there’s no sign of a “second peak” of deaths.)
Those are the hardest-hit states. However, not all of the hardest-hit states are past their peak. Here are the two states of the hardest-hit that are not past their peak.
Finally, to close the circle before discussing all of this, here are two views of the world deaths, one with and one without China. I left out China in one of them to see how much difference it made, because a) China’s numbers are big, and b) I don’t trust them one bit. Here are those two charts. It turns out that leaving out China makes very little difference.
So … given all of that, what can we conclude?
Well, first in importance, if medical care was outpaced by the virus in some location and there was an emergency, the peak of the emergency is over now. Yes, there are some states and countries yet to pass the peak. But by and large, and in particular for the hardest-hit countries as well as for the world as a whole, the peak of the medical load from the pandemic passed about a month ago.
And that means that in those states and countries, whatever chance we had to “flatten the curve” is GONE. The opportunity has passed. For most of the world, curve flattening is history.
And since we were sold this bill of goods on the basis of “flattening the curve”, and since we’re now well past any opportunity to do that, let’s remove the restrictions. Or as I’ve said for weeks, “End The American Lockdown Now”.
Of course, the local petty tyrants who have vastly expanded powers under the “emergency” want to hold on to them. So they’re now saying that we have something new to fear, a “rebound” or a “second peak” … me, I’ve said before that I think we will see very little in the way of any second peak, for a simple reason:
As Sweden has shown, the virus laughs at our pathetic western-style “shelter in place” regulations.
Too many people in “essential” jobs, too many deliveries, too many people coming and going from the households. Combine that with a very infectious virus, and the shelter in place will have little effect … and since it has had little effect when it was there, I say it will have little effect when it is removed.
Now, here’s my argument. The various local instant totalitarian rulers derive their power from the State of Emergency. But the emergency is past, we can’t flatten the curve now. We’re past that, which means there is no further emergency. So them holding onto that power now that the emergency is ended is illegitimate and illegal. It’s also in some cases unconstitutional.
Here’s what I’d do …
• In those countries and states that are past the peak, declare the emergency is over and open everything back up. Acknowledge that the chance to flatten the curve is gone, and revoke each and every emergency order. They are only valid for the duration of the emergency.
• Maintain some approximation of social distancing, on a voluntary basis.
• There are flareups in certain locations now, even with all of the regulationss. There will be flareups after the regs are removed. Get used to it. A flareup is not a second peak.
• Maintain personal sanitation on a voluntary basis. Wear a mask, wear gloves, wash hands, and for goodness sake, if you’re ordering bat soup, tell them to hold the bats …
• Once the majority of the pandemic deaths are over, establish a testing and contact tracing process to keep track of the virus.
• Test people entering the country. As far as I know, I get tested more going in to get my blood drawn than do people entering the US.
• Keep a close watch on the numbers to see if there is some kind of “second peak” developing. If and where that might happen, then in those areas that had trouble with the first peak, push policies that don’t kill the economy, and for heaven’s sake, quarantine the sick rather than the healthy.
• Encourage the vulnerable population (elderly with co-morbidities, immunocompromised, etc.) to self-isolate to some comfortable extent, to be extra vigilant in avoiding crowds, and to maintain a high level of personal sanitation.
Folks, the ugly reality is that every day we keep the now-useless lockdowns in place is another day of misery for a large chunk of the population. COVID-19 is now a part of the virus landscape. Let’s reclaim the power from the Federal, state, county, and city megalomaniacs who are issuing diktats and expecting everyone to obey.
END THE AMERICAN LOCKDOWN NOW!
Here, the unusual late rains have returned. We didn’t get one drop in February, which is usually wet, so these late rains are most wonderful.
Best to all, stay well,
w.
AFTERWORD: I note today that Matt Briggs, Statistician To The Stars, has a new post up entitled “There Is No Evidence Lockdowns Saved Lives. It Is Indisputable They Caused Great Harm“. His posts are always worth reading, and he actually is a statistician to the stars.
PS—When you comment, please quote the exact words you’re referring to. This prevents much misunderstanding and useless argumentation.
In New York City this epidemic that you consider so trivial has killed 25,000 people –one in 300. What magic will prevent the virus from doing the same in the rest of the world? That’s 20 million dead–trivial, right? The virus will not tucker out as you so fondly dream. It is growing exponentially in Russia, India, Brazil , Peru and will certainly grow in the US, where a very partial lockdown has only caused the cases to plateau, not decline. Only spending the money to have universal testing, contact tracking and government-financed and supported isolation can suppress the infection, as S. Korea and Taiwan have shown. The solution to people running out of money for food is for the government to pay them the money they need, not shovel trillions into bailouts of billionaires, as they are now doing.
The US Government is Bankrupt. The economy was already sick and was just waiting for the pin to prick the bubble.
What killed the economy is the us socialist federal reserve system. You can not print yourself into prosperity. A socialist federal reserve system is corrupt from day 1 and will only get worse until like all cancers will kill the body it feast on.
To have a free economy you first need freedom. There can be no freedom and a direct tax (like income tax) system in the same place.
Shouln’t the US Congress enact a law making immortality a right?
Well, if nothing else, Eric Lerner explains AOC’s following. There are a lot of brain-dead morons out there, and a lot of them vote.
Robertvd very much agree.
New car sales down for pretty much the whole of last year. Repo market started tanking last Sept. Somebody said about the balloon economy; there are so many pricks out there, trying to pick the one is useless.
We are where we are due to what we did so the best thing is to figure a sane way out of this. The infections and deaths were going exponential for a while anyway. I think the real problem was people not understanding and acting as the pandemic was or could run up the slope (linear thinking). There were more options available on the long flat left side of the curve where maybe we could have stepped actions more sanely.
There were 2 triggers for me in Feb. The (at the time) rumor of asymptomatic spread and the huge lock down in China. The Chinese lock down was an indication this was a big issue. I don’t think we’re getting our moneys worth from our intelligence community. There’s no sense in spending huge amounts of money when the agencies (pretty consistently) don’t produce timely, accurate or actionable data that actually would help the citizens.
re: “New car sales down for pretty much the whole of last year.”
In the US – or your country? Quick eye-balling says it doesn’t look down to me …
Click on the 10 yr button in this chart:
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/total-vehicle-sales
Nice charts, looking at the 5Y mean, trend has been downward since 2016
“What magic will prevent the virus from doing the same in the rest of the world?”
1.MOST of the rest of the world does not pack people like sardines in transit.
2. MOST of the rest of the world does not pack people into high density living quarters.
3. MOST of the rest of the world does not force contiguous people into nursing homes.
4. Sadly, too many socialist health care systems save money by operating too close to capacity, leaving little room for surges.
4. Sadly, too many socialist health care systems save money by operating too close to capacity, leaving little room for surges.
Nothing to do with “socialism”. It’s cost cutting. All businesses do that. Private clinics do not have a responsibility to deal with surge in cases during a pandemic. Large public hospitals do.
The UK is in a mess not because it’s got a “socialist” health system but because since the time of Blair, they have been cost cutting , replacing doctors with administrators and doing privatisation by stealth.
I fear that my good friend Willis Eschenbach may not be looking at the numbers with sufficient dispassion (a quality that is admittedly difficult in these strange times).
In the United Kingdom, even with a quite severe lockdown that is only now being relaxed so that it now approximates to the semi-lockdown in Sweden (where it is not correct to say there has been no lockdown at all), there have been some 67,000 deaths of or in consequence of the Chinese virus, of which about half appear in the official Government totals. The rest have been deduced by the Financial Times based on excess-mortality statistics.
It is not, therefore, appropriate to say that “the virus hardly affects anyone”, particularly since the distribution of daily deaths with a highly infectious pathogen such as this tends to be fat-tailed, which means we can expect perhaps as many deaths again before this pandemic is over. Killing 0.2% of the population.
Suppose that “only” 0.1% of the global population were to die of or in consequence of the Chinese virus. That would be close to 8 million deaths. So the models predicting millions of deaths are not yet demonstrated to have been incorrect. At 0.2%, make that 15.5 million deaths.
The Imperial College model predicting 40 million deaths by year end in the absence of control measures and in the absence of any efficacious prophylactic or therapeutic may not, therefore, have been entirely off-beam. Already, one in eight of the 500,000 UK deaths by year-end that that model predicted a couple of months back have occurred, and that’s even after a lockdown.
In my respectful submission, arguing that lockdowns were never necessary is unlikely to persuade governments. Once governments had failed to adopt the efficient Taiwanese or South Korean approach, those governments – particularly where there were centers of high urban population density – were bound to introduce lockdowns. It would have been grossly irresponsible to do otherwise.
Instead, it would be more successful to draw attention to the most important fact we know about this virus to date: namely, that the risk of death to those under 60 is vanishingly small.
The sensible approach, therefore, is to allow the under-60s to straight back to work, provided that they wear face-coverings indoors and keep their distance. That, in effect, is what HM Government – persuaded by me among others – is rather clunkily beginning to do. As for us wrinklies, the best thing is for us to take more elaborate precautions not to expose ourselves to the infection. No need to tell us what to do.
In conclusion, it is the models that predicted very few deaths that have already been proven to have been comprehensively and grievously wrong. One thinks, for instance, of the IHME model, which undershot very badly at the outset.
Where I expect Willis and I agree is that modeling was not the best way forward, any more than it has proven to be in climate change. When looking at a pandemic of this kind, in the very early stages the best guide to what will happen is the observed exponential growth-rate in cases. It was very high, which is how one could tell quite early on that this was going to be – as it has already proven to be – considerably worse than the flu.
There are very serious questions that should be answered which proponents of Lockdown simply ignore:
1. Severely ill patients have had their treatments suspended while on Lockdown. These will have serious outcomes. Why not include the delaying chemo/radiation/etc. for cancer patients and their outcomes both in terms of overwhelming, suffering and death?
2. Homicides. My local has seen a four fold increase in the rate of homicides since Lockdown. Why not include these?
3. Domestic violence. My locale has seen a 7 fold increase in domestic violence reports (911 calls) with many of them ignored by the police due to Lockdown. Why not include these – both the ones responded and those not responded.
4. The suicide rates are trending upward. Why not include these due to Lockdown?
5. Depression is leading to dramatically increased stress. Stress, alone, degrades health and leads to early death. Why not include these as part of Lockdown?
Just to name a few. And the sum of the few will far exceed the count of CV-19. They are “overwhelming” any positives of Lockdown and producing “excess deaths” beyond those even imagined by Fearful Fauci.
It is clear that some prefer to examine one’s naval with a microscope but fail to see the vastness of the other parts of their body. What’s the use of having a pristine naval yet kill the body?
In the United Kingdom, even with a quite severe lockdown . . .
The lockdown has been severe in terms of liberty and wealth destruction but apparently ineffective on the impact of COVID-19. The rate of infections has been falling at a similar pace since before the severe lockdown began; there is no indication in the data at all showing its start. All graphs, including Monckton of Brenchley’s own, show the same.
. . . there have been some 67,000 deaths of or in consequence of the Chinese virus, of which about half appear in the official Government totals. The rest have been deduced by the Financial Times based on excess-mortality statistics.
It’s fair to a degree to say that the deaths are a consequence of the Chicom disease but it is more accurate to say that a great many, perhaps most, are due to the government response (from medical institutions upwards). Emptying the hospitals of old people (to make way for predicted vast numbers of COVID victims that didn’t materialise) resulted in tens of thousands of COVID-19 infections and deaths in care homes. Maybe as many as twice that number of elderly died of other causes as a direct result of being removed from or denied access to regular care.
British Medical Journal:
“Staggering number” of extra deaths in community is not explained by covid-19
https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1931
“Only a third of the excess deaths seen in the community in England and Wales can be explained by covid-19, new data have shown.”
Suppose only 0.1% of the world’s population die from the kungflu? I suspect you mean that those deaths would be spread over the entire course of many years because right now the kungflu is on pace to cause as many deaths this year as a normal flu season at most ~500-600K. It will take 16 years at this pace to reach that 0.1% mark.
Yeah, I’m quite certain that the models that predicted 40 million deaths by the end of the year without protective measures is pure fiction that only someone desperately wanting The Brave New World would push.
I think that “excess mortality” can all be laid at the feet of the virus (do virus have feet?) Some are under-counted deaths of people infected with the virus. Another group (larger than the first? Who knows?) can be attributed to the impact of the lockdown. As cedarhill points out, deaths due to delayed medical treatments, procedures, examinations, suicide, murder, etc. contribute to the excess mortality, but are only an affect of the lockdown, not a direct infection with the virus through the shutdowns. The direct deaths are largely people in poor health who have lived a long life and in the main don’t want to be destroying their children’s lives. The other cohort will likely be on average younger and generally healthier or afflicted with treatable illnesses than the ones taken directly by the virus.
