A lawsuit has been filed in Illinois challenging Pritzker’s authority to continue a “stay at home” order. Actually, it’s a second lawsuit. The first only asked for one person to be released. This one asks for everyone to be released. So far, that case ruled in favor of the plaintiff; naturally it is being appealed.
You can read about the second lawsuit filing here. The filing itself is here.
I find this part of the filling detailing the law telling:
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“ No person may be ordered to be quarantined or isolated and no place may be ordered to be closed and made off limits to the public, however, except with the consent of the person or the owner of the place or upon the order of a court of competent jurisdiction (20 ILCS 2305/2(c)). In order to obtain a court order, IDPH must prove, by clear and convincing evidence, that the public’s health and welfare are significantly endangered and all other reasonable means of correcting the problem have been exhausted and no less restrictive alternative exists (20 ILCS 2305/2(c)).â€
We’ll see what happens. It sounds like there are various legal manouverings. I have no idea what powers the state constitution and state law give the Governor.
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I do know that, in the end, Governors are going to walk a razors edge on this. Chicago continues to have kids having parties on weekends. (Some got shot in the legs by drive by shooters!!!) There are varying amounts of bitching by both pro-and anti quarantine people. Some people are getting arrested for violating quarantine– things like people doing nails in homes.
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Like it or not, the longer this goes on, the more violating we are going to see. Individuals will almost always find a reason why *they* should get a break but *other people* shouldn’t. I mean…. *I* *need* *a* *haircut*. I like dancing… dance studios should reopen. You, OTOH, don’t really need to whatever “stupid” thing it is you want to do. fishing? hunting? pffftttt! That probably spread corona like crazy. But my hobby…. should be ok. )
Is that like dancing with the devil?
Is what like dancing with the devil? (Walking the razors edge?)
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I may need to look up methaphors. . .
“What does dancing with the devil mean?
To dance with the devil is to engage in risky, reckless, or potentially immoral behavior.”
Urban dictionary:
“WALKING ON THE RAZOR’S EDGE
A term used to describe someone who is in a very dangerous situation.
(i.e. If you were walking on a giant razor’s edge and fuck up, you either plumet to your death or you slip and land on the razor…getting chopped the fuck up and then raining down below).
Terms with the same meaning include:
SKATING ON THIN ICE and LIVING ON THE EDGE. “
lucia (Comment #184306)
You said…” Like it or not, the longer this goes on, the more violating we are going to see.” Then you mentioned dancing… which made me think of people violating as dancing with the devil.
I probably should have referenced what I was responding to.
I guess so!!
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I bet if this goes on, there will be students and dance teachers sneaking in violations to. Right now, dance studios are all closed. So are exercise places like Planet Fitness. Many of these places have big pane glass windows facing the street…. otherwise, I bet there would be people sneaking over to work out!!
Lucia,
I went to an island (boat access only) beach today. I have been there 30 times over several years, but today there were 5 times as many people as the most I have seen before; instead of a handful, or a few dozen, there were hundreds. Social distancing? No. They were arriving 10 at a time in small boats. I had a hard time finding a place to anchor in half a square mile available space. It was a perfect beach day…. 79 and sunny with low humidity and gentle breeze. Umbrellas, beach chairs, surf-boards, blankets, towels, you name it, it was there. People know where the social distancing police go, and it is not a boat-only access beach with no roadways. Not a mask to be seen, but plenty of beer in coolers.
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Whether or not the lefty scolders like it, the lock down will end, and end soon.
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I think it is good to keep in mind when unemployment benefits start to run out; I believe that will be the defacto end of the lockdown. For the sake of domestic tranquility, blue state governors should remember when those benefits end.
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BTW, there were many boats with giant “Trump 2020… Keep America Great†flags mounted to flutter in the wind… never seen that before either.
Lucia,
I think that’s the big problem with the lock down in the US… people are getting sick of it and just not complying (if they ever did). While I still think that the world going into lock down is a good thing, I’m also starting to think that the US is a unique case and probably should lift the lock downs now. You’ve had enough time to prepare your hospitals for an influx, and people over there are only interested in themselves. Don’t spoil my party with a lock down. So what if the death count is already over 60,000, it’s just a number on the scoreboard.
I’m starting to see that people in the US have a different mindset and a lock down is never going to work over there.
Currently at my local Kaiser hospital pharmacy. 6 counter staff, ZERO other customers
SteveF,
I suspect there are people working under the table AND taking unemployment. I don’t personally know any and I haven’t been approached by anyone. But I bet it’s happening especially with services.
I recommend the transcript of this podcast on the constitution, law and coronavirus quarantines and lock-downs. The program has two law professors who have written books and worked actively on public health law. The National Constitution Center has a non-partisan charter and normally has one speaker from the Federalist Society and one from the (liberal) Constitutional Society. In this case, it is possible that they couldn’t find any conservative or libertarian experts on public health law.
https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/podcast/the-constitution-and-the-coronavirus
Ed Forbes: You are missing part of Illinois quarantine law:
Dept of Health Powers. Ill. Rev. Stat. ch. 20 § 2305/2 (2009): “Authority. The Department of Public Health has supreme authority over declaring new or modifying existing quarantines. A county board of health should be created with responsibility for control of contagious diseases, including the use of quarantine for areas within the county not incorporated. Corporate authorities of municipalities have jurisdiction for quarantine extending one-half mile beyond corporate limits. Local health authorities shall establish quarantine of contacts of someone suspected of carrying a disease that requires this action.”
If you want to see a summary of your state’s law, see:
https://www.ncsl.org/research/health/state-quarantine-and-isolation-statutes.aspx
Power to declare a quarantine is one thing, using force for compliance is another. Politicians who start mass arrests are going to have very short careers. These lock downs are essentially voluntary, when public support wanes they will end.
Tom Scharf,
Yes, that is exactly correct. You can’t arrest a large fraction of the population.
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I think a secondary point which everyone seems to ignore is that the existing quarantine laws are designed to control the spread of contagious illness by people who are infected…. the laws were designed to quarantine the sick. The quarantines of healthy people was never anticipated by these laws, and wholesale permanent taking of everyone’s first amendment rights was never part of the plan. The quarantine laws are being mainly misapplied by the States. We’ve seen this before (“waters of the United States†and the EPA’s effort to regulate most land areas under the clean water act, for example). I expect there will be revisions to many of these laws once the pandemic passes and people evaluate the economic destruction misapplication of the laws allowed.
Frank,
Quarantine of everyone, regardless of whether or not they are sick or known to have come in contact with someone who is, is a violation of the first amendment and others. These laws, and especially their implementation, will be challenged, and I hope declared unconstitutional by the SC. Badly written laws that are misapplied by local officials ought not be allowed to negate Constitutional protections of personal rights.
Frank,
The quarantine is going to break down. This isn’t a normative (i.e. “should” ) statement. It’s a descriptive statement (i.e. “will”.)
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It’s a bit like observing that water will flow over the top of a dam. You can think it “should” stay behind the dam the way you want. It’s won’t.
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Lori Lightfoot is issuing threats to fine people who break quarantine with parties and so on. But the police are actually not arresting or fining people who have parties. Kids will see this. They will have parties. Some parties will be sneakier; progressively they will be more public.
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I updated New York State to May 4, 2020 with the Annan Bayesian model and the following results:
Days to Death/Recovery = 11.1 (-1.4/+4.7)
Ro = 4.3 (-1.0/+1.3)
Rt= 0.81 (-0.1/+0.1)
Kenneth,
Wow, that is a really big change in Ro, much larger than the 2.5 -3 people have consistently talked about. Did you start with the same Ro prior probability distribution (centered at 3.0) and the model then generated the 4.3 Ro as the posterior value? If so, that adds credibility to the modeling approach.
Lucia,
“But the police are actually not arresting or fining people who have parties.”
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The Chicago police can’t even control the street gangs that do most of the shootings in Chicago. They sure as heck are not going to start barging into people’s apartments/houses because of a “suspicion of party”. I saw a clip of Lori Lightfoot threatening jail time for people daring to attend a party. IMHO, she is truly bonkers, and out of control with rage to boot. The Chicago police will (wisely) look the other way.
They handed out the Pulitzer Prizes, In general national political reporting was shutout this year, mostly regional and local stories. Orange Man Bad is getting boring I guess, maybe next year which should cover impeachment which everyone already forgot about.
https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2020/here-are-the-winners-of-the-2020-pulitzer-prizes/
Happy Cinco de Mayo.
DeWitt,
Para ti también.
Never on a Sunday.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/new-jersey/
Look at the daily deaths trend. ;-o
SteveF (Comment #184353)
I used a prior for Ro of 3.1 for the most recent update of New York State. I did not see the posterior for New York state centered at a value as high previously as I saw with the current data. On April 20, 2020 the Annan model gave me:
Days to death/Recovery = 11.3 (-1.2/+1.2)
R0= 3.1 (-0.6/+0.6)
Rt=0.5 (-0.2/+0.2)
MikeM’s comment got me thinking that New York State which is mainly NY city data should have a higher Ro than I had originally seen. The model is evidently indicating that our view of things can change dramatically with more (and maybe better) data. Ro has some rather large uncertainties with the current and April 20 runs. The uncertainty has actually increased with more data.
Kenneth,
“The model is evidently indicating that our view of things can change dramatically with more (and maybe better) data. Ro has some rather large uncertainties with the current and April 20 runs.”
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Very interesting, but a bit of a head scratcher, since I don’t understand how the most recent data could so substantially impact the estimate of Ro. I imagined optimized Ro values come mainly from the very earliest data… I don’t understand how the effect of recent data propagates backward in “model time”. Do you understand how that can happen?
SteveF (Comment #184360): ” I don’t understand how the effect of recent data propagates backward in “model timeâ€.’
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Parameters estimated by fitting a model will not be reliable unless the model is a good representation of reality. All the fancy statistical methods in existence can not change that. The SEIR model is little more than a cartoon. Plus, it seems that in the Annan implementation, some of the parameters are given essentially arbitrary values. Thus, there is no reason to expect fit parameters to behave in a physically reasonable manner.
SteveF (Comment #184360)
Steve, I have some thoughts on how this occurs, but I need to dig deeper into the data and the model. My initial thoughts were the same as yours.
Mike M,
“The SEIR model is little more than a cartoon.”
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Certainly some people consider it more than a cartoon representation, or perhaps more accurately, a more realistic cartoon than the alternatives. But your point is well taken; the population is not homogeneous over large geographic areas, the susceptibility to infection is not homogeneous across age groups or socioeconomic groups, and the times between infection, symptoms, and resolution (recovery or death) are most certainly not constants… not to mention the very critical issues of duration of infectivity, and magnitude of infectivity, both of which are (of course) likely to be different from person to person and wildly different between identifiable sub-populations (young versus old, for example).
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All that said, working toward a model which is a reasonable representation of reality is not a bad thing, especially if the model evolves to incorporate more epidemiological knowns over time. I think Annan and Hargreaves presented a model that is far more informative and elegant than the rubbish models which have been (mis!) informing public policy, and doing great damage in the process. The huge range of Ro across a country like the USA (with vastly different local propagation rates) was being utterly ignored, leading to doomsday projections and very (very) bad public policies.
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If there is a next time (and let’s hope there is not) perhaps governments will react a lot more rationally to an impending pandemic. In some places (like the Boston-to-Washington corridor) implementing “social distancing” much sooner would have been far better. In other places, including almost every rural area in the States, the panic has been unbelievably damaging to the economy, for little reason. If there is a next time, perhaps better, more complex, and more accurate models will help inform public policy so that public policy does not cause more damage (in every sense) than the pandemic itself. I, for one, hope so.
SteveF (Comment #184363): ” I think Annan and Hargreaves presented a model that is far more informative and elegant than the rubbish models which have been (mis!) informing public policy”.
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In what way? Real question. I don’t see any difference, except that Annan and Hargreaves are on the simple end of the models. Maybe I missed something important.
Mike M,
Yes, I think you are missing something(s) important. The Annan/Hargreaves model at least rationally adapts (in a Bayesian way) to changing data. Other models present utterly preposterous projections right up until the moment reality completely refutes them, inevitably leading to very bad public policies. Those bad models then continue to make stupid, wildly wrong projections even after they are shown by reality to be utterly wrong (Annan’s description of “dross on an industrial scale” seems about right).
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The U of Washington model, relied upon heavily in the early stages of the pandemic, produced unbelievably wrong projections, just as it does up to this moment. Most every state projection was horribly wrong: way too low where the pandemic was very bad, and way too high where the scale of the pandemic was modest; this lead to destructive, wasteful policies almost everywhere. Look back at the projections of catastrophic doom from early March in the UK, the USA and elsewhere. Those projections caused stupid, counterproductive policies in the USA, the UK and lots of other places.
MikeM
That is a big factor in it’s favor relative to other models. Being on the simple end and fitting is a very good thing in a model. F=ma is a very simple model. That’s one of the good things about the model.
Annan and Hargraeves isn’t as simple as F=ma. But at least it’s simple relative to other models.
By being complicated and unmoored from data, it has the risk that someone can fiddle to predict anything. If you start trying to put in parameters for “my guess for how well masks would work” and “my guess for how much compliance to stay at home we will get” and so on, things are going to go south fast.
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It may be that Annan and Hargreaves is having trouble now for the simple fact that behavior isn’t really a step function between “before stay at home” vs. “after stay at home”. The after part may change more and more as the stay at home lasts. We are seeing violations. The first few weeks, I think people in most states were frightened, they were willing to turn around on a dime and they did. But now… bored. Starting to find exceptions for “what I want to do”. The latter even happens with people who claim to be totally, completely 100% for the quarantine. They just whine about other people. 🙂
Lucia,
“ They just whine about other people. “
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Wait, do you mean Democrat politicians and their journalist poodles, or actual people? (There is a distinction: democrat politicians and their journalist poodles are NOT actual people.)
Steve F,
I’m sure it’s politicians too. But I mean… “Karens on nextdoor/facebook” etc. (No offense to real Karen’s intended. But your name has been taken… )
There are TONS of people who, for example, complain they *went somewhere* — often to get something that is not actually “necessary”. Then while they were there the place was “crowded” by people who were doing “wrong” things like standing to close in line or not wearing masks and so on.
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Now… mind you, the complaint might be valid. But seriously Karen…. You went to the Home Depot on the *first beautiful Saturday* and discovered (horror) there was a line filled with horrible people who “should have been” (evidently) behaving “better”. But meanwhile YOU decided to ADD to the crowding in the freakin’ line because… well… YOU need *potting soil* for your tomatoes. blah… blah.. blah.
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Oh… and evidently, she wants everyone to know that *customer service* (by the harried retail employees) was not up to snuff. (Well… yeah…)
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But in these things, everyone *else* is the “problem”. This Karen’s decision that SHE needed to be there on *that busiest time* of the week/season is NOT a problem… in her eyes.
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I see similar types of people complaining that OTHER people won’t veer out of THEIR way on walking trails. Whatever the rule is, evidently it’s that those complaining are in “the” category who one must make way for. Often these posted complaints are long and detailed, but if you read them, you can see the standard is that -for whatever reason– the thing the complainer wants to do is “necessary” or “right”. Their chosen precautions are “enough” and “noble”. But something someone else is doing is totally selfish.
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Yet, there is no objective reason to take the complainer’s side.
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In fact…. I would suggest you read the next post on “Professor Lockdown Ferguson” who had his married lover break quarantine to visit him. Her view as that she wasn’t really breaking quarantine because she considered him part of “her” household! Presumably he took a somewhat similar view. Yet he’s the one who basically persuaded the government to put everyone on lockdown!!
Well Annan’s model is simple and open source so people are attracted to it because they can play around with parameters and increase their understanding. There is zero evidence it’s better than what Imperial or Oxford are using even noting Annan’s mostly baseless attack on these experts for being initially wrong. Imperial had the IFR reasonably correct even though they were too pessimistic. But given the level of ignorance in the early going, it was not too bad. Their models are complex and opaque with legacy code. Annan is like a chemist (Linus Pauling for example) dabbling in medicine. The result cannot be expected to stand up to much scrutiny.
In addition the use of the single “lockdown” step change was probably designed to make the case for James’ preferred policy options which are motivated by alarmism and by a bad case of BDS (Brexit Derangement Syndrome).
Wow. There was quite the tailgate party in the parking lot of the Mexican restaurant where I picked up dinner. I’m thinking people are getting sick of staying at home.
Happy cinco.
This complaining is what you get when people are scared by journalists and have no idea about what might really work and what is just left wing politicians implementing their dreams of controlling people’s lives. That’s because said journalists are more concerned with getting people worked up enough to click back every hour to track how bad it is and blaming their enemies and advocating than in conveying actual science. Many of these measures have little scientific support.
I personally think masks outdoors make little sense especially if the sun is out. I even doubt if distancing on trails makes any sense either. Micromanaging people’s behavior is really hopeless. Give the public guidance and the tools they need and then let them decide for themselves.
In Washington state Boeing has reopened virtually all its operations even though many are working from home. Manufacturing employees cannot do that and are showing up for work. Double digit IQ Inslee allowed them to do it because he had no choice. Boeing are doing a better job of case reporting, isolation, and sanitation than the state is doing. What was double digit going to do, call out the National Guard?
It also exposes the petty tyrant nature of some of these closures. Building airplanes is no more essential (when demand is zero) than “routine” cancer screenings at a hospital, cancer treatments, or “routine” medical and dental appointments, not to mention barbers or other businesses. In fact, hospitals are half full, in financial trouble, and laying off employees. That’s really really stupid. The rules are riddled with discriminatory enforcement. One boutique business got an exception because they sell scented and very expensive bars of soap!! Many local sheriff’s have made it clear they are not going to enforce the rules in any meaningful way. Rural counties are likely to be non-enforcement zones.
What I see is organized chaos with no guiding principles or strong scientific support. Given how US cases appear to have plateaued and not started coming down much, what is the case for continued chaos with all its costs? Governors have not shared their end games with us. Why are their policies going to minimize total harm?? Like bad generals in wartime, they think they can do tactics and ignore strategy.
The bottom line here is really very simple. People who are seriously ill already need to be isolated (40%-60% of worldwide fatalities have been among residents of long term case facilities). Young and healthy people need to go out and get infected so we can get to herd immunity ASAP.
Steve, I went back and looked at the code I used for the original NY State Annan model run and found an error in my file with the daily death data. It had a space without a comma in the text file. When I fixed that error the result for the posteriors and Ro were essentially the same as my current run. I also went back and looked at the NY City original run. The posterior there for Ro was 5.7. That means the model results for Ro are in line with number of daily deaths per population unit seen in NY and NYC.
The Annan model is more than a toy model but not as complex as some of the models being used to make projections on daily new cases and deaths for Covid-19. How it performs with projections will be determined in due time. Annan merely produced a Bayesian model in black box form using some well known and tested ordinary differential equations from epidemiology. I am currently attempting to put together R code for a model that is not a black box.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidemiology#The_SEIR_model
https://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/thomas.house/blog/modelling-herd-immunity.html
David,
Rest assured, the behavior that is now considered the type that makes a person a “Karen” exists independently of fear, journalists or this contagion. There are now Covid-19 associated manifestations of their behavior. But they are the sort of women my sister complained of when her daughter was in elementary school. These women wanted to dominate other mom’s and insist that every mom whose daughter took ballet would send in snacks, and also insisted there would be “rules” like the snacks had to be “healthy” and “home made” and so on. No matter what is currently going on they want to dictate that this is some sort of “rule” that it is for the benefit of “all” and not merely them imposing their will on others.
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The women were not necessarily left wing. What they wanted to impose might vary depending on their political view, but that they wanted to impose and be seen as virtuous for what amounted to not only getting their own way, but forcing other people to give things up is a feature.
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Yes. We see this with politicians too.
Please stop posting rhetorical questions.
Kenneth, looked at the Thomas House pages, but seems to think strategy can only be lockdown, then let it rip, where only end game is herd immunity via infection. My country (NZ), but also Australia, South Korea, Taiwan, China are working to “Stamp and dance”. The “Stamp” is severe lockdown (mostly) to buy time for scaling up contact tracing and testing, plus reducing infections to very low level. The “dance” is heavy survellience testing and rapid contact tracing to keep Rt very low till vaccine can produce herd immunity. Oh and keeping borders tightly shut except to other countries who are trusted.
The big question is how low can you keep Rt with this strategy. Singapore is having problems, but so far other countries are looking pretty successful. If it can be maintained then NZ strategy of “go hard, go early” will be validated. The next couple of months will be interesting. Mind you, NZ started with 88% in favour of lockdown. Democracies should always work within social licence. If majority of US believe that “let ‘er rip, and be damned with the losses”, then that is what they should do. What do polls show about “lives versus livlihood”?
>only end game is herd immunity via infection.
Is that the case if mortality rate is 10%, 20%, 50%?
New Zealand is isolated, small, and has very low population density. Those factors, plus essentially closing off arrivals before the infection became widespread, make the policies there work. Those same policies would be difficult or impossible to implement in many (if not most) other countries. Australia is larger, but also an island with low population density, where arrivals were stopped early, before the virus was widespread. Imagine the situation in Australia if 10,000 Chinese students had been allowed to return for classes instead of simply refused entry.
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BTW, I don’t know anyone who suggests the USA should do nothing. There are lots of people who think efforts should focus on protecting those at substantial risk, and not worry about those not at substantial risk. The Swedish response, while by no means perfect, seems to me a lot more sensible than what has happened in many countries, including the USA.
Phil
Not sure. I’m in the county next to Chicago. A number or mayors or local towns including Naperville are asking the Governor for local control on this issue. (Naperville is almost “city” sized. Just dwarfed by Chicago.)
Naperville’s mayor also owns a business. I’m pretty sure his goal is to allow alot more movement and business than Governor Pritzker (who is a man who inherited alot of money.)
Most the ongoing violations we see are mostly recreational– parties, parks etc.
MikeN
As a practical matter, once a contagion has arrived and taken hold, it’s the only end game until we have a vaccine. This one has arrived and taken hold.
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In the past, everyone just knew that was the end game. Walled cities might get surrounded by guards to keep it in, but inside the city the infection went on until herd immunity was reached.
Lucia,
I would be shocked if Pritzker ever gave even minimal control to local officials…. unless he could arrange for only local officials who agree with his policies, to get that control, but not local officials who disagree with his policies. He would probably agree to allow local restrictions to be more draconian than state restrictions, never less draconian.
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I think Illinois will be among the very last places where economic reality imposes itself on recalcitrant politicians.
Phil, The problem is that we don’t know how good any vaccine will be. I saw a report that there were already multiple strains of covi 19. The track record is not good here. Waiting for a vaccine seems to have only weak scientific support.
I’ve seen poll results that show support for lockdown concentrated amoung Democrats with most Republicans wanting to reopen. Red states are reopening quickly whereas blue states generally are not. Purple states are in many cases also starting to reopen. Colorado for example.
This kind of makes sense. The left wants more power in the hands of government and tends to be empathetic with those who are suffering. Conservatives are more interested in freedom and economic freedom and distrust government power.
I doubt Pritzker will cede control voluntarily. He might end up doing like Newsom and cedeing control when he finds that he is unable to enforce it.
“I see similar types of people complaining that OTHER people won’t veer out of THEIR way on walking trails.”
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I see this behavior here. Some people veer off so far I worry that they will hurt themselves. Some people stare you down like a game of chicken, ha ha. Our walking path is 8 feet wide so I think it is a bit silly, but I think most are just on automatic behavior and not discriminating by situation.
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From what I can tell you want to avoid hanging out in enclosed poorly ventilated places with strangers for more than 15 minutes. Closing down hiking trails was idiotic (was not done in FL).
It should be noted that models of exponential behavior are going to look very wrong in absolute numbers with just minor errors as you get farther away from their run time. A model that estimated doubling times at 3 days instead of 2 is going to look really bad 3 weeks down the line. I suppose you need to be looking at log graphs for this.
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NYT notes that if you subtract out NYC, then the rest of the US has increasing cases over the past several weeks. (The media’s shifting of the goal posts from flattening the curve to virus elimination is still ongoing)
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/06/opinion/coronavirus-deaths-statistics.html
Lucia,
Newsom clearly sees the inevitable (he is no longer threatening legal action against local officials, just scolding), but is doing his very best to delay any real opening. For example, from NBC:
Sounds like actual re-opening, until you read further down that only curb-side pickup will be allowed. Nobody has any reason to order from a local clothing store if they can’t try on the clothes… easier and probably cheaper to order from Amazon.
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Here in Florida, there has actually been some reopening: I noted yesterday that my favorite crab restaurant’s parking lot was about 1/2 full; they have to space people out of course, but there are people eating at the restaurant. You would be poisoned if you ate crab, of course.
David wrote: “The left wants more power in the hands of government and tends to be empathetic with those who are suffering.”
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The comparison I use is a lifeboat on a ship with more people than lifeboats. They would say that the lifeboat must be filled beyond capacity because that would save the maximum number of lives. That the overburdened boat then sinks and kills everyone is just an unfortunate accident. At least they tried.
FYI: For us slow people, the Karen meme:
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How ‘Karen’ Became a Coronavirus Villain
A popular joke about entitled white women is now a big pandemic meme.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/05/coronavirus-karen-memes-reddit-twitter-carolyn-goodman/611104/
Tom Scharf,
‘….the rest of the US has increasing cases over the past several weeks. (The media’s shifting of the goal posts from flattening the curve to virus elimination is still ongoing)”
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The number of cases is most certainly not rising everywhere else; Florida, for example has falling case numbers…. falling death rates will surely follow: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/florida/
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Same thing in lots of other states. The aggregate may be rising slightly, but that is mainly because many states are in earlier stages of spread. Seems to me the NYT can only bring itself to make dishonest arguments that advance its policy preferences, not honest arguments that reflect the clearly conflicting interests involved. The death rate in the Boston-Washington corridor is simply not going to be duplicated in many other places, and imposition of policies which might make sense for the Boston-Washington corridor (and that is debatable!) do not make sense for many other places… like say, Texas, Florida, or Utah.
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The NYT would do well to examine why death rates among the elderly in NYC and much of the Northeast are so high, in spite of all those states implementing the kinds of draconian policies the NYT supports, and why death rates are so much lower in many of the states the NYT constantly criticizes for having policies which “will kill people”. They will never examine that discrepancy, of course; that would be too honest. IMHO, the NYT is an evil organization.
FL death rates are almost flat for the past several weeks, but new cases are falling. Hopefully the deaths will start to decline soon. My county just started offering testing to everyone, even without symptoms.
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There are some rural areas that have big outbreaks per capita, but they are exceptional. Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama.
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The NYT is split between an extremely partisan opinion and news “analysis” staff and actual news reporting which is intermittently very good. The coverage of anything touching culture is very predictable and tiring. Their editor is very partisan and prone to heavy selection bias in what gets resources for news coverage (see Tara Reade). Their relentless focus on viewing everything through an identity politics lens annoys even their own readers. However it is a reflection of what people on the left are being told to think, and sometimes a reflection on what they actually think.
Phil Scadden (Comment #184379): “Kenneth, looked at the Thomas House pages, but seems to think strategy can only be lockdown, then let it rip, where only end game is herd immunity via infection. My country (NZ), but also Australia, South Korea, Taiwan, China are working to “Stamp and danceâ€. ”
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I originally thought that something akin to ‘stamp and dance’ was the purpose of the restrictions in the U.S. But it is now clear that has failed, if it ever was the strategy. It seems likely that it failed sometime in February, if it ever had a chance. Given the world wide spread of the virus, I am not sure that it can succeed anywhere.
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I have never once heard anyone seriously suggest ‘let it rip’ as a viable strategy. I am concerned that what is happening in the U.S. will end up converting to ‘let it rip’.
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IMO, the Swedes are closest getting it right. A policy that will approach herd immunity without overloading the health care system while being sustainable for the relatively modest amount of time needed for it to work.
Researchers have found a mutated coronavirus that appeared in February in Europe is the most dominant form, and more contagious than the original.
The probability of being infected outdoors while passing another jogger is very low.
Would it be sufficient if both people just held their breath while passing, or are the viruses from the previous breath still lingering?
MikeN,
Probably depends on the wind speed and direction.
” Imagine the situation in Australia if 10,000 Chinese students had been allowed to return for classes instead of simply refused entry.”
Or in NZ… However, the model for Stamp and Dance is surely South Korea. Not exactly low population density either. Or for that matter China. These are countries that got burned by SARS, (no vaccine for that still, and certainly didnt end with herd immunity), and learnt valuable lessons. Covid19 is tougher with longer incubation period and asymptomatic spreaders but I think same scaled-up response is a valid strategy.
I am puzzled as to why Sweden is regarded as a good response? Looks to me like they are doing worse per capita than US (in fact 10th worst of all countries) and far worse than their neighbours. Take out the countries where stats distorted by tiny populations and they are 7th worst. South Korea also didnt go in for extreme shutdown but they were already setup for testing and contact tracing and moved very quickly.
As for poor performance of Stomp in US (beside the very late start), compare Google mobility for NZ with US.
Phil Scadden (Comment #184430): “However, the model for Stamp and Dance is surely South Korea. … These are countries that got burned by SARS, (no vaccine for that still, and certainly didnt end with herd immunity), and learnt valuable lessons.”
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But South Korea was *not* trying to implement Stomp and Dance. They were trying to do what they did with SARS: Put the genie back in the bottle. That bottle has been smashed. So now they are dancing. But the dance will have to go on forever, so it seems likely that they will have to eventually give it up.
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Phil Scadden: “I am puzzled as to why Sweden is regarded as a good response? Looks to me like they are doing worse per capita than US (in fact 10th worst of all countries) and far worse than their neighbours.”
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No, they are doing very well. They have had lots of cases without overwhelming their hospital system.
Total cases, relative to population, will probably end up being very roughly the same everywhere. This will continue until herd immunity is reached. The trick is to get there with the least damage. Sweden seems to be doing that.
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Phil Scadden: “compare Google mobility for NZ with US.”
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Means nothing, for the same reason that you can’t compare Chicago with Wyoming.
South Korea started way earlier than everyone else… You’re trying to bolt the stable door, not just after all the horses have bolted, but you have to round up a few hundred generations of offspring as well. This is a mammoth task, which will require constant vigilance in a globalized world until either a vaccine is available or enough people eventually catch it for it not to matter any more.
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The point about sweden is their population is far more likely to be ahead in the natural immunity stakes. This may make their short term numbers worse than others, but possibly better in the long run.
MikeN,
The issue of “Karens” complaining isn’t so much objective fact the combination of bossiness and entitlement. So, for example, a Karen will always have a reason why someone else should have veered and she should not have.
I have no plans to join anti-stay at home protestors demonstrating. But I have even less sympathy for people who are posting complaints about less than perfect customer service at retail establishments. Of course retail establishments can’t give perfect service right now. Many are short staffed. Most have extra burdens just trying to stay open!
Phil, I agree with MikeM. Given how contagious this virus is, its just impossible to stamp it out without incurring massive and unacceptable costs. That can only happen in totalitarian states in cultures that emphasize obedience. In the West, it’s not going to happen so you should stop fanticizing that it is going to happen.
2.84 million die in the US every year, many of them from preventable diseases that they contract due to choices they make. Obesity is a behavior caused condition that has very serious consequences. Likewise for opioid use or smoking marijuana. In my opinion we should spend what little public health capital we have on these things that can actually be prevented by people making different choices. In a free society success will be limited, but some will be saved.
Phil Scadden,
“I am puzzled as to why Sweden is regarded as a good response?”
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You are puzzled because you only are looking at one side of the equation. The Swedes have not destroyed their economy. The US (plus he UK, France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, etc, etc) have caused terrible economic damage with their covid19 policies. So long as you look only at immediate deaths and nothing else, (ignoring all the things which are actually far more important to human well being), you will always draw nonsense conclusions. I honestly find it almost incomprehensible that so many people ignore the obvious.
Tom Scharf,
“Their editor is very partisan and prone to heavy selection bias in what gets resources for news coverage (see Tara Reade). Their relentless focus on viewing everything through an identity politics lens annoys even their own readers.”
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Lets cut to the chase. Their editor and the entire editorial staff is blinded by lefty ideology and utterly dishonest to boot. Anyone who entertains their tripe as meaningful, even for a moment, needs to have their head examined for a tumor which distorts rational thinking. No, they are simply, utterly ,totally, evil.
