Owing to the brouhaha related to Florida’s slick Covid tracking page, Florida is in the news. (Not that they haven’t been for quite a bit of time.)
It’s difficult to discuss Florida’s time line because my understanding is there were many local actions. I’m putting only statewide actions on my graphs. This is Florida’s daily death rates and so on. For comparison, I’m now adding US Daily Deaths.
I consider the “death” rate the most concrete one.
The brouhaha over the firing Rebekah Jones who was coding in the Covid tracking page involves accusations there is some irregularity in the case numbers and the pages degree of “transparency”.
FWIW:
WRT to “transparency”.
I’d visited the Florida Covid web portal. Like many popular portals, it looks really slick with all sorts of bells and whistles that web designers like. You can get a quick snap shot of quite a few things– which was nice. I didn’t explore it in detail. It does look like, at least today, you can sometimes get some of the data associated with some of the graphs by clicking a link at the bottom of the page; but I couldn’t quickly find the link for every graph. (Of course, I want data for graphs not shown. 🙂 )
WRT to “cases”:
There is an ongoing brouhaha that extends beyond Florida over the CDC and states choice of what to count when reporting number of “tests” and computing the “positive”/”negative” ratio. The number the Federal guidelines want low is the ratio of viral tests. Evidently, many states (and perhaps the CDC) are just mixing the numbers of viral and serological tests. That makes the number a rather stupid one to use to track a states progress in being able to identify the currently infected or the current state of the contagion.
None of the articles about the FL brouhaha mention what the issue over “cases” on the Florida portal might be.
About a month ago, you publicised the Annan model, which was looking good, and Kenneth Fritsch applied it to various data sources, including UK. At the time, I said that reality did not match up either with the Annan model nor Ken’s runs. Both models showed the UK epidemic tailing off so rapidly that they were over by now. Reality is closer to what I said, deaths running flat but at lowish levels.
This gives me no joy.
And the disease people are striking back at the naïveté of curve fitting. It’s so redolent of the climate wars. Except in this case we have data to show that naive curve fitting does not tell the story.
Annan’s model assumed a constant r rate until lockdown. Reality shows that selective lockdown was happening long before lockdown. The infection peak happened well before the Annan model said. So all his strutting analysis about excess deaths is essentially naught. Apologies to the disinterested but it is great to see Annan so massively shafted on his over confidence
It didn’t work too bad for Illinois! But I think the mystery may be solved by looking at the mobility data. In nearly all these lockdowns, there is initial compliance… then the % time at home droops… % time at work rises and so on.
Nope. The google mobility data doesn’t really show this most places– or to the extent it is there, it’s trivial. What it shows down is selective non-lockdown is happening after the lockdown!
Well, I looked at the stats for cases in the UK, and the rate of increase was slowing by the time lockdown was imposed. But everybody is publishing papers and it looks as if, if people get worried, more people stay at home.
Based on my anecdata from London, the weekend before lockdown. In the pubs, lots of people. On public transport not so busy. In art exhibitions, not so busy. In Irish pubs, no difference. In restaurants in Camden Town, not busy.
People above the age of 30 were not going places. But. Just anecdata
And the latest data tells us that in zondon there were many many asymptomatic carriers of the youthful variety
Diogenes,
Ages related behavior change could matter to perception. The young and old chose different restaurants, bars, events.
Different Covid-19 files have different start dates for data. So… I need to pull up the once that says “cases” instead of “categories” to see the slope before March 19! (Yeah… weird…)
I’m trying to add info so I can see spacings on things local governors did. (I’m mystified why NYork has such a long space between closing New York schools and finally having a stay at home. While death’s were mounting. It’s not too surprising DeSantis in Florida wanted to keep potentially fleeing New Yorkers out!)
One can get the underlying spreadsheet for the Florida data at https://open-fdoh.hub.arcgis.com/datasets/florida-covid19-case-line-data
I saw an article some days ago claiming that Florida hid the “Event date” field, however that’s available at the above site. Perhaps it was removed for a few days, and subsequently restored.
HaroldW,
Thanks! That page has a “download” button. It’s file has these headings
“FID,County,Age,Age_group,Gender,Jurisdiction,Travel_related,Origin,EDvisit,Hospitalized,Died,Case_,Contact,Case1,EventDate,ChartDate”
That’s very detailed all in one place. (I can get a lot of this at github — but I don’t think I can get all of it. Or maybe I just haven’t found the age/gender/ travel releated stuff because I haven’t looked for that specifically.)