As someone with children and grandchildren, I’m happy to take my chances.
Great points!!! And a major issue is that one cannot simply sit on your hands an observe during the earliest stages of a pandemic as the U.S. has done. That is when decisive, concentrated effort needs to be focused on containment and testing, and we failed badly.
Lord Monckton of Brenchley
You are too invested in your meme to face facts.
Sweden is not locked down. They have almost exclusively voluntary social distancing. The only thing locked down is their Universities. Other than that, there are very little mandates. 6 foot between tables and bar stools…
England’s lock down failed to accomplish anything meaningful. As evidenced by its complete lack of containing the virus.
You continue to allow the lie that dying with SARS-COV-2 is the same as being killed by Covid-19.
You are losing massive amounts of credibility with your incredibly poor judgement on this lock down versus virus debate.
Instead of 0.1% or 0.2% the reality is closer to 0.025%.
Excess deaths can be attributed to the lack of healthcare provided to anyone that is not deemed a covid-19 patient.
Emergency rooms say they are seeing a 70% reduction in Heart Attack and Stroke admissions. Since the United States averages 805,000 Heart Attacks and 795,000 Strokes per year. That is over 3,000 people per day that should be going to the hospital for extremely deadly causes who are not going. Are they the bulk of the excess deaths you are claiming are Covid-19 deaths? If you were really serious, these are things you would look at.
Instead, contrary to your skeptical position on global warming, you are a completely beguiled by the “experts”, models, “Scientists” and so forth who have yet to get a single tiny bit of this disease correct to date.
For once I agree with CofB, including his admitted difficulty to be objective. Sadly, Willis has adopted an equally prejudiced view as CofB, albeit a diametrically opposed one.
They should never have been quarantined in the first place, which is why I opposed CofB’s initial authoritarian attitude. This age factor was known even before the epidemics spread to Europe. Sadly CofB has been rather slow to catch on to the fact. At least we are on the same page now.
As always, the problem is *unwarranted* extrapolation. You can not calibrate a model with a growing exponential which morphs into a decaying exponential before you get well past peak infections, even if the model is an accurate representation ( which subsequent data shows to be not the case ).
What is becoming evident is that the simplistic models do NOT adequately describe what is happening, otherwise we would be seeing strong resurgence of the suppressed spread of infection in countries like Italy and Spain which have made massive changes to confinement rules. In the case of Spain since 14th April.
This tells us that simple “flattening the curve” does NOT describe what confinement did.
Apart from a two, one day glitches ( one +ve, one -ve, which presumably are some kind of “data correction” ) Spain has continued to see a steady decline in new cases despite 4 weeks of return to work in manufacturing and construction.
Similarly my analysis of Italian new cases shows a very mild and statistically non significant rise towards constant new cases. The weekly trend remaining infallibly below zero, even after the broader return to work. Where is the predicted “second wave” ?!
There are some factors, possibly either immunity from other corona viruses we have already encountered or wider non symptomatic infection, which have confounded the naive expectations of our “world class academic experts”.
Once again, for reasons which remain opaque, the alarmist OPINIONS of a narrow field of “expertise” have been allowed to dictate wider policy, as if only their narrow frame of reference was relative as to how run a country’s economy.
“Saving lives” does not just mean today at A&E, it means do we even have the wealth to HAVE an A&E service in 12months. Saving the environment means being wealthy enough to have the luxury to even worry about it in 2030 or 2050.
So far we are on a trajectory where we fail on both counts.
Greg Goodman May 14, 2020 at 10:43 am
QUOTE MY WORDS! I put that at the end of the post because I knew that otherwise charming folks like you would twist my words to fit their worldview, and then write reams of rubbish about their fantasies of what I said.
And even when I make that simple request, over and over, there are always gonifs like you who think they are far above such plebian things …
w.
Moncton,
Isolation is destroying our economy… you completely ignore the reality of the consequences of isolation.
We can reduce the covid death rate by more than a factor to ten. I would bet my life, my soul on that statement.
Facts are facts. We have turned off our minds.
Why are black people in the UK twice a likely to die from covid than white people? Same finding in the US.
Hint it is the fact that 82% of the US black population is deficient in Vitamin D, as compared to only 42% of the general population.
Our bodies are missing three key materials required for them to function, biologically optimum.
Because we only change one variable at time and there are three deficiencies to correct…
…. and some of our body’s systems require all three deficiencies to be corrected to enable that system to function…….
…we would never have found body optimum except for a serendipitous discovery that all of the meat eaters in the high ‘Vitamin’ D tests were severely deficient in magnesium.
The vegetarians were less magnesium deficient and their bodies modulated calcium to optimize microbiological operation.
So, the high ‘Vitamin’ D tests were all modified to include magnesium supplements.
‘Vitamin’ D is a protohormone that turns on and off genes to enable 200 microbiological systems to occur in our body.
With the addition of magnesium citrate supplements, the benefits of raising ‘Vitamin’ D levels in the body became apparent. There was a 50% reduction in type 2 diabetes, a 70% reduction in cancer, a 60% reduction in muscular sclerosis, and so on.
Our Bodies are super capable of fighting cancer and viruses if our microbiological levels of ‘Vitamin’ D, magnesium, and zinc are optimum.
Magnesium in our foods has declined by more than 50% because of modern farming techniques.
It is suggested that the dietary intakes of magnesium in the United States Nutrients 2015, 7 have been declining over the last 100 years from about 500 mg/day to 175–225 mg/day. This is likely a result of the increasing use of fertilizers and processed foods [5,9,22–24].
Protohormone ‘Vitamin’ D deficiency. Caused by living at high latitudes, wearing clothes, having dark skin, not taking daily supplements and so on.
Our population Vitamin D recommendations ignore skin color problems and do not reference the fact that we are also deficient in magnesium and that Vitamin D supplements should be taken with magnesium supplements.
Our “Vitamin’ D recommendations do note that the entire population that cannot travel to a low latitude region for fun and sun, every long dark winter, is severely Vitamin D deficient in the winter.
It is a fact that our population is deficient in a proteohormone and two ‘minerals’…
… it this deficiency which is the reason why are population cannot defeat the covid and all other viruses and most other diseases.
We are fighting a war against covid and the entire population is deficient in ‘Vitamin’ D, Magnesium, and Zinc.
Download PDF – MDPI
http://www.mdpi.com › pdf
Nutrients 2015, 7, 8199-8226; doi:10.3390/nu7095388
Magnesium in Prevention and Therapy
Epidemiological studies in Europe and North America have shown that people consuming Western-type diets are low in magnesium content, i.e. 30 ng/ml,
(2) insufficient – serum 25(OH)D of 21-29 ng/ml, and
(3) deficient – serum 25(OH)D of < 20 ng/ml.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-52492662
Black men and women are nearly twice as likely to die with coronavirus as white people in England and Wales, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The analysis shows the inequality persists after taking into account age, where people live and some measures of deprivation and prior health.
People from Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities also had a significantly higher risk of dying. Men and women from Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities had an increased risk of between 30% and 80%, the analysis found.
DR Healy
You said, “… we failed badly.” As did most countries, mostly because of the collusion of WHO with the Chinese, who were not forthcoming in the danger of the disease. The few places, such as Korea, which had quick initial success, implemented procedures that were not practical for most other countries. I don’t even own a smart phone, so I wouldn’t have been able to even grocery shop. I suspect that a lot of the people in Lombardy would similarly not have been able to take advantage of the smart phone-enabled tracking that Korea and China employed.
“67,000 deaths” or 0.098% of the population, whereas 0.941% of the population would have been expected to die ‘normally’ this year.
It is not a case of being dispassionate but getting some perspective – that is a tiny number, a tiny risk. So small that the consequences of the lockdown policy will easily do worse.
We did not have a lockdown in 1950/51 or any other corona virus epidemic and it quickly went away. We are protracting CV19 – it won’t save lives overall from the virus, the lockdown will cost additional lives.
I assume your “67,000” is for UK, well I did a comparison for England and Wales – I hope it will give you some perspective.
First 6 weeks of CV19 = 46,494 so 92,988 for 3 month comparison (unlikely to be that high).
Winter 3 month (flu etc.) excess deaths – worst was 1950/51 106,400, and interestingly hit UK/Canada/New England much harder than the rest of the USA.
The extraordinarily rapid death rate abated on its own without a lockdown, some very minor measures.
https://afludiary.blogspot.com/2018/01/remembering-1951-year-seasonal-flu-went.html
https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2011/jan/06/flu-epidemic-hits-south-lancashire-1951
https://cf.datawrapper.de/UQrZU/1/
More recent years.
2013/14 17,280
2014/15 43,720
2015/16 24,500
2016/17 34,410
2017/18 49,410
2018/19 23,200
So far however many direct CV19 deaths are hiding in the excess, it isn’t unprecedented.
It isn’t good, but the measures adopted are insanely disproportionate.
Monckton of Brenchley
May 14, 2020 at 3:45 am
——
Lord M, you know… or you must know;
That, Dr. Fauci does not believe in what he says.
Doncha know this much, or this little, by now, dear Lord M!
cheers
I am concerned about the possible basic mistake of trying to compare one country to another country, as if we are talking about the same phenomenon in each case.
What assurances are there that testing in all countries is being done at the same standard of excellence? What assurances are there that the definition of a “case” is consistently the same from country to country? What assurances are there that countries are equally honest in how they report statistics? — is China the only country whose honesty we question? What assurances are there that consistency exists in the determination of death FROM the virus?
I fail to see how we can trust the data in such a naive fashion, as we seem to be doing.
There could be even deeper questions about the mechanics of how the virus spreads that have not come to light yet. Is contact from person to person really the only vector?
”there have been some 67,000 deaths of or in consequence of the Chinese virus, of which about half appear in the official Government totals”
That is just a bare faced lie!
Please look at the link from PJF. I can speak from personal experience that some nursing home deaths were caused by the lockdown.
I think you may change your view on Covid-19, lockdown, etc., if you watch this entire video by Prof. Dolores Cahill who has degree in molecular genetics and a PhD in Immunology and has worked in this field for years.
If not, I’d be interested in what you believe she got wrong.
Mr Monckton sir, could you do up the “excess deaths” stat for the UK? I’ve done it for the state of New York and Georgia and if you read my post in this thread you will see the links to the CDC data I used.
I used 2014-17 to get an average baseline as it was the data the CDC had available (2018-19 is not posted). I picked New York state as it was supposedly the hardest hit and was shocked by the result. A few days later the debate flared up for Georgia as they ended lockdown so I did up that state.
Neither result was what I was expecting.
I can tell you what they’re saying now if it helps.
C19 has caused over 50,000 excess deaths so far
The number of actual C19 deaths is below 35,000 (the same people gave these numbers out)
They obviously must think we’re all as stupid as they are
Sorry, wrong video got posted:
This is the video of Prof. Dolores Cahill on Covid-19 and lockdowns.
Let’s find common ground & progress from there. AGREED, those 60 & younger–lacking KNOWN comorbidities–should be allowed, even encouraged, to resume their daily routines.
Let me add: Government should have initially and should continue to
(1) Offer paid leave for a reasonable time span to those 60 & younger with KNOWN comorbidities lacking the opportunity to work from home.
(2) Protect DIRECTLY those 60+ yrs old with KNOWN comorbidities.
MoB. Link please for the Financial Times deduction.
Sadly Lord Monckton has joined the massed ranks of hysterical panicmongers it would appear. Figures released today by the ONS & NHS do show that more than 60% of deaths in the past month, had co-morbidity with other life threatening conditions. Again the rates of infection do not show any affinity for particular age groups either. What’s more Dr. Whitty himself stated recently live on TV, that just because deaths were recorded as “having died after testing positive for Coronavirus, didn’t mean they died from CoViD-19 …. in most cases no post mortems were conducted”.
The ONS said it found “no evidence” to suggest age has an impact on the likelihood of an individual having Covid-19.
The estimated percentages of the sample who tested positive for Covid-19, broken down by age, were: 2-19 years old: 0.32%; 20-40 years old: 0.26%; 50 to 69 years old: 0.32%; 70 years and over: 0.23%.
For the first time, NHS England has published a breakdown of deaths by pre-existing conditions.
Of the 22,332 patients who died since March 31, when pre-existing conditions began to be reported, some 5,873 (26%) of patients had diabetes, while 4,048 (18%) had dementia.
Some 3,254 (15%) were reported to have chronic pulmonary disease, while 1,549 patients had asthma.