Well my money is on death rates not being the same everywhere. Maybe we get a vaccine or not, but I would seriously bet on getting better anti-virals and managed care.
“Economic damage” I guess is value-based. I see an economy as primarily providing food and shelter and I am sure we can do that and better. To me, most of economy here is hibernating rather than dead with exception of tourism and is starting to fire again fine. So, yes, I do value the death toll more highly than “economic damage” depending on how you measure it. I do support our government spending to help (and just as well starting from position of healthy surplus). I think economy with recover pretty fast. Time will tell who is right.
People who have poor health outcomes from lousy lifestyle choices do not get a lot of sympathy from me. If you want to smoke, then go for it. Just dont ask me to pay for your healthcare or breath your smoke. I support public health funds going into preventing their choices impacting others.
Virus’s however are no respecters of your good choices.
“Virus’s however are no respecters of your good choices.”
Phil, This is completely untrue. Those who are in good health are vastly less likely to die of covid19 than those who are obese for example.
My question for you is why is covid19 any different than any other infectious disease that kills people? Why are you so scared/convinced that causing the worst Depression is world history with the millions of resulting deaths is worth it for this virus but not for swine flu or the Hong Kong flu in 1969.
Phil Schatten,
“Economic damage†I guess is value-based. I see an economy as primarily providing food and shelter and I am sure we can do that and better. “
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Economic damage is number based; not sure where values get involved. If the economy generates 30% less goods and services, the people have 30% less material wealth…. you know, the wealth that separates places like New Zealand from most of Africa.
SteveF – I would like see some measure of economic damage. An economy produces 30% less good and services – for a time, but then recovers. In 10 years, how much worse off would it have been if had not shutdown? “Damage” to me is when the means of production takes lasting damage. I would actually like to see estimates of that. I am aware of this paper https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3561560 looking a value of interventions in 1918 flu, but it is not peer-reviewed and I am certainly not qualified to assess it.
DY – why worry about this one? Because it seems that in places where not checked, excess mortality is running way higher than flu. And because we can? We certainly made strenuous efforts to keep swine flu out. And yes, good health seems big help. I have chronic asthma and work every day keep lungs healthy but also being extremely careful not to get covid because no matter how hard I work, I am still at risk. Ditto to many other conditions.
I would also say to compare economic damage to human life, means getting a no. on $$ per years of life reduced. Now, we do this all the time. Health economics depend on it. However that number seems highly variable depending on context and different countries. Also seems to be discrepencies between numbers used in say drug funding and damages awarded by courts. For this reason, I would say that comparisons of economic damage and human life are value-based.
Phil Scadden (Comment #184441): “I see an economy as primarily providing food and shelter and I am sure we can do that and better. To me, most of economy here is hibernating rather than dead … I think economy with recover pretty fast.”
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Tens of millions of people in the U.S. are now unable to afford food and shelter. Lots of business will never open again, especially if this goes on much longer. That will greatly slow any recovery.
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But the perhaps the biggest problem with the shut down is that it is literally killing people. I don’t just mean the myriad ways that poverty and/or stress kills. I am talking about all the untreated cancers, untreated heart attacks, untreated strokes, the list goes on and on.
Well it is values based Phil. Cuomo’s standard is irrational. One widely used method is to compute the total earnings over the career of the person in question including pensions, etc. From an economic perspective that makes sense.
Phil, You also need to consider that “returning to normal” happens only very slowly. Depressions can last for many years because demand can recover only slowly because with so many out of work, they are unable to buy things. The damage from suicides, the stress of being evicted, possibly being homeless costs lives. None of us can remember the great Depression, but it was brutally fatal for many.
This is from the Chicago Tribune…
Less than half of the deaths in Illinois have been people who some would describe as “ready to clock off anyway”.
Above, I stated that I do not find the Annan model useful. Perhaps that is because I am missing information. All models are wrong, but some are useful. The useful ones are those that are fit for their intended purpose. So perhaps the problem is that I do not understand the purpose of the Annan model.
What is the purpose of the Annan model?
MikeM,
Purpose: To better forecast death rates after a dramatic change in policy.
Lucia,
Since the model priors distributions are very wide, the model appears to just “do it’s own thing” based on evolving data. If so, then another potential purpose is to to make projections of future deaths without any post-hoc manual tweaks of assumptions, tweaks that seem to drive the better known models to lunge violently from one crazy projection to another.
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When I look at the individual state death trends, it looks to me like the daily number of deaths will fall only slowly in most places; that may be a result of people just refusing to stay at home any longer. In any case, I can’t see how total deaths end up much below 140,000 to 160,000 several months from now, or a bit under 0.05% of the population. In Italy, (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/) where the pandemic is near its end, it looks like total deaths will end up a bit under 0.06% of the population. I find this similarity shocking.
SteveF (Comment #184468)
May 7th, 2020 at 7:51 am
That’s quite a change from what you were saying about 4 weeks ago….
SteveF (Comment #182604)
April 10th, 2020 at 7:16 pm
SteveF (Comment #182607)
April 11th, 2020 at 6:16 am
lucia (Comment #184467): “Purpose: To better forecast death rates after a dramatic change in policy.”
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Then I do not believe that model is fit for purpose since the forecast depends on a bunch of untested assumptions. Among them are:
– That any change in slope was due to an abrupt change in policy rather than a gradual change in individual behavior. Demonstrably false.
– That you know the lag time from infection to death. By the way, what lag time are you assuming?
– That you know the latency period and duration of the illness. By the way, what values are you assuming?
– That the illness randomly sample the population, independent of age, health, location, class, behavior, etc. Surely false.
– That you know the fraction of the population susceptible to the virus. You don’t.
– That you know the ratio of exposed people to confirmed cases. By the way, what ratio are you assuming?
SteveF (Comment #184468): “When I look at the individual state death trends, it looks to me like the daily number of deaths will fall only slowly in most places; that may be a result of people just refusing to stay at home any longer. In any case, I can’t see how total deaths end up much below 140,000 to 160,000 several months from now”.
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Essentially drawing a line through the data and extrapolation into the future. Probably just as good as the Annan model.
Strangely it’s almost like everyone is having a hard time predicting this virus, even those on Team Science. It looks like NYC was a super-spreader event in the US.
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Travel From New York City Seeded Wave of U.S. Outbreaks
The coronavirus outbreak in New York City became the primary source of infections around the United States, researchers have found.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/us/new-york-city-coronavirus-outbreak.html
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“The central role of New York’s outbreak shows that decisions made by state and federal officials — including waiting to impose distancing measures and to limit international flights — helped shape the trajectory of the outbreak and allowed it to grow in the rest of the country.”
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It is a bit ironic that at the time the Europe travel ban and possible NYC quarantine were met with hostility from the usual suspects, who now profess to have had knowledge that not enough was done early as if it was obvious all along.
MikeM, the purpose of a model is basically what Lucia posted and the advantage of the Annan model is as SteveF noted in his post that it can be updated with new data. Annan says essentially the same in his article. The Annan model with it’s free parameters fits the observed data rather well.
As an aside I think that most of us posting here are updating our own projections about C-19 – much like a Bayesian model. That does not necessarily change our views on what is the best government policies.
In my view politicians are doing what politicians do and that is look at the present with regards to favor from the voting public and ignoring the future long term effects of their policies. That, of course, means that most of the voting public looks at these things from a present /short term perspective and with lots of help from the media.
Mike M
It doesn’t assume this. So presumably, you should favor this model on this point.
No. It also doesn’t assume this. So presumably, you should favor this model on this point.
It doesn’t assme this. So presumably, you should favor this model on this point.
Yes. This is what standard SEIR kinda-sorta do. But it kinda-sort of doesn’t. It’s based on SEIR. It has an Ro for the population as a whole not for subgroups who are then mixed.
It could presumably be extended, but in that case, there are more parameters to fiddle with.
You can put that in SEIR. However, it really doesn’t make much difference at the start of a contagion. You could scale, and the model would actually work if applied at the start of a contagion. What it would get wrong is the fraction of the total population that gets sick.
It doesn’t make this assumption at all.
It’s all well and good to not like the model. But you (like skeptical) seem to object to it based on lack of knowledge of what it does.
MikeM
Well… SteveF and I are engineers. Engineers typically prefer having a mechanistic underpinning to a curve fit. These tend to work better. Annan Hargraeves model has that. That’s makes it “better” from an engineering point of view.
Phil
I think we are going to see some of this. Some companies that were operating well and producing things will go bankrupt. Some skilled workers will be dislocated and need to shift what they do to make ends meet. Some skills will erode. Some skills will not be developed (e.g. newly graduating engineering/STEM students will not land entry level jobs. )
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Some education is being delivered badly– future work force will suffer somewhat.
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Whether it’s worth it can be debated. But to the extent that it’s an over-reaction, there are costs. The costs of under reaction are also obvious.
me: “any change in slope was due to an abrupt change in policy”
lucia: “It doesn’t assume this.”
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The graphs in the paper have vertical lines marking the date of lock down and two R values, R0 and Rt, labeling the regions on either side of the line. That sure looks like they assume an abrupt change in R on the date of the lock down. If not, how do I interpret that?
The growth rate of new cases was clearly decreasing around the time of the lock downs, indicating that the infection rate started decreasing at least two weeks earlier.
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me: ” the lag time from infection to death”.
lucia: “It doesn’t assume this”.
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I found that hard to believe, so I went looking in the paper. They write, just before Table 1:
“In order to calculate daily deaths from the infected population, we use the Gamma distribution for time to death described by Ferguson et al. (2020), except with the minor modification that we marginally reduce the mean time from 18.8 to 15 days”.
Seems pretty clear. Not sure if they adjusted that further for other data sets.
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me: “the latency period and duration of the illness”.
lucia: “It doesn’t assme this”.
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Those parameters appear in Table 1. But it is not clear what values were used.
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me: “the ratio of exposed people to confirmed cases”
lucia: “It doesn’t make this assumption at all”
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That assumption most certainly is made. The fraction of the population that has been exposed is central to a SEIR model.
One can argue that it does not matter early in an epidemic. But in that case the prediction from the SEIR model is that same as assuming a constant percentage change each day, fitting the data to that, and extrapolating.
Mike M,
“Essentially drawing a line through the data and extrapolation into the future. Probably just as good as the Annan model.”
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It is a little more than drawing a straight line. The trends do vary from place to place, and most certainly are not straight lines. The models which were widely known tended to overestimate the total number of deaths, even after the curve was starting to bend, and then overestimated the drop off in the rate of deaths after the peak, leading to underestimates of total deaths in many places. Before we got past the peak(s), it was difficult to refute the projections of rapid fall. That is not the case now; the death rates do not drop off as quickly as some well known models projected; no place has the death rate fallen off like a near mirror image of the rise…. even though that was a common projection.
The Annan-Hargreaves model has 2 E & I boxes, so it’s not the simplest SEIR model. They comment in the code
Wondering if any here are willing to speculate…
Mike,
The parameters are given as priors with large uncertainty intervals. So they are not assumed equal to the mean of the prior. The change depending on data. You could look at the code to see what values were used. . .
Yes. But since it is an SEIR model, the slope can and will change as the fraction of susceptible change. So this claim of yours is wrong
It’s wrong because you use the term “any”. In their model an abrupt change in policy can cause an abrupt change in slope. But it is not the only thing that can cause some sort of change. It could change for other reasons.
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Also, nothing in their model forces the R to change after a policy is enacted. The model could get the same Ro and Rt if the reproduction rate was unaffected.
Sure: it’s required at the beginning of the population and then evolves during the calculation. So it is not “assumed”, it is an “output” at any given time. It doesn’t happen to be one he plots.
Kenneth,
“As an aside I think that most of us posting here are updating our own projections about C-19 – much like a Bayesian model. That does not necessarily change our views on what is the best government policies.”
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True, although I think evolution of the pandemic, and better/firmer data on the very low level of risk across most of the population, have made clearer (at least to me!) that the early relative lack of focus on isolating/protecting those at high risk, along with a concurrent rush to “stop everything” (schools, retail, manufacturing, services, etc) in many places, led to worse outcomes both in lives lost and economic costs. I mean, some things have just turned out horribly as a direct result of public policies… like layoffs of healthcare workers and insolvent hospitals and related businesses….. policies which were in hindsight very far from optimal. The thing that I find most puzzling is the apparent lack of evolution in policies in many (most?) places, in spite of clear evidence that those policies should evolve to become more effective.
Harold,
Dunno. It might be the person who coded it wanted to subdivide “early exposed” vs “late exposed” and simpler for “early/late” infectious because he had ideas about when symptoms happened and so he wanted to plot out more than one group? You’d have to ask him.
Off topic public service announcement; case against Flynn dropped.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/07/michael-flynn-criminal-case-dropped-by-justice-department.html
lucia (Comment #184487): “The parameters are given as priors with large uncertainty intervals. So they are not assumed equal to the mean of the prior. The change depending on data.”
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But I thought that the discussion above established that recent data does not alter the early fits. In other words, that those other parameters were determined by the early fits, then fixed. Did I get that wrong?
In any case, values are being used for those parameters. How realistic those values are impacts the reliability of any extrapolation.
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lucia: “It’s wrong because you use the term “anyâ€.”
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You got me there. I meant any change other than due to a shrinking frcation of susceptible people.
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lucia: “It could change for other reasons.”
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Are there reasons other than the one I just mentioned?
If not, then it seems you are trying to have it both ways since you claimed above that we are still in the early stages where susceptible fraction is essentially unity. If that is not so, then the issue of the ratios of exposed to confirmed and dead becomes critical. If that is so, then my criticism stands, even if I did not state it precisely right.
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lucia: “nothing in their model forces the R to change after a policy is enacted”
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You have scored another technical point. Yes, the model does not force a change in R, it just forces any change, other than evolving susceptibility, to occur at a specified time. That does not alter my criticism.
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lucia: “and then evolves during the calculation”.
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Indeed. And that evolution depends on a variety of assumed values that are not stated. How realistic those values are critically impacts any forecast.
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lucia (Comment #184477): “Engineers typically prefer having a mechanistic underpinning to a curve fit. These tend to work better. Annan Hargraeves model has that. That’s makes it “better†from an engineering point of view.”
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That is only true if the model is sound. A model that has multiple poorly determined parameters is usually worse than something simple. Far worse, if prediction is the goal.
Cuomo is acknowledging that a very high percent of new cases are among those who are “at home” and not working or going out except for essentials. But lockdowns “work.”!!?? Lockdown is now the virtue signal of choice for those who like government control.
Below is link to a good explanation of compartments (boxes) in models used in epidemiology
There is an even simpler model called the SIR model which has 3 boxes. The SEIR model has an exposed stage because: “For many important infections, there is a significant incubation period during which individuals have been infected but are not yet infectious themselves. During this period the individual is in compartment E (for exposed).”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidemiology
The link below discusses for what purposes boxes might be added to the SIR model (including an Exposed box for the SEIR model) and how the boxes would be added.
https://towardsdatascience.com/infectious-disease-modelling-beyond-the-basic-sir-model-216369c584c4
mark bofill,
Thanks, I was not aware of that.
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The only question that remains is which of the many Obama associates who abused their political positions to harass political opponents will be charged with criminal violations. I am thinking conspiracy, multiple counts of perjury, falsification of documents and others. The sensible thing would be to work up the food chain, starting with Klinesmith…. offer him 5 years prison or turn states evidence. I think ultimately we will learn it was all directed by Obama and his aids. But I think there are several (Susan Rice?) who will fall on their swords to protect him…. even if it means years in prison. They were and are criminals, but most will probably get away with it.
“Tens of millions of people in the U.S. are now unable to afford food and shelter. ”
But the primary production capacity in your economy is absolutely able to provide it. Other governments, including ours, simply provide it and support businesses to get through it. It isnt going to work for our tourist industry but alarm bells have been ringing for years on that. A few people get rich but mostly it is provider of very low wage, often lifestyle jobs. Government intervention to help find jobs and build alternative industries is a given for virtually all (maybe all) politicians. As an outsider looking in, it seems this kind of government support is an outrage to at least right wing elements in US. If that is the majority view, then so be it but glad I leave here.
David Young,
“Lockdown is now the virtue signal of choice for those who like government control.”
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Of course, this has been the case for a while. But I think there is a big fraction of people who have never thought it through, and just take the hysterical MSM reports as truth…. easier to just go along than to fight it. But the truth is, save for putting each person in a hermetically sealed box, the virus will spread among those who are vulnerable to it. Rather than put each in a hermetically sealed box,I think it better to come as close to that as possible for the 10% of the population who are most likely to die from the virus.
Phil Scadden,
I read your comment three times. You really need to clarify… a lot. Have you been drinking? What you wrote is immune to understanding. Specifically:
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” Other governments, including ours, simply provide it and support businesses to get through it. ”
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What? What other governments? What government is “ours”? The USA, New Zealand, or something else?
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“It isnt going to work for our tourist industry but alarm bells have been ringing for years on that.”
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What is “our” tourist industry? In New Zealand, in the USA, or somewhere else? Which alarm bells have been ringing? Where?
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“As an outsider looking in, it seems this kind of government support is an outrage to at least right wing elements in US. If that is the majority view, then so be it but glad I leave here.”
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I have not the faintest clue what you are saying. Are you from New Zealand (an outsider), or from the States? When are you leaving? Why are you leaving? Are you sure the New Zealand government will let you in?
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None of my questions are rhetorical.
The FBI … sigh. They have to do better than this. What an embarrassment.
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This one really takes the cake, none other than McCabe whining about the dropping of charges in the NYT.
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“A former senior F.B.I. official involved in investigating Mr. Flynn defended the bureau’s actions and accused officials of politicizing law enforcement.
“The department’s position that the F.B.I. had no reason to interview Mr. Flynn pursuant to its counterintelligence investigation is patently false, and ignores the considerable national security risk his contacts raised,†the official, Andrew G. McCabe, said in a statement.
“Today’s move by the Justice Department has nothing to do with the facts or the law — it is pure politics designed to please the president,†added Mr. McCabe, a frequent target of Mr. Trump’s who was fired as deputy director of the F.B.I. over failing to be forthcoming in an internal inquiry.”
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WTF. Jail for thee, but not for me!
Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Klinesmith, and a host of others should be charged and tried.
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Unlikely they will be, which is very unfortunate.
“ Today’s move by the Justice Department has nothing to do with the facts or the law — it is pure politics designed to please the president,†added Mr. McCabe, a frequent target of Mr. Trump’s who was fired as deputy director of the F.B.I. over failing to be forthcoming in an internal inquiry.â€
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If there is anyone who was involved in this scandal who deserves multiple years of jail time it is McCabe. Dishonest, politically motivated, and someone who acted illegally on those political motivations.
McCabe needs to go to prison. Flynn was completely innocent. The recently released texts and memos show that the FBI’s intent was to entrap Flynn which is illegal. Further, the FBI agents who interviewed Flynn stated that they thought he was not intentionally misleading anyone. The prosecution withheld exculpatory evidence which is also illegal. Why Flynn? Because Flynn was going to find out about the phony collusion FBI/CIA operation and tell Trump about it. They needed to keep this phony operation going to be able to get the dirt on Trump to get him removed. In my view, this is vastly bigger than any other political scandal in American history and the heads of this operation need to go to prison so that it never happens again. In January 2017 the FBI know the Steele dossier was garbage and the collusion myth a lie. Yet the investigation continued for another 2 years and some good people had their lives ruined.
MikeM
It’s pretty clear you don’t understand what the model does or assumes.
David Young,
“Yet the investigation continued for another 2 years and some good people had their lives ruined.â€
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We might expect those actually deserving of having their lives ruined will now suffer that fait. The cast of political, FBI, and intelligence agency criminals is long and infamous. I hope they all suffer a great deal and for a very long time. I doubt most will, but I hope at least the worst of them do. They betrayed the public trust and should be ashamed of themselves. They are not…. which is why they need jail time.
MikeM
Well… It wouldn’t change it much if the central estimate in the prior was close to right. As many were picked based on studies, it’s not unlikely they were close to right. (E.G. The estiamate for infectious period exposure period etc were from a chinese study– and not one using any method similar to Annans.)
If you want, you can download the code, use a totally different prior and see if it moves.
Well, the model wouldn’t be able to explain the data if the Ro changed if unbeknowst to us, the Wicked Witch of the West placed a curse on the planet and caused the rate to go up, nor if Glinda the good predicted otherwise.
Well…. it may not alter it, but it seems like a silly criticism. The purpose of the model is to try to examine the change associated with a policy change. That’s what it does. Your complaint seems to be that’s what it does!
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Look, I’m not really sure what your complaint is. Yes: the model contains some assumptions. It looks to see if a drastic change in social policy changed Ro associated with an SEIR. It seems to have, and that model seems to have decent explanatory power.
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If your gripe is that the fact that this model seems to fit the data well, doesn’t mean some other model might not also do so: That’s correct. Some other model might also do so. In which case, someone who has an idea for a different model can come up with it and see if it also works well. Maybe it will. In such a case we’ll have competing models, and competing explanations.
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That would be useful. Some people have suggested things that might matter– but haven’t come up with a model as simple as Annan’s that actually fits the data. They are “models in someone’s head”. They might work– but they might not.
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But the fact that the model has a few assumptions is not a weakness. All models have assumptions!! The fact that it looks to see if a very strong and obvious intervention that was intended to change Ro and estimates the magnitude of the change is not a weakness of the model!
Yes SteveF, I hope for the same thing. I actually am starting to think however that Durham and Barr may bring the biggest set of indictments in American history. I’d be really surprised if there isn’t a huge paper trail of emails and texts between the heads of this conspiracy and their troops. I also think at least one conspirator is cooperating with Durham. The noise of the approaching four horsemen of doom would also explain why Schiff, McCabe, Comey, and even Obama are doing their best to spin this before the fact. It’s already documented that this went all the way to the Oval Office.
Another sign of things to come: Schiff released the transcripts of the hearings into the collusion hoax along with a statement doubling down on the collusion hoax. And Palosi seems more and more unhinged and desperate. I think they know winter is coming.
“Despite the many barriers put in our way by the then-Republican Majority, and attempts by some key witnesses to lie to us and obstruct our investigation, the transcripts that we are releasing today show precisely what Special Counsel Robert Mueller also revealed: That the Trump campaign, and Donald Trump himself, invited illicit Russian help, made full use of that help, and then lied and obstructed the investigations in order to cover up this misconduct,†Schiff said in a statement.
SteveF – sorry about that. I am from NZ, and “our” refers NZ. And I meant, “Live” not “Leave”. Not drunk, just rotten typist and even worse proof-reader.
David Young,
Schiff is a political hack. Nothing is going to change that so long as he is in office. He would have been an excellent addition to Stalin’s secret police.
The problem with the case against Comey, McCabe et.al. is that since the MSM has never covered what actually happened, they can get quotes from McCabe and Comey and publish them without comment as if they were trustworthy. So the average Joe who gets his news from the most trusted news reader in the US (Lester Holt, NBC News) probably does think that dropping the charges against Flynn was purely political and that Barr is corrupt.
Needless to say there was no mention on NBC of the emails between Strzok and Page or the withholding of exculpatory information by the FBI.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #184511): “So the average Joe who gets his news from the most trusted news reader in the US (Lester Holt, NBC News) probably does think that dropping the charges against Flynn was purely political and that Barr is corrupt.”
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Indeed. Yet another reason that criminal charges need to be laid against the actual guilty parties.
Well, Once indictments are unsealed, public opinion becomes secondary. At that point its every man for himself and those least committed to the cause start to turn state’s evidence.
lucia (Comment #184476)
Oh, I know what it does. It spends a lot of time and consumes a lot of CPU resources to produce, what I must admit is, a very pretty graph. The only real objection I have to this model is it’s obvious lack of forecasting skill, but I’m guessing that we’re supposed to just ignore this minor shortcoming.
skeptical
Except it has pretty good forecasting skill!
lucia (Comment #184521): “Except it has pretty good forecasting skill!”
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Can you point me to some examples?
Flynn explicitly admitted guilt twice. He also admitted guilt to crimes for which he was not charged. What should we do about those?
The New York Times summarizes its assessment of dropping the Flynn case in its “morning briefing” email:
This article on cognitive biases seems apt.
Flynn lied to the FBI.
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Adam Schiff lied to everybody. John Brennan lied to Congress. McCabe lied about disclosures on the FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation. The list probably goes on. What should we do about those?
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Flynn has lost millions trying to defend himself. Schiff, Brennan, and McCabe have paid no comparable price.
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Regarding not registering as a foreign agent, puhleeze. Times were just about nobody registered as a foreign agent. Let me rephrase that — times were it was not a serious matter to ignore registering as a foreign agent. I don’t actually know how many people registered, but I read that many who should have did not.
Strzok lied to the FBI about his affair with Page.
Clinesmith falsified information on a FISA warrant application.
What are we going to do about that?
Thomas Fuller,
A threat like “We are going to throw your son in jail for a very long time if you don’t plead guilty and cooperate” may have had something to do with it.
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Please lay out each of the other crimes he admitted to but was not charged with. Please leave off the list “Logan Act violations” and “making false statements” during an unlawful perjury trap.
Steve,
1. He didn’t register as a foreign agent and admitted he should have.
2. He violated the speed limit multiple times, traveling in excess of 7 miles an hour above the prescribed limit.
3. He removed tags from his mattress at home.
4. Sources say there may be a library book the adolescent Flynn never returned to a junior high school.
Thomas, You appear to be smart but your comment on Flynn is dumb. Flynn plead guilty because he was bankrupt and to keep his son from being hounded into bankruptcy too. This case was a total sham from day one.
Thomas Fuller,
I do not know how many indictments will come from John Durham’s investigation. It won’t be zero. Those charged will have actually committed crimes, not just offended the sensibilities of a lame duck president who was facing the dismantling of his mostly lawless ‘legacy’.
I forgot Comey. Comey lied to Congress about not authorizing leaking information to the media.
Been a while since I’ve seen so much whataboutism in such a short period.
The National Security Advisor of the United States of America was taking money under the table from Turkey while in office.
And that sonuvabitch is not in jail?
Whataboutism? I can fix that for you.
You are a hypocrite without principle, who has no real interest in justice but pretends to have one where convenient to use the law against your political opponents. You embody the absolute worst of the Left, Thomas.
Justice needs to be impartial and applied equally, or it’s not justice at all.
The SEIR model is used in epidemiology and is discussed and used in peer review papers in that field. Annan’s model and forecasts are strictly based on that model. There are published R and Python coded programs from several sources that the Annan model borrows. For my purposes the fitted parameter of interest is Rt. Rt is the forecasting parameter. That forecast can only be relevant for the period of time that the underlying factors affecting Rt (and not Ro) hold at the same or near same level. If those factors are changing the model Rt (forecast) changes, which is, of course, what you want the model to do and inform.
Critiquing any version of the SEIR model is good and part of the learning process – providing you understand what the model is doing and the assumptions it makes. I want to understand the model better by constructing my own versions of the model and determine if a simpler model might perform as well.
Left, yada yada, hypocrite, yada yada, no real interest in justice yada yada.
Mark you seem to want to discuss a wide array of fascinating subjects.
None of them include Flynn’s admitted guilt to betraying his country.
Justice needs to be impartial and applied equally, or it’s not justice at all. Agree or disagree?
Flynn betrayed his country. Agree or disagree?
I will digress with you, if you will do me the courtesy of eventually returning to my point.
In what way did Flynn betray his country?
[Edit: I am aware he lied to the FBI and that he did not register as a foreign agent. I do not see in what way this means he betrayed his country, so I disagree, but I am listening if you are willing both to explain your point and eventually return to mine.]
Are you referring to this?
Perhaps you refer to Flynns work as a foreign agent for Turkey. The idea that there was any conflict of interest there has been acknowledged incorrect:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/12/20/judge-implied-flynn-was-traitor-who-committed-treason-what-does-that-actually-mean/
(emphasis added)
Trump Derangement Syndrome turns seemingly rational blog commenters into partisan trolls.
Agree of disagree?
Thomas Fuller (Comment #184524): “Flynn explicitly admitted guilt twice. He also admitted guilt to crimes for which he was not charged. What should we do about those?”
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We should try, convict, and imprison those who misused their offices to persecute and blackmail Flynn.
——–
Thomas Fuller (Comment #184534): “The National Security Advisor of the United States of America was taking money under the table from Turkey while in office.”
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That is a very serious charge. Do you have any evidence?
There is very strong evidence to the contrary: People using massive government resources searched like mad for something and could find nothing more than a questionable paperwork violation.
———–
Thomas Fuller (Comment #184539): “Flynn betrayed his country.”
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That is slander.
Earle (Comment #184542): “Trump Derangement Syndrome turns seemingly rational blog commenters into partisan trolls.
Agree of disagree?”
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Agree! 🙂
Russian collusion anyone? Anyone? Anyone? I’m sorry, did we get cutoff? Ha ha. It seems like only yesterday so many earnest faces breathlessly covered every leaf falling from the tree of Russia collusion. Now it’s what, Logan act, registering as something, lying during a perjury trap? Those are some pretty meager rotten acorns. Ha ha.
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Flynn is really beside the point and only a pawn in this mess. I have no idea if he is a scumbag or innocent bystander. The real story is the FBI’s complicity in politically motivated investigations and their willingness to selectively enforce their own rules to achieve predetermined outcomes, and to not hold their own effing people to the same effing standards they espouse from their pedestals of “honor and integrity”. Trump and his administration may be a car full of clowns, but they deserve to be held to the same standards as everyone else. Instead we get another car full of clowns trying to bring down the first car of clowns.
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It just looks like a clown fight to everyone who isn’t a dedicated partisan, because it is exactly that, a clown fight.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-coronavirus-and-project-fear-3-0-11588869841?emailToken=4150b7694b0cb7642048dcbb01e33dc2pnVffQYAeIloTKSiVMe6HUv4055qUeIil+YQNs6IVYV3MwGfdyUlnsqyCsKxKAKITuB8nPHx0NRc6fjqnptpmlCfFXLhgFffrzciCCJKQn0%3D&reflink=article_imessage_share
has an explanation for the Karens phenomenon.
A summary of Flynn’s case from that right wing mouthpiece, NPR:
https://www.npr.org/2020/05/08/852582068/mike-flynn-pleaded-guilty-why-is-the-justice-department-dropping-the-charges
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“First, they turned state’s evidence. Initially, prosecutors called him a model cooperator and told a judge they would be fine if he received a sentence of only probation, even though federal guidelines contemplated at least a few months in prison.
The longer Flynn cooperated, however, the more fraught became his relationship with the feds. After giving prosecutors everything they wanted in the Russia matter, Flynn became less forthcoming when the government brought a case against his former business partner, prosecutors said.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for Washington D.C., which took the prosecutorial baton from special counsel Robert Mueller’s office, told a judge that it thought Flynn should be sentenced to as many as six months.”
T Fuller: “Flynn betrayed his country. Agree or disagree?”
Ridiculous. He got ensnared in a perjury trap that had no relationship to anything of substance.
…….
Here is a former FBI agent describing the corrupt (and most probably criminal behavior) of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page:
……
“For more than half a century, FBI agents conducting interviews have been required to memorialize any information that might become testimony, on a form called the FD-302. It was always considered the interviewing agent’s FD-302. Supervisors never modified it; its purpose was to reflect what the agent observed and heard from the witness or suspect. As an FBI supervisor, I reviewed hundreds of FD-302s. Other than an occasional grammatical correction, I never changed a word.
So it was shocking for me to read the newly released text messages between Peter Strzok, then deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, and Lisa Page. They show that after Mr. Strzok and Agent Joe Pientka interviewed Mr. Flynn, Mr. Strzok heavily edited Mr. Pientka’s FD-302—to the point that he told Ms. Page he was “trying not to completely re-write†it. Even more shocking, Ms. Page, an FBI attorney who wasn’t an agent and wasn’t at the interview, provided edits.
Worse still, the FD-302 that was eventually provided to the court wasn’t that of the agents’ interview of Mr. Flynn. It was instead a FD-302 of an interview of Mr. Strzok, conducted months later, about his recollections of the original interview. Truly bizarre.” https://www.wsj.com/articles/rewrite-in-flynns-case-shows-fbi-needs-reform-11588541993
…..
Of course, the original 302 is missing as of now, which is truly disgraceful.