NHS England said the accuracy of the data is reliant on the availability and transfer of information by healthcare providers, and patients may have had more than one pre-existing condition.
Please DO pay attention people to the actual facts, and not succumb to newspaper fear mongering from the “fake news”…. wake up !
“It is not, therefore, appropriate to say that “the virus hardly affects anyone”, particularly since the distribution of daily deaths with a highly infectious pathogen such as this tends to be fat-tailed, which means we can expect perhaps as many deaths again before this pandemic is over. Killing 0.2% of the population.”
Well who can say when it will be over.
Can anyone say it will be over within 2 years from when it started, or it ends Dec 2021 or without any doubt by June 2022.
I think by June 2022 it’s had 15 million deaths globally and virus hasn’t mutated into variant, that would be low death from SARS-CoV-2- assuming it’s correctly counted, globally. But is the US or Europe going to be counting it by Jan 2021?
And globally we can’t say it’s been correctly counted at the present.
Brazil total right now is, 13,999 total deaths with total pop of 209 million or 66 deaths per million or .0066 percent.
And Venezuela has 10 total deaths with total pop of about 28 million. Is the magical cure not having hospitals with running water or electrical power?
It been reported that Venezuelan elites are getting sick with the virus at drunken parties in various tropical resorts- maybe just the rich get it.
India: 2,649 total deaths or 2 deaths per million
It looks to me like India is near flattening their curve and guess they will be out of all lockdown type stuff before the end of summer, and have stop counting it before Christmas.
But could have say 20,000 death by the end of summer. Lets say averages 100 per day for 120 days: 12,000. Totals about 15,000 and about 15 death per million before October 2020 but by Christmas is lower the 40 deaths per day. That would definitely be a flatten curve. Why test for it, after that?
And you could test for it, but are going to continue to count it. If later climbs to 100 death per day, then you could count it, to track it, as might get even worse.
“The 1968 pandemic was caused by an influenza A (H3N2) virus comprised of two genes from an avian influenza A virus, including a new H3 hemagglutinin, but also contained the N2 neuraminidase from the 1957 H2N2 virus. It was first noted in the United States in September 1968. The estimated number of deaths was 1 million worldwide and about 100,000 in the United States. Most excess deaths were in people 65 years and older. The H3N2 virus continues to circulate worldwide as a seasonal influenza A virus.”
Not counted, and not continuously totaled.
Hong Flu was remembered as killing 100,000 deaths in US and tracked for two seasons which total of two season is the 100,000 number, less in first year, more in second year, and then “ended” but it didn’t actually end, it just become part of seasonal flu. Which far as I can tell is guess estimated every year- certainly not cumulatively counted.
So I think you have to pick a date, and going to have to be somewhat certain it will counted up to that chosen date.
So, could pick July 15 2020. It seems quite certain be counting it by that date. Plus by then, we probably get accurate guess-estimate for Venezuela and China. Also have better clue about 1.3 billion people in Africa by then.
And might as much as 1 billion tests done by then.
And could more counted deaths, because we got more tests. And might count it longer time period because got an excessive amount of easily available tests.
I quoted the person I was replying to, saying I agreed.
If you are not happy with what CofB said , why do you not start ripping him with your childish insults instead of attacking me?
I’ll tell you why , because you are a hypocrite.
Whenever I do reply directly to you , quoting your words, you almost infallibly chose not to reply. Stop whining.
To add some levity, my friend growing up use to call me a mamzer gonif… bastard thief was how I understood the combination in Yiddish. PS, I am not directing mamzer gonif to anyone here… Just brought fond back memories.
cedarhill:
Just to name a few. And the sum of the few will far exceed the count of CV-19. They are “overwhelming” any positives of Lockdown and producing “excess deaths” beyond those even imagined by Fearful Fauci.
That’s an assertion, and unquantified; show your data.
” It’s cost cutting. All businesses do that.”
It’s not just cost cutting by health businesses in the USA. In many states, before a health provider can expand bed capacity, purchase equipment, or add to facilities there is a process called “certificate of need”. If the provider can’t convince the gov’t health dept., then no expansion is permitted. This is to control costs as the gov’t, through gov’t health services and regulations on insurance companies, has a vested interest in cost containment. The unintended consequence is a lack of capacity for any form of surge demand due to something like pandemics unless the hospital can makes it’s case to expand beyond immediate need.
George
On the other hand, an emergency tent hospital was built quickly in Seattle, and was never used. The Navy supplied a hospital ship to NYC, and it was not utilized efficiently.
The key difference is that in socialist systems, like the NHS of the UK, or Medicare of Australia, patients are pure cost. They don’t pay anything, which means that the system has to work by preventing patients from coming. In Australia, we have gigantic queues for essential medical services.
Contrast this with normal systems, where more patients mean more profit – there, if there are more patients, the operators will build more capacity.
That’s what socialized medicine does. You described the axiom that defines socialism – a growing bureaucracy and declining competence and productivity.
But, never mind all of that. The US is a fully socialist State already. Most industries are now at least partially nationalized, the US taxpayer is on the hook for all losses public and private while not participating in the gains. A small number of powerful actors have and continue to seize control of the vast majority of the real wealth in the country, and our bastardized corpo – fascist model of socialized healthcare is beginning to falter.
Don’t like how things are going in the US? Well, the answer isn’t to do even more of the same thing we’ve been doing.
I think this needs to be studied and displayed more before the cost saving and socialized medicine formula spreads without fully documenting the multiple, unintended consequences. The U.S. pays much more for health care, but when politicians do comparisons with Canada and Europe they rarely get beyond superficial measures. Drug costs and the professional boycott of supplements is the major failing in the U.S. system. The U.S. also pays more for defense with many free riders on board while the aggressors oligarch nations growth in power and reach.
5. MOST mayors did not tell their people to stick a thumb in Trump’s face by going to China Town and joining the celebrations.
6. MOST governors did not keep PPE in warehouses until late in the game for a “real” emergency.
Eric, exponential growth means that the amount of new cases doubles from one day to the other. In Brazil that was not, and will never be the case. Two cities show complicated numbers. São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and believe it or not, the whole MSM is rooting for the ChineseVirus here, so that it can destabilize Bolsonaro’s term and try to put the Left back, so that MSM can have its absurd contracts back! I’m living in Italy now, not in the eye of the hurricane though, Italy is the prof against the lockdown! Agree the disease is a killer, so is all that comes along with the lockdown. Want to know more about the details in brasil, regarding COVID numbers, check here https://transparencia.registrocivil.org.br/registral-covid
This is official data, when one die in Brasil, family needs to go through “Cartorios” so that it can proceed with papers for pensions and so forth. Have a look, have a good day. Best and stay safe.
As a fellow Brazilian I must second your comments, Gustavo; they are absolutely spot on and reflect what I have been saying for months now.
Viva Bolsonaro from Paraguay!!
Gustavo, I made the same mistake as you about “exponential growth.”
In fact, the rate of growth does not have to be a “daily double.” It could be, for example, 1.1 x 1.1 x 1.1 etc., or 1.5 x 1.5 x 1.5 etc.
@ Gustavo Longhin:
Quote: “exponential growth means that the amount of new cases doubles from one day to the other. ”
Ma adviye: go back to calculus 101 and learn what exponential growth is about.
This might help:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth
MFKBoulder: “Ma adviye: go back to calculus 101 and learn what exponential growth is about.”
If something indeed doubles every day, then that is defined as exponential. Right from the link you posted. Please reference your link and learn from it.
And if someone spells wrong, that is probably called a type… I assume you my “My advice:…”
Put that in context of the normal annual death rate and suddenly it isn’t so bad. Also there is ample evidence that epidemics do not behave the same in all locations.
This paper concludes that at best lockdowns in Western EU countries were ineffective and were possibly harmful.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.24.20078717v1
Exactly. I’ve been saying for at least a month now that the lockdowns are literally making C-19 worse, especially in places like NYC and London. At about the time we started realizing that C-19 included unusual and deadly symptoms like a-fib, that was a big red flag.
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04363840
Thus far in total, C-19 has taken the same number of people that tuberculosis takes on average every 63 days.
Robert
According to the CDC, while there are an estimated 13 million cases of latent TB; the reported active cases for 2019 was only 8,920 cases — a little more than 10% of the total COVID-19 deaths. My sense is, that TB deaths are fairly rare these days, with just some people having antibiotic-resistant strains, for which there are alternative treatments. Your claim that TB takes as many people every two months as have died from COVID-19 seems wildly and irresponsibly inflated. Can you provide any citation to back up your claim?
Inaccurate reporting causes prolongation of the Panic-demic !
It’s this use of “loose terms”, such as Coronavirus, Corona, Covid19, Cov19, C19 …
Died of, Died from, Died after testing positive with, and With Covid on Death certificate…
Tested as having, had, having had, with, ” coronavirus” (which one of the 4000+ species and hybrids, and which test and did is discriminate sufficiently to isolate the Novel SARS-2 Family, and if so which of the six to ten known hybrids of that family? You see even doctors aren’t sure what they are supposed to be treating for when patients arrive at hospitals, and many are Zinc or Vitamin deficient, and have compromised immune systems.
The trouble is that use of NONE of the above loose terms does actually mean that the Novel SARS-2 Coronavirus was actually responsible for those deaths. (compromised immunity due to chemical deficiency is rarely, if ever, mentioned or even tested for). To the Public and News Editors, and Politicians & Pundits however they are all conflated into one giant confusion and indeed obfuscation. Added to that is the undoubted chicanery and vested financial interest in making every hospital admission ” Corona-ed”. This results in the entire literate World, arguing endlessly about who is right and who is wrong, whilst cash making creeps relish in the pedantry all the way to the Bank. Some would argue that the CDC is as much a Government agency as the Federal Reserve bank is; really they are both privately funded QANGOS even though they both do benefit in a large way from Taxpayers Funds. Bah, there’s an eye watering rotten smell about how this narrative is being reported.
Not all Medical Professionals however, agree with the coterie of Administrative classes at the aforementioned Agencies, and Organisations, and its worth seeing this report at least…..
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/doctors-and-clinical-researchers-challenge-uns-who-cdc-and-dr-faucis
This all rather reeks of FRAUD and the Culprits should be jailed. This is a bigger scam than that perpetrated by Bernie Madoff, or indeed Ponzi himself (by several orders of magnitude).
It’s obvious that New York City is an outlier, one reason probably that it has a very high population density.
To extrapolate this to the world as a whole is uitterly ridiculous.
If you want to know what’s happening in the world, look at the data for the world.
Data from the WHO:
https://covid19.who.int/
Currently the number of deaths globally is 290,242. Your figure of 20 million dead is also ridiculous. You’re seriously saying that the total could eventually be nearly a hundred times higher than the current? And basing that simply on an extreme outlier?
“It is growing exponentially in Russia…”
No it isn’t. Look at the Highest Cases graph for the Russian Federation.
It has been flat since the end of March. Both India and Brazil have been flat for several weeks (Peru does not appear in these graphs).
Your post is pure alarmism. Willis is right and you are wrong.
Please leave unfounded alarmism to climate “science”.
Chris
If you go to the flu section of the WHO website, they closely monitor global flu trends, and state that every year 290,000 – 650,000 deaths from influenza.
SARS-CoV-2 has only just become as deadly as flu, and has to kill more than double the number it already has to beat flu.
Incidentally this years flu season ended, very suspiciously, at least 4 weeks than it has ever ended before, leading me to believe that many flu cases are being written up as covid cases (Used WHO ‘Flu-Net’ monitoring system for data)
Meh just use their lying with statistics against them.
Good news everyone! There is evidence that Covid-19 greatly reduces the number of people that contract serious influenza and cuts the number of people that die from it in half!
It’s a very easy sell to be honest !
John Cullen, Aka JohnEHoover, claims that USA had 144,000 flu deaths 2019-20, and most of those were H1N1. He takes numbers directly from government sources. Why was the government not talking about this, the worst flu epidemic in many years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l77PzfqygVM
If you add flu + coronavirus deaths in US, the numbers are very large.
Also, John Cullen claims that H1N1 is the same as Spanish Flu, and that it was “revived” in US lab in 2005. I cannot verify this claim.
The big problem with New York City is how the Covid-19 virus was mismanaged on several levels! One serious mistake was in sending those elderly people who had contracted the disease back to old-folks homes! Another was lack of proper steps in disinfecting mass transit units, and there are others!
Clearly, Mr. Cuomo should be held responsible and as far as advancing his political career, it would be a horrible mistake to reward him for incompetence!
There is an egregious amount of confirmation bias on display in these discussions.
If everyone wore a mask in public 100% of the time, we’d get the R0 below 1 (see Czech Republic). We have PPE now, and public behavior has changed. In my corner of the world, we went from a small minority of people wearing masks out and about to a very small number of people NOT wearing masks. When we entered this outbreak, there WAS NO PPE. The Chinese had hoarded all of it (known fact, now).
We have no idea what trajectory this would have taken had we continued to cram people into crowded cube farms and “open office space”, crowded bars and restaurants, subways, airplanes, etc.
Moving forward, people will have to wear PPE in public to prevent exponential spread. Hard to drink margaritas and eat Mexican food with a mask on…
If everyone wore an N95 respirator the R0 might get close to 0, but cotton masks with the capability to filter at smallest a 3 micron particle does not fully prevent the spread of a 0.125 micron virus.
Droplets that persist in the air and are inhaled into the lungs past our protective mucuses are of this size. Cotton masks give more of a false sense of security when anyone sneezing or coughing is already taking extra precaution.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK143281/
Face-fit is the problem. While the filter material *may* keep viral particles out, poor face fit lets them in. And surgical masks are pretty useless at preventing inhalation of virus. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5058571/
The explain how Czechia have done so well.
Masks — the marks of pod people with naive expectations.
https://hubpages.com/health/COVID-19-Face-Mask-Protection-What-Leaders-Fail-to-Understand
Lisa is ignorant.
She thinks people in Wigan wore masks before the outbreak. Less than 5 percent of the chinese pop wore masks.
That’s why… they passed a law, and why they have out free ones.
Eric, trying reading the article for comprehension. You may learn something. Also New York is run by
moronsDemocrats. Contrast their high death toll with Florida, which has 2 million more people but isn’t run by idiots. Florida has had only a fraction of the cases and deaths of New York. You get the kind of government you elect and the difference among the states reflects that.S. Korea and Taiwan are small countries with an extraordinarily homogeneous population and culture and they readily accept authoritarian government intervention, unlike most other countries. They began aggressive testing and quarantining of sick people and the healthy people immediately around them right from the start. The U.S. is vastly larger and more culturally diverse and it is much more difficult to do the same thing here; never mind the fact that we are also a republic of 50 states that have all responded differently.
New York is a case study in how to respond badly. They initially belittled Trump and his guidelines, then when the virus spread like crazy, ordered nursing homes to house stable patients who had tested positive for COVID-19 so the most vulnerable were being exposed, and didn’t bother to sanitize their public transportation system until just the last couple weeks. Florida on the other hand took extra precautions to protect nursing homes. The outcomes have been vastly different in those two states.
Willis provided lots of facts and data but it bounced off your head. The data shows that almost everywhere in the U.S. COVID-19 deaths have been declining for about a month. The number of new cases hasn’t gone down as much because…wait for it…testing continues to increase every day. But even with increased testing, new cases are going down almost everywhere.
With the exception of a couple hot spots (NY), the number of deaths was a small fraction—less than 5%—of deaths from all other causes. In fact, in many places the number of deaths was, yes, about the same as a seasonal flu or even less. So we have successfully “flattened the curve”. Cowering in your home for the rest of your life to minimize the risk of getting a virus is not realistic…unless you’re an agoraphobic billionaire.
Try really hard to understand that every contagious virus in history has “tuckered out” at some point. People die or develop immunity. Lots more people have immunity now than have died from the COVID-19. Over 1 million that have been tested have recovered. Many times that number probably were infected and recovered at home without getting tested or never knew they were infected because they had no symptoms or mild symptoms. The virus is running out of new hosts.
It’ can be a horrible disease. I don’t want to catch it. However:
Population of NYC about 8 Million
Covid-19 fatalities for NYC (so far) about 15,000
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page
About 1/500 (so far) So about 0.2 % of the population (so far).
However to know how deadly the virus is you really need to know how many fatalities to how many actual infections.
A very recent German study puts the fatality rate at about 0.3 percent.
https://www.uni-bonn.de/news/111-2020
That is only if 100% of people got the virus. It’s not even sure that 20% got it. That would mean 5x 0.2% = 1%.
German sample size is too low. IFR is calculated from 7 – yes, seven – deaths total.
[German sample size is too low. IFR is calculated from 7 – yes, seven – deaths total.]
Are you serious, Ron?
If I test 100 people and there are 7 – yes, seven – deaths then “the sample size is too low.”
If I test 10 000 people and there are 7 – yes, seven – deaths then “the sample size is too low.”
If I test 1 000 000 people and there are 7 – yes, seven – deaths then “the sample size is too low.”
If I test every person in the world and there are 7 – yes, seven – deaths then “the sample size is too low.”
Sorry, but that does not make sense to me.
Just calculate what number of cases you need for an IFR of 0.36% based on 7 deaths. That should give you an idea.
Ron
May 14, 2020 at 9:42 am
Just calculate what number of cases you need for an IFR of 0.36% based on 7 deaths. That should give you an idea.
—————————–
In consideration of what the guy there said, been to conservative and following WHO procedures, yes it could be a case that in reality the real IFR was far far lower… than one produced by this specific study, with the specific numbers and the specific sample.
Kinda of very very unlikely to be higher than that 0.36%.
So you could still do your math safely, especially when the most blind guesses with no real confirmation studies show something like 3 x higher IFR.
(like the Feguson chap)
Wondering why Germany doing far much better than UK in this one!
There you have the answer, 5:5.
But you get to take in account the extra hospitalization severity, due to demographic politics of the different places and different population,
in consideration of health care medical practices too. (the extra moronic cowboy factor)
The history shows clearly that some did get rid of diseases by hunting and burning witches, some utilizing the volcanoes.
And since ancient times some places dealt with crises by literally terminating en masse, new born babies.
So, some times different places and population do pretty strange dumb things,
under the circumstances, by their own volition decisions …
so got to consider that one too.
Ron it was not a random sample study.
A place with a clear signature of strong infection signature, but with little severity and fatality, which can help understand better the demographic variance “pollution”.
The sample in the study maps clearly the place, and the population in consideration…
large enough… in a proper full disease blow in that population.
Where lock downs flattened nothing and stopped or delayed nothing.
It is a study confirming at that point the IFR for that population, in a very conservative way, biased towards the higher figure.
To a degree meaning or indicating that more or less in the consideration
of 20% penetration of infection disease in any kind of population larger than this one, IFR should not be higher,
with the emphasis that at ever increasing rate of that penetration in the population the IFR would only decrease.
cheers
@whiten
Look at the study:
https://www.ukbonn.de/C12582D3002FD21D/vwLookupDownloads/Streeck_et_al_Infection_fatality_rate_of_SARS_CoV_2_infection2.pdf/%24FILE/Streeck_et_al_Infection_fatality_rate_of_SARS_CoV_2_infection2.pdf
They had to adjust the initial reported IFR from 0.36% to 0.41% [0.33%; 0.52%] because of one single additional death.
The problem of small numbers: huge variability by chance.
Spain has reported a randomized serological study to estimate the real number of infected people. 90,000 people in 36,000 households. Came back with ~5% of the population infected at some time. 10% in Madrid, 2% in less hit regions.
Taking the reported deaths and the estimated number of 2,300,000 infected would be an IFR of 1.02%.
Ron
May 14, 2020 at 4:34 pm
I simply quoted you.
Now let me simply quote you again:
“They had to adjust the initial reported IFR from 0.36% to 0.41% [0.33%; 0.52%] because of one single additional death.”
You see it is still not 1.2 or even 0.8.
There is no bases for your interpolation, as it is just meaningless.
It is the IFR estimate for that population and place Ron.
Yes true with high biases for a positive error as you have shown.
Meaning that for bigger and multi populations has to be considered as far lower
from the outset Ron… as the error in question does not increase Ron.
As 10% of margin error on real fatality is kinda of criminal in big numbers,
And that is if at 0.8% not even at 1.2%.
1 extra death above 7 in a small population is a random thing, an inherited possible error effect, for estimations.
but a thousand extra deaths for every 8 or 7 thousands in big populations is not a random act effecting the condition as an acceptable error for estimations.
A big population showing above 0.36%, in consideration of this study, definitely doing or done something wrong.
One more thing Ron;
I see you have a very big problem in understanding the difference between the
infected and diseased.
The study in question is also positively biased for higher IFR than the real one as it simply based mainly in the antibody test, a test which by default can not be considered in its own as confirmation of the disease, where the subjects are considered as infected, with no much weighting connection to the disease…
in condition of a full blown disease on the population.
While actually most are diseased by the proposition of accuracy, than to be considered as representing the total number of infected…
meaning that the true number of infected is even higher in that population,
or at least the premise means that for other bigger population the estimate of IFR has to be far lower… in consideration of this study as the factor of the infected versus diseased weights far much more towards a far lower IFR.
Technically meaning that the study consist as one estimating DFR, (disease fatality rate) more than IFR (infection fatality rate), which still biases the IFR very considerably towards artificial positive result,
but with no much error in this case, to contemplate, due to it being a small population estimate.
Ron consider this:
20% of confirmed diseased being asymptomatic, means the number of the diseased testing negative, is at least 20% of the negative viral tested subjects, meaning that the viral test has ~ 50% natural false negative.
Where 50% of the all diseased are asymptomatic, at the very very least.
Can you estimate now, how big the total number of infected is Ron?
Now Ron, you still may have and eat your cake of the 1.2% extrapolation of biggy numbers, but in consideration of DFR not IFR… as that how it may translate in this case for the biggies… if you still like it.
cheers
@whiten
It is a too small sample size cause we know from New York how different the CFRs in different ages are. 30 more old people in the 2000 sample could have pushed the deaths to 1.2% if only half of them died.
IFR = infection fatality rate. I don’t know what you are talking about but the IFR is calculated from the whole of people infected.
The Spanish study gives you an IFR of 1.2% if the reported deaths are in the right ballpark. Given the Spanish testing regime and their excess mortality reports it is probably an underestimation.
But it was to be expected that people who couldn’t follow the self-evident numbers from South Korea that the IFR has to be at least close to 1% or even higher – because if they had a high number of undetected cases their testing and tracking strategy strategy wouldn’t work – would take the first reliable well-sized randomized serological studies into question if the would not fit the narrative of a low IFR.
But there are more studies to come. Netherlands, Germany, France, UK are all doing such studies. No country will have anything near herd immunity and all will have a IFR of at least 0.8%. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be above 1%.
My apologies for being so blunt but you have clearly no idea of what the tests show you and what not. You are making things up in your mind that don’t relate to reality and jump to wild guesses from there.
Asymptomatic people are infected. By definition they have the disease. They just don’t show symptoms.
You can test them positive for the virus. You can test them later positive for antibodies from all we know.
I really don’t know what you are making up in your mind.
Ron
May 15, 2020 at 4:22 am
Sorry for this late reply.
All points in my latest reply to you, were in the line that IFR is a very erroneous in consideration of establishing the severity and fatality of a specific disease.
Quite no big problem in consideration of seasonal flu as it is a condition of many agents, many different infections.
Also no very big deal with small populations in consideration of low fatality diseases.
The German study shows that.
IFR very bad deal in case of HIV. Does not even “work”.
In case of covid-19 is very clear that IFR is misleading, as considered.
IFR 1.2% in Spanish study is wrong, as ~80% of total number of confirmed infected by the antibody test are diseased.
Again, 20% asymptomatics is in consideration of confirmed diseased,
not infected,
meaning that at very least the true number of the diseased is twice of the confirmed by virus testing, aka more than 50% of the “true” diseased are asymptomatic.
Where in consideration of antibody test, like in Spain ~80% of positives are diseased.
In this case the estimation of infected as done, represent more closely the total number of diseased.
Where 1.2% is very close to DFR than IFR.
In seasonal flu if considering IFR versus DFR, DFR is 10 X of IFR.
Trying to see it and estimate it for better accuracy and a realistic representation;
1.2% in Spanish study indicates an ~1.5% DFR with the implication that IFR is mathematically to be estimated at 0.12%, with adjustment for a range of:
0.09-0.18%, according to the data in consideration of the period the data represents, at 5% penetration of the disease in that population.
Meaning a lower closer to the true IFR or DFR in further penetration of the disease in the population.
Ron, I still think you have it difficult to distinguish between infection and disease.
Many can be actually infected and test negative in a antibody test.
Both German and Spanish study indicate this, and all there we have about this disease show that the number of confirmed as diseased is far far lower than the true number of diseased, therefor the number of infected far far higher than the number of infected confirmed by the tests.
Through the erroneous IFR the severity and fatality of COVID-19 is very highly artificially inflated,
by failing to really properly adjust it in consideration of confirmed diseased versus total number of diseased,
where actually as done, the estimation for the total infected represent actually the total diseased.