……
If you want to talk about betrayal of the country, the person you should focus on is Adam Schiff who lied to cover up the attempted intelligence agency coup. One of his silliest and most corrupt lies was that publication of the FISA application was a serious risk to the security of the US. That such a thoroughly dishonorable person led the impeachment proceedings shows how fake they were and what a disgrace they were.
Thomas Fuller above demonstrates precisely what I mentioned above. If you only get your news from partisan sources like NBC News or the NYT, you have a completely different view of what happened than, say, if you rely on the editorial pages of the WSJ.
Speaking of which, in today’s WSJ, we have an article about Cuomo wanting the out-of-state health care volunteers to pay NY state income tax on their earnings.
And then there’s this:
******
T Fuller: “Flynn explicitly admitted guilt twice. He also admitted guilt to crimes for which he was not charged. What should we do about those?”
……
Flynn was following the instructions of his attorneys (who incidentally had an agreement with the prosecutors which was not disclosed to him) who undoubtedly told him that even if he was innocent, his son would be indicted and there was a substantial chance that the govt could manufacture a case against him.
……
Although I have never handled criminal cases, I have entered civil settlements into the record with judges. The client is told if you want to settle, you say, “yes, yes, yes…” If you raise any issues, the case won’t settle. Flynn was undoubtedly told the same thing with respect to his guilty plea, which he was entering on the advice of incompetent (and probably dishonest) attorneys who had conflicts of interest. It is not the least bit uncommon for innocent people to plead guilty in the same manner that Flynn did.
Foster was murdered! Kill Bill.
Pizzagate! Kill Hillary.
Muslim! Kill Obama.
Flynn: I am guilty of the crimes I am accused of. Free Mikey!!!
Thomas Fuller,
Since you ignore my rebuttal and instead post ..this.. whatever it is, I take it you concede your errors.
Thomas Fuller,
The most recent post of yours is nothing other than a series of meaningless snark. It’s really not conversation, debate, news or anything useful. I request you post arguments or information.
Quod erat demonstrandum.
On a more upbeat topic, in Alaska the reported number of tests for COVID-19 is increasing around 600 per day. The reported number of new cases is down to around two per day. Confirmed cases is about 1.5% of all tested.
It is spring and leaves and tree pollen are busting out all over. My wife and kids and I are all hunkered down together and still on speaking terms with each other. Tonight we will break out Dama’s mah-jong tile set and attempt to learn the game my mother-in-law enjoyed immensely.
Thomas Fuller,
“Foster was murdered! Kill Bill.
Pizzagate! Kill Hillary.
Muslim! Kill Obama.
Flynn: I am guilty of the crimes I am accused of. Free Mikey!!!”
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1) There is absolutely no evidence Foster was murdered.
2) There is zero evidence Hillary was ever involved in child abuse of any kind.
3) Barack Obama spend part of his childhood surrounded by Muslims. There is no evidence he was ever himself a Muslim.
4) There is overwhelming evidence Flynn was the target of an FBI perjury trap. That is why the case against him was dropped.
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You are yourself as delusional about Flynn as people who believe numbers 1 to 3 above. Flynn is not going to jail. Some miscreants who abused the power of their offices at the FBI are. Get over it.
I actually think Trump would do well to hire Flynn as a “senior advisor” to the National Security Council. He has a breath of experience that can help in formulating prudent foreign policy.
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I also like the “rub their noses in it” aspect.
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Obama, his lame-duck officials, and his holdovers acted dishonestly and immorally, and should be held to account. If that is not possible (and in most cases, unfortunately, it will not be), then at least let them know that their efforts to sideline Flynn completely failed.
Good article on stay-at-home orders and people staying at home:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-didnt-wait-for-their-governors-to-tell-them-to-stay-home-because-of-covid-19/
Large numbers started staying at hone starting around March 14 and the number reached a plateau around March 23. Very similar in all states. Almost all the change occurred before stay-at-home orders were issued.
Reading over Thomas’s non-sequitur comments, I fear he has terminal TDS; he now seems completely incapable of reasoned analysis. Too bad.
Perhaps SteveF, Flynn could become FBI director and clean house the way Wray doesn’t seem to be doing.
Steve,
Yes. I’d be astonished that a progressive like Thomas actually argued that equal treatment under the law is actually just whataboutism, except that I’ve come to expect a fairly low standard from him these days.
It is too bad.
David Young,
In fairness to Wray, I suspect he thinks most of the worst have been thrown out, and he wants to protect the structure/experience of the organization. I personally think he is mistaken, and that political bias extends from top to bottom in the FBI. Even though the entire Comey cabal was blatantly biased, we have heard nothing (not a peep!) about others at the FBI filing internal complaints of bias. The only way that can happen is if political bias is accepted by the entire organization.
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I don’t think there is yet a clear mandate from the top: “if you display even an appearance of political bias in anything you do or say, then you will be immediately firedâ€, backed up by a series of summary firings. Heck, he should long ago have fired every single agent even remotely associated with Crossfire Hurricane, Crossfire Razor, and each of the applications for FICA search warrants of Trump campaign staffers. Every single one of them should have been screaming about the blatant bias. They didn’t. They should be gone. I don’t think Wray will ever do any of that. He should.
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My guess is Wray stays through the election in November. If Trump wins re-election, then Wray will be gone forthwith. Whoever Trump chooses to replace him will be far less tolerant of political bias than Wray.
JD Ohio, there is no recording of the FBI interview with Flynn or a transcript of the interview with Flynn. There is only notes taken by the FBI agents, which are then written up into a summary, which can be edited by the agents to fit a preferred narrative.
Mike N,
The only reason to not record audio and video of each interview is to hide from the target that what they say is being recorded. The existence of “302’s†when actual recordings can be made is a travesty of justice, and an invitation for agents to slant the ‘memorializing’ of any interview against (or for) the target. If Christopher Wray wants credibility, and proof the FBI has improved, he need only ban 302’s and make it FBI policy to only use audio and video recordings of interviews. He won’t. That is but one of the reason’s he should be replaced.
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Police dashboard and body cams have improved police work and caused immediate dismissal of bogus claims of abuse against police. The FBI should do no less.
SteveF (Comment #184566): “In fairness to Wray, I suspect he thinks most of the worst have been thrown out, and he wants to protect the structure/experience of the organization. I personally think he is mistaken, and that political bias extends from top to bottom in the FBI.”
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Indeed. What happened to Flynn is now built into the structure and experience of the organization. At least at the upper levels, it is thoroughly corrupt.
It is not entirely political. A big part of the problem is the abuses of power that inevitably follows from having the opportunity to abuse power. And even the political partisans would honestly deny being political. They are just defending the Good, the True, and American Values. As they see it. That can be even scarier than naked partisanship, since the latter has the capacity for shame.
I suspect the rot does not extend all the way to the bottom. My guess is that there is a filtering mechanism on who rises to the upper echelons. You either embrace the culture or stop advancing.
Mike N “JD Ohio, there is no recording of the FBI interview with Flynn or a transcript of the interview with Flynn. There is only notes taken by the FBI agents, ”
……
The original notes should be preserved, as was stated by the Agent who wrote the WSJ article. Summaries or whatever that can be “edited” (changed) without any record of the original are fraudulent. People can and will change the statements of the people testifying to achieve their own goals, which a fair amount of time will be to convict someone even when the conviction is not justified. This practice is particularly disgraceful when you can be convicted for lying to the FBI.
……
The justification for the practice is that FBI techniques can often be brutal or dishonest and the FBI doesn’t want the jury to see what is going on. In my mind, the only way that these survive is that defense attorneys have decided that more often than not, they have stronger arguments to make against notes than when there are recorded statements. Until I heard of this about 4 years ago, if anyone had asked me whether I would let my client be questioned in this manner, I would have thought it was a joke in that the procedure is so absolutely crazy.
I can also add from my own experience that it is impossible to remember a conversation from something like a month earlier. If people are going to do that, it is better not to have the questioning at all.
Lucia: “Thomas Fuller, The most recent post of yours is nothing other than a series of meaningless snark.”
Thank you.
> Until I heard of this about 4 years ago,
Have you reconsidered what you were saying back then?
Mike M,
“ My guess is that there is a filtering mechanism on who rises to the upper echelons.â€
.
You may be right about that. But in any case, those who exercise power at the FBI appear a) uniformly dishonest and b) extremely biased against anyone who does not share their political views. When agent Strzok testified before Congress, my reaction after an hour or so was “How is it possible that such a dishonest worm ever got hired by the FBI in the first place, never mind promoted many times?†Really, it is not even fair to worms describe him as a worm; real worms are not so dishonest. There are serious structural problems at the FBI, and if the organization is going to continue to exist, they need to get out of politics completely.
lucia (Comment #184521)
American humor?
In a WSJ article today the author, Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., puts the Flynn FBI debacle in a light similar to how I view it.
What I see most of the media doing in the present time is ignoring any actions from big government to which they once upon time might have reacted because it was misusing its power or even having too much power and as practical matter because it was newsworthy. With the media in the form of the likes of the NYT and the WP being our intelligentsia and whose ideas and opinions influence the politicians and the public, I see little hope in the current situation, where the intelligentsia is in bed with big government and their advocates, of getting back to the times where the media was more inclined to investigate all matters and not just those that promoted a certain agenda.
lucia (Comment #184521): “Except it has pretty good forecasting skill!”
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Lucia has not justified that claim, so I went looking and found
http://rankexploits.com/musings/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/KennethsGraph.png
Maybe that is what she meant.
Checking the forecast deaths for IL, based on data through April 16. Actual numbers from the COVID tracking project.
April 17: 55 (36-86), actual: 62
April 17-23: 330 (190-580), actual: 616
April 17-30: 866 (866-1866), actual: 1283
April 17-May 31: 866 (866-2866), actual so far (May 8): 2169
It looks like maybe some typos on the graph, or maybe I misread it.
I suppose that one could argue that 3 of the 4 predictions are in range, so that amounts to some skill. But “pretty good”, nope. At least not when the error bars are so wide for the short intervals and the through May value looks sure to end up being wrong.
Looks to me like no forecasting skill at all.
Time to boycott the media. They are simply partisan hacks.
If indictments are unsealed they will be unable to avoid covering it but will be echo chambers for the defense lawyers.
Mike N: “Have you reconsidered what you were saying back then?” No, if anything it is worse.
Selection bias in the media is a huge problem, and they are willfully blind to it. Tara Reade and FBI abuse are only the latest in a long series of examples. By not covering these stories with the same vigor they cover those that fit their preferred narrative they convince themselves they have integrity, but it is simply lying by omission.
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The moralizing they do frequently in “news analysis” is also absent when the narrative doesn’t fit. They rarely quote outraged people such as in the Reade story, while filling the papers with pictures of Hand Maidens in front of the Supreme Court and citizens dressing down Senators in elevators at other times.
Tom Scharf,
The MSM are simply dishonest, and have been since before Ronald Reagan was elected president. The dishonesty has grown worse as the MSM have adopted ever more ‘progressive’ policies as their own. Ignoring the MSM is perfectly reasonable. The MSM are populated with social justice warriors from colleges and universities, where they were indoctrinated by graying socialist professors who grew up in the 1960’s and 1970’s, rarely if ever held a productive job, and who believed, in their drug addled minds, all the rubbish from Woodstock and the first ‘Earth Days’. I think the only sensible policy is to stop providing public funding for attending colleges and universities. Such funding is only subsidizing the undermining of the Constitution by people who known nothing of substance.
Mike M
The graph is here
Three out of four outcomes in range is pretty good especially relative to other models. Could we wish for better? Sure. But this is certainly more skillful than the Ferguson Imperial college model or others floating around.
If the model Rt fit changes the forecast will change. The Rt change indicates underlying factor changes. If I were a Pritzker- or even a Karen – I would be watching that model indicator like a hawk. If I were a MikeM or a skeptical not so much.
Kenneth,
Who is ‘Karen”?
I very much doubt skepical cares what the model projections are…. he wants all lockdowns to continue until the risk to the elderly is zero.
SteveF,
Either you’re having a senior moment or you haven’t been paying attention. It’s not Karen, it’s a Karen. See here.
This was all explained upthread in several posts.
I see the FDA has approved an antigen test similar to tests for the flu and strep on an emergency use basis that can give results in minutes and can be run on instruments that already exist in many places (~36,000 in place). The down side is that the sensitivity is only 85%, so 15% false negatives. There was no information on false positives in the article
lucia (Comment #184588): “Three out of four outcomes in range is pretty good especially relative to other models.”
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One of those is only in range because we still have three weeks to go in May. One of the others was for the next day, any fool can do that.
To illustrate: I predict that one year from today, the Dow will be at 30,000 with a range of 15,000 to 40,000. I am quite certain of the actual value being in range. But I claim no skill in predicting what the stock market will do.
DeWitt,
I wasn’t paying attention. I never pay attention to social memes. Never will.
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Other reports are that false positives in the test are very low. Not sure how much this helps. The current testing has showed between 4 out of 5 and 19 out of 20 who where thought they might have the virus don’t have it. A test with 15% false negatives doesn’t seem to help much if you are approaching a needle in a haystack positive rate.
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I think more useful would be a rapid blood antibody test with very low false negatives to show who is a minimal risk of becoming infected or becoming a carrier.
MikeM,
Skill of a model is determined relative to a “reference skill” level and relative to it’s own stated uncertainty. You may not like this, but that’s the way it’s done.
Whether we consider your forecast’s skill “pretty good” depends on how well we expect other people doing the same thing do it. Once again: you might not like it, but that’s the way it’s done.
Mike M,
“the Dow will be at 30,000 with a range of 15,000 to 40,000.”
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Business contacts from around the world are all telling me the same thing: sales are drastically off in most industries, even those that only involve business-to-business sales. I would not be so certain of 15,000 as the lower plausible end.
Mike M,
The stand-up comedy model from the University of Washington projects deaths in Illinois for May 31 somewhere between 11 and 185. That is giving yourself some leeway I guess. The truth is the models have been horribly wrong and driven destructive public policies from before the pandemic was even underway in most places. The Annan-Hargreaves model has wide uncertainty, but seems immune to post-hock “expert” tweaks that have made the better known models nothing short of ridiculous.
SteveF wrote (Comment #184350) May 5th, 2020 at 7:43 am
“Frank, Quarantine of everyone, regardless of whether or not they are sick or known to have come in contact with someone who is, is a violation of the first amendment and others. These laws, and especially their implementation, will be challenged, and I hope declared unconstitutional by the SC. Badly written laws that are misapplied by local officials ought not be allowed to negate Constitutional protections of personal rights.”
Nevertheless, quarantine of a ship entering a port has been perfectly legal for centuries, even though the authorities don’t know for sure who is sick and who is not. And the Trump administration initially quarantined on military bases the Americans they flew back from China and passengers from a cruise ship – without clear evidence of who was sick and who was not. (They may have released them too soon.)
If you actually read the National Constitution Center podcast transcript I linked, you’ll find state public health laws have been repeatedly upheld in the past. With 50 states, however, it is hard to say precisely has been upheld. However, what you call “Badly written laws that are misapplied by local officials” have withstood judicial review by courts with the responsibility striking a proper balance between protecting our liberties and exercising of the powers Americans chose to grant to their governments. One of the wonderful things about the NCC podcasts is that they usually involve a respectful conversation between two legal scholars on a particular topic: one who tends to favor more government and one who tends to favor less government. While I tend to sympathize with the latter position, I find the basics both sides agree upon valuable, and I come away with a better understanding of how tightly constrained the SC is by precedents that make some sense to me. My instincts are often humbled.
As for our first amendment right to assemble PEACEFULLY, that means we must do so in a manner that doesn’t ENDANGER our fellow citizens. Our rights certainly don’t include the right to endanger others via improper disposal of human waste (cholera), burning trash in cities, driving a car without a catalytic converter, selling food prepared under unsanitary conditions, failing to control mosquitos in wet areas threatened with malaria and yellow fever, and so on. Rights come with responsibilities (including a military draft). Fortunately, history has been kind those alive today, and we haven’t NEEDED to take drastic action to protect public heath in our lifetime. Several Asian countries learned from their failure to take drastic action against SARS and MERS, and were much better prepared for COVID-19.
I do completely agree with Lucia that irresponsible people unlikely to be personally harmed by COVID-19 are increasingly likely to violate quarantine, especially under the influence of our self-absorbed and undisciplined leaders. As Prohibition proved, persisting in banning practices most people don’t find dangerous is grossly counterproductive. Germany didn’t have a mandatory lockdown, but fear, government recommendations and better testing has accomplished more than our mandatory rules. IMO, we need mandatory rules in densely populated areas where many people are afraid, not rural areas that can sensibly decide for themselves whether to make state guidelines mandatory.
Nevertheless, when a family member needs to take the Washington DE Metro back to work, I don’t think anyone has the right to use those public facilities without a face mask and hand sanitizer. At the moment, such measures aren’t mandatory. That is idiocy. People aren’t going to return to work until they (and older family members) feel safe.
We already have one mutant strain of SARS-CoV-2 that is spreading faster than the Wuhan strain, is producing higher levels of viral RNA and is possibly more lethal. It is possible that unrecognized mutations could be (or may already be) making a much larger percentage of those infected seriously ill. Or resistant to the vaccine everyone is expecting. Public health authorities have enormous power because we have experienced pandemics far more dangerous than this one has been – so far. As several famous people have noted: “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.” It is perfectly sensible to debate how much those ignoring rules about social distancing are actually endangering other Americans or whether those rules are sensibly protecting Americans. However, let’s not declare the powers we have granted to public health authorities unconstitutional. You may want them back some day.
Respectfully, Frank
Frank,
“Nevertheless, quarantine of a ship entering a port has been perfectly legal for centuries, even though the authorities don’t know for sure who is sick and who is not.”
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A thoughtful comparison of a small pea and a giant pumpkin if I ever saw one.
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I read three relevant Supreme court rulings. None had anything at all to do with wholesale quarantines of people not suspected of being sick nor suspected of having been in contact with someone who is. The right of authorities to quarantine people who are sick has always been upheld, but that is not what the issue is here.
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I am pleased you like hearing both sides of an argument from the National Constitution Center. Sounds like it could be informative.
Too bad that is not what they presented in this case.
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Sounds like you think people who are unlikely to be harmed are selfish losers. OK, I get that. But I will note that those people are probably 90% of the population. To what extend does 90% of the population have to endure loss of income and loss of freedom without complaint? Do you go along with Governors Cuomo and Murphey, who insist any level of economic destruction is OK so long as a single life is saved? Should children not attend school….. indefinitely? Should entire industries be stopped and people be unemployed until all the the franks and Karens out there are satisfied that not a single extra death will happen? (not rhetorical questions)
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What should be done if reducing the risk of death is the goal is to focus on protecting those who are actually at risk of death, not the entire population. What has happened is not just a grotesque infringement on liberty, but ineffective, destructive and wasteful.
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“The Constitution is not a suicide pact.”
Please. The original quote had nothing to do with the issue at hand. I suggest that the constitution ought not be permanently made null and void based on the policy preferences of governors… or any other politicians, and that is what is happening right now. That is why I think ultimately the courts will place limits on them.
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” However, let’s not declare the powers we have granted to public health authorities unconstitutional. You may want them back some day.”
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I do declare them exactly that: profoundly unconstitutional, and profoundly dangerous to personal liberty. I think they will ultimately be revised via changes in most state laws and constitutions, if not directly struck down by the SC. (A bit like the idiotic Kelo decision by the Court led to nearly all states banning either by statute or state constitutional amendment what happened to Kelo and her neighbors.) I most certainly will never want canceling of Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms to ever be an option for governors…. or anyone else.
The problem here is an ill-posedness problem. These epidemiological models like climate models are solving an ill-posed problem and so their results are very dependent on the parameters chosen for the model.
With climate models, they are run on such coarse grids that the truncation errors exceed the changes in energy flows being sought by at least an order of magnitude. Thus skill can only be expected for outputs used in tuning the models. All other outputs have zero expectation of accuracy or skill. Despite a 20 year disinformation campaign by Schmidt among others, this analysis is mathematically correct. Now after the disinformation campaign Stevens and Palmer finally essentially acknowledge that it’s correct. Climate science is a hopelessly politicized very dishonest field infested with activists who are willing to tell any lie for political advantage.
The fact of the matter is that epidemics are strongly dependent on very small details of behaviour and virus mutation over time. It’s virtually impossible to predict with any accuracy. The best we can do is measure accurately the IFR as a function of age etc. and use that for targeted policies.
The fact that Annan has some valid criticisms of Ferguson’s model means nothing. All these models are going to be wrong, perhaps disastrously so.
Frank, I fear you are misinterpreting the Constitution.
Even during the Civil War which was perhaps the most existential event in American history, the Supreme Court did not uphold Lincoln’s rather limited impositions of martial law. Everyone knew these orders were questionable including Lincoln who argued that the Constitution was not a suicide pack. And everyone knew they were of questionable legality.,
The problem here is that this epidemic is not an existential threat. Far from it, its probably comparable to the Hong Kong flu when there were no suspensions of the Bill of Rights. Barr is starting to take legal action to reign in petty tyrants who are suspending these rights.
Further, one must also generally show that your actions are proportionate to the threat. There is no such showing here. Governors, such as our governor double digit IQ has merely suspended the Bill of Rights on the assumption that he would not be challenged.
There is the further problem of just and equal application of the suspension of rights. In Washington state, there is gross favoritism involved. Boeing has been allowed to reopen whereas small businesses are not even though building commercial airplanes is absolutely not an essential activity when market demand is negative. Our governor is a petty tyrant who yields to the powerful while intimidating the powerless. But tyrants always do this. That’s why we have the Bill of Rights.
Frank
Well… that’s not quite why I said. I said people are increasingly likely to violate quaratie. The “irresponsible people unlikely to be personally harmed by COVID-19” is entirely your interjection. My 88 yo mom who is likely to be harmed is also unlikely to start violating quarantine. So are people who merely want to be able to pay their rent and pay for food whether or not they are likely to be harmed.
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I think pretty much everyone is going to start violating it. That includes (a) the responsible and (b) those who can be harmed. Some will violate because they are responsible and willing to risk themselves for others who depend on them. Others will violate because the are irreponsible and willing to risk harm to others merely to increase their own… pleasure(?), amusement (?) whatever….
I previously said…
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skeptikal (Comment #183423)
April 22nd, 2020 at 2:46 am
Well, I might have been wrong… it looks like peak deaths in Illinois may have happened a couple of days ago. It’s still too early to tell for sure, but I’m guessing this is the peak.
skeptikal,
Might be. But with the weekly cycle in reporting issues, I figure we should never call the peak on a weekend. Today’s deaths will probably drop (because it’s Sunday). Tuesdays will probably be up because that’s the day that’s often high. At home I’m looking at weekly averages and daily.
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It may be moving out into the collar counties and beyond a bit more too.
Here we go again.
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“Coronavirus spread accelerates again in Germanyâ€
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https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-germany-cases/coronavirus-spread-accelerates-again-in-germany-idUSKBN22M019
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I think this is the same outfit that rushed out a claim out a claim on April 28 about another spike barely a week after restrictions were eased on April 20. (COVID-19 still is considered to have a 5-7 day average incubation period?)
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While it’s always possible they have more up-to-date data than Worldometer, that didn’t seem to pan out with the earlier claim, at least from the standpoint of the visual graph. (I am using the everyday definition of “spike” here.)
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https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/germany/
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On a related note, media reports are out about a spike in S. Korea. I won’t chance offending the filter by pasting in another link, but folks can find the S. Korea data on worldometer for themselves.
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Finally, it’s disappointing worldometer has stopped showing the seven day moving average. It was really helpful with Germany, which has a clear seven day oscillation in its data. Maybe it was clogging up the website.
John,
7 day averages are definitely useful almost everywhere. Nearly everyone has weekend reporting issues. I’m hunting around for which online data is consistently fresh and going to switch to always looking at 7 day center averages. I’ll just show weekly (not a smooth since that tempts the brain to see trends where there is really only noise.)
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Yeah…Sweden’s reshuffled data isn’t reliable for 10 days… but their instantaneous “worldmeter” type reports wouldn’t be too bad if 7 days smoothed. It will lag– because not all deaths are reported yet, but at least that big sinusoid gets taken out.
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Given the various responses, and the way illness spread and evolves, I don’t think there’s much point in any smoothing other than a 7 day average to deal with the obvious reporting issues.
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I’ve found a nice set at github that has:
NewCases NewDeaths NewMild NewSevere NewCritical CurrentlyMild CurrentlySevere CurrentlyCritical
It has country and states. So I’ll be looking at that for Illinois pretty soon. (I need a site that updates more freshly for counties. The one I pulled from two days ago turns out to update infrequently. So it’s most recent data are 5/04. That’s still better than not being able to see county data at all… but I’d like to find something better– I know it exists..)
David Young,
I read the Palmer and Steven’s article. They say the climate models are not fit for purpose if that purpose is detailed projections of future warming (and other effects), especially on regional scales. They also suggest that the only way the models become substantially more accurate… and more fit for purpose… is to greatly reduce grid size and to eliminate, to the extent possible, all sub-grid parameterizations….. which is where they say the models crash on the rocks.
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They are clearly pushing for a new generation of models which run on gigantic distributed systems over the internet (likely with millions or tens of millions of processors) and far smaller grid scales, to allow elimination of most parametrizations. I suspect they will not be taken seriously by the “modeling community”…. far too many vested interests…. but that is a different issue.
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I didn’t see anything about truncation errors being an order of magnitude larger than the changes in flow being modeled. Did I miss something in the article?
Lucia,
“…going to switch to always looking at 7 day center averages.”
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As big an issue as cyclical weekend reporting is the longish delay in getting accurate numbers, as we have been discussing for a while. Looks to me like the best you can do is to use the reported numbers from 9 or 10 days ago or more, and nothing newer… all the newer stuff is just wrong.
SteveF,
Yes. But using the lag time only really works with Sweden because they eventually put the deaths on the right day. The available – to – me sources for Illinois and the US never update. So all I have is the deaths reported on a particular day. That has a cycle, but it doesn’t go away with time because the numbers never get shifted to the actual death date.
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With that data, the best I can do is average over 7 days and just be aware that the deaths reported for “5-08-2020” in Illinois didn’t necessarily happen on 5-08-2020.
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The weekly average acts like a smoothing filter. But so would a temperature sensor with a finite response time in a lab. In this case, we really do need to smooth out that weekly sinusoid though because it definitely doesn’t tell us anything about the trend. We understand why it’s there. Just deal with lack of perfection in the data!
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SteveF (Comment #184616): ” Looks to me like the best you can do is to use the reported numbers from 9 or 10 days ago or more, and nothing newer… all the newer stuff is just wrong.”
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I agree with lucia. Seven day averages are the way to go. The last three days will be wrong, but before that should be OK.
Fantastic article on where the real risks are in transmitting the virus:
https://www.erinbromage.com/post/the-risks-know-them-avoid-them
“The principle is viral exposure over an extended period of time.”
He gives specific applications and examples.
Mike M,
Well… the article says things with great confidence. I’m not going to bet that you can’t catch it at the grocery store. Mind you: I’m still going to get groceries. I’m just not going to tell people they can’t get it there!
Mike M, Lucia,
I did not mean to suggest a 7-day rolling average is not needed…. of course it is. I was only suggesting that the final week of data, whether 7-day averaged on not, is going to be wrong, so it makes no sense to me use that last week in estimating/modeling the progress of the pandemic.
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I did an interesting (to me) calculation: I calculated the ratio of deaths to total confirmed cases for each state, using the Worldometer values. I had expected some states to look very bad (New York, New Jersey), but I was a little surprised by many of the truly “bad” states. Here are the ten states with the highest chance of death per confirmed case:
Michigan – 9.7%
Connecticut – 8.9%
New York – 7.8%
Louisiana – 7.2%
New Jersey – 7.6%
Pennsylvania – 6.5%
Massachusetts – 6.3%
Indiana – 6.3%
Oklahoma – 6.0%
Vermont – 5.8%
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Here are the 10 states with the lowest chance of death per confirmed case:
South Dakota – 1.0%
Wyoming – 1.1%
Utah – 1.1%
Nebraska – 1.2%
Tennessee – 1.6%
Iowa – 2.1%
Arkansas – 2.3%
North Dakota – 2.4%
Kansas – 2.5
Alaska – 2.6%
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The nation wide average is about 4.2% chance of death per confirmed case (Illinois is 4.4%). I thought the state values might be distorted by big differences in frequency of testing per million population, since more testing might catch more mild-symptom cases, so I plotted tests per million population in the same order as the chance of death per confirmed case. Result: no correlation (R^=0.0037). If anything, states with high chance of death per confirmed case have slightly more frequent testing than average, not less. That said, Oklahoma, Indiana, and Pennsylvania (the three most surprising states on the list of 10 “bad states”) all have tests per million population well below the national average, which may be making them look worse than they are. New York, New Jersey, Louisiana, and Massachusetts all have rates of testing well above the national average.
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I conclude that either:
1) The age profile of the people actually being infected must be very different in different places (that is, some states are isolating the elderly more effectively than others), or
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2) that the true rate of infection in places with high chance of death is actually much higher than reported, but young people who are not at serious risk are just not being tested at all, while elderly who are at risk are being tested like bejesus, yielding an apparent elevated chance of death per confirmed case.
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But maybe there is some other explanation I have not thought of.
lucia (Comment #184623): “the article says things with great confidence. I’m not going to bet that you can’t catch it at the grocery store”.
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It does not say can’t. It says that for a shopper “the opportunity to receive an infectious dose is low”.
Mike M,
That was a good article. Although clearly tempted, the author refrained from get on a soap box to lecture the deplorables on their evil ways, which I am sure was difficult for him. After he got past that initial temptation, the information he presented was very useful.
Mike M,
From your reference:
So playing golf is not so terrible after all. 😉
I don’t watch a lot of TV news. But has anyone noticed a TV talking head or public official who looks like he has not had a haircut for a couple months?
Quarantines obviously can serve a valid purpose, imagine an outbreak that is 10x more fatal and has a younger profile. I don’t question their usefulness. The real question is at what point * should * they be called and what happens when there is disagreement between the public and health officials / politicians.
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There would have been a lot of push back had NYC pushed for a severe lock down early on, which using the infinite wisdom of hindsight was needed. I think everyone learned a lesson that waiting for deaths to get out of control with a fast spreading virus with a mutli-week time to death is a very bad plan. It’s likely we will over learn that lesson as is the tendency to do so in shock events.
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However we can’t hand risk averse unelected bureaucrats the power to shutdown the economy at will. We need a a trustworthy group of people to make that decision. I’m not sure we have that.
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I read an article today about some US health official who thinks mandatory stays at a 2 week+ quarantine facility is required like they do in Asia. You can be jailed for not showing up. He states in home transmission as the problem. This will never pass muster in the US for this type of outbreak. These type of people worry me. I get a feeling that people probably refuse to get tested if it results in a sentence to quarantine jail.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/should-mild-coronavirus-cases-isolate-at-home-many-asian-countries-say-no-11589108401
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“At the time, the (SK) government didn’t have legal grounds to charge people who insisted on staying home. But in early March, it amended the infectious-disease law, allowing it to take action against those who refused to follow orders. Health authorities determined whether a patient needed to go to a hospital or a residential treatment facility, and individuals couldn’t contest their decision.”
Jesse Waters on Fox looked like he was ready to return to the cave a couple of weeks ago. Haven’t seen him since then.
Tom Scharf,
South Korea is not the USA…. not in culture, not in diversity, and not in range of population density. South Koreans also don’t hold more than one gun per capita in their homes. Any attempt to enforce such a rule in the States would lead to violence.
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WRT a trusted group: though less trustworthy than we might hope, state legislatures are pretty much the only option we have. We have already seen that governors are clearly not up to the task, because one highly political individual is incapable of weighing often divergent and conflicting priorities of the voters. Not to mention often channeling their inner Stalin with useless but oppressive rules (think Gretchen Whitmer). Legislatures are more responsive to divergent priorities, especially if they are hamstrung by supermajority requirements. If a policy is really obviously the best, then getting a supermajority of a legislature is easy. Most policies from the petty tyrant governors would never get a supermajority in the legislatures.
Tom Scharf (Comment #184630): “Quarantines obviously can serve a valid purpose”
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Yes, but that means quarantining the sick, the exposed, and the most vulnerable. Instead we have been quarantining the healthy.