The paradox Ron,
if total number of diseased to be considered as 70-80% of total number of infected, in consideration of a specific influenza infection, than
almost 80-90% of the population already infected.
Again, IFR is not a standard universal equation for assessment.
For different diseases is a different equation, in consideration of specifics of the disease.
DFR (Disease Fatality Rate) is quite less problematic in considering the severity and fatality of the disease.
IFR simply assessed on top of DFR, or in consideration of and other specifics of a disease in relation to the confirmed diseased versus the fatality,
as an indicator of the infection disease penetration in the herd… for a better picture of the overall infection.
The question here is:
Why fatality rate estimated and utilized backwards, in the case of COVID-19?
Where every one rushing to “meet” IFR without considering the disease fatality
and the related specifics of this particular disease to fatality and severity for the living.
Another+ question:
Why every one there fails to recognize, and keep hand waiving at the fact of 20% of asymptomatic diseased, and hiding the fact that the number of true diseased is far much higher than the estimation?
How can any one consider to estimate correctly the IFR, when the estimation of diseased is sooo sooo wrong, or not even factored in?
Ron, this is a conversation, not a contest.
Only required that we understand each other, irrespective of acceptance.
I am fine with “we agree to disagree”.
thanks 🙂
cheers
Do you seriously believe the 15,000 number?
At least 5,000 of those people were deemed SARS-COV-2 positive without any test at all.
Of the remaining 10,000 or fewer, 80 to 90% of infections of SARS-COV-2 do not cause any symptoms in the infected. Which means even if you have a positive result, 80-90% of the time you will not come down with the disease covid-19. In a hospital, the SARS-COV-2 spreads widely very quickly. Someone in the hospital dying of something else is very likely to become infected with the virus and never develop the disease and go on to die. So, generally speaking, I would give that last 10,000 a real number of deaths caused by Covid-19 a true value of 1,500 at the high end.
Now what is the Infection Fatality Ratio?
No. Highest estimates from epidemiological studies for no symptoms is 20%.
Generally speaking you attribute the highest excess mortality ever seen in New York City in a single month since the Spanish flu to “unknown reasons” so that you don’t have to count them as COVID-19 and ignore that people came to the hospital with SARS-CoV-2 and didn’t get it there.
Well, that’s a really good example of being delusional. Thank you.
Cite one of these studies saying it’s 20%.
Ron, it seems you missed the part where Governor Cuomo ORDERED the nursing homes to take in COVID patients, setting fire to a whole haystack of thousands and thousands of cases and deaths. So no, people did NOT “come to the hospital with SARS-CoV-2 and didn’t get it there”. In far too many cases they got their disease right there in their hospital beds.
w.
Can you provide a reference for the 20% figure being asymptomatic.
The British Medical Journal, the WHO, Wuhan labs, all reckon 80% is about right
“50% are completely asymptomatic”
This is not at all the case.
It is more like, “about 50% of cases are mild or asymptomatic.
There is no data indicating half of all cases are “completely” asymptomatic.
That is just an outright exaggeration.
Words have meanings, and completely means something very specific.
As well,
“~85% do not develop the serious Covid-19 symptoms”
is similarly incorrect and is a misuse of language.
Somewhat over 15% develop SEVERE disease symptoms.
You cannot pretend to be speaking factually while distorting and exaggerating.
When anyone does that, any people who are trying to be serious and FACTUAL will simply not pay attention to you any more, although people who are similarly inclined will give you praise and kudos for being “on message.”
When attempting to communicate concisely and accurately, one might consider leaving out absolutes and strong adjectives…words like “completely” when a word like “relatively” is closer to the truth…and instead using stronger verbs.
Some number of people report having absent symptoms, although in many cases when such people are questioned more carefully it turns out many of them had SOME symptoms, just that they were not very inconvenient or too very unpleasant. Some people are more soldierly, and some people are whiners and complainers.
Also, it is known most children do not experience this disease in the same way as adults, and that young adults are more likely to have a mild case than older but perfectly healthy adults.
Someone who gets symptoms identical to a really bad cold might consider themselves to be “seriously ill” if they were calling in sick two years ago, but not if they got COVID and then felt better two to five days later…because only having what seemed like a cold might make someone with COVID ecstatically happy to have gotten off so lightly from something killing other people.
Very few people who are not really old or frail ever see a doctor or go to a hospital when they get a really bad flu and are sick as hell for a week. Everyone knows you just have to suffer through it and it will be over after a short while…which may seem long in the minute to minute aspect but not in retrospect.
So context is important and has to be taken into account.
“Everything” I have read and learned indicates that a substantial number of people, perhaps 20% (but no one really knows because no place has had comprehensive testing and almost no one has had a reliable antibody test) have a case than appears to be asymptomatic. This is actually not at all unusual for a disease that gives some people a very bad illness, it is just largely unknown prior to recent weeks.
Another large batch have mild symptoms, by self reporting standards anyway.
So perhaps something like half of people know to have been infected do not have what most would consider a really bad illness…although in other times many of these people might have called in sick from work for one or more days.
Another tranche get sick…very sick, like case of the flu sick, and not just a cough, cold, or mild sniffle. But a fever and a feeling of being really very sick.
And about 15-18% of people get what a doctor would call a severe illness…requiring hospital care, and many of them need to be getting intensive care in an ICU unit.
So saying 85% of people do not get a “serious” illness is a misuse of language…serious and severe are not interchangeable terms.
So you ought to recognize that you are deploying deceptive terminology in order to exaggerate.
Exaggeration comes in two distinct flavors…minimizing something or inflating it unrealistically.
It is amazing to see global warming skeptics enthusiastically embrace all of the lessons of how to be deceptive, uncritical, unscientific, and unrealistic, that has been the subject of many years of intensive discussion here in the context of climate alarmists.
Selective attention, moving goalposts, exaggerations, willful blindness to information contrary to one’s predetermined point of view…these are not characterizes of people who are being realistic or scientific or who are striving to be serious and factual.
17.9%:
https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2020.25.10.2000180
22.2%:
https://www.ukbonn.de/C12582D3002FD21D/vwLookupDownloads/Streeck_et_al_Infection_fatality_rate_of_SARS_CoV_2_infection2.pdf/%24FILE/Streeck_et_al_Infection_fatality_rate_of_SARS_CoV_2_infection2.pdf
up to 25% said CDC:
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/31/824155179/cdc-director-on-models-for-the-months-to-come-this-virus-is-going-to-be-with-us?t=1589480155311
As I said you might have been confused by this WHO statement:
https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200306-sitrep-46-covid-19.pdf?sfvrsn=96b04adf_4#:~:text=For%20COVID%2D19%2C,infections%2C%20requiring%20ventilation.
But asymptomatic spread numbers are probably highly influenced by age distribution of the investigated cluster. It should best resemble age distribution of the population.
Nicholas
Not that it is the last word, but Dr. Osterholm states,
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/transcript-michael-osterholm-on-intelligence-matters/ar-BB141F17
I don’t know about upstate New York that’s why I was talking about New York City where most of the people died and this practice has from all information I got not anywhere significantly contributed to the number of deaths. That is not what the death and infections clusters studies show.
Somewhat more people would have survived using anticoagulants and not intubating them too early but that is not the responsibility of any governor or mayor to make this kind of decision.
Ron
May 14, 2020 at 8:30 am
No. Highest estimates from epidemiological studies for no symptoms is 20%.
———————————–
These are estimates from epidemiological studies considering data from the structure of testing the high risk to infection, must test group in the population,
not taking in account the further expanded random tests of the population.
Definitely only virus test based , and only from the strict forward main protocols, of a very select specific part of the population…
where still the data polluted by the COVID-19 diagnosed cases as per the symptoms of severity/fatality only, with no tests at all for the infection…
kinda of post mortem… aka post matter of fact.
cheers
From everything I’ve read, ~50% are completely asymptomatic and ~85% do not develop the serious Covid-19 symptoms.
You are confusing that with the reported 80-90% being asymptomatic, mild or moderate in total.
The more elaborate studies backed up by antibody tests are coming down with non-symptomatic – like really no symptoms at all – with around 20%.
“50% are completely asymptomatic”
This is not at all the case.
It is more like, “about 50% of cases are mild or asymptomatic.
There is no data indicating half of all cases are “completely” asymptomatic.
That is just an outright exaggeration.
Words have meanings, and completely means something very specific.
As well,
“~85% do not develop the serious Covid-19 symptoms”
is similarly incorrect and is a misuse of language.
Somewhat over 15% develop SEVERE disease symptoms.
You cannot pretend to be speaking factually while distorting and exaggerating.
When anyone does that, any people who are trying to be serious and FACTUAL will simply not pay attention to you any more, although people who are similarly inclined will give you praise and kudos for being “on message.”
When attempting to communicate concisely and accurately, one might consider leaving out absolutes and strong adjectives…words like “completely” when a word like “relatively” is closer to the truth…and instead using stronger verbs.
Some number of people report having absent symptoms, although in many cases when such people are questioned more carefully it turns out many of them had SOME symptoms, just that they were not very inconvenient or too very unpleasant. Some people are more soldierly, and some people are whiners and complainers.
Also, it is known most children do not experience this disease in the same way as adults, and that young adults are more likely to have a mild case than older but perfectly healthy adults.
Someone who gets symptoms identical to a really bad cold might consider themselves to be “seriously ill” if they were calling in sick two years ago, but not if they got COVID and then felt better two to five days later…because only having what seemed like a cold might make someone with COVID ecstatically happy to have gotten off so lightly from something killing other people.
Very few people who are not really old or frail ever see a doctor or go to a hospital when they get a really bad flu and are sick as hell for a week. Everyone knows you just have to suffer through it and it will be over after a short while…which may seem long in the minute to minute aspect but not in retrospect.
So context is important and has to be taken into account.
“Everything” I have read and learned indicates that a substantial number of people, perhaps 20% (but no one really knows because no place has had comprehensive testing and almost no one has had a reliable antibody test) have a case than appears to be asymptomatic. This is actually not at all unusual for a disease that gives some people a very bad illness, it is just largely unknown prior to recent weeks.
Another large batch have mild symptoms, by self reporting standards anyway.
So perhaps something like half of people know to have been infected do not have what most would consider a really bad illness…although in other times many of these people might have called in sick from work for one or more days.
Another tranche get sick…very sick, like case of the flu sick, and not just a cough, cold, or mild sniffle. But a fever and a feeling of being really very sick.
And about 15-18% of people get what a doctor would call a severe illness…requiring hospital care, and many of them need to be getting intensive care in an ICU unit.
So saying 85% of people do not get a “serious” illness is a misuse of language…serious and severe are not interchangeable terms.
So you ought to recognize that you are deploying deceptive terminology in order to exaggerate.
Exaggeration comes in two distinct flavors…minimizing something or inflating it unrealistically.
It is amazing to see global warming skeptics enthusiastically embrace all of the lessons of how to be deceptive, uncritical, unscientific, and unrealistic, that has been the subject of many years of intensive discussion here in the context of climate alarmists.
Selective attention, moving goalposts, exaggerations, willful blindness to information contrary to one’s predetermined point of view…these are not characterizes of people who are being realistic or scientific or who are striving to be serious and factual.
Eric, the virus was is and continues to be a scam. The world wide death toll is about 290,000 as of this am. Not quite up to the standards set by the seasonal flu that killed 3,177,204 in 2018. 8,000 people die in America every day of the year flu or no flu. You scare mongers need to back off. The only numbers that matter are the total fatalities verses total population and they are insignificant.
Please provide some links to your ” seasonal flu that killed 3,177,204 in 2018″ as I can’t seem to find it.
Because the accepted figure is ESTIMATED to be up to 650,000 per year
60,000,000 NORMALLY Die each year most old you idiot! there are 7 billions people on earth it seems you want everybody to live to a 100 or more years or not to die ever! cheers and get a life
The nihilists are coming ! (Albert Pike, 1871)
On that basis Eliza, every individual cause of death from flu to car accidents to mass murders to terrorism to war is just some statistical triviality. Wow, the 9/11 response was abit cranky wasn’t it? I mean the total deaths that day was about 20 minutes of business as usual on your numbers so what was all the fuss about? Cheers to you too and btw, get a soul. See if you can pick up a brain on special while you are at it.
Considering all such data on flu cases are estimates, the 204 tacked onto the end of that number is simply inane.
It’s been quite a while since flu figures were estimates. Since the creation of flu-net, with it’s intention of finding facts because estimates weren’t good enough, things have really come along in terms of accuracy.
https://www.who.int/influenza/gisrs_laboratory/flunet/en/
Chris
I think that you misunderstand. While the CDC collects death certificate reports, under normal circumstances, they rely on the death certificate indication of the cause(s) of death. It would be rare to actually confirm through serological testing the strain causing death, because during normal years, there are only one or two seasonal strains circulating, which have been confirmed by random samples. If the attending physician thinks the person died of pneumonia resulting from seasonal flu, that’s what gets put on the death certificate.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/overview.htm
Well thats a lot like covid reporting……or isn’t ?
Well, I think they’re doing better than an educated guess all the same
https://www.who.int/influenza/surveillance_monitoring/en/
A lot of the deaths in NYC were caused by the medical care they received. Doctors didn’t know what the hell they were doing and intubated patients almost as soon as they walked in the door.
https://twitter.com/drjohnm/status/1250037261024059394
Not to mention that the health care experts were denied the use of effective treatment and threatened with prosecution if they used it.
You have seen this before here, how to avoid the NYC DISASTER, try a covid protocol that works.
Watch “Early Intervention Protocol for COVID-19 Can Save Lives” on YouTube
https://youtu.be/__w8lBVwoNA
Article and interview
https://knowledgeisgood.net/2020/05/02/a-report-from-the-front/
For full protocol see and download:
Evms.edu/covidcare
As for hydroxychloroquine, they have used from beginning and have seen it work. If I could I would post all the version of this protocol. Have them locally in pdf form. Do not misinterpert there recent politically correct mode to not distract from backend treatment. Anti-virals need to be given early, period…
How screwed up was NYC..
Watch “Dr Cameron Kyle Sidell. E R & Critical Care Dr From NYC” on YouTube
https://youtu.be/sKExxcD26_I
Another disturbing trend, big time. My Dr who I have used for a long time and I had an understanding with all this…. NOW..
If I should come down with anything respiratory, he can not treat me. He has to send me to a state network of covid special care providers. Yesterday I tried to work thru the system. In short the response at all levels…. I am pissed, I never got a straight answer. Most did not even know how to answer my questions…
What to do…
Do not listen to..
WHO
FDA
CDC
Anything published in the New England Journal of Medicine
From a tax exempt brokerage disguised as a university
Harvard
That’s very disturbing that your own doctor is not allowed to treat you. Sounds like they’re trying to limit what treatments can be done. What state is that?
btw if you want a video to show up in your post put the link by itself on a separate line.
Icsil
Iowa, the thing I do not know, should the time come and i make appointment for some other treatment to just get to him, will he prescribe. I am on a medicare supplemental insurance plan and really do not understand his limitations.
Thanks for edit comment, I just realized my tablet memo editor that I paste from does not use cr/lf “;$$,…..
Terry, we know it works and it is not the only one.
But there is no money in it.
Treatments are being deliberately suppressed.
Terry, we know it works, but there is no money in it.
Line 1
Line 2
https://youtu.be/__w8lBVwoNA
Line3
Line 1
Line 2
https://youtu.be/__w8lBVwoNA
youtu.be doesn’t work. You have to click on the youtu.be link, then copy the youtube.com URL that loads, then paste it here.
You also have to strip off the “&feature=youtu.be” at the end of the URL.
Thank you been searching high and low as to why it was not working
You might be interested.
My significant other is in Ohio now. Her take from from the authorities about all this…
They have enough remisiver for any body that is critically ill and needs it.
Do not even know where to go with this..
My next step is to track the dr/associate from Wisconsin that is aligned with EVMS.
Looking for a reference to UofI
https://youtu.be/__w8lBVwoNA
Line1
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=__w8lBVwoNA
Line2
from computer not tablet
Chrome on tablet
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=__w8lBVwoNA
The “m.” stands for mobile. Strip it out. If you can’t, paste the link into a text editor or search bar and strip it out there.
Firefox on tablet
Yes yes yes. S Korea, China, Singapore, are the models for effective quarantine. Identify the sick. Hunt them down, take them out of circulation. Enforced quarantine of the sick will work, does work, can work, and always has worked.
Shelter in place? Quarantine equally? 66 percent of New York New cases are elderly people sheltering at home.
The models have no skill (big surprise to the WUWT crowd). Open the windows, get some sunlight, quarantine the sick if you must, but recognize, everybody staying home when you are well is beyond stupid
Are you suggesting we somehow return to being monoracial societies?
No, even in the whole state it is less than 25,000. The first fact you presented is a false fact, a lie.
Should we read any further?
Please learn to read, comprehend, and think, then return.
In New York City this epidemic that you consider so trivial
You owe the author of this post an apology for that untrue smear.
Consider 25% of NYC deaths are from the Governor forcing Covid-19 patients into senior homes…this isn’t the Spanish Flu…
‘The solution to people running out of money for food is for the government to pay them the money they need, not shovel trillions into bailouts of billionaires, as they are now doing.’
That might be the most blindly idiotic post I’ve seen so far today.
Willis, I think this sentence is a bit off: The virus damage is short-lived, but we and our children will be paying for decades for our stupidity in killing the economy.
Shouldn’t that be written this way? The virus damage is short-lived, but we and our children will be paying for decades for our stupidity in ALLOWING POLITICIANS TO HORNSWOGGLE US INTO killing the economy.
This “crisis” was manufactured by opportunistic political animals, and most of us were naive enough to go along with it. NOT saying that there is no problem: Covid-19 is a bad, bad bug, but is not killing off the numbers that were predicted and eventually will be defeated.
This mess that we have been putting up with, globally, was created out of whole cloth, not to save lives but to see how much control freak crap people would put up with from their government. It is not going well here in the good ol’ USA. Wisconsin’s Supreme Court declared the stay-at-home order to be unconstitutional. I believe other such results will follow.
Show me all the statistics you like. It will NOT change the fact that this appears to be a test run for control freaks to destroy freedom.
Your major mistake is treating both the US and the rest of the world as if it is a sphere with a uniform and homogeneous population density. It’s not so your predictions are moot.
By the way Taiwan didn’t shut down while Korea did.
“So the first lesson of the emergency is, don’t kill your economy to try to delay or avoid a few deaths.”
Great idea – but only if you are under 70.
The author might change his tune if he is old enough or has less than perfect health!
I’m 73. Go figure.
w.
Have you had the virus?
Are you at all concerned that if you’re exposed to it then you might die from it or maybe that your wife may die from it? You probably should be.
TimTheToolMan May 17, 2020 at 6:44 am
Not as far as I know, but when half the cases are asymptomatic, who knows?
Nope. Que será, será. I’m not an idiot, and I don’t take unnecessary chances, but I’m not concerned in the slightest. Gotta die from something, after all.
Do you sit up at night all concerned that you might die in a car crash? I doubt it. You do what I do re: corona—you assess the odds, you take the precautions, and you don’t waste time fretting about it.
We could take the corona count to zero. Just lock everyone in their houses and don’t let anyone out ever.
We could take automobile fatalities to zero. Just stop driving.
Sorry, not interested in either one.
w.
TimToolMan: This is a science blog, not an emotional knee jerk feelings blog site.
Reading your post made it clearer for me how some people (like you) should never be in charge of important decisions affecting other people. Put it another way, if Chicken Little were running things, we’d all end up plugged into the Matrix.
Willis writes
I think the odds of fatality are considerably higher (for older people) by catching COVID-19 and its not a theoretical question, the test is waiting right outside your door.
I think the analogy would be more accurately something like would you worry about dying during your first sky diving adventure. And many people simply avoid sky diving because the answer to that is a yes. I dont want it, I wont do it.
So you want to send people back to work but what about those who prefer to remain isolated and not take that chance. In your world view of preferred working, do you believe the public purse should support those people as is happening now with the government handouts?
Or is this more a isolate at your own expense and if you cant afford it then starve, kind of thing?
” the test is waiting right outside your door.”
If you’re sitting in your home and you smell a fire outside, how does the smoke make it’s way to your nose ?
The same way that an odourless virus does.
The virus is coming in your home anyway, either through the air or more likeley through fomites
He says he is 73 Roger so I guess he may have less than perfect mental health or something. He does get a bit OCD regarding data and graphs n stuff come to think of it…. Too much time at sea?
:-))
Sorry Willis, just couldn’t resist.
Komrade Kuma May 14, 2020 at 11:07 pm
No, you’re not sorry in the slightest, Comrade. You are getting off on being a total prick and attacking my mental health and saying I “claim” to be 73.
You think that’s funny, smiley-face smiley-face. It’s not. It’s sick. Not a good look on you, Comrade …
w.
Great. I look forward to you turning over your car keys for the rest of your life.
After all, people die in automobiles.
Or is it? Where are the excess deaths? Not in the state of New York but in Georgia.
Excess deaths are the only valid way to look at it because a lot of the data is bogus. From false positives/negatives to fruit and goats testing positive to deaths “WITH” being counted as death “FROM” it is a total crap show.
Since it is harder for the “authorities” to rig the deaths compare a multi-year baseline to this year.
https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/mortality.html
Click New York state and then go through weeks 1 to 16 and then get the “Total Deaths” from the bottom right. First 4 months is 39,005
The yearly data on deaths for New York state are here and 2014-17 average about 120,000 a year
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/states/newyork/newyork.htm
I’ve done it for New York state and Georgia.
NY ~= 40,000 expected and 39,005 (-995)
Georgia ~= 20,000 expected and 27,000 (+7,000)
Not what I’d expected in either case.
Instead of using the CDC page for top causes of death as I did previously,
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/states/newyork/newyork.htm
I have looked up other sources such as the state government sites. Problem is they are a mess. Very hard to find total death stats and in the case of Georgia I went with Statista for a single year. So much for a standard 4 year average.
My previous estimates were all very conservative by design. I made a rough estimate by adding the top 10 causes plus drug overdoses. It was close and erred on the low side by design.
Using the new numbers there is no “excess deaths” of any statistical significance. This makes the case for lockdown at all, much less continuing, dodgy at best.
New York: Expected 50,319 / Actual 39,005
Georgia: Expected 27,699 / Actual 27,161
Illinois: Expected 36,138 / Actual 37,870
All 2020 deaths year to date are from this CDC page:
https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/mortality.htm
Click the state and then go through weeks 1 to 16 and then get the “Total Deaths” from the bottom right.
New York: 150,959 yearly deaths (2013-16) expected average for 4 months = 50,319
https://apps.health.ny.gov/public/tabvis/PHIG_Public/lcd/reports/#state
Georgia: 83,098 yearly deaths (2017) expected average for 4 months = 27,699
https://www.statista.com/statistics/241581/births-and-deaths-in-the-us-by-state/
Illinois: 108,414 yearly deaths (2015-18) expected average for 4 months = 36,138
https://dph.illinois.gov/data-statistics/vital-statistics/death-statistics
And lets add Texas to the list. They have a 10% increase.
Texas: Expected 60,408 / Actual 66,071
Texas: 181,226 yearly deaths (2012-15) expected average for 4 months = 60,408
https://dshs.texas.gov/chs/vstat/annrpts.shtm
And now up the left coast to Washington state:
Washington: Expected 19,599 / Actual 19,270
Washington: 55,796 yearly deaths (2015-18) expected average for 4 months = 19,599
https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/Pubs/422-099-2018-2010-VitalStatHighlights.pdf
As alluded to below, most of the United States isn’t packed into clusters like New York City is and, even if you buy the somewhat suspicious stats on Covid deaths in Manhattan, that doesn’t mean most of the country needs to be locked down for citizens to be safe. Certain metropolitan areas might need more invasive measures put on residents, but in most of the country those measures aren’t needed, and locking down an entire economy is, in my opinion and that of a growing number of people, worse than the virus. Human beings have always lived with a level of acceptable risk, and where I live I have a far greater chance of being bitten by a rattlesnake than I do of contracting the virus. And my chances of being bitten by a rattlesnake are acceptable to me, so I live with the risk, just as I’m willing to live with the risk of getting sick. What I think is insane is shutting down an entire economy because of a flu-like epidemic. Having lived through many of these kinds of epidemics, I’m not worried about this one. I’m careful, thoughtful, and prudent, but my daily routine hasn’t changed much, other than the issues caused by the stores and restaurants being restricted or closed. If I lived in the New York City area or along the Eastern Seaboard, in the LA metro area, the SF metro area, I’d be somewhat more concerned, but my point is that for those of us who don’t live in an area where there’s a high population density, prohibiting us from doing business is more of an unacceptable risk than that posed by the virus. Obviously, I’m not dismissing as unimportant the Covid related deaths, but ultimately I believe there will be more serious national issues caused by the lockdowns than by the virus. Americans have to relearn the idea of acceptable risk and get over their reflexive response of looking for government help every time a challenge presents itself. And government has to relearn its place in national affairs and stop spending money (our) money it doesn’t have.
By self isolating you can help stop that.