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Tom Scharf: “I read an article today about some US health official who thinks mandatory stays at a 2 week+ quarantine facility is required like they do in Asia. You can be jailed for not showing up. He states in home transmission as the problem. This will never pass muster in the US for this type of outbreak.”
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That would be a sensible policy, both far more effective and far less damaging than what we have.
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Tom Scharf: “I think everyone learned a lesson that waiting for deaths to get out of control with a fast spreading virus with a mutli-week time to death is a very bad plan.”
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But that is not what happened. Prior to Friday, March 13, when Trump declared an emergency, there were 51 deaths nationally, of which 44 were in Washington state.
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Through Sunday, March 15 there were 3 deaths total in New York state and DeBlasio was getting crucified for not closing the schools in NYC. They were closed the next day. By Sunday, March 22, New York had 114 deaths.
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The problem was that no one in power (and few others) realized the huge number of cases that were already present. By the time of the first official case in New York City, March 1, there were already thousands of infected people walking the streets and riding the subways of that city and travelers had spread the virus from New York all over the country. Officially, there were 8 deaths, all in Washington state. Actually, I think they were all in one nursing home.
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My numbers are from the COVID tracking project. I think they don;t count people who caught the virus outside the country.
SteveF, Palmer didn’t explicitly mention this but its well known first year numerical analysis. The truncation error is derived from a Taylor series approximation. For second order PDE’s the second order term is the viscosity term. The size of the neglected terms in the Taylor series is Ch^2 where h is the grid spacing and C is a measure of the maximum value of the 4th derivative of the velocity in the cell. If h ~ 50 kilometers and the 4th derivative is order 1, you can see that’s its a huge number. Basically, the higher frequencies of the solution will be totally wrong. I will amplify this below as to what is known from 50 years of CFD experience.
Everybody in CFD knows this in fact. In aeronautical simulations using RANS (which is what GCM’s are), we like to use grid spacing that is about 1 inch in diameter maximum, much much smaller in regions where the derivatives are larger. Now its true that in the atmosphere Rossby waves generally are large scale features so they don’t require such small grids, but there is lots of stuff that does like convection which is critical to climate. Also free air turbulence, precipitation, etc. all have quite small scale dynamics.
The only way around this “iron law” is to try to use a subgrid model to get the “average” effect of the unresolved scales on the resolved scales. Even the turbulence models despite 80 years of intense research are known to give terrible answers in massively separated flows or convective turbulent flows. Modeling convection this way is assumed to be hopeless by every respectable turbulence model expert based on experience with massively separated flows where you need to resolve the details. This is really settled science by the way.
However, even eddy resolving time accurate simulations are also well known to have serious issues with ill-posedness, sensitivity to grid sizes, etc. What Palmer and Stevens are proposing seems to be unlikely to really pay off in perhaps 50 years and may never pay off depending on the attractor properties. For one thing classical methods of numerical error control totally fail. So you cannot even do local grid refinement and know it will make the answer better.
SteveF, If you are interested, I have a very detailed technical writeup on these issues with references. You will need to contact me privately. Lucia has my email address.
From the online WSJ:
ventilator use
The article also confirms that in at least one hospital, ventilators were used rather than less invasive methods of raising blood oxygen level to protect staff. While understandable, it does seem to violate the Hippocratic Oath. However, the survival rate of patients on ventilators in the mentioned hospital was quite high.
Also in the news, almost all of the recent spike in South Korean COVID-19 cases can be traced to one individual.
That’s 18 cases yesterday and 34 today. There also seems to be a sexual orientation issue involved.
David Young,
“Palmer didn’t explicitly mention this but its well known first year numerical analysis. The truncation error is derived from a Taylor series approximation.”
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OK, but do Palmer and Steven’s actually agree with you on this? (real question, because it is not in their article)
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The authors spend quite a bit of time harping on the inadequacy of coarse grid scales and the incorporation of parameterizations to account for unresolved processes. Do you think they do not actually believe a large reduction in grid scale would help improve the accuracy of the models, because my impression was that the do in fact think that.
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I really do not know enough about the subject to even ask the right questions, but there appears a huge discrepancy between what you say and what the Palmer & Stevens article says about the root of the problem with GCM’s.
DeWitt wrote: “However, the survival rate of patients on ventilators in the mentioned hospital was quite high.”
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As I think I mentioned at the time ventilators were first brought up, most of the damage caused by ventilators is a direct result of the amount of effort required to keep the person alive ie it’s highly likely they’d be dead without the vent, so if only 10-20% recover, that’s good going.
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If the person requires only a modest amount of support, the risk is relatively minimal, because it’s the same sort of support delivered via non-invasive methods, just with more efficiency. This is why you would expect a hospital that intubated and ventilated less severe patients to have a better vent survival rate than those who only put more severe cases on the vent.
DaveJR,
The problem, though, would be that the survival rate with less invasive oxygenation could well have been higher than with intubation and ventilation. Ventilation may be more efficient, but it does increase risk to the patient. As I said, I understand the logic, I just don’t agree with it.
Well SteveF, Stevens and Palmer don’t use my exact language. But they do reflect the concensus in the field I outlined above. Whether you talk about truncation errors or unresolved scales, the overall point is the same.
David Young,
As I said, I may not know enough to even ask the right questions, but I can read what Palmer and Stevens wrote. It is very clear (at least to me) that they think vastly finer grids and elimination of most (all?) parameterizations can make the models ‘fit for purpose’. If they believe truncation errors are a problem, they do not write that. Perhaps they have talked about truncation errors elsewhere, but they did not in that article.
SteveF: Thanks for the excellent response. You said: “Sounds like you think people who are unlikely to be harmed are selfish losers. OK, I get that. But I will note that those people are probably 90% of the population.”
I don’t want to pass judgments about anyone in such a complicated situation. As best I can personally tell, we can’t easily separate the medically vulnerable or the economically vulnerable from the rest of the people. If the pandemic grows exponentially among the medically less vulnerable, it will also grow exponentially among the more vulnerable. The clearest place you recognize this is in an elder-care facility, where half the population has a very high risk of dying from a COVID-19 infection and the other HALF are staff who are living at home with their families, shopping, etc in the midst of a pandemic that is unlikely to seriously hurt them – pose a greater threat than influenza does in an ordinary year. However, if the pandemic continues to grow exponentially or remain at a high level until there is herd immunity, there will be roughly a 50% of chance that a staff member will be asymptomatic but infectious for a day or two during the pandemic – and this will be the situation until every staff member can be tested every day before starting work. A similar, but harder to quantify, situation exists for vulnerable people who live on their own and need to shop, visit the doctor, and interact (less frequently for those who are scared) with family or other humans. So I think that if we have a pandemic that ends because of herd immunity – say 50% have neutralizing antibodies – that roughly 50% of the SURVIVING vulnerable population will also have neutralizing antibodies. May that could be reduced to 25%.
The same thing appears to be true economically. No matter what policies governments adopt, the economy will be a mess until most people are no longer afraid of COVID-19. IIRC, weeks before any government mandate, the NCAA cancelled March madness, the NBA shut down, schools began closing, colleges began sending students home and businesses were having people work from home. Government policies may have sped up this exodus and made it larger or earlier than necessary, but the only real protection from this storm would be the three- or six-month’s living expenses emergency fund that financial planners recommend and few have.
Our leaders and media have done such a lousy job of explaining what is happening and what needs to happen, that calling anyone selfish or irresponsible (except for our leaders) would be unjustified (IMO). With clear signs in March that the pandemic could overwhelm the local hospitals, I didn’t expect the government of any developed country fail to take action that will prevent people from dying in line waiting to get into the emergency room or in the hallways of hospitals … hospitals with their staff potentially shrinking from sickness and death. All leaders (democratic or authoritarian) will do something to prevent this scenario – even if it will cost far more economically that doing nothing and doesn’t actually save lives in the long run. Watching civilized health care disappear (which is what happened in Wuhan and North Italy and neared in NYC) wasn’t a viable option, even if it later proves to be the “right” option. So, I won’t second guess that decision. Almost every developed nation except Sweden chose to act, and Swedish leaders received different information and may have have unique circumstances.
Now that we are committed, we need to make that decision a success. IMO, that means R needed to get near 0.5 and stay there as social distancing diminishes (ie increasing effectiveness at reducing transmission per contact), not stay around 1.0 and then increase as the we re-open the economy. In the former scenario, we would be back to something approaching normal in 3 months. However, our leaders in the White House (who are extremely vulnerable to COVID-19) don’t have the slightest idea that face masks, effective contact tracing, rapid testing, inspirational and educational leadership are essential to getting R down to 0.5. Flattening the curve (R=1) means our hospitals won’t be overrun, but the continuing epidemic IMO will continue to scare Americans and disrupt our economy indefinitely. This could prove worse in the long run than having done nothing.
Few people seem to agree with me, so it is entirely possible I am wrong.
SteveF, As explained above, truncation errors go down like the square of the grid spacing. So making the grid finer and reducing truncation errors are more or less interchangable ways of describing the same thing.
Stevens and Palmer are finally admitting what every CFDer has known for 50 years. And this after 30 years of climate scientists and activists “circling the wagons” as they describe it. Laymen might use another term for a deliberate deception with a political motive.
Frank,
Masks are little more than virtue signalling. At best they somewhat reduce the chance that an infected person will infect someone else. If you aren’t infected, just wearing a mask is unlikely to make much difference. Mask shaming doesn’t help. It just makes people angry. Trump and Pence are tested frequently, so the chance they will infect someone is minimal. The risk is that someone else will infect them so everyone around them wear masks.
If you go to a restaurant, the staff wear masks, but it’s a bit hard to eat while wearing a mask.
“However, our leaders in the White House (who are extremely vulnerable to COVID-19) don’t have the slightest idea that face masks, effective contact tracing, rapid testing, inspirational and educational leadership are essential to getting R down to 0.5”
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There’s a difference between understanding these things and being able to wish them into existence. Testing isn’t a matter of will, it is a matter of infrastructure, reagents, swabs, test machines, organized testing locations, regulatory approvals, etc. at a time when the entire world (now with Brazil, Russia, India ramping up) is competing for these things. Trump can’t order these things with the Fed credit card from Amazon.
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You can’t have “inspiring leadership” when the media spends 99% of every breathing moment trying to tear it down. That is their right, but I’m not going to pretend they are being helpful here. They spread FUD constantly and aren’t very helpful in most cases. It is pessimism 24/7 in the media.
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The virus is unlikely to allow us to get 0.5, most places aren’t there during lock down already. It’s too virulent. We can’t really effectively isolate the elderly, we have found isolation in old folks homes is the worst answer.
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If we re-open and the virus spikes, then what? We may have to just live with it, and that sucks. The government trying to force an additional 6 month lock down simply isn’t feasible in my opinion. There will be a coronavirus weather report every day, just like there are smog alerts.
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An effective treatment would be a life saver here, it is up to science to save the day. It’s a hard problem, but the incentives are there.
SteveF (Comment #184653): “what Palmer and Stevens wrote. It is very clear (at least to me) that they think vastly finer grids and elimination of most (all?) parameterizations can make the models ‘fit for purpose’.”
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Do they say what scales would be needed? Will that be computationally possible?
Just guessing at some numbers to get sense of scale. I am doubtful that a kilometer would be good enough for the horizontal scale. Maybe 100 meters. It is now what? 500 km? So that would be 7 orders of magnitude more grid points. I don’t think Moore’s Law has that much room to run, if it has not failed already.
Frank (Comment #184655): “As best I can personally tell, we can’t easily separate the medically vulnerable or the economically vulnerable from the rest of the people. … The clearest place you recognize this is in an elder-care facility”.
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That is not so. We certainly can protect the most vulnerable. It won’t be cheap, but it will be a lot cheaper than what we are doing. It won’t be perfect, but it can be a lot better than what has been done. That is shown by the fact that different states have widely varying results as to what has happened in elder care facilities.
But since protecting the vulnerable will be hard an imperfect, it is only a temporary solution. To make it work, the general population must move to herd immunity as quickly as possible.
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Frank: “No matter what policies governments adopt, the economy will be a mess until most people are no longer afraid of COVID-19.”
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That is true. So we have to get past this as quickly as possible without overwhelming the healthcare system. But the economy need not be as big a mess as it is now.
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Frank: “IIRC, weeks before any government mandate, the NCAA cancelled March madness, the NBA shut down, schools began closing, colleges began sending students home and businesses were having people work from home.”
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Not weeks, days, at most. NCAA, NBA, and MLB took their actions on March 11. The next day Trump imposed the travel ban from Europe and on the 13th he declared a state of emergency. Most schools closed at about that time.
Gov. Inslee declared a state of emergency in Washington on Feb. 29. On March 11 he invoked emergency powers and started banning things. Most other governors followed within a few days. The really heavy handed stuff started kicking in around March 20.
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Frank: :Our leaders and media have done such a lousy job of explaining what is happening and what needs to happen”.
Indeed. That has been a disgrace. Some, like Trump and Cuomo, have been trying, but you have to watch the endless press conferences to try to glean any information.
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Frank: “Almost every developed nation except Sweden chose to act”.
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Not true. Sweden most certainly chose to act. They just chose not to overreact.
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Frank: “Now that we are committed, we need to make that decision a success.”
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No, no, no. When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.
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Frank: “IMO, that means R needed to get near 0.5”
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How do we do that? It sound to me like wishful thinking.
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Frank: “and stay there as social distancing diminishes”
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That is contradictory. If social distancing is what reduces R, then you can’t diminish social distancing and keep R constant.
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Frank: “In the former scenario, we would be back to something approaching normal in 3 months.”
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How? Again, that sounds like wishful thinking.
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Frank: “Flattening the curve (R=1) means our hospitals won’t be overrun, but the continuing epidemic IMO will continue to scare Americans and disrupt our economy indefinitely.”
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Not indefinitely, only until herd immunity is approached. Any other strategy *must* be maintained indefinitely.
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We can’t go back. We can’t go around. The only choice left is through. The quicker the better.
MikeM,
They did not specify a grid scale. The did say the the many individual models generate very different projections (multiple different parameters) because they use parameterizations to account for things which take place on a smaller scale. They suggested that great reduction in grid scale is not going to be possible except through very widespread distributed processing (eg. many millions of processors). If you want to read it, it is open access at PNAS, December 2019.
frank,
The economy will open, and very soon. Unless steps are taken to reduce risks for the elderly who are at greatest risk, opening the economy will certainly lead to more deaths in that population. It is impossible to say how many more deaths, but I would not be surprised if it were 100,000 more immediate deaths. I hope those steps are taken to drastically reduce those additional immediate deaths, but whether or not they are, the economy can’t be crushed indefinitely, which is what you appear to support. The long term destruction, including future unnecessary deaths, is far worse than the additional immediate deaths.
Today’s “Watch them squirm” hilarity comes from Senator Feinstein who was finally asked about Tara Reade after 2 months.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/democrats-desperation-is-growing-about-tara-reade-so-is-their-hypocrisy/
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“When finally asked about Reade yesterday, Feinstein responded: “And I don’t know this person at all who has made the allegations. She came out of nowhere. Where has she been all these years? He was vice president.â€
To put this in perspective, when Ford came forward “out of nowhere,†Feinstein said: “Victims must be able to come forward only when they are ready.â€
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And this:
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“Yesterday a document uncovered by local journalists in California — somehow missed by Barack Obama’s crack vetting team — shows Reade’s ex-husband bolstering her claim in 1996 divorce proceedings: “On several occasions [Reade] related a problem that she was having at work regarding sexual harassment, in U.S. Senator Joe Biden’s office.â€
The reaction to the divorce papers has been extraordinary. Biden defenders argue that because Reade alleged “sexual harassment†— a catch-all term used in the 1990s when men were getting away with despicable behavior far more often — it proves her story has changed. Biden, through his deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield, alleges that “more and more inconsistencies†come up every day.”
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Obviously Reade has far surpassed the liberal edition of the Ford evidence standard. Biden says he will withdrawal the new Title IX college kangaroo court rules put in recently that allow men a fairer process. I await someone to ask him if he is willing to go to the kangaroo court using his standard with his nomination on the line, ha ha. I very much doubt he would.
Tom Scharf,
I think those defending Biden are quite incapable of shame, and are not squirming at all. The rule is: Presumption of innocence for me and mine, never for thee and thine. They are corrupt, dishonest and evil…. as quite common for ‘progressives’.
SteveF: “I am pleased you like hearing both sides of an argument from the National Constitution Center. Sounds like it could be informative. Too bad that is not what they presented in this case.”
I’m glad we both like to hear both sides of an argument. The National Constitution Center is often a good place to hear both sides. I just had a chance to listen to a second program (4/9?), this time with two experts on the First Amendment (including one from FIRE, a right-wing group that defends charter schools and battles liberal dominance of education) rather than the previous experts on the history of public health law.
There are two issues here, federal and state. Federal power can be applied at borders and is exemplified by the Trump administration’s quarantine of Americans returned from China and passengers from a cruise ship. Do you think this quarantine violated the First Amendment? What about the quarantine of those returning from Africa after working with Ebola patients? (The term QUARantine originated long ago in reference to a 40-day period when ships were forced to wait outside port during epidemics. Quarantine was probably understood by the Founders as a power all states possessed to protect their people from invasion – by illnesses that were comparable to the threat posed by a foreign army.)
Most police and public health power belongs to the states. It wasn’t until the 20th century that the Supreme Court began to use the Bill of Rights to limit the power of states. State constitutions offer some and differing protection of the rights of citizens, but I’m not familiar with how state public health laws clash with state constitutional rights. As far as I understand, the Supreme Court and other federal courts apply “strict scrutiny” any time a state is accused of violating the First Amendment (and most of the rest of the Bill of Rights). In other words, is there a COMPELLING REASON for the state to take such drastic action and has that action been taken in the least restrictive manner? A pandemic obviously provides a compelling reason for acting. I think an argument that COVID-19 is similar to the usual seasonal influenza epidemic (which hasn’t compelled action in the past) will fail. Whether action has been taken in the least restrictive manner is a subject for debate, so Elon Musk could win against the State of California for that reason. Sadly, our legal system is too expensive and slow to provide much protection for individuals and small business owners from state over-reach. Most class action lawsuits serve to enrich attorneys, not provide justice for ordinary citizens. And there can always be a big difference between what is legal for a government to do and what a government should actually do.
FWIW, a New Hampshire judge dismissed your freedom of assembly rational more than a month ago, presumably for these reasons. The closure of abortion providers and gun shops are other hot-button issues. If cases get heard in higher courts, the NCC is one institution that will provide you with an understandable and reasoned discussion between attorneys associated with both sides of the case, so that you can understand what laws and precedents are actually being debated and applied.
I enjoyed reading about the Kelo case you mentioned. The fundamental problem is that our “living constitution” was construed in such a way that property can be taken for private purposes as long as the new owners are expected to generate more tax revenue. I’d prefer to stick to original intent behind “public use” and not allow five unelected judges to make up the rules as they go along. It was interesting to read that even the conservative justices endorsed earlier decisions about taking property that was: blighted (and posed a hazard to ordinary citizens) or needed for a private railroad throughway, or economically strangled a community. Personally, I thought the Court should have been skeptical about New London’s ability to raise tax revenue through government-sponsored redevelopment of an area with little private development, but the Court wanted nothing to do with judges second-guessing the [lack of] economic acumen of another branch of government. I have a personal appreciation of the Kelo case because my immigrant grandparents lived on a large mound covered with dry natural grass one block off Main Street in a small California town that had been grown and merged with the East Bay megapolis. Their property didn’t produce as much revenue as the department store that filled the entire block across the street. Selling their property taught me that your land is only worth as much as a buyer can afford to pay based on what the city will let him build on your property. Influential developers can afford to pay more.
For coronavirus, original intent is based on the Founder’s understanding of quarantine and other actions taken to preserve public health under English common law, how it was practiced by the Founders, and what precedents have been set since. Have you considered original intent in this way?
Before I learned from the NCC, I might have agreed with your position that freedom of assembly is all that matters. Is the NCC perfect? Of course not, but they do take their non-partisan education charter very seriously and usually have guests actively involved in both side of cases reaching the Supreme Court. For example, a recent program on the constitutionality of the legislation establishing the Consumer Financial Safety Commission featured a legal scholar from the CATO Institute, who had filed an amicus brief, and Richard Cordray (who was chosen to head the agency based on his experience as the Solicitor General and Attorney General of Ohio and who was shockingly unlike crusading Elizabeth Warren).
Frank (Comment #184671): “As far as I understand, the Supreme Court and other federal courts apply “strict scrutiny†any time a state is accused of violating the First Amendment (and most of the rest of the Bill of Rights). In other words, is there a COMPELLING REASON for the state to take such drastic action and has that action been taken in the least restrictive manner? A pandemic obviously provides a compelling reason for acting.”
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There was a strong case for that in March. But as we learn more, the reasons becomes much less compelling. For instance, fears of a badly overloaded medical system have not come close to realization. Also, part of the compelling reason was to permit time for other, less restrictive measures to be put into place. That time has passed. Finally, if the Bill of Rights is to have any meaning, short term emergency measures must not be allowed to become continuing normal practice. The time has long since passed for backing off on restrictions.
Lucia wrote: Frank, The quarantine is going to break down. This isn’t a normative (i.e. “should†) statement. It’s a descriptive statement (i.e. “willâ€.)
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It’s a bit like observing that water will flow over the top of a dam. You can think it “should†stay behind the dam the way you want. It’s won’t.
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Lori Lightfoot is issuing threats to fine people who break quarantine with parties and so on. But the police are actually not arresting or fining people who have parties. Kids will see this. They will have parties. Some parties will be sneakier; progressively they will be more public.”
These are all excellent observations. On the other hand, at least one evangelical minister who resisted quarantining of his church has died, making the prospect of being re-united with God more tangible. The White House now has several prominent COVID-19 infections among vulnerable individuals and suddenly has decided after nearly two months that wearing masks is prudent. A protest group could become a visible hot spot for COVID-19, especially if they are jailed (which is probably unlikely). I won’t take any bets you may offer on the potential of such events to educate the public, but I’ll simply say the future hasn’t been written yet.
frank,
Arm waves about old English law, and what the writers of the Constitution ‘really’ meant, in spite of what they wrote, mean nothing. The words of the constitution mean what they clearly say, although they have been too often corrupted by many ‘living constitution’ defacto amendments, forced upon the electorate by activist judges. I think if Trump winds another term, many of those defacto amendments will be reversed in short order by a court with 5 actual conservative jurists and one whining RINO (named Roberts).
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WRT to the suggestion Covid 19 is like the seasonal flu: you clearly like straw man arguments. Nobody here argues it is like the seasonal flu. The Covid19 virus is very likely to kill about 0.02% to 0.06% of the global population before effective treatments and/or an effective vaccine becomes available. The trouble with life is that it is fatal, and no matter the illness, your chance of dying from an illness rises dramatically as you get older. Covid 19 is no exception.
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Finally, the NCC is neither perfect nor important. I can read the constitution, and I am quite certain that many SC rulings are blatantly violating the plain meaning of the document. I am all for constitutional amendments. I am 100% opposed to a ‘living constitution’… AKA no constitution at all.
frank,
The truly effective actions were taken by the public without having to have their arms twisted. That will continue after restrictions are lifted. It is only the petty despot stuff that needs penalties.
Mike M,
“Finally, if the Bill of Rights is to have any meaning, short term emergency measures must not be allowed to become continuing normal practice.”
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That is the crux of the argument. Some people care about the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, some give not the tiniest sh!t about them. Those who don’t care about the Constitution are gung-ho to force people, in direct violation of the Constitution, to do things they would otherwise refuse to do. As Ben Franklin noted:
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I would go further: Those who would take other people’s liberties to purchase a little temporary safety for themselves are scoundrels.
Mike M wrote: “There was a strong case [that compelling reasons for quarantine existed] in March. But as we learn more, the reasons becomes much less compelling. For instance, fears of a badly overloaded medical system have not come close to realization. Also, part of the compelling reason was to permit time for other, less restrictive measures to be put into place. That time has passed. Finally, if the Bill of Rights is to have any meaning, short term emergency measures must not be allowed to become continuing normal practice. The time has long since passed for backing off on restrictions.”
The fear of an overloaded medical system was a reality in NYC. Given that cases of COVID-19 were doubling every few days, a delay of another week could have quadrupled the already infamous lines of people waiting to enter emergency rooms, needing ordinary or ICU beds, respirators, and attention from trained staff. Some went home without being seen. To the best of my knowledge, the breakdown was worse in Wuhan and Northern Italy than NYC.
The average reader of this blog would probably do a far better job than the average judge at reading technical briefs and determining what restrictive measures need to be continued and for how long. However, I suspect many would agree that this is a job for our elected representatives in consultation with the experts they have appointed or retained – not for unelected judges or self-nominated scientists. Elected leaders probably also should be deciding whether our goal is to reduce the number of cases to an absolute minimum through severe restrictions (like South Korea or China) or merely to suppress exponential growth of cases so that the capacity of hospitals is not overwhelmed, but otherwise let the pandemic continue until halted by herd immunity. Which course will be better for our economy in the long run? Should judges be making such strategic decisions?
Both experts on the First Amendment participating on the NCC podcast warned that our rights become weaker in practice during national emergencies. FDR issued an executive order quarantining Japanese Americans during WWII, and the courts including the Supreme Court, let it stand without ever reviewing the secret rational for doing so (now acknowledged to be bogus). Just recently, five Supreme Court justices allowed an executive order to stand banning immigration from a number of Muslim countries – an order issued by a president who ran on an anti-Muslim platform. Those justices chose not to second-guess the president’s assessment that national security was at stake and ignored Congress’s requirement that immigration law be applied without religious discrimination. After a year’s delay in the courts due to the new administration’s incompetence, was there really a compelling reason to discriminate against Muslims from the chosen list of countries? Expect Roberts et al be extremely reluctant to interfere with governors and public health commissions – and criticize them if you wish.
Both experts also said that emergency orders with a defined end-point would be more likely to survive legal challenge than those that remain in force for an indefinite period of emergency.
frank,
“I suspect many would agree that this is a job for our elected representatives in consultation with the experts they have appointed or retained – not for unelected judges or self-nominated scientists. Elected leaders probably also should be deciding whether our goal is to reduce the number of cases to an absolute minimum through severe restrictions (like South Korea or China) or merely to suppress exponential growth…â€
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I suspect most would disagree. I certainly do. The fundamental structure of the country, as described by the Constitution, is primarily a list of things elected representatives are NOT allowed to do, not what they are allowed to do. Elected officials can do things, of course, but only within those constitutionally described limits. I am actually a little surprised when people seem unaware of what the Constitution says and why it is structured the way it is.
Frank
In our system, citizens get to discuss and have opinions on these things too. They get to criticize leaders with whom the disagree.
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In any case, whether you are or are not willing to bet on it: If they continue, quarantines and stay at home orders will be violated. They already are violated. Some death’s are not going to stop people who think they need to go to church from going to church. The kids in Chicago having parties and not getting arrested are going to have more parties. Some hairdressers, manicurists and so on will do in-home die jobs. And so on, and so on.
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Pritzker has made many of his conditions for opening independent on actual progress of outbreaks and rather things politicians need to do– like getting case tracing and testing in place, or having sufficient hospital beds for when a surge occurs. Unless something goes very wrong, I think we will be in “phase 3” in June.
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I don’t know if dance studios are considered “health clubs” for the purpose of the phases. If they are, my studio will be open in June.
SteveF,
The Tenth Amendment, which seems to have been forgotten by the courts, spells that out:
The problem with a list of only things that are forbidden is that one can assume that if it isn’t forbidden, it’s permitted. I suspect that’s one reason why the Tenth Amendment was added to the Bill of Rights. But then the Constitution is not just a list of forbidden things. There are a lot of things the Constitution requires the federal government and the states to do.
The other way one can structure rules is to list what is permitted and include a statement that if something is not specifically permitted, it is forbidden. That’s how the Sports Car Club of America structures its competition rules and regulations.
lucia,
Indeed. And in the news today:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-to-restart-production-elon-musk-says-11589230278?mod=hp_lead_pos2
DeWitt,
“Elon Musk Says Tesla Is Restarting California Production, Defying Local Orderâ€
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Damned technical types, always thinking laws and regulations should be rational! It will be interesting to see if he is taken away in handcuffs. If so, there will soon be a vey big factory available in Freemont. I’ve been there; it’s huge.
SteveF,
I suspect he’s talked to his lawyers and figures he’ll go to court to challenge the quarantine. I bet a number of small business people would if they could but they don’t have the money to launch the challenge. Elon does.
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I have no idea what the outcome of a court case would be.
Lot’s of press attention, that’s for sure.
Lucia writes: “Pritzker has made many of his conditions for opening independent on actual progress of outbreaks and rather things politicians need to do– like getting case tracing and testing in place, or having sufficient hospital beds for when a surge occurs. Unless something goes very wrong, I think we will be in “phase 3†in June.”
I don’t understand why you think case tracing and testing are “independent of actual progress on outbreaks”. To me, this pandemic is a simple mathematical problem in epidemiology, and I know from reading your blog (mostly in the distant past), that your mathematical abilities often exceed mine. To me, if one infected person infects an average of one other person, the pandemic will rage on until slowed by herd immunity. (I believe this is sometimes called R_e, the effective transmission rate, as opposed to R_0, the initial transmission rate before society or individuals alter their behavior in response to the pandemic.) 86% of the prisoners in one Ohio prison have tested positive – so far, so there nothing besides immunity acquired through infection or vaccination will stop the pandemic. (Ordinary citizens don’t live in as close contact as prisoners, so the “herd immunity” from Re less than 1 is expected to require perhaps 67% of people to be resistant (when their behavior and policies return to normal.
In the case of influenza, which is slightly less transmissible than SARS-CoV-2, we have 30 million cases in an average year despite fading resistance from past infection and 50% of the population getting a vaccine that is typically effective against only 50% of the strains that are circulating. The 1918 pandemic supposed infected one in three, about 100 million Americans today. Pandemic influenza has occurred in all seasons. The big difference between influenza and SARS-CoV-2 is that most influenza victims realize they have been infected (30% contact a doctor), but a far larger fraction of COVID-19 patients (especially children) appear asymptomatic or only modestly ill. When now that we are getting RELIABLE antibody tests (with well understood false positive and negative rates), we will have a better handle on this problem.
Since viral RNA levels in children are as high as in adults, it is wishful thinking to believe asymptomatic children aren’t as infectious as symptomatic adults.
Therefore, if Re is about 1 today and we open up our economy and have more contacts on the average between people, the outcome appears to be a mathematical certainty to me. If we expect more contacts between people, we must make the average contact safer.
And if we want the pandemic to be controlled – as it appears to have been in South Korea and China – instead of continuing indefinitely, we need a Re in the vicinity of 0.5.
The Chinese had 9000 people doing contact tracing in Wuhan. Whenever anyone tested positive, the Chinese and South Koreans immediately identified and called all of the people who were in contact with the sick person, and reduced the likelihood those contacts would pass the virus on to others, especially when they were asymptomatic. So I’m mystified why you don’t think the ability to get test results within hours and immediately begin contact tracing isn’t important to the decision to re-open the economy. (And I’m worried that I am missing something important when other smart people don’t share my perspective.) We have millions of unemployed people who could have learned to do contact tracing over the past two months, but local governments have no money and tax payments have been postponed. Instead we have given 20 million Americans a 3 month vacation with many drawing unemployment payments higher than they were earning.
Of course, I recognize that human behavior has a tremendous impact viral transmission. That simply means that we need to reduce transmission between people who act more responsibly or have more ability to social distance to compensate for those who are less responsible or have less ability to social distance. Human behavior is a challenge to be changed as much as possible and be overcome with every tool at our disposal: testing, contact tracing, masks, hand sanitizer, cleaning … At a minimum, we could track down and widely publicize the hundreds of people have been infected (or died) because one minister flouted the social distancing. We could do the same for partying young adults whose contacts may have been traced into a nursing home. If we can suppress all of these problems by 50%, that gets Re down from 1 to 0.5, or prevents a disastrous return to exponential growth in cases.
Is our current new case rate of 20,000/day tolerable until a vaccine is available? 600,000/month. 7.3 million/year. 2%/year. Yes, that is tolerable. The only real problem is a return to exponential growth
Frank wrote: “Elected leaders probably also should be deciding whether our goal is to reduce the number of cases to an absolute minimum through severe restrictions (like South Korea or China) or merely to suppress exponential growth of cases so that the capacity of hospitals is not overwhelmed, but otherwise let the pandemic continue until halted by herd immunity.”