Stay home and buy Amazon.
That’s one billionaire you can support.
Some of us will not do that and we’ll go out and work.
We are not billionaires.
Why do you care about that?
The advantage of the Conservative Advantage is it allows those with a conservative mind to accurately predict answers from a progressive.
The disadvantage of the Conservative Advantage is that having obtained the power, the difference between an actual progressive post ranting and a conservative created parody of a progressive rant is almost undetectable.
However, Eric, taking your post at face value and ignoring the fact you forgot to mention the melting poles, dying bears and disappearing islands, let us discuss one of your magic points – Giving the poor money to buy food.
Wow.
Do you understand where food comes from? Not all of us have a walk in freezer filled with ice cream, so many of us have to buy food from the shops. Where do shops get their food from? Well in the real world there are things known as Supply Chains. In loose terms they start with whoever grows the food and end with the supermarkets and shops. In between you make go through processing plants, canneries, mills, bakeries that do all the steps that convert wheat into bread and the like.
So to get food to Mr and Mrs ‘running out of money’ all those links in the chain still need to be in place.
Wait! Haven’t finished. How does wheat get out of the field and in the grain solo? Short answer – Farm machinery. Then how does the grain get to the flour mills? Trucks and/or trains. Mill to bakery? Trucks (detect a theme yet?)
Still haven’t finished. How do trucks work? Where does the fuel come from? Who replaces the parts? Who delivers the parts that need replacing to the people who do the replacing? And those people doing all this delivering and replacing, where are they getting their lunch? What about their replacement work shirts because fat shaming is real and no one wants to see a topless truck driver.
So, basically when you think you are saying ‘pay them the money they need’, what you are REALLY saying is everyone needs to go back to work.
Congratulations. You are now anti lockdown.
You are right, it isnt going to just go away. But per the NYCity covid site, death at 15,800 as of May 15.
15800÷8,000,000=.002 1 in 500. 3/4 of that amongst the 65+ population. And 85% have some kind of underlying condition.
Infer that the remaining 13,000 deaths in the state are spread over the other 12,000,000 residents, 1 in 1,000 is a rate far more relevant to the vast majority of states. But all the data should also account for the substitutive death the stats dont show. These covids aren’t all extra deaths above the regular background .04 of annual death in the over 65 cohort. Half a million annually from heart disease alone.
Triviality isn’t the point, balancing the needs of the entire population is what public policy needs consider. It’s an extra and a new risk in life and thus scary, but clearly the death rate is vanishingly, exponentially smaller for those under 45 on down. And nearly insignificant up to 65.
Kids won’t die from going to school. Paid leave for teachers beyond a certain age, relax certifications and bring in younger ones? Have the last two months be summer vacation and send them back now. Or have pro-infection camps for the under 30’s this summer. Many possible ideas should be considered, not just what we were doing last month in the apparently new magical goal of having no one, anywhere catch it next.
In New York City this epidemic that you consider so trivial has killed 25,000 people –one in 300. What magic will prevent the virus from doing the same in the rest of the world? That’s 20 million dead–trivial, right? The virus will not tucker out as you so fondly dream. It is growing exponentially in Russia, India, Brazil , Peru and will certainly grow in the US, where a very partial lockdown has only caused the cases to plateau, not decline. Only spending the money to have universal testing, contact tracking and government-financed and supported isolation can suppress the infection, as S. Korea and Taiwan have shown. The solution to people running out of money for food is for the government to pay them the money they need, not shovel trillions into bailouts of billionaires, as they are now doing.
You did not read “PS—When you comment, please quote the exact words you’re referring to. This prevents much misunderstanding and useless argumentation.”
I stopped reading your post when you wrote “you consider so trivial has killed 25,000”
What a hateful response to an article where you suggest such a thing.
You posted the same thing twice, where I had expected you to have figure that out. You did not.
Next time measure twice and shoot once.
The solution is to isolate people… persons at risk, to reduce globalization, and to curb immigration reform. Also, the virus from Wuhan, as HIV before it, is notably a hygienic and ideological bigot. People need to wash their hands, avoid black… back holes, and moderate their socialization. That said, Her Choice has proven to produce less excess deaths but far greater collateral damage than her choice. This can be planned to mitigate the progress of Planned Parenthood, Planned Parent, and Planned Population.
Eric,
It is worth remembering the “Government” has no money.
It has been granted the authority, (by the voters) to take as much of your money as they wish as long as they are in office.
When you say let the government pay them, you are simply saying let us use our savings collectively, to hide our fears, whether valid or imagined, let us idle the economy and reduce our wealth.
That is fine so long as you do it for a valid moral and financially beneficial reason.
Allowing families on the edge of financial ruin, to fall into despair and worse, just to have a virtue signal culture evolve while claiming we have to do what’s right for our old, in preference to everyone else is stupidity on steroids.
Once the reason for lock down had passed and the flat phase of the curve has been achieved, which it has, then it is time to do the sensible and the only thing that will save lives. We have committed so much wealth into saving the medical systems from being swamped, now let us start saving lives again.
Let’s get back to work, including the currently idle medics in hospitals up and down our countries.
Eric Lerner May 13, 2020 at 10:30 pm
First, I NEVER called this epidemic “trivial”, that’s the voices in your head. It’s also why I ask people to quote the exact words they’re talking about.
Next, the figure you quote is for New York State, not New York City, and even there you exaggerate. Up to today, there have been 22,013 deaths in the whole state. And no, that is not “one in 300”. It’s one in 884.
Next, you ask:
Well, consider that of all of the localities I’m aware of, the death rate in New York State is the worst. Worse than Belgium. Worse than Italy. Worse than Spain. Worse than anywhere.
So I don’t know the answer regarding what is stopping the virus from “doing the same [as it’s doing to New York State] in the rest of the world” … but since it’s not doing it anywhere else in the world, much less everywhere else in the world, there must be some very real reasons at work.
Wrong. If the whole planet had New York’s rate of deaths it would be 8.9 million. Not trivial by any means … but not 20 million.
And also not probable in the slightest. As my article points out, most countries and states have passed their peak. None of them are even near the New York State death rates, nor will they ever be.
Finally, you say:
The solution to people running out of money is NOT, as you claim, for us to go into more debt to perpetuate this lunacy. We cannot borrow our way to wealth.
The solution to people running out of money is to END THE AMERICAN LOCKDOWN NOW!
w.
+100.
Willis,
I am curious. Australia and New Zealand have both had extremely small numbers of deaths. Where do they appear on your country chart?
Thanks, Hive. I’ve only posted countries with high death rates, as they are the ones where flattening the peak might make a difference.
w.
I wouldn’t compare any SH nation to any NH nation at this point, wait until their cold/flu seasons.
LOL, NZ *never* had a covid problem. Horse-face simply wanted play #metoogreatleader and ape what other countries were doing. She did untold unnecessary damage to her country for no valid reason.
She also waited until there was near zero new cases before redressing her authoritarian, misjudged actions.
So much for the “liberal” label. Hopefully this will be a salutary lesson for kiwis next time around.
A predictor of how bad the Covid infection got in your area is how many people you meet every day. I prepared the following from some rough figures I pulled of the internet.
The first graph surprised me – I really want to believe vitamin D has an impact on Covid-susceptibility. I was expecting latitude vs infection rate per million to show a trend.
The second graph is also interesting – infection rate vs population density. Obviously the numbers are very scattered, and the bunching at the bottom left is not a good thing, but there is more evidence of a relationship than the non-relationship between latitude (sunlight / vitamin D) and infection rate.
Of course all this is very crude. People in northerly climates are more likely to take vitamin D supplements, so maybe latitude is not a good proxy for vitamin D levels.
Behavior such as using sunscreen all but kills the sunshine. As well, what get’s people outside during mid day. Our society is typically indoors during the day where the sun’s angle enables ample UVB. And people in nordic countries each fish which has vitamin D… so we can test for vit D deficiency and compare that to mortality or severity if we had ample data. I would say there must be a correlation based on some reporting I’ve seen.
I think when UVB is filtered out, you get more UVA which does not lead to Vit D3 manufacture… but does cause tanning and skin damage. So complex!
The governor of NY issued an executive order mandating that infected patients be moved to nursing homes. That’s where most of the deaths occurred. He needs to be put on trial for manslaughter.
Like Willis says, misquoting can lead to errors in understanding. No question, ALL government has miss-handled the situation in nursing homes, long-term care facilities and veteran’s hospitals and homes. All these environments tend to be headed by people of loving natures but less than revolutionary (reactionary) questioners of authority.
“Don’t wear masks!” “Don’t worry, it’s not a threat to the US.” “Stay inside.” Where is UVC? Inside? Well, yes, now, in Hong Kong. But not in April -September in Northern Hemisphere.
I believe the nursing home rule was actually to prevent NH administrators from PREVENTING accepting contaminated patients from returning or entering. These administrators should have had the guts to Just Say No!
Thanks for clarifying. I was sloppy/careless in my wording.
Eric Lerner has just elevated himself to the single biggest clueless idiot on the board – and he posted twice.
The level of flat, moronic ignorance is breathtaking.
You should look up the word “pay”.
I totally agree. In the UK we have had a succession of government that have no understanding of the scientific method, who believe all computer modelling without question, who don’t examine the past performance of scientists or their ideology, who don’t understand risk, who don’t ask about model verification, or validation, who don’t ask about independent peer review, who don’t ask about data, who don’t understand uncertainty – the list is endless. A clear out of the swamp is needed, but it isn’t going to happen while we have a left-wing civil service and a left-wing media which are also ignorant of science.
Phillip, let me correct your first statement for you.
” In the UK we have had a succession of government that have no understanding.”
Unfortunately British, USA and Australian Universities and Scientific methodology has become in my view 3rd world see Mann, Cook, University of Queensland, Nature publishing drivel from Glieck climate and Fauci viruses ect these are political hacks not scientists. Basically this coronavirus ignorancia is the self immolation of the West. Glad I am 68 and will not live to see this as I live in a safe tropical country far away from these horrible places in an incredibly miserable earth controlled by left wing ideologues. A 3rd world war China Nuclear induced war is definitely in the making my 2 cents worth. Hope I am wrong.
I love this article. I look forward to the ugly debate to come! Thank you Willis!
More than welcome, Mario.
w.
Sorry Willis but I think you have been drinking some sort of conspiracy theory Kool Ade. Here in Oz we got in early and have not even recahed 100 deaths out of 25 million. There may be some extra ones unattributed but still very low so don’t tell me lockdown’s don work.
As for the actual death numbers, imagine the same numbers per day from say terrorism or deliberate poisoning of water supplies or whatever and the reaction would make the response to 9/11 look like a hiccup.
I am all for personal liberty etc and looking after the economy but gee, have a drink or something. A joint? This thing is not the climate conspiracy, it is a real disease that actually kills people.
At the start if the outbreak Australia was coming out of summer, a time when sunlight derived vitamin D levels are at their peak. Vitamin D now accepted to be playing a very important role in helping with the immunity to the virus
Also, they were fortunate enough to be hit by the weaker strain.
https://www.cato.org/blog/two-supertypes-coronavirus-east-asian-european
Yep, we got lucky, coming out of summer and we have a much lower population density even in our largest cities, as do the Kiwi’s. We both locked down quick and have reaped the benefits. The implication is nonetheless, despite our luck that the lockdowns work, particularly well in low density populations so in high density ones they are probably more necessary. Hardly an argument to dispense with them.
As for death rates, the Covid deaths in the US is now about 50% greater than the total US deaths in Vietnam but achieved in just a few months not a decade. So the Vietnam casualties are nothing to fuss about too? Perhaps you should pop down to the Vietnam Memorial Wall and tag it accordingly. Allied deaths on D Day? Only 5 to 10,000! What on earth is the fuss about YOU might ask.
Honestly Chris, you and some others commenting here really do need to go kneel in a church or somewhere similar and search for your souls because they are MIA. But if kiddy fiddling statistics is in your soul then I suppose that’s where its at for you.
The difference between covid victims, and Vietnam victims, is that the Vietnam victims got to see or hear their enemy coming.
Could you quote your source for the number of people who died in Vietnam, I think many times more people were killed in Vietnam then covid has killed worldwide
Deaths in Vietnam War (1965–1974) per Guenter Lewy
Allied military deaths 282,000
PAVN/VC military deaths 444,000
Civilian deaths (North and South Vietnam) 627,000
Total deaths 1,353,000
Perhaps it’s always a bad idea to compare anything to the number who die at war ? But it does sound good sometimes doesn’t it ? 🙂
Chris I quoted a figure for “US deaths in Vietnam” for which I had a figure in my head of 55,000 but Wikipedia says was more like 58,000. As for your total deaths of 1.535 million ( I assume over the 10 years of the war) that is 153,500 per year on average and half that in six months vs a bloody sight more from COVID 19 in that sort of time frame so I am not sure what your point is.