Lucia replied: “In our system, citizens get to discuss and have opinions on these things too. They get to criticize leaders with whom the disagree.”
Frank continues: Yes, but we have a representative democracy, not a pure democracy. The only time our opinions really matter is at elections. (Our Representatives have gerrymandered districts so effectively that perhaps only 20% need serious fear losing in a general election.)
Musk claims Tesla’s Chinese factory learned how to operate safely during the epidemic in China. He might be able to make a good case that Tesla knows more about how to operate his Fremont plant safely that the local interim Public Health Officer in the California county with his plant. He could have a good case that the least restrictive rules necessary to protect public safety have not been applied in his case (a fairly unique case).
It’s pretty simple. These are independent because achieving the criteria mostly occurs by mayors and counties staffing up case tracing and testing. It is not primarily dependent on whether the number of cases grew or fell. So not withstanding your many paragraphs explaining the math of epidemiology and Ro to me: My diagnosing Pritzker’s criteria for allowing the a region to proceed into phase 3: which is the region having enough testing capacity and case tracing in place to be effective as being independent of the actual progress in changing mathematical feature like “R”.
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These measures are intended to slow further progress and likely will do so. But the diagnostic for allowing us out of a phase of quarantine is does not require the states case rate numbers to have gone down as a result of implementing the measure.
Frank
I’m honestly not sure what point you think you are trying to make. But my opinion differs from your stated opinion on this. I think our opinions matter before elections also. Sharing our opinions matter. And we should all share them.
We’ll be having a big election in November.
Beyond that, there are other times our opinions matter. In the case of the quarantines: Individuals will decide if they are going to break quarantine. That will be based on their opinions and that matters. So: no I think your opinion about whether citizens opinions matter is woefully unsupported by actual facts.
Frank
If it goes to court, the case he presents could encompass many other manufacturers. I suspect what will really happen is Newsome will step back and think very carefully about how severe restrictions really need to be. He’s already done so with respect to beaches.
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Like it or not, the “opinion” of aspiring beach goers and surfers mattered to the elected official and the elected official changed his orders based on observing the empirical fact that his orders were becoming unworkable.
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Other Governors are going to do the same because none of them are going to march out the State Militia to arrest hoards of beach-goers or risk having courts massively overturning everything about their orders. They’ll end up seeing the wisdom of at least pulling back and avoiding court order throwing everything out.
frank,
“ Human behavior is a challenge to be changed as much as possible and be overcome with every tool at our disposal:â€
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You seem to be channeling your inner Che’. I think you missed your calling; you should be a strategist for some totalitarian leftist dictator. Maybe Nicaragua…. and there is always need for more control in China.
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That you think people’s behavior should be changed as much as possible with every tool at our disposal is way beyond arrogant, it’s dangerous. Pass laws telling people in great detail what they must do, then throw anyone who disagrees with you in jail. Or worse. Perfect. Fortunately, reality is going to quickly overtake your totalitarian fantasies.
Lucia,
Yes. Many, if not most, stupid rules will be ignored. There are just not enough police in the country to enforce them… because so far at least, we don’t have a police state. Which is not to say there are not plenty of people who think we do need a police state…. one that exists to enforce only their political preferences, of course. But even the most egregiously misguided political hacks like Newsom and Pritzker know that when stupid rules and laws lead to a general disregard for rules and laws, that is ultimately very bad for society.
Frank,
You can’t possibly really think human behavior should be changed as much as possible using every tool at your disposal. At least I hope you don’t think beach goers should be plowed down by armored tank in our own US flavored Tiananmen Square moment. There are many, many, many tools at “our” disposal that should not be used.
More over, if some of these they are used, there will be insurrections. That will mean we would have active military actions during the outbreak of a contagion. From an epidemiological POV, the R would sky rocket. From a hospital point of view: you think there was risk of overcrowding before? It would get worse. From a stable government and rule of law POV, it would be a catastrophe.
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IOT: It would be three strikes. As a country, we would be OUT.
I ran the Annan model with IL daily death data through May 11, 2020 with the intent of using an end date with the most effect from the 7 day cycle discussed here. I subsequently ran the model again with the original data smoothed with a backward looking 7 day moving average. The results of those runs are summarized in the link below. The Rt values for raw and smoothed data were 1.04 and 1.14, respectively and for Ro were 4.0 and 4.7, respectively. The data for determining Ro is noisy and does not reach very high numbers. Deaths are first reported on 3/17/2020 and lock down starts on 3/20/2020.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/j7ps088cd2heu7v/IL_Covid_to_05_11.pdf?dl=0
I have driven in almost every state in the USA, and a bunch of other countries as well. I can say for sure that people will ignore speed limits, pretty much whenever they can. They do slow to the speed limit where there are known radar traps, but then return to a higher speed. This is universal…. every place I have driven. That clearly means they are “endangering†themselves and others. By frank’s sorry logic there is no limit to the penalties which are justified for such drivers….. and that is basically most everyone. The reality of speed limits is complicated: speed limits are inherently a value based judgement, not something that is “fact basedâ€. Drivers clearly judge the added “safety†of a lower speed not worth the extra travel time that lower speed leads to. Traffic safety analysis make a determination of the “correct†speed based on some values based criteria, but drivers clearly disagree. Just like speed limits, the “correct†policies for dealing with covid 19 are values based, not fact based: If opening the economy and returning 20 million people to work causes 100,000 more deaths over the next year among the elderly, should people be allowed to return to work? How about 10,000 deaths, or 10 deaths? Those are questions which can only be answered based on values. Public policy is always values based, and when numbskulls insist that their preferred values based policies are factually better than other peoples preferred values based policies, I can only roll my eyes at their infantile thinking. This is ultimately the cause of all totalitarian government.
SteveF
As do local enforcement officials. It’s quite clear local police do not ramp up to enforce speed limits on high ways or city streets. Speeding is pretty much allowed in many places at most times of the year. Most people know where it is and is not allowed. Some towns along the drive from Urbana to Chicago suburbs are known speed traps. Sometimes, the town really has a good reason for the lower speed limits; sometimes it’s just revenue generating. People learn which towns you have to slow down in.
I think Musk is feeling a bit unappreciated by the local government. He invented a product, took a huge risk, built a huge factory, provided tons of jobs, and they are not kissing the ring. He’s going a bit bonkers with his direct challenge, but that is Musk. I think he is totally willing to move the factory and might be looking for an excuse to do so, “Make my day”. My guess is the local government backs down, as they will get the boot if relations with Musk deteriorate to the point of job loss. The progressive Twitterati have now turned against Musk since he won’t kiss their ring. Great fun to watch this cage match.
Toma Scharf,
“built a huge factory”
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Well, not really built…. more like renovated. The Fremont factory was started by GM in 1962, and ultimately ended up owned by a joint venture between Toyota and GM, until Tesla took it over in 2010.
Why I don’t trust fact checks. I don’t really read these any more, but one at NBC caught my attention and confirmed my opinion that these are now mostly hopeless propaganda.
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Fact check: Trump falsely claims coronavirus numbers are ‘going down almost everywhere’
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/fact-check-trump-falsely-claims-virus-numbers-are-going-down-n1204561
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This thing is pretty bad for a lot of reasons that are now standard “fact check” practice, but I’ll address one:
“The institute’s state-level projections show estimated infections on the rise in Arizona, Florida, Missouri and other states.”
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Huh?
Florida:
https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/96dd742462124fa0b38ddedb9b25e429
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https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/florida/
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So apparently the “fact checker” is using a projection of estimated cases instead of actual counts for the statement “”Coronavirus numbers are looking MUCH better, going down almost everywhere. Big progress being made!”.
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Ha ha.
“The progressive Twitterati have now turned against Musk since he won’t kiss their ring.”
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The left always ends up eating their own, until a dictatorial regime emerges and establishes absolute control.
If the words “fact checker” are included, whatever the article says is almost certainly wrong. The fact checkers are inevitably biased, and usually present as “facts” whatever data supports their desired policies, while ignoring data which undermines those policies. You only have to actually read several “fact checks” to verify they are usually rubbish and designed to mislead, not inform.
Some fact checks are OK, some are not. The question is whether one can easily discriminate between the two. I can’t on many subjects. There is a great deal of appeal to self authority in these things. There is an enormous amount of selection bias in what gets checked. There is a lot of bias in the * interpretation * of the statement being checked. A statement the fact checkers don’t like generally gets interpreted literally, while ones they do like get interpreted charitably. In many case they don’t even attempt to get a further explanation, ask for sources from the person making the statement, or display the entire statement in context.
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The ones I have checked years ago where I knew enough relevant information only made judgment errors in one ideological direction. You get things like disagreeing with a climate change sea level * projection * is called a lie.
Mike M. wrote (Comment #184677) May 11th, 2020 at 2:25 pm
“The truly effective actions were taken by the public without having to have their arms twisted. That will continue after restrictions are lifted. It is only the petty despot stuff that needs penalties.”
Do you have any data to back up this assertion? I remember seeing many plots with log(cumulative case) on the y-axis vs time (days since 100th case) with dotted lines showing the slope for doubling times in days. The graphs that interested me, and which I can’t find anymore had stars showing when a country started intervening to slow the pandemic. Since the typical incubation period is 5 days, in a perfect experiment, one might expect to see the slope of the epidemic decrease abruptly about 5 days after a government took effective action, whereas flatten before or after might be due to the spontaneous changes in individual behavior – which you assert are the only “truly effective actions”.
These graphs started with the 100th case to avoid the complications of dealing with the individual behavior of the first few infected patients. By the time of the 100th case, the data was showing the average behavior of the population. The initial case doubling rates were between 2 and 3 days for all but a few countries*, but the 100th case occurred on different dates in different places. So individual behavior initially was the same around the world, despite advance warning in some countries. If my memory serves correctly, the slopes flattened only after governments announced serious social distancing rules and/or lockdowns. Unfortunately, I have never seen such an analysis comparing Sweden and other countries this way.
The slope of such cumulative cases vs time plots isn’t sensitive to changes in transmissivity as Re approaches and falls below 1. To study the effectiveness of spontaneous and government measures in reducing transmissivity low enough that the pandemic will come to a halt, one needs to mathematically extract Re(t) from the case data.
*However, it is trivial to prove that the only effective measures were NOT those taken by the public! Look first at the countries that were exception to the generalization that the pandemic began with cumulative cases doubling every 2-3 days – South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Experience dealing with SARS and MERS had left public health authorities in these countries well-prepared and funded to deal effectively with COVID-19 from the moment the epidemic started.
The other exception is China, where experience with SARS and MERS and a tradition of wearing masks in public didn’t result in behavior that prevented a pandemic. Government recognition of and response to the outbreak was slow (but no worse than in the US). However, exceptionally stringent measures eventually were exceptionally successful in bringing the pandemic to a near halt. We probably can’t trust China’s official numbers, but the gap between their numbers and the US’s is enormous. Our new case rate is about 25,000/day – (75/million)/day – after two months of serious pandemic, while they claim to be experiencing a dozen or so cases per day in a country of more than 1 billion. If they are lying by a factor of ten or even one hundred, their measures are vastly more effective than ours. And if you look at cumulative cases/million, you find the US currently at about 4000 and China at 60 and South Korea at 212.
It should be COMPLETELY OBVIOUS that the “only effective measures” are those being taken in these countries, not those being taken spontaneous by the American people. All we have done with lockdowns and voluntary changes in behavior is stabilize the number of new cases/day at a potentially tolerable level. Unless we are continuously making person to person contact safer, opening up our economy is mathematically certain to result in a return to exponential growth of cases. According to the NYT, the experts are telling the Trump administration to expect an eight-fold rise in cases to 200,000/day by June first. That is only a doubling every 6 days, as opposed to a doubling every 2-3 days we had in March. Maybe things will be twice as good as projected and it will take until mid-June to reach 200,000/day. The death toll from COVID-19 might be comparable a decade or two of seasonal influenza – if we are lucky. If our leaders don’t want to take the necessary measures, that is their choice; the electorate will let them know how they feel about those choices in November. However, we should stop our Magical Thinking and learn to recognize the consequences of our choices. And, above all, remember that there are viral diseases that are more deadly than COVID-19 (such as Ebola) and that it isn’t unconstitutional to take appropriate public health measures to combat them.
Frank
I’ve been showing daily death with time since quarantine. It takes longer to die than to show symptoms. It’s pretty clear that the change in slope on the semi-log plots happens around when we’d expect it to occur if the cause was the “stay at home”. That doesn’t preclude that the cause might be “something else” (whatever that might be), but it does suggest it could have been the “stay at home”.
James Annans model also draws lines to mark when a strong social policy went into place.
My most recent graphs looks like this:
This epidemic was never exponential. Daily deaths on a semi-log plot were bending right from the beginning. It took a week or two for confirmed cases, due to the late ramp up of testing.
Deaths lag confirmed cases by 6-7 days, that can easily be seen by comparing the curves for daily increases. Deaths are reported to lag symptoms by 18-19 days and symptoms lag infection by 4-5 days, so deaths lag infection by a little over 3 weeks and positive tests lag infection by a little over 2 weeks.
Coming at it the other way, we have 4-5 days to symptoms; a few days, possibly longer, to get bad enough to seek a test; some time to get approval for the test and to get it scheduled, then 2-3 days for a result. That could quite easily be two weeks, maybe more.
If you look at the slopes of new cases and daily deaths, the former peaked at the end of March, the latter a week later. That implies that the rate of growth of new infections peaked around March 13. That is when the public was starting to react strongly, but before the lock downs started.
Singapore took the same measures as South Korea and Taiwan. Oops.
frank,
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/
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No lockdown, and no exponential growth.
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https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/sweden/2020-05-12/swedens-coronavirus-strategy-will-soon-be-worlds
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I do believe you are delusional. The lock downs are going to end.
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https://www.usatoday.com/storytelling/coronavirus-reopening-america-map/
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The only real question is how much economic damage will be done between now and economic recovery. Obviously, some states will have more economic damage than others. Probably related to their governor’s policies.
frank,
“And, above all, remember that there are viral diseases that are more deadly than COVID-19 (such as Ebola) and that it isn’t unconstitutional to take appropriate public health measures to combat them.”
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Appropriate is the key of course.
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Your position is going to be rejected by almost everyone in the world. Get over it. But please make more predictions of gloom, if you have any. They are entertaining, sort of like a b-grade horror film.
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I don’t know if Trump will get re-elected or not, but the betting markets still think his odds are better than 50%. I don’t think the covid 19 pandemic will make much difference. When the pandemic has mostly past, and the economic destruction remains, I expect voters will hold governors at least partly responsible for that destruction.
The horse has been beaten to death, but don’t confuse “no government ordered lock down” with “no change in public behavior”. Also in FL’s case there were regional lock downs in hot spots before the statewide ordered lock down. Cell phone location data was used to show that many people stopped moving around before lock downs were ordered, although that is probably only a week or two difference at most. Less contact between people, less virus transmission.
Curious stat, NYT: Only 17% of those who died in NYC were employed.
Tom Scharf,
Sure, there was a lot of behavior change before formal orders were issued. But things are starting to return toward normal. Waterfront restaurants with outside seating are busy, and traffic is much heavier than three weeks ago. Totally enclosed restaurants continue to suffer. It will take time, but things will get better.
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My county has a total of 274 cases and 50 hospitalizations… numbers almost unchanged in the last two weeks. We had 6 deaths two weeks ago, and still have 6 deaths today…. in a county of 155,000.
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“Only 17% of those who died in NYC were employed.”
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Very elderly people in poor health are rarely employed.
frank
Sure. But it is unconstitutional to take inappropriate public health measures. Therein lies the debate.
Went out to eat at a restaurant tonight for the first time in a couple of months. It was lovely. I think I enjoyed all the little things I used to overlook and take completely for granted.
Maybe COVID cases will spike in Alabama. It was still wonderful to be able to go out to eat again.
Lucia: “Sure. But it is unconstitutional to take inappropriate public health measures. Therein lies the debate.”
SteveF: “Appropriate [public health measures] is the key [to constitutionality] of course.”
Hoorah, we can agree upon the most important thing. Now, who decides what is “appropriate”?
Trump initially claimed he was the decision-maker, but he was later informed that public health officials working with the governor in each state would decide. (Trump controls quarantine at the national borders, especially ports international airports.) To help the states, Mike Pence’s team proposed some prudent requirements for each phase of re-opening the economy. When Trump was informed by his epidemiologists how long those requirements might take, the former head of the Council of Economic Advisors, Keven Hassett, was recruited to make some rosier projections. Those projections (like the CEA’s projections that the 2017 tax cuts would pay for themselves) haven’t come true, but Trump had become irreversibly committed to re-opening in May. According to the MSM, most states don’t meet the administration’s suggested requirements.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/openingamerica/
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/07/us/coronavirus-states-reopen-criteria.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/34-days-of-pandemic-inside-trumps-desperate-attempts-to-reopen-america/2020/05/02/e99911f4-8b54-11ea-9dfd-990f9dcc71fc_story.html
https://www.businessinsider.com/white-house-economic-adviser-hassett-model-coronavirus-deaths-zero-10-days-2020-5
So, if you, Elon Musk and others take your governor to court for continuing inappropriately restrictions on our constitutional rights, I’ll enjoy the National Constitution Center’s presentation of both sides of the issue. It would be great if you won and we could have relative safety and less restrictions. Unfortunately, the administration’s recommendations could be used as evidence supporting your governor’s actions. (:)) So judges will be next to decide what is appropriate. Unfortunately, only really gutsy judges are likely to second-guess a governor and his public health advisors during the early stages of the biggest pandemic in a century. Eventually voters may have their say.
Since I’m often too pessimistic, you can correctly accuse me of gloom-and-doom. However, outside of NYC, the number of coronavirus cases is still increasing nationally and re-opening will increase opportunities for transmission. Things are worse where I live. Our governor has decided to start Phase I of re-opening only in the safer part of the state – a decision we might all might agree is in keeping with the spirit of taking the least restrictive measures needed to fight the pandemic.
Mike M. wrote (Comment #184730) May 12th, 2020 at 1:12 pm
Mike wrote: “This epidemic was never exponential. Daily deaths on a semi-log plot were bending right from the beginning. It took a week or two for confirmed cases, due to the late ramp up of testing. Deaths lag confirmed cases by 6-7 days, that can easily be seen by comparing the curves for daily increases. Deaths are reported to lag symptoms by 18-19 days and symptoms lag infection by 4-5 days, so deaths lag infection by a little over 3 weeks and positive tests lag infection by a little over 2 weeks.”
I choose to look at cases of COVID-19 because treatment could improve with time and because greater numbers make the data smoother. When we are dealing with a process where one sick patient on the average infects N healthy people during a average period of infectivity, we are dealing with an exponential process (unless N=1). For values of N near 1, it can take an impractically long time to distinguish between linear and exponential. The fact that N changes with time makes things more complicated, but the process is still mathematically exponential at all times.
I grabbed and plotted the data for the US. From 3/4 to 3/27, the cumulative number of cases grew exponential with a doubling time of 2.5 days and an R^2 of 0.998. There was a discontinuity between 3/3 and 3/4 and some flattening in late March, but I still get a doubling time of 2.5 days, a nearly 5000-fold increase in cases, an R^2 of 0.986 for 3/1 through 3/31. Stretching to 40 days (4/9) distorts the doubling time to 2.9 days and R^2 is down to 0.96. The full 73 days since 3/1 have a formal doubling time of 5.4 days and R^2 of 0.83. It would be dubious to characterize 40 days as “simple exponential growth” and unambiguously wrong to say that about the full 73 days, but “simple exponential 5000-fold growth” is a reasonable description of what happened in March. Assuming an average of 5 days between infection and transmission, that would mean each infected American infected 4 others (N=4).
When I look at the most recent 10, 20 or 30 days of the US pandemic, I get doubling times of 36, 29 and 24 days and R^2 of 0.996, 0.989, and 0.979. So the US lockdown increased the doubling time from 2.5 days to about 3-5 weeks. Assuming an average period of 5 days between infection and transmission, the average American infected about 1.2 Americans during this period. Judged on this basis, US measures have been very successful, but far from successful enough to bring the pandemic to an end (roughly N about 0.5), as has been done in some Asian countries. If opening the economy means the average American infects as average of 2 others (N=2), in theory, we will have a 64-fold increase in cases over the next month, reaching nearly 100 million cumulative cases and overwhelming hospitals. If opening the economy means the average American infects only 1.5 other Americans, it will take two months to reach 100 million cases (and 500,000 deaths). In either of these cases, we wasted an enormous amount of money shutting down our economy, without changing the final outcome. However, the transmission rate will probably slow as the pandemic burns out in the most densely populated regions of the country. And we have an unknown numbers of case with no symptoms or mild symptoms that are missing from these numbers,
As expected, the data beginning on April 1 also fits well to a linear trend increasing 28,400/day (an average of 3% increase) over the whole period and 26,300/day for the last 20 days (both R^2 0.999).
frank,
‘appropriate’ includes quarantines for sick people. Mass house arrest of people who are not sick is not appropriate. If it were, people would do it voluntarily.
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I understand you believe experts. I trust them only for ‘factual analysis’, but one heavily biased by their personal value preferences (see climate ‘scientists’, for example). They should never be making policy…. ever. Factual information, that’s all. Fauci, Birx, et al are no more qualified to make the value-based judgements which go into important public policy choices than the factory worker who is now unemployed or the barber who’s shop has been closed for two months. Politicians are slightly better than ‘experts’, because they at least care about re-election, if not protecting our Constitution or our personal freedom. Politicians understand fear: the optics are really bad when your policies lead to handcuffing young mothers for daring to let their kids play with other kids. That kind of bad optics makes politicians you lose elections. Surfers make bad targets too… and boaters, beauty salon owners, etc. The list is long. When foolish policies, instituted by fiat, turn many ordinary citizens into criminals, those policies are never going to work. The harder those policies are pushed, the more resistance they will face, including, if it goes on long enough, violent resistance. Politicians will usually relent when facing resistance; from deep in their oversized reptilian brainstem, fear will motivate them. ‘Experts’ have no fear, and will never relent. Which is why they should never make policy or even policy recommendations.
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Free individuals should make virtually all decisions about their personal actions, not politicians, and certainly not (heaven forbid) ‘experts’.
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And that, frank, is the most important value-based judgement of all.
Well spoken Steve. I agree.
Frank is completely wrong, but he has made it clear that there is no point in arguing with him, since he ignores any criticism of his claims.
Mike M,
“Frank is completely wrong, but he has made it clear that there is no point in arguing with him..”
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Indeed. It is a waste of time.
New height of stupidity: “experts” have told the governor of Sao Paulo state that more than 50% of people must stay at home to keep the infection from growing exponentially. So on Mondays it is illegal to drive your car (anywhere) if it has an even numbered plate, Tuesdays odd number plates are illegal, etc. It is lost on these idiots that asymptomatic people remain carriers for multiple days…. and they will go out on alternate days to try to make money. Families are starting to go hungry in Sao Paulo. I predict this is not going to work out very well.
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Fortunately for the governor, only true criminals have guns in Brazil, which are pretty much prohibited by law.
Interesting thread at Climate Etc authored by Nic Lewis where he uses the 4 box SEIR model and accounts for inhomogeneity in the populations under consideration for individual susceptibility, infectivity and social connectivity. When these factors are modeled the percent infected of a population to reach herd immunity can change dramatically.
Frank
Perhaps a more appropriate exclamation would be “Hurray, Frank has finally realized no one ever said appropriate action was not permitted!!!
Now, who decides what is “appropriate�
MikeM
Comment #184730)
May 12th, 2020 at 1:12 pm Edit This
I have no idea where you get this idea:
I see no bending in the beginning.
Kenneth,
Yes, it was interesting, and not very different from what some other people have calculated. But Nic got endless push back, some calm….some hysterical, from the usual lefty suspects who want to continue lock downs indefinitely. Reality will overrun their recalcitrance very soon, but they will never admit they were mistaken.
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When the USA doesn’t end up with 400,000 corona virus deaths 10 months from now, in spite of eased restrictions, they will insist it was the heroic efforts of Democrat governors who “saved a quarter million lives”. I will try to resist vomiting, but may not succeed.
I find it interesting to read how each state is handling the easing of restrictions.
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/states-coronavirus-reopening-plan/story?id=70565409
lucia (Comment #184761),
My Comment #184730 was referring to US data. It seems to be true for cases in all states I have looked at.
Spain’s antibody testing of 60,000 people shows 5% of population infected, about 10x higher than their official case count. 26% were asymptomatic.
lucia (Comment #184611)
May 10th, 2020 at 6:29 am
You’re right… I did call the peak a bit too early.
The way the deaths keep climbing, it’s starting to look like the lock down has only had a limited effect, which is disappointing. You might end up staying in lock down right through summer.
MikeM
Ok…. well, odd to talk about whether or not the US or world data are or are not exponential. No… we don’t expect it to arrive at the same time in NYC and North Dakota…. We also don’t send patients in NYC to North Dakota.
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Lucia,
“We also don’t send patients in NYC to North Dakota.”
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Which is a bit unfortunate. If most of the nursing home population in the NYC region had been send to (evil, deplorable, wicked) states with very low infection rates, then the NYC death rate would be a lot lower, and there would be a lot of now dead grandparents still talking to their grand kids.
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But you know, that only matters if you actually care about people dying for no good cause. Saving elderly people in the NYC region could never happen, because the social justice, lefty cultural warriors don’t give a sh!t about people dying, only about ‘progress’. So die they do and will.
Yes, It does seem that serological IFR’s are all over the place between .1% and 1%. I’m thinking this must be due to differential exposure of different age groups. Probably the higher numbers had higher exposure of older groups.
Here is a link to a paper along the lines of Nic Lewis’ thread that shows how the herd immunity threshold can be lower than a model using homogeneity would predict.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.06.20093336v1
David Young,
“I’m thinking this must be due to differential exposure of different age groups.”
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Probably that is a very big part of it.
David Young (Comment #184771): “Yes, It does seem that serological IFR’s are all over the place between .1% and 1%. I’m thinking this must be due to differential exposure of different age groups. Probably the higher numbers had higher exposure of older groups.”
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Another factor could be initial infective dose. Large or multiple initial doses likely lead to more serious infection. And really small doses don’t produce an infection. So in crowded and/or confined environments, you are more likely to catch the virus and also more likely to get a severe case if you do catch it.
——-
Addition: It looks like there is a positive correlation between CFR and cases per thousand population.
Wisconsin becomes the first state for the courts to rule that lock down orders are not an absolute power.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/us/coronavirus-wisconsin-supreme-court.html
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“an agency cannot confer on itself the power to dictate the lives of law-abiding individuals as comprehensively as the order does without reaching beyond the executive branch’s authority.”
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The usual suspects are responding in the usual “how dare you question my omnipotent power” way. Public health and the executive can also rule by recommendations and follow that up by “orders” if it become a legitimate crisis. Most people will follow these already. The world doesn’t end with a few barber shop outliers. And if there is a vast gulf between government bureaucrats and the public, perhaps the public should win.
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The ruling is not what many make it out to be. The executive is supposed to consult with the legislative in these orders and unsurprisingly the Democratic governor and the Republican legislature aren’t talking.
We should all be excited at the prospect of so many natural experiments. Well at least the scientists should be. The five or six fatalities per million each day a bit less so.
Tom Scharf,
The usual suspects have now increased their already exaggerated histrionics.
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The Governor says “it’s the wild west”.
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No, it’s the law in Wisconsin. The governor was required to ask the legislature for authority to extend the lock down orders. He didn’t, because he refused, like most every ‘progressive’, to make substantive compromises. So the court (correctly) threw out the extension.
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If the governor goes to the legislature, I am sure he can work out a compromise… certainly not as restrictive as he would like, but stronger than nothing. We’ll see, but I doubt he is willing to compromise on substance. When you are convinced you are 100% correct, and morally superior to boot, substantive compromise is very difficult. Religions seldom compromise, same as ‘progressives’. That’s not a coincidence.
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Brings a smile to my face: the cities and counties run by Democrats have already moved to replace the state-wide restrictions within their own local restrictions, the legality of which I am sure will be challenged. But in the mean time, people who live in those places can just drive a little further and go to a store or restaurant in a different county. Next logical rule: road blocks to keep citizens captive within the local jurisdiction, and so subject to their rules? I don’t think that is enforceable, never mind legal or constitutional. But the prospect is funny.
Yes, and only 3 of the 421 corona virus fatalities Wisconsin has experienced happened yesterday. May their good fortune continue.
co·her·ent
/ËŒkÅˈhirÉ™nt/
adjective
1.
(of an argument, theory, or policy) logical and consistent.
his·tri·on·ic
/ˌhistrēˈänik/
adjective
overly theatrical or melodramatic in character or style.
“a histrionic outburst”
noun
exaggerated dramatic behavior designed to attract attention.
Interesting. Histrionic? Wisconsin yesterday did dramatically better than the U.S. as a whole, suffering only 1 fatality for every 2 million residents. That’s great good fortune and they should be proud of doing so much better. It bespeaks good sense and intelligent behavior. Long may they reign!
I was told that not allowing everyone to vote by mail would lead to death in Wisconsin.
It certainly increases risk unnecessarily. If you have the opportunity to reduce risk of exposure and do not take advantage of it, what does that mean?
Thomas Fuller,
I was not suggesting YOU were histrionic. The usual suspects at the NYT, WaPo, CNN, etc are histrionic, along with the governor of Wisconsin, of course. You are just muttering a bit.
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Do you think that the governor in Wisconsin should have compromised with the (hated) Republican legislature, or was his choice to flip them the bird instead a better idea? Real question, not at all rhetorical.
Thomas Fuller,
My home state of Florida has just about the same death rate per million population as Wisconsin….. in spite of having an evil Republican governor who never embraced the Evers formula of permanent strangulation of the economy…. most retail was never closed, only restaurants and services, and they are now open. Those irresponsible people walking on the beaches for the past weeks are to be scolded and reviled, right? Should I be proud of Florida’s low death rate from corona virus, or horrified that we elected a scumbag Republican governor who is killing so many people? Real questions, not rhetorical.
Here is how Wisconsin compares to some “irresponsible” red states in deaths per million:
72.3 Wisconsin
70.3 Oklahoma
55.3 Nebraska
52.5 North Dakota
44.1 South Dakota
42.0 Texas
32.1 Arkansas
23.4 Utah
12.1 Wyoming
MikeM,
“Here is how Wisconsin compares to some “irresponsible†red states in deaths per million”.
You clearly miss the point. It is 100% about public control of private behavior. It has almost nothing to do with outcomes, death rates or anything else… those are just the means to the desire end. As Rahm Emanuel (2008) explained:
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Coercing the public to give up their personal liberties is exactly what the whole Democratic response to Covid 19 is about. It will pretty much always be about that, no matter the issue: health care, environment, climate change, tax laws, free speech, you name it, the story is 100% the same… give up your person liberty, or else. It is not a resolvable disagreement.
SteveF (Comment #184799): “You clearly miss the point.”
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Sarcasm?
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SteveF: “It is 100% about public control of private behavior. It has almost nothing to do with outcomes, death rates or anything else”
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Indeed.
That is the reason that Democrat governors won’t compromise with Republican legislatures. It is not so much that they are unwilling to compromise on policy. It is that they are unwilling to share power.
Mike M,
Sarcasm, yes.
I know you appreciate the disconnect between factual reality and the politics of covid 19. It is hard to treat the nonsense from the left with anything but sarcasm. As I have said several times before: the left never stops, never tires, and never compromises. It is what makes them dangerous to liberty, and whenever allowed to succeed, destructive to the rule of law and the Constitutional protections we enjoy.
Geez, this all reminds me of talking to dhogaza and sod and those types about climate change. Do you really think the governor of Wisconsin wants to control the lives of his constituents? Really?
It’s too early to blame this on the relaxation of health measures, but Wisconsin deaths went from 3 yesterday to 13 today.
Thomas
Much too early.
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I have to admit I’m surprised to read you throwing that out there. I think it’s fair to say those 13 are definitely ones that are more influenced by pre-lift policies. It does take away from the applause you gave WI governor for keeping the deaths down to 3, as it’s now the dreaded 13.