Komrade Kuma May 14, 2020 at 1:35 am Edit
Comrade, since I neither said it was a conspiracy, nor implied it was a conspiracy, or even thought it was a conspiracy, I fear your reading skills are poor. This is why I ask people to quote the words they are discussing.
As to Australia, IF you impose a rather draconian lockdown, quarantine, and shelter-in-place as soon as the first bell rings, and you live in a country with no other countries next-door, you can indeed hold the virus down. Taiwan did the same, as did New Zealand.
HOWEVER, that’s not true if you don’t move immediately. Because you have been able to keep the numbers small in Oz you can do testing and contact tracing. But with as many cases as we have here in the US, that’s not possible.
Finally, you keep talking as though there were no costs to the lockdown. There are now an additional 600,000 Australians unemployed from the lockdown. That means 600,000 stories of poverty, depression, domestic violence, and the like. Go tell one of them just how lucky they are …
w.
PS—as to “terrorism or deliberate poisoning of water supplies”, those we can do something about, like arrest the people doing it and end the danger. But it’s kinda hard, as you may have noticed, to arrest the virus and end the danger. So I fear your example is no example at all because there’s no parallel to our current situation.
If all Australians were tested now for any coronavirus my guess is 100% of the population would have it. the incidence of covid 19 is about 0%. Get a life or a degree in virology. Willis is 100% correct all lockdowns were a complete waste of time and money. If there was no internet you would never heard of this virus
“If there was no internet you wouldn’t have heard of it”
Please lets not go back to the television and radio days. Our first TV didn’t have a remote control and was black and white.
In a way it was nice, it had some sort of artistic separation about it, a little bit unreal, and the people you had next to you in the real world were still more important than anyone in a dishonestwood
They nicknamed television “the idiot’s lantern” in some parts
And then the propaganda started…..and all of the progress into the future we were hoping to make amounted to merely going from one stage of television to the next….to colour…an added video recorder…dolby sound….then came HD…..and digital transmissions…..and 4k.
We can still see them telling us the same lies here in the future, except now, it’s a better picture, and no hiss in the sound…..except from the snakes
+100
Eliza writes
Australia has performed over a million tests and found 7,045 cases of the virus. Australia has a higher test rate than the US. Australia has successfully tracked each case of infection and isolated the infected.
Australia has had 98 deaths and compared to other countries with similar populations ought to have had upwards of 10,000 deaths by now.
My guess is that you’ve not even looked at the Australian situation.
Hear hear Mario.
#meTOO:-) Many TYs, Willis.
RE: “To prevent … peak load from crushing the medical system, it was decided in many countries … to “flatten the curve” ” Sweden’s curve IS flatter than most other European nations’ curves. HMMM.
RE: “… quarantine the sick, protect the vulnerable, but do NOT quarantine the healthy.” EXACTLY RIGHT!! In stark contrast, Dr. Fauci refused at the start of the AIDS outbreak to quarantine the tiny # of infected and thereby spread HIV to many, many, many … more people. Now, he insists MUCH of the US population be quarantined indefinitely instead of focusing on directly protecting the 5-10% very vulnerable to dying with WuWhoFlu.
A wise person once described an expert as someone who knows more and more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing. Pls keep this in mind when urged to defer to expert opinion / recommendations.
Also keep in mind that just like too many pedigree dogs are rendered stupid by breeding for physical traits, one can be rendered common senseless by too much time in academia & a bureaucracy.
“…one can be rendered common senseless by too much time in academia & a bureaucracy.” That’s a keeper…
My sentiments too, Mario. Thank you Willis.
There’s a noticeable 7 day cycle in the data for many locations. You said there is weekend incompleteness. Why are there weekends incomplete? Seems strange.
If there is no weekend incompleteness, the data seems to suggest much less deaths during weekends.
Do more people go out or stay in during weekends? I don’t know the data during normal times. So I can’t figure out if herd immunity or isolation is the answer. Someone please resolve this for me. Thank you.
Well, the medical staff report the deaths. There typically are less of them at during weekends. This is because, well, the weekend is the weekend, and rven medical staff need some rest. So, during weekends, less non-critical work gets done. Reporting is less critical than actual care-giving. So, the reporting gets delayed until the weekend is over.
If someone dies on a Saturday, it must be really hard to report on Monday that they died on a Saturday?
Or is there literally no one at the hospital to note the aprx time of death?
We tend to forget that bureaucrats and clerks report what they are told to report. So if only the number of recorded deaths has been asked for, only the number reported or processed by the admin section is reported. When the data is passed to the statistical services they break it down into, hopefully, more discrete data, thus they report actual daily deaths rather than deaths reported to them that day. GIGO is ubiquitous, not solely a computer phenomenon.
I’m pretty sure that most of the reporting (certainly worldometer) you see is based on day of report not day of death or day of test sample drawn. There is quite often a delay in reporting deaths of up to weeks. If you were to get deaths by day of death the trends are even more pronounced. I saw the Sweden death data by day of death vs report date and the trend difference was pronounced. I’ll see if I can find where I saw that.
Correct. There is a lag in the reporting of deaths. Worldometer reports deaths by day reported instead of by day of dying. Sweden updates their charts so they report deaths by day of dying. It’s always better with good data.
The Health Department (still being paid, like ALL government workers) is not open on weekends. So they update the numbers when they get around to it on Monday or Tuesday (or Wednesday, or next week, or a month from when they actually occurred – as in New York).
I just find it hard to believe that the date of the update determines the death day.
I suppose they could be that stupid, but I need evidence for it.
It is done as a basic public information and they don’t care what you think. Compile your own numbers at your expense and you can control the way they are presented. Alternatively wait a year or so and most governments release yearly data.
You suppose they could be that stupid but you need evidence. Take a look at just about everything else that they do and get back to us on whether they could be that stupid.
Zoe, this is the chart for Sweden where the deaths have been allocated to the date of death, rather than the date of reporting.
https://adamaltmejd.se/covid/
I don’t know, but when the standard is: “If they had any symptoms that look anything like COVID, mark it down as COVID!” can we trust that these numbers are real? How many end-of-season seasonal flu deaths got lumped in with COVID because the patient died of pnuemonia?
Though I could make an argument that a significant number of drug overdoses victims, spouse or child murders victims, and drunk drivind deaths during this period could be attributed to COVID (or at least the lockdown response) so I guess it is all connected.
If you look at the Worldometer daily deaths bar graph for the USA, there is a clear pattern over the last 5 weeks or so. Sunday has the lowest number of deaths recorded, then Monday was next lowest. Often Tuesday was the highest (as they entered a backlog of data from the weekend is the most obvious reason). But Tuesday through Friday are always much higher than Sun, Mon. And Saturday is more variable but always higher than Sun, Mon. Possibly, sometimes people work on Saturday to get caught up and other Saturdays they don’t. So, Zoe Phin, you can either believe it has to do with when the data are entered or believe that the pattern is actually due to the virus being more dangerous on Tuesdays or perhaps there are serial killers in all the hospitals that like to kill on Tuesdays. Not sure why you need more evidence than the clear pattern.
David,
Thank You. Now I have evidence that there is nothing special about the weekends.
The medical staff are there 7-days…the admin staff are there 5 days…the govt admin staff that record, collate and provide the numbers are also there 5 days. Certificates of death are not given by doctors (in the UK), they are given by the registration office, one is given to the person who registers the death (others have to be paid for). Needless to say, that is a 5-day operation.
I use to look after some lighthouses (navigation aids). The records show that they failed more frequently at weekends ?
Excellent! Best models/analysis/data visualization of anyone anywhere. Kudos, Willis!
42^42 times dittos on your conclusions. Free the People! Ignore the Petty Tyrants! Out Now!
Laugh in their faces and go back to your life. Do it today.
+100 and Congrats Willis!
On the curative side A marked improvement in outcomes from a hospital and doctors treating patients.
A study with zinc+ HCQ+AZ Zinc early helps later not much help.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.02.20080036v1.full.pdf
Great post Willis !!! Many thanks !!!
According to New York health officials, 60% of the children with these symptoms statewide tested positive for COVID-19 and 40% tested positive for the antibodies. 14 percent tested positive for both.
Experts believe the victims may have been exposed to the virus weeks before developing symptoms. They range in age from less than 1 year to 21 years old.
https://abc7ny.com/coronavirus-new-york-reopen-ny-news-update/6179458/
Many thanks for this very excellent and informative post. Here in Thailand, 44 of the 76 provinces that have had no new cases for a month have been “opened”. I am in one of those “open” provinces. The golf courses are open. Wonder what Willis makes of the Vietnam miracle?
“As of 11 May, Vietnam has reported zero deaths, just 288 positive COVID-19 cases and no community transmission since early April. It’s all the more remarkable when you consider the country shares a border with China, is home to nearly 100 million people, and has a greater population density than China, Indonesia, the United Kingdom or Italy. Vietnam has drastically flattened the coronavirus curve at a relatively low cost through early action, a targeted approach and strong political leadership. In a quirk of fate, when the pandemic struck the Health Ministry was under the control of one of the country’s longest serving Deputy Prime Ministers, Vu Duc Dam, after the Health Minister was forced to step down last November. This unclogged the bureaucratic arteries and gave the pandemic response extremely high-level political authority. Vietnam – always highly attuned to events occurring across its northern border – acted quickly and before the virus had an opportunity to become entrenched. On 3 January, authorities put hospitals and local health departments on high alert for cases of the “new pneumonia”. China recorded its first death on 11 January and Vietnam’s Ministry of Health began issuing urgent dispatches to government agencies just a few days later. When two Chinese nationals travelling in Vietnam tested positive on 23 January, the government launched a public information campaign. This included everything from online content on websites and social media, to messages blasted across the country’s ubiquitous loudspeaker system. The country’s people, conditioned by the 2003 SARS outbreak, reacted immediately and, in some ways, even overreacted, with many restaurants and shops banning foreigners. Expatriates reported locals crossing the road to avoid coming into contact with them. While South Korea fought the virus with expensive mass testing, Vietnam chose a less costly route. Authorities quarantined those infected, then pursued aggressive contact tracing down to second and third-hand contacts. They quickly developed a tracing app that has been the most downloaded free app in the country since its 10 March launch. Meanwhile, authorities set about creating a targeted testing regime. At the beginning of the outbreak, there were just three laboratories equipped to test for COVID-19. By April, that number had leapt to 112. So far, more than 260,000 tests have been conducted, with just 288 positive results. While that is fewer than 2,700 tests per million people, it’s by far the highest ratio of tests to confirmed cases anywhere in the world. The targeted testing approach also bought Vietnam extra time, which it has used to roll out testing to anyone showing symptoms of the virus. During March, face masks were made compulsory, provincial borders were closed, and foreign entry was banned. Those allowed to return from other countries, such as Vietnamese nationals, were taken straight from their port of entry for a 14-day quarantine at an army base. At least 80,000 people across the country have been placed in quarantine so far. The economic damage in Vietnam, as elsewhere in the world, has been significant. Up to 10 million workers are estimated to have lost all or some of their income. The government has stepped in with income support for poor households and contract labourers and is providing zero interest loans for businesses. But the best remedy lies in getting normal life and economic activity back. The successful suite of measures isn’t just paying dividends for buses and schools; the government began easing restrictions on many businesses as early as 23 April.”
Indeed, Vietnam is one of the unsung success stories of the virus.
w.
I really doubt most people here on this site would have agreed to the measures Vietnam implemented. Not. At. All.
There is no uncostly way out of this. The question is just who pays less.
Ron May 14, 2020 at 5:48 am
Agreed.
w.
I never expected to see Mr Eschenbach cherry picking data to make a case.
Comparing low population Sweden to high population worst performing countries is hardly a fair example.
When you compare the performance of Sweden with their neighbors who did various versions of lock down, things do not look so rosy.
Norway, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland all did much beter and even the very densely populated Netherlands did slightly better than Sweden.
Other countries who did notably better are Czechia, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, Vitnam, Singapore, Tawain, need I go on?
Where other surrounding countries are now in the last throws of their pandemic, Sweden are still in the 600s of new cases per day.
They are also 9th worst in the world for Deaths/Million Population.
It’s now known that there are two supertypes and one is worse than the other. In general, countries in Asia are fortunate to have the less infectious and dangerous type. Italy and NYC had the worse and there is a mixture in most places.
We are making comparisons between countries at different stages of disease progression. Nothing wrong with that except that we have to realize that the situation is dynamic.