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We won’t be able to see what effect lifting had for at least 15-18 days. My guess is they will trend up some. We may see the effect on mobility sooner.
Thomas,
I don’t think the governor necessarily want to control his constituents lives. But I do strongly suspect he doesn’t want to have to deal with the legislature and would rather just impose his decision whether or not it’s supported by other elected officials.
Thomas,
“Wisconsin deaths went from 3 yesterday to 13 today.â€
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The reporting of deaths is delayed, and always has a 7-day cyclical component. You can’t draw any conclusions about the influence of policies on death rates for at least 14 days, and more reliably 21 days.
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Yes, the governor wants to control the private actions of the citizens. What else is he doing? You (clearly) think he should do this. Others strenuously disagree, including a lot of his constituents.
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There are in fact many parallels to the policy debates over global warming. Both are fundamentally disagreements about the scope of personal liberty versus government control. Where people fall on these questions is not difficult to predict based on what priority they give to personal liberty..
I think any governor should (and probably does) have the power to declare a public health emergency and institute sensible precautions. I think that includes shutting down non-essential businesses where people tend to congregate. It includes mandating the use of personal protection such as masks.
We have the same semi-lockdown here in Oregon. People are still getting on with their lives. My wife and I go jogging, go for a walk, go grocery shopping and watch a lot of Netflix. It isn’t ideal but it is not hell on earth.
We have a million fewer people but just one-fourth the fatalities of Wisconsin. Our lefty governor put us in quarantine early. Because we did it early and people took it seriously, most counties in Oregon are relaxing the restrictions (somewhat) tomorrow.
434 people in Wisconsin have lost their lives due to the corona virus. If 434 people had died there due to any other cause, the governor would be impeached had he or she done nothing in response.
The not-so-subtle subtext of some of the protests is that people around the state should not be penalized for the virus spread amongst those of darker skin hue in Milwaukee.
StevF, what I recall from the heated climate conversations was that the more rabid of the alarmists were always quick to ascribe nefarious motives to people who did not agree with them about the implications of the science or the policy prescriptions they favored.
Kind of like saying “It is 100% about public control of private behavior. It has almost nothing to do with outcomes, death rates or anything else†or equating mostly moderate Democrats with a left that “never stops, never tires, and never compromises.” We don’t win often enough to make that even close to plausible.
Those statements are downright weird.
I think Thomas that the issue here is whether there is any science behind these restrictions. Given that those states that did not shut down seem to have pretty low deaths per million, there seems to me to be little empirical evidence that lockdowns work.
There is a lot of evidence that people had already started to socially distance voluntarily before lockdowns.
This then leads to the very real question of why something with very little science behind it but huge costs is being pursued. I personally agree with SteveF. It’s about left wing governors desire to control their subjects and finding ways to make that happen. I also see a lot of evidence that liberalism has in the last 20 years morphed into socialism which believes the Bill of Rights is secondary to social justice. One outcome that some want to happen is some sort of universal income. The continuation of the PPP would be just that. So that can be forced to happen by making the economic Depression as severe as possible which then might force the Federal government to step in.
It’s depressing but perhaps half the Democratic party no longer believes in either the Constitution or the free enterprise system. That’s according to polling.
David, I don’t see that at all. Obama was a pragmatic centrist. So is Biden. Sanders was never a Democrat–he tried twice to hijack the party and failed twice. Hell, Hillary is a pragmatic centrist. Look at the primary contenders–Buttigieg, centrist. Klobuchar, centrist. (I already forget who else was in the primary… Oh, yeah–Gillibrand, centrist. And yeah, we had a couple of loons on the stage, all 1 percenters.)
Warren is left of center but is far from a leftist loon. She’s just really progressive. AOC is pretty far to the left, but she’s a freshman congressperson with not much in the way of power.
I just don’t see reality in your descriptions.
Thomas Fuller,
“ The not-so-subtle subtext of some of the protests is that people around the state should not be penalized for the virus spread amongst those of darker skin hue in Milwaukee.â€
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Please. The virus doesn’t discriminate. That you would suggest people in Wisconsin who disagree with the governor’s policies do so because of racial discrimination is about as despicable as it gets. I note that is but one of the (many) issues about which left never quits.
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I don’t accuse you of nefarious motives; I am saying your preferred policies come from caring little about personal liberties and caring much more about public control of private actions. It is a question of priorities and values. I just strenuously disagree with your priorities and values.
And I almost hesitate to call to your attention that there really is only one person who is posing a challenge to the constitution. And he ain’t a Dem.
Thomas,
I don’t know who you are accusing of posing a challenging the constitution or in what way. If your intention is to discuss the merits of some claim, you need to actually state it rather than leaving it to our imagination.
Obama is a far left ideologue who pretended to be a pragmatic centrist until his second term.
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David Young is right. There is little or no science behind the restrictions. They are about control.
Thomas, You will note that Biden is starting to move left too and has called on AOC to draft a green new like plan. What is happening is that Bernie and the squad has forced formerly sane Democrats way to the left. This is particularly easy to see with cultural marxism and its hierarchy of victim groups. Every Democrat pretty much tows the Marxist line on this.
Thomas Fuller (Comment #184811): “We have the same semi-lockdown here in Oregon. People are still getting on with their lives. My wife and I go jogging, go for a walk, go grocery shopping and watch a lot of Netflix. It isn’t ideal but it is not hell on earth.”
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How nice for you. And for me, since the lockdown here in New Mexico is not as extreme as many places and my income has not been significantly affected. At least, not yet.
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But it is very different for the people seeing 30 years of hard work destroyed. And for the people who can not afford to feed their families. And for the people who are basically locked in their small apartments. And for the farmers forced to turn off the air supply to the chicken barn to suffocate their chickens, or to slaughter and bury hundreds of hogs, or to dump out tanker truck loads of milk.
Thomas
I would assume that (a) whether a governor has that power depends on individual states and that (b) in most states, the constitution limits that power. Generally speaking, their power will be limited in time and scope. At some point, the legislature will need to be consulted and act.
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That’s the way our separation of powers works. At the federal level, the president can move troops. But he can’t actually get funds to support his choices without the legislature.
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That’s our method of avoiding Executives becoming tin-pot dictators.
It might not allow him to (a) levy fine or (b) impose jail time for violating the rule. Those are normally a legislative functions.
Impeached? Uhmm… I doubt it. Not re-elected: perhaps.
I’m not seeing what hue of skin has to do with it.
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In Illinois, Grundy is not thrilled with being on lockdown due to Cook county. I don’t think this has much to due with the color of many victims of Covid in Cook County. It has to do with the fact that extremely rural Grundy, where people live on farms and are spread out don’t see much point in being forced to close their economy when that will have little benefit to either their death rate nor that in Cook.
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The fact is: the behavior in Grundy county isn’t going to affect the health of the city folk Cook be the Cook County resident black, white, brown red, yellow or even purple.
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But sure: Accuse those in Grundy of racism. It’s a pathetically weak argument. But it’s a stronger one than trying to make the case that closing down Grundy will help anyone in Cook.
Thomas,
“ We don’t win often enough to make that even close to plausible.
Those statements are downright weird.â€
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I am old enough to have seen the long term trend has been steadily toward the left. Yes, Ronald Reagan slowed it some, Bush the elder went with the flow, Bill Clinton moved only slowly leftward, Bush the younger did nothing but tread water, and Obama ran leftward about as fast as he could (consider what went on at EPA, ‘dreamers’ and their less dreamy parents, obamacare, etc), with no interest in compromise….,.â€elections have consequences“ I think sums it up.
Did I lose my compass? I was under the impression that Grundy and Cook counties were in Illinois, not Wisconsin.
It’s good to know that the good folk of Illinois are devoid of the prejudice that I inferred to exist among the protestors of Wisconsin, based on my opinions of what some said. Although when I was a child in Decatur, we did hear rumors of the Klan being alive and well in the state.
I think we’re both speculating on the limits of different governors’ powers in time of emergency, and I for one am not willing to read 50 state constitutions to find out.
MikeM, the lockdown is really tough on some, as you point out. I do feel for them and applaud the actions the President and Congress have taken to provide succor. I hope more such help is forthcoming. I think watching a loved one die via Facebook on smartphones is also tough and I hope the steps we have taken make such occurrences rarer.
Lucia, when the sitting president asserts in court that he cannot be investigated for criminal activity, let alone be prosecuted, I believe he does violence to the Constitution.
Thomas, I think you have only a superficial understanding of the issues involved. I think the general rule is that a President can be impeached but not prosecuted by his own attorney general, or at least that’s not practically possible under normal circumstances. I don’t think a former President has ever been prosecuted for acts while he was in office either. Similarly, members of Congress have immunity. They can be removed by their body if they are eggregeous enough, but not prosecuted.
Thomas,
You are saying the protests against lockdowns are motivated by racism. Whether they are in WI or IL is not relevant to that accusation.
I didn’t claim they are. My claim is that it’s easier for you to levy that accusation than face the fact that people in rural counties are correct to point out that their being locked down is neither required to save the lives of those in the city. It isn’t even helpful.
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That those in rural areas might or might not be prejudiced is rather irrelevant to whether they should or should not be locked down. After all: no one is saying we should lock them down to punish them for their attitude. Of if that’s the reason you think they should be locked down then just say it. Otherwise, try to advance an argument that locking them down helps someone.
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I’m pretty sure you can’t make one. That’s why you are taking the lazy route of accusing them of prejudice and doubling down. But the fact is: whether they are prejudice or not is irrelevant. To justify locking them down, you need to make a case that it could possible help them or someone and that the amount it helps is significantly greater than the harm to them.
Sure. But you were perfectly willing to advise that governors did have this power until someone pushed back. In fact: You don’t know. Moreover it is highly unlikely they do in the current circumstance, which may or may not be sufficiently “dire”.
Does violence is a turn of phrase. His merely saying something but doing nothing does not represent a constitutional crisis. Nor is it a constitutional violation of any sort.
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But thank you for clarifying what you meant. Because now that you’ve said it, it’s clear that you merely dislike Trumps behavior. So do I. That doesn’t mean it violates the constitution.
Well, I’ll break this into separate comments and I apologize for length beforehand:
The Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause prohibits the president from accepting personal benefits from any foreign government or official.
Trump has retained his ownership interests in his family business while he is in office.
Thus, every time a foreign official stays at a Trump hotel, or a foreign government approves a new Trump Organization project, or grants a trademark, Trump is in violation of the Constitution.
Trump has repeatedly pushed his properties as avenues to secure his favor, and multiple foreign officials have stayed at his properties while lobbying his administration.
Saudi officials and an Iraqi Sheik stayed at his hotel when lobbying for their interests.
China approved multiple trademarks for his family’s brands while negotiating trade policies.
Trump promoted his club in Doral Florida for the 2020 G-7 Conference, and then the White House announced the multi-million dollar contract was awarded to Trump’s own resort after Trump’s suggestion. Ultimately, this contract was canceled despite his attempts to abuse his position.
And every time he goes to golf at a Trump property, he funnels taxpayer money into his family business—violating the Domestic Emoluments Clause.
To date, Trump has spent over $100 million taxpayer dollars to golf and vacation at his own properties.
Federal law prohibits campaigns from soliciting or accepting anything of value from a foreign national.
2016
Donald Trump publicly called on Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s “missing†emails on July 27, 2016. Five hours later, Russian hackers attacked Clinton’s personal office for the first time.
In the middle of the 2016 election, Trump’s son was invited to meet with a Russian national regarding “information that would incriminate Hillary and…would be very useful to†Donald Trump. Donald Trump Jr. was told it was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.†Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort took the meeting.
Paul Manafort and Rick Gates met with Konstantin Kilimnik, likely a Russian spy, multiple times in the summer of 2016 to provide him with internal campaign polling data detailing the Trump campaign’s midwestern strategy.
2020
Trump used U.S. military aid to pressure Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 elections and must be impeached because no one is above the law.
He illegally withheld $400 million dollars of military aid to Ukraine and in a call with the President of Ukraine, asked them to “do us a favor†by investigating Joe Biden’s family and a debunked conspiracy theory (that has been pushed by Russian intelligence) alledging Ukraine hacked the DNC’s computer servers.
White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney admitted in a press conference that Trump had withheld military aid to Ukraine to pressure them to investigate his rivals for the 2020 election. He told the public to “Get Over it†as the White House does this “All the timeâ€. Other State Department officials made it clear to the Ukrainian government that the aide would not be released unless the Ukrainians investigated the Biden family for the purpose of helping Trump win re-election.
Trump told the press that, in addition to Ukraine, China should investigate the Bidens specifically and said “If they [China] do what we want, we have tremendous power†in ongoing trade negotiations.
After this occurred, a Trump aide claimed that the Chinese had, in fact, given him information on Hunter Biden’s business dealings in the country.
Multiple witnesses confirmed in the public impeachment hearings before the House Intelligence Committee that Trump was attempting to bribe and extort Ukraine into helping his reelection.
President Trump threatened to withhold aid from Ukraine if its Prime Minister did not investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son. Using taxpayer dollars to manipulate an important ally against Russia and attack a political rival is a clear abuse of presidential power.
Furthermore, this administration tried to conceal the whistleblower complaint that brought this corruption to light and label the civil servant who filed it as partisan.
In addition, Trump’s decision to pardon Joe Arpaio, who was convicted for contempt of court after ignoring a court order that he stop detaining and searching people based on the color of their skin, amounted to an abuse of the pardon power that revealed his indifference to individual rights, equal protections, and the separation of powers.
Pardoning this conviction goes against the Fifth Amendment, which allows the judiciary to issue and enforce injunctions against government officials who flout individual rights.
40 years ago today, people pushed the state to reopen areas around Mt. St. Helens citing tourism & the economy against advice of scientists. Five days later, the volcano erupted.
Thomas,
Quite the rants. Nothing new. All exaggerated, misrepresented, or outright false. Except for the Biden thing…. that he did try to pull off, without any success. Of course, plenty of people think the clear appearance of Biden selling influence in the Ukraine (and China) to enrich his family deserves investigation.
SteveF, please be specific.
Thomas,
BTW, you would be wise to not criticize Trump about playing golf….. Obama was at least as guilty. I was once returning from a West Coast overnight flight, and my plane was forced to circle Palm Beach for half an hour while Obama’s plane “was secured . turned out Obama was playing golf with some tour pros just a few miles from where I live. Of course, he flew from the airport to the golf course via helicopter, while I fought the traffic snarl due to the security operations for his visit…. I expect he was on the 7th tee before I got home. He flew back to Washington that afternoon. I don’t think it was a cheap round of golf. Presidents cost too much…. better if they were forced to stay in the White House unless on a diplomatic trip.
Obama: 100 golf outings in 8 years
Trump: 250 outings in 3.5 years
Thomas
Ok… so now, whether you preface between “breaking into two parts” or not, you are onto an entirely different gripe from before.
So did Washington. And many other presidents after Washington.
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If you want to pursue the whole emoluments thing.. ok. Lots of people ehave discussed this. Many pointing out there is no issue. BUT, it could be pursued. So pursue it. I have no problem with that.
But at least admit it has nothing to do with your previous gripe of
And go on about the Russian hacker. You need to show there is a connection to Trump. In fact, the evidence we have suggest this is a consipiracy theory by those who don’t like Trump. That doesn’t meant it can’t be true. But still.. ..
“Paul Manafort and Rick Gates met with Konstantin Kilimnik, likely a Russian spy, multiple times in the summer of 2016 to provide him with internal campaign polling data detailing the Trump campaign’s midwestern strategy.”
That would be providing something of value, not soliciting or accepting something of value.
“Donald Trump publicly called on Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s “missing†emails on July 27, 2016. Five hours later, Russian hackers attacked Clinton’s personal office for the first time.”
Even if this were a serious statement by Trump, what is the thing of value here? According to Hillary Clinton, the missing e-mails are all about non-work subjects like yoga and Chelsea’s wedding. The only way this could be of value was if Hillary broke the law in deleting the e-mails.
“In the middle of the 2016 election, Trump’s son was invited to meet with a Russian national regarding “information that would incriminate Hillary and…would be very useful to†Donald Trump.”
This is where you are at least presenting something that seems to match. However, the actual laws do not agree with this interpretation. For example, FEC has said that foreigners can volunteer for a campaign.
If it were otherwise, then Hillary can be prosecuted for soliciting the Steele Dossier from Brit Chris Steele.
Thomas,
I think you have more time available than I do. Here is but one of the many exaggerations: Trump publically called for the Russians to release the many thousands of illegally deleted email messages, if they had them. They didn’t. Hell, I’d publicly call for that if anyone would listen to me. The point is:Trump was not colluding with Russia, and did nothing illegal there. Hillary had the email server ‘bleach-bit’ scrubbed to ensure those messages were never turned over, even though they had already been formally requested. Makes one think the deleted emails might have been about more than haircut appointments. Nasty politics? Maybe, but Hillary was the queen of nasty politics, as her use of the Steele documents, and her political knifing of Bills rape victims show clearly.
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You hate Trump. I get that. I loathed Obama. I think he was by far the most blatantly lawless president of my lifetime (including Nixon). But I accept he was elected, and then re-elected. Trump and Obama are both horribly divisive, and Trump may actually be a little worse on that score. I am confident history will treat nether Obama nor Trump very well….. but for very different reasons.
Given some new articles I’ve seen about Vitamin D reducing effects of coronavirus, perhaps the lockdowns are causing deaths beyond economic impact.
Thomas,
Trump owns 16 golf courses, two within a couple of miles of his residence in Palm Beach. I played golf a couple of weeks back with a policeman assigned to provide security at the local courses when Trump plays… he confirmed Trump plays most every day that he is in Palm Beach if it’s not raining. So ya…. a lot of rounds, but not so much expense.
MikeN,
If you are past 65, deficient in vitamin D, and have type A blood, you actually are at substantially elevated risk, no joke. Compared to a sun-tanned type O 65 year old (lots of vitamin D) you might have 75% higher risk of severe illness. So choose your parents well, and spend some time on the beach. 😉
My blood type is B. I went for a walk wearing a sleeveless top today. . .
Lucia,
All the best people seem to have type B. 😉
I think excluding AB, it’s the rarest. Of course A is just A and B, and so, naturaly rarely than B.
None of us got Dad’s rare RH negative blood though. He was B-. I’m B+.
Steve said “Thomas, Quite the rants. Nothing new.”
I agree.
I don’t understand what you want from us Thomas. We know what you believe about Trump. I’ve argued some of these issues with you before. I didn’t persuade you, you didn’t persuade me. So why do you resurrect them every week or two? I don’t know the answer to this question, but if I did maybe I could help you resolve whatever it is you’re trying to resolve. It gets tedious and boring after a while; unpleasant, actually.
Or every month or two; I lose track.
Somehow we went from discussing the merits of who decides the extent of lock downs to the epic constitutional crisis of the possibility of foreign visitors staying a Trump hotel? That’s argument whiplash, ha ha. Somebody might want to check up on the Clinton Foundation if one was to represent themselves as severely concerned about these type of things. Look, squirrel, indeed!
The NYT is sick of hearing about Sweden. The framing bias here is they choose to focus on comparing to their direct neighbors.
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Sweden Stayed Open. A Deadly Month Shows the Risks.
Sweden’s outbreak has been far deadlier than those of its neighbors, but it’s still better off than many countries that enforced strict lockdowns.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/15/world/europe/sweden-coronavirus-deaths.html
SteveF wrote: “I understand you believe experts. I trust them only for ‘factual analysis’, but one heavily biased by their personal value preferences (see climate ‘scientists’, for example). They should never be making policy…. ever. Factual information, that’s all. Fauci, Birx, et al are no more qualified to make the value-based judgements which go into important public policy choices than the factory worker who is now unemployed or the barber who’s shop has been closed for two months.”
I agree with you. Instead of arguing about the correctness of Fauci’s and Birx’s epidemiological recommendations, Trump should say to the public that it is his job to take into account epidemiology information from epidemiologists and economic information from economists and information about the challenges faced by small and large businesses and workers and families; and (with guidance from his most trusted advisors) integrate that information to make the best possible decision, and keep refining that decision as new data emerges. And if Trump were skeptical of what he heard from those two epidemiologists, he should hear from more epidemiologists in person and ask them about uncertainty and how best to determine whose forecasts were proving to be most reliable. Instead, the thin-skinned Mr. Trump makes a gut decision and publicly insults those experts who didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear to justify ignoring their advice. It’s all about personal loyalty. As a experienced creator and consumer of models, Mr. Hassett was qualified to express an opinion about how to choose between conflicting models, but certainly not qualified to create an “unpeer-reviewed model of his own.
As for climate scientists, the IPCC is controlled by a self-selected/self-perpetuating group of activist scientists who serve as legislature, prosecutor, judge and jury trying our fossil fuel-based economy behind closed doors without any defense attorneys being present. Their verdict is pre-ordained. In law and politics, we have an adversarial system for determining truth or best policy, in which both sides are provided equal opportunity to make their case and rebut the case of the other side, and in which no one is expected to be candid about the strength of his opponent’s case or the weaknesses of his own case. Since scientists don’t have the time or money to waste on an adversarial system for discovering the truth, ethical scientists are – as Schneider famously said – expected to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth – with all of the ifs, ands, but, and caveats. The IPCC gives us the worst features of both systems, scientists behaving like prosecutors. Nearly every conclusion in an IPCC SPM should start with the phrase: “If our climate models are correct, then …” and contain a massive and clear section about parameterization and what climate models do and don’t do well. Plus a clear explanation that in traditional science, a scientific conclusion that is merely “likely” is a joke and “very likely” usually isn’t worthy of mention in the abstract of a paper. Real scientists would never allow political appointees to control wording of their reports, because scientists are ethically required to thorough discuss caveats and no politician would ever admit to the existence of caveats – they are in the business of selling certainty.
Nevertheless, I see no reason to believe that medical science and constitutional law contain the serious flaws I perceive in climate science. What I see is President Trump’s disdain for anyone whose expert opinion conflicts loyalty to the President’s agenda. His tweets paint them as agents of the swamp he has failed to drain or the Deep State and are uncritically accepted by his supporters.
Frank,
You’re not paying attention. Or you’re paying too much attention to the partisan media. What Trump tweets and speaks off the cuff is nearly always irrelevant. Look at what he does, which is pretty much exactly your ideal procedure.
frank,
“Instead, the thin-skinned Mr. Trump makes a gut decision and publicly insults those experts who didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear to justify ignoring their advice. It’s all about personal loyalty. ‘
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Sure, Trump is something of an a$$ole. Yes, he should do lots of things he has not done… things that would save lots of lives among the elderly, and reduce damage to the economy. If I stipulate that Trump is less than Ideal as a leader, (he clearly is) someone who makes terrible ‘gut’ decisions, and someone who acts like a buffoon, can you stop with the nutty demands that everyone stop living until the universe is safe from coronavirus? We are all going to die. It is a question of when, not if. Freedom and liberty should outlive all of us, but they will only live on if we have a bit of courage. Trading freedom for safety is a very bad deal, for us and for those who come after us.
SteveF wrote: “can you stop with the nutty demands that everyone stop living until the universe is safe from coronavirus? We are all going to die. It is a question of when, not if. Freedom and liberty should outlive all of us, but they will only live on if we have a bit of courage. Trading freedom for safety is a very bad deal, for us and for those who come after us.”
The people who live in South Korea, Taiwan and Wuhan are living in relative safety today. I want my governments to win (as Mr. Trump would say), not lose to these Asian countries. And I want to do so within the limits our Constitution. We can’t even have a sensible conversation about what is and is not permitted under our Constitution.
At the moment, our government has settled for a slowly worsening epidemic that will go on until we have a vaccine, perhaps a year or two from now. The number of new cases has roughly doubled in the last month and opening our economy is likely to shrink that doubling time – unless summer helps a lot. However, most transmission occurs inside, so I don’t see why any rational person should be confident summer will help. Given that more than 86% of inmates at an Ohio prison have tested positive, I don’t think Nic Lewis is correct about the pandemic occurring mostly in a susceptible sub-population that is rapidly being depleted – and producing herd immunity much earlier than expected. If current trends persist (a doubling every month), we will have 100 million cumulative cases by November and we will see our hospitals being overrun like they briefly were in NYC. Is that an acceptable future?
Even if we re-open our economy, is it going to recover during an ongoing and growing pandemic?
I think we need to have a national conversation about what we need to do to avoid this future and what we are actually allowed to do under our Constitution. What are our national goals? I doubt Americans want to settle for the realistic(?) future I have described above, but our obsession for and against Trump dominates every other subject. I suggest a minimally acceptable goal is a 90% reduction in new cases by the time school opens in the fall. That is a 50% reduction every month, an R of about 0.8. The Chinese were able to achieve an R of 0.3 and ended the pandemic in Wuhan in about 1 month. That happened because – when they saw that social distancing and the other measures they took resulted in R similar to what we have today (1.15) – they began taking additional measures almost immediately. Our government hasn’t admitted that our measures have been inadequate and that re-opening will be forced to end if we don’t do better.
https://cdn1.sph.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/21/2020/03/COVID-19-03-16-2020-Lin.pdf
Which of the measures that the Chinese adopted on February 1 (that quickly ended the epidemic) would be unconstitutional or impractical here in the US: a) Quarantining those testing positive away from home? b) Quarantining those with symptoms of COVID-19 away from home? c) Quarantining anyone with a fever away from home? d) Quarantining away from home those who had been in contact with a confirmed or suspected case? (If you are not sick, our government has no right to quarantine you, as best I can tell.)
I’m positive we could be doing more than we are doing today and surprised the highly intelligent people here are satisfied with our present course. I would greatly appreciate an explanation.
Frank,
You can’t believe anything the Chinese report. However, there were reports of officials welding apartment doors closed. I doubt that would be legal here.
I recommend that you heavily edit your posts before submitting. I don’t have the patience to read your overly lengthy efforts.
Frank
It’s not clear it’s worsening. Lots of places appear to have peaked.
New cases/day rose but are now *almost* flat in Illinois. It depends a bit on county.
Your question seems to assume both that the pandemic is growing and on going. That’s not necessarily true in all locations. I think the bet way to get an answer to that question is to see what happens in the states that do reopen. Georgia reopened around April-24-27. Here’s what Georgia looks like in that time.
I don’t think any state is going to reopen while their state is growing. But I don’t see much harm in states that have things under control starting to re-open. It’s not as if keeping bars closed in Georgia is going to help someone in NYC, Queens.
It seems to me we are having that conversation. It also appears that people who aren’t governed by your preferences have contributed to the conversation. And they have taken actions, some of which shou that “future [you] have described above” seems unlikely to occur. IOW: you don’t appear to have stupendous predictive power. Worse you don’t even seem to be looking at data of what is actually happening.
FWIW: Two women who dance my studio were IN China under lockdown before the US got them back here. They quarantine included stuff that is NOT on the list you noted. One told me her later quarantine in the US was voluntary (she complied.) The one in China? Armed guards were visible. Neither of these women fit the conditions you listed.
And yes: it’s legal to quarantine the actually sick or contagious in the US. The question is whether it’s legal to quarantine the not sick and no reason to think contageious.
I’d appreciate if your argument wasn’t based on:
1) You not being aware of facts on the ground.
2) Your assuming your predictions being certain to come true and
3) Having very little idea what the quarantines in China really entailed.
Frank:
I should add: WRT to the above. I’m not as much against stronger actions we have taken in the US. But I think it’s pretty silly of you to lecture people when you appear to simply not know how the pandemic is progressing nor what has happened in different areas.
Frank (Comment #185011): “The people who live in South Korea, Taiwan and Wuhan are living in relative safety today.”
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For now, but will that continue? I notice that you do not mention Singapore or Jilin province in China. The South Koreans may be living in relative safety, but they are under a constant threat that might never be allieviated.
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Frank: “At the moment, our government has settled for a slowly worsening epidemic that will go on until we have a vaccine, perhaps a year or two from now. The number of new cases has roughly doubled in the last month and opening our economy is likely to shrink that doubling time”
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Totally divorced from reality. New cases are *decreasing*. Frank’s claimed doubling time is innumerate nonsense.
Yes, the Constitution is absolutely an impediment to those who seek additional authoritarian power over the populace.
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Hip, hip, hooray!
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Comments such as Frank’s are why I voted for Trump, not because I like Trump, but I value my liberty. Supreme Court. Not being told how to live your life under penalty of law by a bunch of busy bodies (see Big Gulp) has a lot higher value for me than Frank. Frank trusts those people, I don’t. I believe they need to be legally restricted from their worst instincts. People in NYC (see Big Gulp) are now being arrested for not wearing masks.
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There is a balance between liberty and public health. I’m more on the liberty side. I’m not an absolutist. There is a difference between known contagious people coughing in the subway and known healthy people refusing to wear a mask. NYC requires people who have recovered from the virus to wear a mask. Closing hiking trails is stupid, closing theaters is not.
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In one model people should be able to assess their own personal risk, and those who are scared can stay home. In another model everyone must stay home until the virus risk is virtually eliminated (which is a totally different argument than the original flatten the curve).
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It is a judgment call as to where one’s risk assessment infringes on another’s health. We don’t allow people to drive 100 mph down residential roads, but we do allow them to drive fast enough to still kill people in rare circumstances.
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The “conversation” many people want to have is more like a instructional video from on high, an argument from authority, not a conversation.
Dewitt: “You can’t believe anything the Chinese report.”
The Chinese can obscure part of the truth for a short period of time, but they couldn’t hide a pandemic from Chinese social media. Is there really any doubt in your mind that Wuhan is orders of magnitude safer today than it was at the end of January? (The difference may only be only 2 orders of magnitude safer instead of 3.) There is no doubt that other Asian countries have been as successful as China without being a police states. There is no doubt that the US is about twice as dangerous today than it was a month ago. And re-opening will make things more dangerous UNLESS we continue to make interpersonal contacts safer. I’m worried that everyone seems to think we can successfully re-open WITHOUT having to make things increasingly safer. I cited the presentation on China simply to illustrate the clear relationship between government policy and the course of an epidemic. There seems to be some sort of “magical thinking” that things will get better, even if we don’t do anything to make them better.
The presentation I linked makes many of the Chinese lies in early January obvious. However, we had no reason to be fooled. The head of the Chinese CDC called the head of the US CDC on January 1 and 3, admitting (allegedly in tears) that China had lost control of a new SARS epidemic. The only leaders who were fooled were those who wanted to be fooled or too stupid to understand the exponential mathematics of pandemics.
Frank
Pretty sure that was a rhetorical question. But in anycase: Yes. There is doubt in my mind. I’d also like you to provide and objective quantitative number for “safety” so we can take ratios of “safey in January” to “safety in May”. We can then go around and figure out whether Lisle where I live is twice as safe as Chicago, an order of magnitude safer or two orders of magnitude safer.
Now I really want to read your quantification. (I’m pretty sure you’ll find it is not twice as “dangerous” today as a month ago.) Although, perhaps you mean the economic danger is much greater. If so: yes.
Well…that’s an interesting worry. Because I know almost no one who thinks we can just move forward without doing things to reduce the contagion rate. Heck, even SteveF who is very vocal in his criticism over overly stringent lock-downs says we should be carefully handling nursing homes!
You’re saying you are worried “everyone” seems to think that only suggest that you have no idea what anyone things. This may be because you aren’t listening to anyone. Whatever the reason, I’m not going to bother my pretty little head with your irrational emotional states.
You really must not get out much.
I wasn’t fooled. I know the Chinese lie about everything they can get away with. Heck… about 20 years back they lied about the peak temperatures in Beijing! The story was broken by Chinese with camera’s who posted pictures of thermometers in Beijing.
It turns out the weather service as a policy of lying about temperature about body temperature.
The main issue right now is you seem to want us to believe the Chinese about things they are saying now. I tend to figure the Chinese will just lie.
I am intrigued by comments about protecting nursing homes. New York claims 185,000 rest home workers needing testing. If worldometer testing no. are to be believed, then USA is currently testing <400,000 a day. Doing daily tests to protect nursing homes even just in badly hit areas barely seems feasible and certainly wasnt feasible at start. Unless US technologies have improved out of sight, I think you wait at least overnight for result of test, so could still have someone infecting people before test result is known.
While powerful incentives for Chinese to lie, I dont think China reporting too far off. I have friends (including some closet missionaries very well connected with local community) who stayed in China and their reports are interesting. Lockdown was freaking incredible but outside Hubei, the infection levels seemed pretty low. Likewise have talked at length to customers in China, especially about their steps out of lockdown. Life is absolutely not normal but virus doesnt appear to be widespread either.
Phil
One thing we could to to protect people in nursing homes….. relative to what was done before, is to allow them to refuse to require them to take Covid patients! (New York required them to take them. That’s one reason NY is so bad!)
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Around here (Illinois) we’ve had big outbreaks in the county just to the west of mine. I don’t know if they’ve figured out the precise path for virus getting in. (Visitors? Nursing staff? Cook? etc.) I’m pretty show the place was low on equipment.
Yes, well testing patients BEFORE they go into home has to be a critical step. I was gobsmacked to hear that UK was having agency nurses working between different nursing homes which may have been a major vector. That smacks of criminal negligence. Nearly half of NZ deaths from single dementia unit (so with Do Not Resuccitate orders, then didnt even go into ICU). I agree with SteveF that protecting nursing home is THE most important thing you can do to keep death toll down and hospitals functioning. Just very difficult to do, especially early in an outbreak.
Phil,
I think many of the nursing homes were blindsided. Also, no one higher up thought to make getting them testing equipment a priority.
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I know pre-covid there was a hair dresser who specialised in nursing homes. She was a very nice lady and was terrific with my mother-in-law who had Alzheimer’s. You can imagine that jobs like that could easily unknowingly become contagion vectors between numerous homes. If the home didn’t think to stop hair cuts… BAM!
I agree this is very hard to do right– especially at the beginning. People just don’t (and can’t) visualize all the potential contagion vectors until it’s too late.
I first sort of noticed the stories of the nursing homes just when I was plotting cases in counties around me. I was like “Whoa!!! What’s with Kane county?! And Kankakee?”.
Cook I knew– that’s Chi’ Town. That was just a steady rise. Kane and Kanakee are “POP!”. As sad as those deaths are …. Kane and Kanakakee’s death rates will pop back down. Because it’s not really going to propagate out of those places, and the residents will mostly just die over the next two weeks or so.
We need stuff not not have that happen in other nursing homes, and I’m sure we’ll get it done. But by the same token, closing restaurants in Kane county isn’t the measure that will help. (FWIW: retaurants are closed in Kane. All of Illinois for that matter.)
lucia (Comment #184611)
May 10th, 2020 at 6:29 am
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Lucia,
I’ve got illinois deaths peaking at May 10. What are you seeing?
Until you can protect nursing homes and like with much better screening, minimizing no. of contacts etc., I think lockdown, close the borders etc. is an effective strategy. Especially done early. A very hard lockdown of 4 weeks gave time to set up testing, contact tracing and numerous other public health measures to support social distancing. To outsiders, USA looks to have too little social cohesion to make communial efforts work. Racial divisions, GOP versus Dem. Both sides demonize the other, excuse behaviours in their own that they would crucify in the “other” side whatever that is. Good luck.
Phil,
“…excuse behaviours in their own that they would crucify in the “other†side whatever that is.“
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Nonsense. Sounds like you are not paying attention. I roundly condemn any politician who’s policies have directly caused hundred (if not thousands) of deaths among the elderly in nursing homes. They just happen to be almost all liberal democrats.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.20101253v1
I’ll just point out that this new meta-analysis agrees well with my estimates of IFR stated here and elsewhere. The number is 0.01%-0.4%. Naturally, it will be highly variable depending on the age structure of those exposed.
“Infection fatality rates ranged from 0.03% to 0.50% and corrected values ranged from 0.01% to 0.40%. Conclusions The infection fatality rate of COVID-19 can vary substantially across different locations and this may reflect differences in population age structure and case-mix of infected and deceased patients as well as multiple other factors. Estimates of infection fatality rates inferred from seroprevalence studies tend to be much lower than original speculations made in the early days of the pandemic.â€
SteveF, watch a lot of blogs (and their predecessers) over lot of time, liberal and conservative. In recent decades, both sides lock themselves into hyper-critical stance to opponents while excusing just about anything by people they consider their own. Polarization isnt peculiar to americans, but they seen to have it worst of all. To outsider, it looks like dysfunctional society on verge of communal violence. It doesnt look like a democracy – both sides happy deploy any means fair or foul to get their way. It seems many would prefer to elect a dictator for life of their particular colour. Maybe that is a bit extreme, but commentary in media sure gives that impression.
I much admire your late countryman Mark Twain, and especially his comments on politicians and diapers. But do your countrymen now subscribe to this belief or rather that election of the other side constitutes disaster?
Phil
The “Stay at home” is working pretty well in Illinois right now. No major disruptions. People disagree, but I think you’ll see we aren’t so much in the news. Some of the news you see is just the “flashier” stuff.
I do agree a lot of people seem to be all for a dictator as long as it’s “their” dictator.
Lucia – good to hear. I am well aware of media bias to what is racy but also friends who moved back to Wisconsin some time back are thinking of moving back here (have residency) as not feeling safe. All adds to impression.
Frank: ” Is there really any doubt in your mind that Wuhan is orders of magnitude safer today than it was at the end of January? (The difference may only be only 2 orders of magnitude safer instead of 3.)”
My deceased wife was a physician who was born in Wuhan. I have visited Wuhan many times. In late January Wuhan was extraordinarily dangerous. In addition to the lies of the Chinese govt., there are multiple conditions in Wuhan that lead to increased risk of infections. The more apt comparison is to Wuhan now and other places in the US now.
First, the Chinese have the custom of sharing food at meals, with each person selecting food from the same source by using chop sticks. Can’t imagine a much more dangerous method of eating or exposing people to a virus. Secondly, Wuhan is very congested with huge numbers of people living close together in 33 story towers. The only way to prevent the spread of the virus is through very draconian lockdown measures.
China is claiming only about 4,800 deaths in the whole country with about 3,500 in Wuhan. Absent draconian lockdown measures, there is no way to stop the virus. Also, the numbers of deaths in Wuhan and in the whole of China have to be vastly understated.
Personally, I think I am much safer in Ohio than I would be in Wuhan, if Wuhan has abandoned its draconian lockdown measures. (I do know that there has been some relaxation, but what measures are in place, I don’t know.) Wuhan and China’s increased density and a lack of sanitary procedures generally, put CHina at higher risk than the US unless totalitarian state measures are utilized.
Lucia wrote (and thanks for the reply);
“It’s not clear the epidemic is worsening. Lots of places appear to have peaked.”
I’ve been looking at the data from a different perspective than you have. You are looking at new cases (in a few locations), whereas I have been following the slope of the log2 of cumulative cases vs time. I am averaging the noise over the last 10, 20 or 30 days and comparing these slopes to see how much the doubling time has changed. So I’m focusing on the bigger picture – total cases have roughly doubled NATIONALLY in the last month – not on what has happened in the last week of fairly noisy data in a subset of locations. The doubling period was slightly shorter for the last 30-day period (24 days to double) than the last 10 days (36 days), so things are getting better. (I’m also almost a week behind now.)
Public health policy measures haven’t changed much in the last month and fear is likely diminishing with talk of re-opening (which is nonsense, since the number of currently infectious Americans hasn’t dropped by even a factor of 2). If policy and fear are the main factors changing transmission, I might be seeing the big picture more clearly than you do. Some locations may be doing better than others right now, but we live in a highly mobile country and problems won’t stay localized. So we can re-open areas where there are naturally fewer interpersonal contacts (and maybe never should have closed them) and areas that have been lucky, but there is a risk that what is happening in the rest of the country will force them to close. If one person gets infected in the big city and attends a rural church service or visits the local beer joint on Saturday night, the situation could change rapidly. South Korea’s biggest problem started with one super-spreader attending a large church service, but the public health authorities stamped out that outbreak. If SK can do it, why can’t we?!
Worst of all, I see the data in terms of slightly more than 15 doublings since March 1. Slightly more than 21 doublings (since March 1) represents 100 million cases, the equivalent of 1918 influenza and the total failure of our attempts to contain the pandemic and the waste of trillions of dollars. Only a few doublings means overwhelming some of our hospitals, a problem you might be missing unless you look at the worst places in the country. So I’m paranoid that re-opening will start to shrink the doubling time.
I’ve also looked at linear growth and found cases growing at 25,000-28,000/day over 10- and 30-day periods. Given that pandemics are exponential phenomena, so I interpret this as a lengthening of the doubling time.
What I realize now, is that a lengthening doubling time provides me with a different – and somewhat distorted – perspective than looking a simple linear trends for new cases. A doubling time of a month is meaningful, but a doubling time of a year is not. The best approach is probably to follow the change in R with time including confidence intervals for R. That is beyond me, at least for the moment. Doubling time is more closely related to R. However, both of these metrics miss the fact that total cases amount to only 0.5% of the US population right now. That percentage is this low only because we managed to end the period when cumulative cases were doubling every 2.5 days around the end of March. If we had started taking action 5 days later, total cases would be 2% of the population. Ten days delay, it would be 8%.
Respectfully, Frank
Lucia writes, “Heck… about 20 years back they lied about the peak temperatures in Beijing! The story was broken by Chinese with camera’s who posted pictures of thermometers in Beijing.”
Chinese law mandates construction workers be sent home when temperatures rise above (IIRC) 40 degrees Celsius. When I lived in Shanghai summer afternoons were a constant 39C.
Frank,
Thanks for explaining why you have characterized the situation in the US as so dire, being concerned about hospitals being overrun. You write, “Given that pandemics are exponential phenomena…” But we’ve seen that to be true only in the initial stages; if you look at new case graphs for many countries at the worldometers site, you’ll see that the number of cases rises exponentially at first, then peaks and descends. (Sadly, the descent in many places, US among them, is rather slow.) Brazil, for example, is in the exponential phase yet.
Looking at the graph there of US new cases, it is in decline. Yes, the number of new cases is current around 20K/day, not great news. But one doesn’t hear of any place in the US where hospitals are overwhelmed, let alone as a general phenomenon. As a more quantitative example, in the daily report from Massachusetts (e.g., this one), one can see that net hospitalizations are decreasing. This despite a large increase in test cases; from eyeballing one might estimate a doubling of cases in the last month, much as you point out has occurred in the US overall.
I think many of the newer cases are milder ones — at first, testing was reserved to more severe cases due to limited facilities/materials, but now even asymptomatic persons are being tested. But regardless of the reason, I don’t think it fair to consider a doubling of the cumulative case count as reflecting a doubling of the danger.
Thomas,
Yes. According to the WSJ, the motive for lying was evidently that they didn’t want to send construction workers home. So, the national weather service lied.
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There is systemic lying in the Chinese government, has been for a long time, and there is no particular reason to expect that anything in particular will be truthful. Sure, not every single thing they say is a lie. If the temperature wasless than 39, they didn’t lie. They only lied when …. well…. when it seemed appropriate to them, which is when the truth is inconvenient.
Frank
Well… the US. Which I find of particular interest when we are discussing what the US ought to do.
Uhmmm… could you point me to your source and your curve fit so I can understand your precise claim?
But yes, I base how a pandemic is going based on the rate of change in new deaths or cases. I consider “getting worse” when the rate is increasing and “better” when it is decreasing. Otherwise, the definition of “worse” would suggest that measles is perpetually getting “worse” because the number of people who have caught measles over all time continue to increase. Obviously it will never decrease because they will not suddenly become someone who never had measles.
Still…. if you could give a link to a curve, perhaps that would clarify what you mean.
You should trust the Chinese statements as much as you trust Trump’s statements., ha ha.
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I think the fear was not that the virus wouldn’t die out, but that it was going to continue to rise exponentially even after lock downs. Some pathogens are super contagious, like the measles. It was (and is) very unrealistic this thing was going to be stomped out completely given that it is world wide. This will be a marathon.
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The best thing to examine first is the 7 day averaged trend in deaths/day * regionally *. This will tell you how the infection is trending as of about 2 weeks ago.
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You can then examine the infections/day trend over the past two weeks to see a more recent trend. This trend is more exposed to error due to to all the testing issues.
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It’s not so important what the absolute numbers are here as long as they count their numbers in a consistent manner.
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Frank seems to be concerned about the peak number of active cases in the community which is a combination of positives test cases, the multiplier for untested cases (10x ?), and the length of time people are contagious. Cases over 30 days old don’t matter anymore unless you are looking at herd immunity.
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I’m more concerned with the trend/slope of deaths than anything else. There is doubling time for total cases, but I’m looking harder at the “halving time†for deaths/day. This has been slower than anyone had wanted, probably around 30 days in a lot of places. The WP shows this trend for the US on the home page now.
Tom Scharf
Well…. the Chinese lies are a bigger problem because it’s difficult to detect which things are lies and which aren’t. They aren’t the weird tweets of a disorganized communicator who says odd (often incomprehensible) things. They are organized top down. With the lies about 39C mentioned above, the entire Chinese weather service was put on board with the lie. If someone had asked Snopes, if Joe’s claim it was really 40C was true, then Snopes would probably just have pointed out taht the entire weather service said it was 39C. So Joe’s40C claim would have been “debunked”.
That doesn’t happen with Trump, whose “lies”, “truths” and “whatevers” are often as incomprehensible as the “covfefe” tweet.
That was my main fear.
Of course I would prefer the virus suddenly die out like the invaders in “War of the Worlds”. But given information we have, a slow decline in new cases/day with an every increasing survival rate for individual cases while we root for Big Pharma to get a vaccine approved strikes me as an acceptable choice. We would want many individual people to take measures to protect themselves in the meantime. Will some take more risks that others? Yep.
There are dangers to a shut economy and schools. Some of these also involve increase in deaths for other causes. (We are seeing increases in opioid deaths. I’m sure we will see an increase in alcoholism). Some involve… well… I’ll just say “becoming Venezuala.” That path includes death.
At the risk of being accused of being a foaming at the mouth alarmist: World Wide Depressions increase the risk of revolutions and world wars. People in many countries react very badly to declining economic situations especially if hardship gets dire for a significant fraction. What follows can range from the equivalent of peasants storming the Bastille, to rise of people like Hitler. (And no, Trump is no Hitler. and our government isn’t structured like Weimar. If Trump did try to take over, someone else would boot him out. We don’t know who, but someone who somehow set things aside. )
Yes… this is distopian. But really bad economic situations have the potential for leading to dire outcomes. So things that really, truly tank the economy is not something anyone should wish.
Illinois may survive “stay at home” through June. I’m very much doubt it can through July without something pretty bad happening.
Phil,
Wisconsin, just to the north, has had demonstrations.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/us/politics/coronavirus-protests-madison-wisconsin.html
They are just to the north of Illinois. The county my mom lives in abutts WI.
I’m not entirely sure why there is more strum und drang in WI. Their Supreme Court did through out the State wide stay at home order.
I do think it really was a mistake of the Governor to
(a) have the order disseminated by proxy. “Officially” it was not the Governor’s order, but the order by an unelected, appointed officual and
(b) not even enter into negotiations with the legislature.
The order was tossed by the Supreme Court because of (a). But it’s not even clear the WI constitution gives governor himself power to enact a statewide quarantine. That power may lie with the legislature. (My understanding– probably does. But I’m not going to pretend I’m an expert in WI constitutional law!)
When opponents can advances a quite good argument that the Governor is overstepping his bounds and a quarantine is not legal, you are bound go get more vocal opposition.
I know this is a tough situation for Governors, but he should have at least had the cojones to issue the edict in his own name!
(We are having similar legal machinations in Illinois. That the governor is at least discussing phase out does take the momentum away from protest groups. Still, locally, several sherrifs in the “North East” counties have issued letters saying they aren’t enforcing the quarantine. Of course, the states and cities still can — but many cities won’t. That will leaven all enforcement to Pritzker and likely Lightfoot in Chicago. Lightfoot already isn’t arresting people for partying. We’ll see what Pritzker really does with businesses. )
Phil,
I should add: Michiganders are also protesting. Evidently there’s another one set for today.
https://www.woodtv.com/health/coronavirus/may-20-2020-coronavirus-protest-lansing/
I know one of the problems with their governors order was that initially it had provisions that many were going to find unjustified. For example: Landscapers couldn’t mow lawns. People could go pleasureboating if their boat did not have a motor, but not if it did. (Fishing is pretty big in Michigan. So, that likely hit lots of people who had a small rowboat with a small motor.)
The governor slamming the protestors as racist probably only added flame to the fire. (Sure some of them might be racist. But whether they are or they are not, that tactic only makes it sound like the reason landscapers aren’t allowed to mow lawns in rural areas is that the Governor doesn’t like racists! Whatever our governor thinks, he hasn’t been stupid enough to try to persuade those he thinks are racists by accusing them of being racist!)
In case, you are wondering what Wi and Mi are like…. I’ve always considered them our first line of defense should Canadians decided to invade. I’m sure Canada does too and that’s why they’ve never considered it. I’m sure their army would not want to go toe-to-toe against a Wisconsinite or Michigander toting his deer rifle!
Lucia: I copied (onto a spreadsheet) the data from
https://covidtracking.com/data/us-daily
I’m embarrassed to say that the last day with data when I did so was 5/12/20, now a week out of date – but before re-opening had an opportunity to perturb the situation. There is more info on another comment I was writing.
Any chance that instead of verbally explaining your processing, you could create a graph and show the data you eyeballed and what your fit looks like? You can upload to some image site and give us a link.
What is the evidence against the idea that the lockdowns caused higher rates of infection and death?
Sweden
MikeN,
The media fear campaign to justify the lockdowns is definitely causing excess deaths because people are afraid to go to the ER.
Dewitt: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/coronavirus-deaths/
I tried to understand the relationship between current doubling time of accumulated cases (a common metric found at some websites) into the rate of change in new cases. That wormhole led me to some new information.
N(t) = 2^(t/d) + N(t=0) or 2^(t/d(t)) + N(t=0)
N'(t) = (ln2/d)*2^(t/d) (assuming d constant)
where N(t) = accumulated cases t days after March 1, N'(t) = the rate of new cases on day t, d or d(t) is an effective fixed doubling time for some period or a varying doubling time. I plotted log2(N(t)) vs time to find periods when d appears effectively constant.
d was 2.5 days in most of March, with a slight slowdown in the last week, soon after people began to stay home. The cumulative data suppresses influence of noise and resulting in R2 of 0.986 for the month and 0.99 omitting the last few days.
d was 24, 29 and 36 days for the 30, 20 and 10 days ending 5/12. The data for 30 and 20 days clearly wasn’t perfectly linear, but R^2 was still 0.98. I naively assumed that this meant accumulated cases were doubling about every month, and that this meant there wasn’t a dramatic slowdown. (Not surprisingly, these periods also yield an excellent linear increase in N(t) of 25000 to 28000 cases/day, which I ignore because we are obviously dealing with a phenomena involving exponential change.)
Therefore, the bulk of the change in doubling time took place within about two weeks in late March and early April, as expected from the timing of the lockdown.
Assuming I didn’t botch my rusty calculus, treating d(t) as a variable affords:
N'(t) = (ln2/d)*N(t) – {ln2*t*d'(t)/[d(t)]^2}*N(t)
d'(t) was about 1 day/day. With doubling times of about a month, the term that corrects for changes in doubling time, d(t) appeared to be negligible. When N”(t) becomes negative, the number of new cases/day has peaked and begun to fall. Unfortunately, I’d probably botch the second derivative and it contains d”(t), a quantity I don’t know.
So then I did what I should have done from the beginning and plotted N'(t) from the real data. That shows that N'(t) actually reached a peak about April 4 and began to decline at an (assumed linear rate) of 192 cases/day (95-289, 95% ci). The residuals are not randomly distributed, showing a weekly sinusoidal, but I didn’t adjust the confidence interval for this problem. Assuming that the linear relationship persisted, it would take 199 days (132-402 days) to reach zero cases/day. For those in high risk groups or in frequent contact with someone in a high risk group, it would take half as long to reduce the risk of acquiring an infection by 50%. If they act logically, their participation in the economy won’t return to normal for a long time. During this period, 3.8 million (2.5-7.7 million) new cases would accumulate. This would increase the 1.37 million cases (and associated deaths) as of 5/12 by a factor of 2.8 (1.8-5.6). So the epidemic would be far from over, but not doubling every month, as I naively extrapolated (without taking into account the lengthening doubling period). If our only goal is to ensure that our health care system is not overwhelmed, this slow decrease – if it can be maintained – will do the job. The big unknowns are how much transmission will increase as re-opening proceeds and how much it can be suppressed by making contacts between people increasingly safe (more masks, hand sanitizer, testing, contact tracing, individual quarantine, etc). IMO, our goal must be more ambitious than merely avoiding overwhelming our hospitals, BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN I SUPPORT CONTINUING AN INDISCRIMINATE LOCKDOWN OF OUR ECONOMY in areas where it currently isn’t needed or will be ignored. We need to reduce transmission every way practical.
In conclusion, the current doubling time reminds us that accumulated cases (and associated deaths) will increase several fold in the future even though the rate of new cases has begun to fall. However, doubling time grossly overestimates that increase when one doesn’t account for the lengthening of doubling time. And the lengthening of doubling time is not easy to extract from N(t) data. FWIW, d(t) was about 14 days on April 4 when N'(t) reached its maximum and began declining.
Thomas Fuller,
Can you say ‘anecdotal’? One counterexample, no matter how detailed the analysis, proves nothing. You would need to analyze at least several hundred of those deaths to have any confidence in the results. The significant drop in ER visits for heart disease and stroke is supporting evidence that there are, in fact, people dying from causes other than COVID-19 because they felt that going to a doctor or the ER was too dangerous.
If you believe that the vast majority of those excess deaths are mostly caused by COVID-19 based on one analysis, then the significantly more numerous positive reports from physicians in the field using the hydroxychloroquine, zinc and azithromycin regimen for treatment of early COVID-19 should also convince you that it is effective.
Frank,
I’ll repeat myself
This would be a lot better than having us try to read that verbiage.
The fact that you have quite a bit of verbiage before we get to
Uhmmm.. I am not inclined to read and parse all the verbal discussion of what you did which you later realized you should not have done….
Cut to the chase: Make a graph. Show it.
Lucia – “Wisconsin, just to the north, has had demonstrations.” Yes, I was sent pictures. Armed demonstrators forcing entry would definitely not make me feel safe. I cant verify this guys claim https://twitter.com/ryanmarino/status/1263061764884893696?s=12&fbclid=IwAR2pPbK8p28BuCtAc8BbgPbzewTF6N3ZsEvuINzozDCiroK3ovvEsUmxdmo but doesnt seem impossible in US climate.
Lucia,
“ Make a graph. Show it.â€
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There are a few fish that actually can fly…. I’ve seen them many times. But most fish can no more fly than you and I can. Same with people who don’t know what they are talking about: asking for a rational technical argument is like asking a (non-flying) fish to fly.
SteveF
Well… He does write
Which sure as heck reads like he’s saying he suddenly realized he should have been looking at the daily death graph the rest of us told him we used to find the peak (and which he groused about our using.
This sounds like he’s saying that — now using the correct thing to look at he’s finding what the rest of us said was happening. That is: The pandemic is not getting worse at all. (Needless to say it was not getting alarmingly worse as he seemed to be going on about before.
Once again: he is admitting that what everyone else said was correct.
Afterthat, he then tells us what he thinks our policy goal should be. Of course, people can argue about what our policy goal should be separate from the math. I happen to disagree with his notions about our policy goals.
But at least I think we now all agree that his previous mathematical intuition about what was currently happening was based on botched ideas about what to look at in the data and how to go about analyzing it.
Phil Scadden (Comment #185090): “I cant verify this guys claim … but doesnt seem impossible in US climate.
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Yes, the cluelessness and arrogance of some doctors is remarkable. But I am guessing that was not Phil’s point. But I don’t know what his point is.
Lucia: I’d be honored to share some figures, but I’ve not been through the process of using any public repositories before. Obviously the easiest thing for me to do would be email my spreadsheet or pdfs of some worksheets, but I know there are risks of viruses etc. My email address is frankwhobbs at Steve’s place. I’ll polish some figures while waiting for suggestions.
Frank,
I realize appointing me your executive assistant to process your spreadsheets and make nice images is easier … for you. But it’s obviously not easier for me.
I think if you’ve learned how to use EXCEL, and how to post comments at blogs, you can learn how to copy an image in your EXCEL file, post it at imgur, here, and paste a link into a comment. You posting them yourself will give you more control over what you want to say, and be more timely. If you chose not to do this, your discussions of what you have done and what you found will continue to be incomprehensible.
Just go to imgur and practice uploading a few images. You’ll see it’s just as easy as entering a comment here. There is no need to turn this into a secretarial task with me as the secretary!
So this’d be a bad time to ask you to get me a cup of coffee…
/SARC
Lucia: I’d never think of asking you to do the figures. But I would like a recommendation of the simplest way to get them to you.
Mike M and others: The attached link discusses why Singapore’s performance battling the pandemic became as bad as most of the rest of the developed world. They were initially very careful with foreigners entering there country, but failed to quarantine or test citizens who returned from abroad to escape the pandemic. Then they ran into problems supplying enough PCR test supplies. The disease began spreading in neglected dormitories used to house foreign workers (10 to a room).
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-08/singapore-s-nasal-swab-struggle-shows-why-test-kits-are-scarce
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-21/how-singapore-flipped-from-virus-hero-to-cautionary-tale
Although there is luck involved in the arrival of a pandemic and its spread in early days, once an easily transmitted infection like COVID-19 is established in a population, the course of the pandemic is determined by how many people each sick person contacts and how safe those contacts are. Experience shows that each sick person in the urban areas of many countries initially have been infecting 3-6 other people on the average. And that persists until fear drives people to reduce their number of contacts or make them safer or governments implement effective policies that do so. Or until enough people are immune and can no longer be transmitted the disease. Or until the season changes – if weather has a big effect on transmissibility.
Frank
Haven you even tried to upload an image to imgur? Sending to me isn’t practical. You should learn to upload images to free sites. If you can use excel, you can do that. But you have to try!
“Yes, the cluelessness and arrogance of some doctors is remarkable. But I am guessing that was not Phil’s point”
Umm, a Dr is clueless and arrogant for trying to treat a patient with live-threatening disease because the patient thinks it is a hoax? What in your opinion would be a clueful and respectful response? Letting the patient die of their stupidity?
Frank,
Hardly as bad as the rest of the developed world. Singapore has a death rate of 3.9/million (23 deaths) compared to the average for the world of 44.4/million and the US at 300/million. There are 11 countries with higher death rates, eight with populations of 5 million or greater, all developed countries. Belgium, 800 deaths/million, leads the pack of the larger countries.
Of the current 16,717 active cases, only 8 are serious,critical, i.e. likely to die. That says to me that Singapore actually has a handle on their total cases, which is a whole lot better than the rest of the developed world.
Frank,
Have you tried imgur to post them yourself?
I’d much rather empower you to learn to upload them to a hosting site than to have you send me the images, have me click to upload, have me insert the links and so on.
The total amount of work per figure — and even the total amount you do yourself– is less if you just learn to upload to imgur! It’s silly to make the process require multiple steps and multiple people when you should just be able to visit imgur.com, upload and then paste a link into a comment here.
If you need help using imgur.com, ask. I’d much rather talk you through that than start having images be emailed to me and then have tasks that make me do a similar number of steps you would do at imgur!
Loaded images of two Excel charts at imgur:
Exponential Perspective COVID Pandemic.png
Exponential View New Covid Cases.png
Thanks for empowering me, sorry I am so slow. I appreciate your patience and encouragement, especially when you may not be sympathetic to the conclusions I have reached from these charts.
On these charts, I have shown information from regressions on subsets of the data, often with a line added to the chart. If anyone wants to see the real regression line produced by EXCEL on that subset of the data, I’ll be glad to provide those charts too. My workbook consists of more than twenty worksheets.
In an earlier comment, I extrapolated the current slow reduction in new COVID cases to the x-axis (about 200 days from March 1) and probably INCORRECTLY calculated the number of future cases from the area under the line by starting on March 1 rather than May 13. The central estimate is for 100% more cases not 200%. Sorry for the mistake.
Frank,
You need to include the URL with the file name.
DeWitt,
URL? What’s a URL? 😉
SteveF,
As Mork from Ork would say: Oh, humor. Arf! Arf!
DeWitt is definitely old, ha ha.
Frank:
Great! You are almost done!
1) Go to imgur.com
2) Sign in.
3) Look on the UPPER RIGHT corner. Your log in name will be there. putting your mouse over that name will show a “pulldown”.
4) Click “images”.
5) Click the image you want the URL for. A pop up will appear.
6) Copy the “direct link”. Paste it in a comment.
I’ll format it it to display. (If you copy the wrong “type” of link, that’s probably ok. I can deal with fixing the URL.)
Come on guys! Some people don’t do this a lot. It’s going to save me lots of time, and now Frank will be able to post links at other places where he comments.
Lucia,
OK, I was being less than understanding… it’s just that this sort of thing really is pretty common.
A picture, in this case, probably is worth several thousand words.
Lucia,
I plan to break down the Florida confirmed cases by age, and calculate the ratio of deaths to confirmed cases, then plot that ratio against age. A quick look shows that the number of confirmed cases across all ages is more constant than I imagined (relative to the total population at each age), but that the number of deaths (of course) is not. So lots of younger people are getting symptoms (even in their teens and 20’s) but not becoming seriously ill.
It seems that about 50% of deaths have been in nursing homes and assisted living. Something like 2.5 million people live in such places. So with 100K deaths (to be reached in early June), that would be 2000 deaths per 100K people in those places.
There are ballpark 54 million people in the USA aged 65 and older. With 30K deaths among those not in nursing homes or assisted living, that would give 56 deaths per 100K. Lower by a factor of 36.
20K deaths among the other 274 million gives 7 per 100K.
Of course, some people in nursing homes are under 65, so that would lower this number somewhat and increase the death rate for those over 65 and not living in nursing homes. Still it seems that being in a nursing home is the big risk factor. Being in very poor health is probably the real big risk factor.
SteveF –
“I plan to break down the Florida confirmed cases by age, and calculate the ratio of deaths to confirmed cases, then plot that ratio against age.”
I’ve done the calculation of deaths to hospitalizations, which comes out as monotonically increasing with age group, over 50% for the 85+ cohort.
“A quick look shows that the number of confirmed cases across all ages is more constant than I imagined…”
I’ve been playing with FL’s numbers for a while. Originally, the histogram of cases vs. age was mainly in the 65 and older groups. But that was when testing was limited, and only the severely ill were tested. As testing expanded, the histogram showed that all ages were infected, although the younger groups are less severely affected, which shows in comparing hospitalizations to cases.
https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/96dd742462124fa0b38ddedb9b25e429
“Case by County” tab show age distribution of cases. Unfortunately it doesn’t show age distribution by death as well.
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Florida cases are not declining much, but if you examine the “Florida Testing” tab then it shows testing has basically doubled in the past month with % positive rate also dropping by more than half. What all that really means is unclear.
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This website has become politicized unfortunately, probably because it was so clear and useful. One of the people working on it got fired and claimed it was part of a cover-up. The media pounced and now is framing the story of one of the most transparent data sites being a political tool.
https://miami.cbslocal.com/2020/05/24/state-records-show-rebekah-jones-fired-violating-health-department-policy-public-remarks/
Tom Scharf,
It is too bad, because the FL site really is way better than most, with lots of useful information. But politics isn’t like science… it’s more like war (which is why I was so horrified when I started evaluating climate ‘science’… it’s mostly motivated by politics, not science). Disgruntled employees make for bad PR and nasty political attacks; make sure they sign a iron-clad non-disclosure agreement before they start.
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Fortunately, there are no claims the basic data on cases, deaths, hospitalizations, etc is in any way inaccurate.
Tom Scharf,
Thanks for linking to that article. I had earlier seen something indicating Jones’s objection about removing the “EventDate” field. It surprised me, because (a) the field is present now (although I hadn’t downloaded the database for a while, so perhaps it was removed for a few days), and (b) it seemed to be fairly useless to me; I never used it for any analysis. So it didn’t seem to be a significant issue.
If Jones was responsible for the Florida dashboard, then plaudits to her for that. I’ve been generally happy with it, although I would like to see at least one additional field, namely DeathDate for the fatalities. The dashboard shows a graph of deaths vs. date, so I presume that the information is known to the Florida Dept of Health, but isn’t in the downloaded dataset.
SteveF,
Yes. Their site is WAY better than most similar appearing sites. It is one of the few where you CAN find the underlying data as flat files without too much difficulty.
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I suspect we won’t know the “real” story about the kerfuffle with the firing of the woman who was putting it together. In the stories I read, her accusations were vague. From her side, I know there was some friction about some data that she wanted to post and others differed. The governors side is that she was basically a difficult to work with lose cannon.
The site is still up. It still looks transparent. I don’t know specifically what data she wanted posted nor what she thought was wrong with what other wanted her to post or not post. Maybe that part of the story has come out now– I just haven’t read it. Not living in FL, I have to admit keeping up with that is not my first priority!
Tom Scharf,
Yep. In fact, I’m old enough to not be a boomer, at least according to some definitions.
By the way, I found out today why TN has a high testing rate compared to a lot of other states. Our governor actually listened to Birx and used private testing labs. Having a fraction of positive tests below 5% is, IIRC, one of the criteria for re-opening the economy. You won’t get there if you only test the seriously ill and government labs don’t have sufficient capacity.
It appears to be that she was a major player in getting the site up and running and then had some technical disagreements on how to present the data. She was losing control of her baby and had a temper tantrum. That’s a hidden downside of success, others will want to to take the credit and assume control. Been there, done that. Creators usually lose.
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I read several stories and the specific issues are rather vague and seem unsubstantial in the big picture. The governor publicly speaking about her cyber stalking incidents on a former boyfriend was pretty low, but she made some wild unsupported (so far) accusations here I think.
The three highest fractions of positive tests are Puerto Rico at 0.255, New Jersey at 0.247 and New York at 0.210. The three lowest are Alaska at 0.009, Hawaii at 0.013 and Montana at 0.014. The US average is 0.112 and the median is 0.075.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #185370): “By the way, I found out today why TN has a high testing rate compared to a lot of other states. Our governor actually listened to Birx and used private testing labs.”
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I have been wondering if the reason some states have been having trouble with testing has been due to stupidity/mulishness on the part of public health departments. New Mexico has been using private labs since mid-March and has had no problem with testing.
—–
From data at the COVID tracking project, the U.S. average positive test rate is now under 6 percent.
I am waiting to hear from the testing center on the sinus swab they took from me on Wednesday. I have no clue who does the lab processing but the sampling was done by the local hospital mafia (Sisters of Providence).
I had a bug last week with a low-grade fever. None of the symptoms I associate with COVID-19, but my doc wanted to rule it out. So I went and did the drive-up thing and it is as unpleasant as you might think to have a long q-tip scrape the back of your sinuses.
I live in Alaska and there are reports of a few new cases in some of the remote communities. That’s very worrying, as most rural residents don’t have housing that allows isolating folks for quarantine.
Sorry, I didn’t realize that Imgur would create a new name for my images. Thanks for your patience and encouragement.
https://i.imgur.com/1UWE3CO.png = Exponential Perspective COVID Pandemic.png
https://i.imgur.com/Cj146zE.png = Exponential View New Covid Cases.png
Yes, Steve, I know that URL stands for Ultimate Real Loser. Which accurately summarizes this community’s assessment of my recent contributions. When each sick person can infect and average 4 new people or 0.5 new people, one needs to look at pandemics from an exponential perspective The current period of apparent stability is far from the only possibility and can be tipped in either changes in behavior and the efficacy of measures taken to limit transmission. And even if this period of stability persists, the economic and death toll will persist for many months.
Dewitt wrote: “Singapore has a death rate of 3.9/million (23 deaths) compared to the average for the world of 44.4/million and the US at 300/million.”
In Singapore, the pandemic got out of control in the crowded dormitories occupied by foreign workers, who likely are relatively young. Since the US death rate (in the info I posted) is shockingly high (6.5%), our pandemic may be localized in rest homes and other locations. The broadest measure of the pandemic is the total number of confirmed cases. By that measure Singapore is doing as badly (5.2/1000) as the US (4.8), Spain (5.0), Italy (3.8),and Sweden (3.2 and growing rapidly), while Taiwan (0.02), China (allegedly 0.06), Japan (0.13) and South Korea (0.2) have been much more successful as measured by total cases.
Singapore provides an excellent example of what I fear could happen here. From day 70 of their pandemic, the cumulative number of cases rose from 0.3/1000 to 1.8/1000 in about two weeks, a doubling time of about 5 days. On the graph I posted, I showed the US reaching 100 million cases in about 30 days if our doubling time returned to 5 days during re-opening.
Of course, the number of cases a country detects depends on how much testing they do and what their criteria are for reporting a confirmed case. Hospitalization and death rates are also valuable metrics. Things get complicated with all metrics don’t point towards the same conclusion.
The figures are nice Frank! I’ sitting down with my wine, so I’m not going to discuss. But now you know how to do it!
Testing reporting process is worse than I expected
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https://www.theblaze.com/news/cdc-misleading-covid-testing-data
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“.. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention admitted that it is combining viral and antibody tests when reporting its overall testing totals, a decision which scientists say paints an inaccurate picture of the state of the pandemic in America…â€
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“… “How could the CDC make that mistake? This is a mess. The Atlantic report also found that the CDC is not alone in making the mistake — Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas, Vermont and other states have also been conflating the results of the two different types of tests. Virginia and Maine only recently stopped…â€
Ed Forbes,
I think “inaccurate” is not the correct adjective. “Meaningless is more like it!
Frank,
If you believe that the fraction of the population infected in Singapore is the same order of magnitude as in the US, the UK, Italy and Spain, you’re not paying attention.
Yes, Singapore neglected to monitor their guest workers, but they are young and healthy. Also it’s very likely that the number of confirmed cases in Singapore now accurately measures the total number of infections. That is most definitely not true of many (most? nearly all?) of the other countries to which you are comparing. An estimate for total infections in Italy, for example, ranges from 5 to 20 million compared to a reported 230,555 confirmed cases. Antibody tests in New York indicates that 22% of the population of New York City and 5% of the rest of the state has been infected compared to 0.6% of the population of Singapore.
Also, the peak in Singapore is well past and doesn’t seem to have spread beyond the guest workers. The number of active cases is falling and there was one death reported from May 17-26. I think most countries would be ecstatic to have Singapore’s COVID-19 statistics.
Edit: IOW, focusing only on number of cases/million may not be very informative.
Can anyone get tested for antibodies now? I wasn’t aware this had been rolled out. I think I might have got it in the winter.
Mike N,
Yes multiple commercial labs will take a blood sample and give you the result within a couple of days. Cost is about $160 around where I live in FL.
Dewitt, I would agree with your assessment of Singapore – they are looking to get their outbreak back under control. Looks to me that any country that had over a 100 SARS cases has pretty much got Covid-19 under control with the exception of Canada. Valuable lessons got learned.
My understanding is there’s a lab I can go to to get a serology tests around here. I haven’t enquired about price. I haven’t been sick, so I assume I haven’t gotten it.
Phil Scadden,
I would say that Brazil and Mexico aren’t anywhere near in control. Mexico’s numbers are likely bogus. There’s simply no way that recoveries are taking less than one week as the numbers imply. I don’t think Brazil is fudging their numbers, but with Bolsonaro, there’s no telling. There are other countries in Central and South America where things are not looking so good also.
Frank –
I like the graphs!
I can’t disagree that 6 doublings of the cumulative US case count would reach 100 million. But I find it implausible that, after re-opening, the US would experience a doubling time of 5 days. The example of Singapore is unconvincing, as — although you cite it as beginning at day 70 — that was Singapore’s initial, and so far only, exponential growth. In the vulnerable US urban areas, I expect that there’s now a decent fraction of previously-exposed (and presumably resistant) people.
There’s also a mathematical reason that it would take longer than 30 days to reach the 100 million threshold. The US has been in a state of near-constant daily new cases, as your 2nd graph shows. Hence the number of infectious people (currently) is nowhere near as high as would be if there had been straight exponential growth to the current cumulative level of 1.6 million. One could speculate that *new cases* might increase exponentially with a 5-day doubling time. But the *cumulative* count wouldn’t double at that rate, at least initially.
I ran a spreadsheet with new cases doubling every 5 days, with 20K new cases on the first day. It takes about 17 days for the first doubling of the cumulative case count (which started at 1.6 million), and 8 days for the next doubling. Asymptotically, of course, the cumulative case count also reaches 5 days per doubling.
Very humorous. I have read two different articles in the past few days on how science does not yet understand why there are racial differences in coronavirus numbers, but they both state unequivocally that it is NOT genetic. They subsequently provide zero evidence to back that up. They then say it is also NOT behavior based (i.e. culture/health). Basically it can’t be biology, or something.
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Proving a negative is of course difficult, but this is just being willfully blind to things that make people uncomfortable. The assumption in the media and academia now is “white racism” unless proved otherwise, and since their confirmation bias is such that they never look anywhere else there is always one hammer and one nail.
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I’m not saying it is these things, I’m saying they are clearly ruling things out for PC / virtue signaling purposes. It’s obvious as “don’t buy masks because they aren’t useful”. It’s almost like they want affirmative action in test results. I suppose California will just ban coronavirus testing for hospital admission because it is clearly biased.
Tom Scharf,
“It’s almost like they want affirmative action in test results.”
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Which would be funny if it weren’t so foolish and damaging. We clearly do not know for sure all the reasons why African-Americans have higher case rates and (especially) higher death rates from covid19. Some are obvious: more exposure to infection in work environments, higher rates of pre-existing conditions (hypertension, obesity, heart disease), and less access to health care. Whether there are genetic factors which make African American’s more susceptible to covid19 is not known, but if there are, that is something African Americans need to know (along with health care providers).
>I haven’t been sick, so I assume I haven’t gotten it.
How reasonable is this logic?
MikeN,
“How reasonable is this logic?”
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Dubious. Serologic testing indicates many people carry antibodies, even though they never had symptomatic disease (or at least never had symptoms severe enough to warrant testing). Depending on what data you believe, the likely number of asymptomatic cases (or minimal symptom cases) ranges from 10 to 25 times the number of confirmed cases; my best guess is about a factor of 20.
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I believe I may have been infected about 9 days ago (during travel) and had very mild symptoms for a couple of days (slight sore throat, fever of 99.6F, slight headache). Fever and sore throat are gone, still very slight headache. I’m not motivated to spend $160 two weeks from now to confirm if it was covid19 or something else.
Tom,
I think it’s fair to say science does not yet understand a lot about the corona virus. We do know a genetic factor that might matter– at least indirectly.
If Vitamin D deficiency is an issue, then all other things being equal we’ll find that
(a) Dark skinned people living in northern latitudes and living indoors are more prone to vitamin D deficiency
(b) In the US where we fortify milk with vitamin D, the lactose intolerant may tend to be more prone to vitamin D deficiency because they don’t drink milk and so don’t access that possible source.
Both dark skin and lactose intolerance are genetic. And guess what? The only racial group where lactose intolerance is rare is European stock. So, if a risk factor for serious consequences turns out to be Vitamin D, one might call that “genetic”, or not. Whether you do would depend on what you define as “genetic”. Obviously, just as getting sunburned or skin cancer aren’t purely genetic, being Vitamin D deficient isn’t purely genetic. But genetic factors do affect you tendency to experience these problems under certain circumstances.
I think there is sufficient circumstantial evidence that I think it would be prudent for people to take a multi-vitamin with 100% RDA of vitamin D right now. It’s doubly prudent if you are dark skinned and don’t get much sunlight. It might not help, but it’s probably got more upside and less downside potential than just “geeh. we really don’t know.”
Vitamin D deficiency is correlated with many negative health effects. But from what I have read, vitamin D supplements do not typically help. The implication is that vitamin D deficiency and the negative health effects have a common cause; most likely inadequate exposure to sunshine. In other words, sunshine does not just help you make vitamin D; it does other stuff as well.
But I don’t know how solid that is.
Well if Trump says take vitamin D we will soon learn that this is the worst advice ever, dangerous even, ha ha.
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Here’s how the biased framing works. Science says we don’t have * enough * evidence to conclude why certain groups are more prone to bad outcomes and infections. It’s no doubt a complex situation involving multiple forcings.
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The media will then say
1. There is * no * evidence that the differences are genetic. Must be proven true. Conversation over.
2. There is * no * evidence that it * isn’t * due to racism. Must be proven false. Here’s some theories as to why this might be true. Experts say …
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Disadvantaged minorities are poorer and have less education, hence the disadvantaged qualifier. Poor uneducated people tend to be obese and have other issues that make outcomes worse. Is it being poor, being in a dysfunctional culture with low education, a bad diet due to fiscal constraints, no exercise, genetic issues that favor obesity, etc. Who knows. Lots of interdependencies I suspect.
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However the primary reasons are biological and riskier behavior. Obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, etc. Waiting around for racism to completely end so you can magically lose weight and understand how to reduce your infection risk isn’t the ideal plan. It doesn’t even make sense. Racial disparities is now a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game that absolves even clear bad behavior from the playing field.
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Social distancing/infections by income and race for Detroit.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/05/19/social-distancing-in-black-and-white-neighborhoods-in-detroit-a-data-driven-look-at-vulnerable-communities/
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Riskier behavior may be culture based, and may be due to constraints on jobs and living conditions. It may be education based as to not understanding what risky behavior even is.
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Poor health conditions may be genetic, diet, exercise, worse environmental conditions, income limitations, access to health care, not understanding how to get and stay healthy, etc.
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These are all freely discussed without reservation, as long as it is for white or rich people, ha ha. In these cases it is the virus doing the damage, not society.
DeWitt wrote: “If you believe that the fraction of the population infected in Singapore is the same order of magnitude as in the US, the UK, Italy and Spain, you’re not paying attention.”
The data I showed was for CONFIRMED cases, but I did acknowledge that different metrics can lead to different conclusions. Unlike the other Asian countries that have done well, the number of confirmed cases in Singapore has surged several times since the pandemic began, which is why their per capita rate is higher than their Asian peers and comparable to the Western developed countries. And those surges have been accompanied by news stories of failures to test and quarantine.
You added a new metric of antibody testing that has only been used in a few locations. Comparing positive antibody tests for SARS infections with other metrics is meaningless. I would love to have a reference to a good review article on antibody testing and the ratio of silent to “confirmed” infections. Unfortunately, the CDC allowed antibody tests to be sold without normal quality control and some of those tests have since been taken off of the market. When you are performing antibody tests on random members of a population with less than 1% confirmed cases of COVID-19, a false-positive rate of a few percent in an antibody test will grossly over-estimate the real ratio of silent to confirmed infections. These problems have gotten much better, but I don’t personally know which results should and should not be trusted.
The link below is to the Uncommon Knowledge podcast from the Hoover Institution that vocally questions the wisdom of continuing mandatory “lockdowns”. The featured (repeat) guest, Dr. Jay Bhattacharaya, has personally been involved with antibody testing for the Major League Baseball (finding zero silent infections). He quickly summarized the results from at least a half dozen other studies. He said the ratio of silent to confirmed infection is highly heterogenous, with poor communities showing far more silent infections (per confirmed infection) than more affluent communities. Nevertheless, he saw NO PROSPECT that herd immunity is constraining or will soon constrain the US pandemic. If the available information supported any other SCIENTIFIC conclusion, Bhattacharaya would be open to reaching such a conclusion, so I currently accept his conclusion. Bhattacharaya still advocates ending mandatory lockdowns believing a continuing pandemic is unavoidable. (He and the host failed to mention that the pandemic has been limited in Taiwan, South Korea and the other Asian countries.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=289NWm85eas
What is the best metric for judging how successfully various countries have battled this pandemic? The fundamental problem is to limit the spread of the virus between people by: quickly identifying and quarantining infected people (and possibly those who have been in close contact with infected people, by limiting “unnecessary” contacts between people (especially in large groups), and by making those contacts safer through masks, hand sanitizer, cleaning and hygiene. As long as there are no unknown long-term side effects, perhaps death rate is more important. However, deaths following COVID-19 can be attributed to pneumonia, ARDS, as well as a variety of organ failures. And here in the US, I’m skeptical that we can effectively protect our vulnerable populations from whatever pandemic surrounds them. So my preferred metric at the moment is accumulated confirmed. In the US, trends in deaths follow the trends in cases.
Dewitt. I think you misunderstood me.
“I would say that Brazil and Mexico aren’t anywhere near in control.”
As far as I can see https://www.who.int/csr/sars/country/table2004_04_21/en/, Brazil and Mexico never had any SARS cases. I am claiming that countries that have had significant battles with SARS in past (2003-4), have used that experience well (and built the infrastructure) to contain the COVID-19 outbreak.
MikeM
I read the opposite on supplements. They help, but only for those who were deficient. So, for example: kids who are deficient in Vitamin D who are given supplements get fewer colds than those who were not given supplements. But for those with sufficient vitamin D, supplementation doesn’t help.
Megadoses don’t help anyone. That’s what I’ve read from empirical studies.
The thing is, that outcome makes sense. Vitamin D is used in the immune process. If it’s not available for the tcells then they can’t do their job. Extra doesn’t do you any good, but a lack is a problem.
FWIW: People with autoimmune diseases tend to lack Vitamin D.
This may be an effect of their tcells constantly deciding to turn on, grabbing vitamin D and trying to kill their own cells. But basically, the process of t-cells doing their job requires them to use vitamin D.
HaroldW
This is correct. Cummulative is the integral of daily. From the dynamics of the process, it’s daily that is approximately exponential at the beginning of a contagion if R is held constant.
Hypothetically, it could revert to the R if we re-open fully. Then daily rates could double exponentially.
But honestly, right now the data in Georgia not showing R reverting to the “pre” quarantine value. This is likely because they have not opened “fully”, and people have changed behavior. Many still work at home. Many are still avoiding big crowds. Restaurants capacities are light. And so on.
North Carolina had a modest uptick in “currently hospitalized” on the 27th, 5 days after they “opened”. This is too soon to attribute to the opening. The weekly average Daily values of new cases slightly before the opening and is up 2% from data for the week ending May 20 relative to the week ending the 27. That 2% is consistent with “flat”, is less than the average trend in new cases since the quarantine was put in place, and more over, the daily deaths have been declining. (Also, the trend in new cases may be due to increased testing.)
You have to be very careful when people are claiming there are “spike” and attributing it to losening. Right now, the claims are often based on something. But that something is cherry picked (“current hospitalizations” moving one way while “deaths” move the other way), and it’s often based on 1 day of data.
The uptick in “current hospitalizations”, is, of course, important to hospital managers. But unless new cases start to rise at a rate faster than in lockdown (which they have not), then NC isn’t having a “spike”. For now, it’s actually too soon to say, but as far as data we have: there is no evidence of said “spike”.
I haven’t looked at Texas yet. But two out of three rumored spikes: GA definitely not in the data– and we have enough time, NC looks like it’s not there but we don’t have enough time. Maybe things will rise in future: but so far, no.
Frank
My preferred metric is deaths. They are concrete. Also, my preferred metric for figuring out what to do now is always “new daily”. Accumulated anything is useless for diagnosing what current effects. Well… unless you look at the derivative to turn it into daily. 🙂
lucia (Comment #185424): “But honestly, right now the data in Georgia not showing R reverting to the “pre†quarantine value. This is likely because they have not opened “fullyâ€, and people have changed behavior.”
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Looking at the Google Mobility data, about 10 days ago Georgia was perhaps 40% back to where they were pre-panic. So not fully open yet, but significantly open. And new cases are not only not growing like they did in March, they seem to be not growing at all.
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p.s. – About 10 days ago since I downloaded the Google data a few days ago, the latest data were a few days old, and I am working with 7 day averages.
MikeM,
Yes. What I see is mobility was increasing all during the shut down. There is a small “up” blip when they “opened”. Then it continues up.
I was a little slowed down on plotting data every day…. (The github file I was drawing from disappaered… had to change. Naturally picky little things change. The column heading for location changed capitalization. (e.g. “key” vs. “Key”.) Date formats… What exactly is in it changed… yada, yada…
But new GA figures: There is a slight 21% uptick in deaths for week ending today. The way it looks is no more consistent with “death’s are “flat” rather than looking “down”. (There are only 5 dots weeks after the “opening”. )
PS. Yeah… the mobility data doesn’t update every day anyway. I’m anxiously awaiting Wisconsin!!
Lucia,
“My preferred metric is deaths. They are concrete.”
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Yes, death counts are probably the most reliable data we can get. I like deaths per million population to compare different places.
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By that measure irresponsible/evil Florida (Republican governor) remains 14 times better than responsible/heroic New York (Democrat Governor), and virtually identical in death rate to super-responsible/saintly California (with nutcake lefty Democrat Governor), and I think California will soon have a higher rate per million than Florida. The MSM coverage is simply dishonest.
I think that new cases are more useful than deaths. Deaths are not all that concrete. There are suspected Wuhan deaths when no test was done, there are people who test positive and die of unrelated causes, and there are people who die at home without ever being tested. None of those are dominant, but they do seem to be significant.
Deaths are so heavily concentrated in nursing homes that they may be misleading as to what is happening in the general population.
Deaths are much noisier than new cases, so much so that they are pretty much useless for tracking what is happening in less populous states.
Deaths lag new cases by about a week, so they are less useful for looking at recent trends.
Back in March there was concern about the extent to which new case counts were impacted by testing frequency. But since mid-March, deaths have followed new cases pretty consistently in for the U.S. as a whole. So that does not seem to have been an issue for quite some time.
I’ve started putting US death’s per million on all my state graphs just so I can see whether a state is high or low relative to the rest of the country. Otherwise, there’s a tendency to focus only on “progress”.
The absolute value obviously also matters. Those are affected by local conditions– whathever they may be.
It’s pretty clear that Governors should take local conditions into account when deciding on stay at home and so on. That includes lots of stuff, including whether they are going to be able to enforce a lockdown. Newsom folded on the beaches thing. It’s pretty clear that’s not because he saw ‘reason’ based on ‘science’. It’s because he knew he was not going to get compliance, didn’t have resources to enforce, and public willingness to comply with the remaining rules would to into the toilet if he kept that rule.
I would not be at all surprised that part of the reason Illinois is moving into “phase III” is that Pritzker came to realize there was no way in hell he could enforce leaving “Region NE” in phase II. Mayors and sherrifs and so on in the largely GOP “not cook county” part of Region NE were all telling people there were not going to be the ones to enforce– that would be up to the State. Lightfoot tried to talk a good game, but really, even she wasn’t able to send cops out to stop parties. (Last weekend, party goers pulled guns on the cops! These party goers were probably not GOP members. Probably not small business owners either. But still– if you can’t shut down parties, you can’t shut down the hair dressers and nail salon owners.)
New York’s death/cases have been horrible. And for all their “good” PR on being responsible, they shut down after Illinois! (Not long after, but after.)
MikeM
“New” cases would be more useful if detection rates weren’t changing. For now, it’s better to call them “new detected cases.
I think “so called new” cases are becoming more useful. I’ll show some graphs on testing rates this afternoon. It’s clear that testing availability has surged in the past few weeks. Some of the growth in new cases is ability to detect them; some change is actual changes in number of cases.
I suspect going forward new cases will be more useful. But right now some of the growth isn’t growth in actual cases
MikeM wrote: “I think that new cases are more useful than deaths.”
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Maybe, but it’s worth remembering that infections are nothing more than a side show to the main event. Without deaths, the number of infections is meaningless except as an academic exercise.
Lucia,
“New York’s death/cases have been horrible.”
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Sure. Part of that is that infection in the general population had become very widespread, but part is that they killed a big fraction of the elderly care residents via foolish, destructive rules (like forcing nursing homes to accept covid19 patients from hospitals). One indication of the high fatality rate among the elderly in NY is the ratio of deaths per million population to confirmed cases per million population. That ratio is extremely age dependent, since the average is <1% for people below age 60, while at age 80 it is about 17%. https://postimg.cc/gallery/JW5BWT1
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For NY, the ratio of deaths to confirmed cases is about 8%, while for Florida it is about 4.4%, suggesting a much older average victim in NY. The discrepancy is unlikely for lack of testing in NY, since NY has twice as many tests per million population as Florida, and 4 out of 5 NY tests come back negative. Cuomo made some horrible choices that killed a lot of elderly people.
DaveJR (Comment #185433): “it’s worth remembering that infections are nothing more than a side show to the main event. Without deaths, the number of infections is meaningless except as an academic exercise.”
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Not sure I see your point. After all, without infections there would be no deaths.
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Yes, if no one was dying there would not be such concern. But government actions have not been directed at preventing deaths; they have been focused on preventing infections.
NPR: Poll Shows Only A Quarter Of African Americans Plan To Get Coronavirus Vaccine
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/05/27/863401430/poll-shows-only-a-quarter-of-african-americans-plan-to-get-coronavirus-vaccine
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“Of the overall respondents that say they will not get the vaccine, 70% raise concerns about the side effects and 42% say they are fearful of contracting the virus from the vaccine.”
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Bizarre. Older people are much more likely to say yes. My smallpox vaccine mark lasted decades. I assume those numbers will change if a vaccine becomes available.
On an Antarctic cruise, 80% of cases were asymptomatic.
https://thorax.bmj.com/content/early/2020/05/27/thoraxjnl-2020-215091
MikeM wrote: “Yes, if no one was dying there would not be such concern. But government actions have not been directed at preventing deaths; they have been focused on preventing infections.”
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Therein lies the trap. They have been focused on preventing infections as a way of preventing death, but this is a blunt weapon. Infections could soar, but death need not follow. Focusing on infection is taking the eye off the ball.
DaveJR,
Well.. when there is no known cure, and little prospect for finding one quickly, preventing infections mostly does prevent deaths. It’s true that in this case, young healthy people rarely die from an infection and older frail ones do. But still, not getting infected does avoid death from the infection.
Doctors have been looking for treatments too.
Tom Scharf,
It’s too bad some people are fearful of vaccines. I still have a small pox mark on my wrist. It was a secondary reaction. It’s very faint, but I can still see it partly because I know where it is.
Count me in the 49% that’s going to get the vaccine voluntarily pretty much as soon as it’s show to be safe. Some are warning it might only be partially effective– but then when that’s explained, it suggest “all” it might do is make me less sick when I’m infected. Hey… if all the vaccine does is make my symptoms be on par with a bad cold where I would otherwise die, that’s great! 🙂
I suspect it will end up required if you want to live in assisted living, schedule elective surgery or for some jobs. I bet some employers (e.g. meat packing plants) will require it. Others will offer a discount on employees insurance if they get vaccinated. Employees who refuse vaccination will probably be required to indemnify the employer from any lawsuits about potentially exposing them. (This, of course, assumes they get employed at all.)
Heck, I can think of businesses who would want customers to prove they got vaccinated. I don’t want asymptomatic spreaders on a flight with me! Airlines might not want the liability of one unvacinnated person getting infected by an asymptomatic spreader!
Schools may end up requiring it. There already was a move to remove loopholes for anti-vaxers whose objections are not based on religion.
If the Ro for our level of circulation really is 3, then 50% vaccination rate won’t prevent break-out contagions. But it will still dramatically slow them. As long as there is an option for vaccination, that will eliminate the need for business closures or “stay at home” orders.
Lucia wrote: “But still, not getting infected does avoid death from the infection.”
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But getting infected can also avoid death from infection, which is why we keep talking about herd immunity.
DaveJR (Comment #185438): “Therein lies the trap. They have been focused on preventing infections as a way of preventing death, but this is a blunt weapon. Infections could soar, but death need not follow. Focusing on infection is taking the eye off the ball.”
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Yes. Policy should have focused on protecting the vulnerable instead of trying to minimize the total number of infections.
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But if one is trying to understand the spread of the virus, positive tests is more useful than deaths.
HaroldW,
Very interesting article, thanks.
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I note that the ship was completely isolated for 28 days before PCR tests for virus particles were done, but that symptomatic (and presumable asymptomatic) infections were first noted on days 7 and 8, when passangers were confined to their rooms. So by that time the virus was already likely widely spread. When the tests were done on day 28, it is likely many of the people already had the virus and had cleared it…. so their tests would be negative, in spite of having been infected. The only way to know for sure would be serologic testing…. which was not done. Anyway, it puts an absolute lower bound on asymptomatic cases of 4 for each symptomatic, and likely much more than that.
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The authors note 10 instances where one of two people in the same room tested positive and the other negative….. makes me think the negative person was either already resistant or had cleared the virus by the time of the test.
I bit of good news from Bloomberg:
“Researchers are finding evidence that patients who test positive for the coronavirus after recovering aren’t capable of transmitting the infection.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-19/covid-patients-testing-positive-after-recovery-aren-t-infectious
Yet even more proof Trump is a fool for taking hydroxychlorquine:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.20094193v1.full.pdf
HaroldW wrote: I can’t disagree that 6 doublings of the cumulative US case count would reach 100 million. But I find it implausible that, after re-opening, the US would experience a doubling time of 5 days. The example of Singapore is unconvincing, as — although you cite it as beginning at day 70 — that was Singapore’s initial, and so far only, exponential growth. In the vulnerable US urban areas, I expect that there’s now a decent fraction of previously-exposed (and presumably resistant) people.
There’s also a mathematical reason that it would take longer than 30 days to reach the 100 million threshold. The US has been in a state of near-constant daily new cases, as your 2nd graph shows. Hence the number of infectious people (currently) is nowhere near as high as would be if there had been straight exponential growth to the current cumulative level of 1.6 million. One could speculate that *new cases* might increase exponentially with a 5-day doubling time. But the *cumulative* count wouldn’t double at that rate, at least initially.
I ran a spreadsheet with new cases doubling every 5 days, with 20K new cases on the first day. It takes about 17 days for the first doubling of the cumulative case count (which started at 1.6 million), and 8 days for the next doubling. Asymptotically, of course, the cumulative case count also reaches 5 days per doubling.
Harold, thanks for pointing a new problem with my work (which I hope is still approximately correct). I made the mistake of becoming enamored with seeing the accumulated US cases in March almost perfectly fit an empirical doubling time of 2.5 days.
Intuitively, I think of “doubling time” as being directly related to the average number of new people infected by each currently infected patient. If the average infected person infects 4 other people over a period of 5 days (that the person remains infectious), the doubling time would be the 2.5 days observed in March. So this is why I intuitively want to describe the pandemic in terms of doubling times.
There is a lag between infection of a person and that person being variably infectious over a range of days centered about a week after infection. Assuming such a phenomena can be modeled by conventional first-order kinetics:
dn(t)/dt = k*n(t)
where n(t) the rate new infections occur every day. Assuming k remains constant for a period of time (as demonstrated by linearity in a semilog plot of n(t) vs t):
n(t) = n(t=0)*exp(kt)
n(t) = n(t=0)*exp{(ln2)*(kt/ln2) = n(t=0)*2^(t/d)
n(t)/n(t=0) = 2^(t/d)
d = ln2/k k = ln2/d
Let N(t) be the accumulated cases on day t. Integrating
N(t) = {n(t=0)/k}*exp(kt) + N(t=0)
N(t) = {n(t=0)/k}*2^(t/d) + N(t=0)
N(t) – N(t=0) = n(t=0)*(d/ln2)*2^(t/d)
After a few doublings, N(t=0) becomes negligible compared to N(t=0), leaving the equation I have been fitting:
N(t) = N(t=0)*2^(t/d)
I don’t know if this is why the points for March 1 and 2 lie slightly below the line. Note that on any semilog plot (including my preferred choice of log2), the slope of both n(t) and N(t) will be the same. (This is true when d is changing with time.) So what happens if we have re-opening decreasing the doubling time to 5 days on day 73?
N(t) – N(t=72) = n(t=72)*(d/ln2)*2^(t/d)
So – assuming my math is correct – the INCREASE in cumulative cases grows exponentially. And after a few doublings, N(t=72) becomes small compared to N(t) and the semilog plot will approach linearity again, perhaps around day 82.
To understand the danger inherent in pandemics, I still think they should be analyzed in terms of a doubling time or an “effective doubling time” – rather than in terms of linear trends. Or a “halving time” when they are begin contained. This concepts are directly related to the fundamental process of transmission – how many people on the average are being infected by each infected person. That is determined by how many close contacts people have and how dangerous those contact are. This applies until a significant fraction of the population is immune and can’t be infected. If one loses touch with these basics, one may be engaged in “magical thinking”. Nevertheless, twice commenters have uncovered limitations/imperfections in the doubling time approach: when doubling time is very long and changing as total cases plateau and when now in a transition period after a hypothetical abrupt shrinking of doubling time.