Lucia,
I had already used that download to look at the Florida data. Since every confirmed case is listed, it is a huge excel spreadsheet! I sorted by death/nondeath and then generated a graphic of number of deaths for 5 year age groups (down to 30). A graph of these numbers versus mid-range for the age group shows the actual fatality rate across age groups. As we would expect, most of the deaths are people over 65. About 16% are below 65 and 4.5% below 50. I expect most of the under-65 deaths involved underlying health issues, but there is no data on that.
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While this shows the total deaths by age, it doesn’t take into account the number of individuals in the different age groups. If those data were used to determine % of people who died by age group, that would better show the true risk of death by age, which I think would help people make better judgements about their personal risks. I will try to find Florida age demographics later today and generate that “personal risk” graphic.
I have seen the claim, without supporting evidence, that age per se is not that big a risk factor for death from the Wuhan virus. The major risk factors are heart disease, liver disease, kidney disease, and weakened immune system. Age is correlated with all of those and therefore correlated with risk of death from Wuhan. Plausible, but I don’t know that it is true.
Mike M,
” and weakened immune system.”
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A weaker immune system is strongly associated with “normal” (non-disease) aging, and this is widely understood. I get a 4X stronger dose of the flu vaccine than young people because it is assumed my immune system needs a bigger kick in the pants to generate useful resistance. BTW, that 4X higher dose gives me brutal flu symptoms starting ~5 hours after the injection and lasting for about 16 hours. I don’t know if that is a good thing or a bad thing (immunity wise), but I sure do get sick after the injection.
The MSM and local paper have been going crazy with a conspiracy theory on a cover-up of data manipulation on the FL website. This has been happening for days now and I have yet to determine what data was changed and why. Just a lot of innuendo, and the person making the accusations (who was fired) is long on accusations and short on specifics.
https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/05/22/ousted-manager-was-told-to-manipulate-covid-19-data-before-states-re-opening-she-says/
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“Jones, 30, did not respond to questions from a reporter on specifics on which data she meant or how she was asked to change it.”
“Per Dr. Blackmore, disable the ability to export the data to files from the dashboard immediately. We need to ensure that dates (date fields) in all objects match their counterpart on the PDF line list publishedâ€
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AFAICT She was asked to take something down until it was verified, she went ballistic, and the data was put back up a day later.
SteveF,
As I understand it, many symptoms of illness are actually due to the immune response. So maybe your supercharged flu shot is causing a too strong reaction from your immune system. And maybe your immune system is strong enough that you do not need the supercharged shot. But I am pretty sure that you are much too intelligent to take medical advice from me. 🙂
Chronological age and biological age are not the same thing.
SteveF –
The Florida website doesn’t provide a per-capita breakdown by age group, but Massachusetts does. Recent info shows that about 1.3% of the over-80 cohort in MA has died from the virus. About 60% (3807 out of 6228) of MA Covid-19 deaths were in long-term care facilities.
MA has much higher overall per-capita cases & deaths than FL, so FL rates for the elderly are presumably lower than MA’s.
MikeM
Sure. But don’t kid yourself. Everyone who says age is just a number is certain their bio age is lower than their chrono age. Roughly half of these people are wrong.
HaroldW
I wonder if FL’s elderly tend to be slightly healthier than elsewhere. My siblings and I brought Dad back here when he got Alzheimers.
Having kids collect full time residents and bring them to their kids home state was not-uncommon in the Condo association where he lived. The snowbirds tended to just not come back after being up north with their kids. These people were then replaced by new retirees who still wanted to swim, golf, enjoy warm weather and so on.
This sort of thing tends to be a “sink” for failing elderly at the condo associations with rules that make them places for older people. (No kids. Can’t live there until you are some particular age.)
Here is the population adjusted risk of death versus age based on Florida data through yesterday: https://i.postimg.cc/VNqwFZg3/age-risk.png
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Note that the risk of death is impossible to evaluate for those below age 25, because there have been no deaths in Florida in that age group. However, the risk of death for those younger than 25 is very close to zero. Note also that the risk of death from Covid 19 rises almost exponentially with age…. just as with most every other health related risk of death.
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Finally, the risk for those with no underlying serious health conditions is somewhat lower than indicated by the graphic, and somewhat higher for those with serious underlying health conditions.
Lucia,
It might be informative to use the Florida data to calculate risk of death per confirmed case across age groups. A quick eyeball of the data indicates the relative risk of getting the illness (confirmed) is not nearly so skewed toward the very old as is the relative risk of death.
Yes Graeme, I agree with your first comment on this post. Annan’s model relies on naive assumptions. The latest CDC modeling effort at least gives an IFR that is right in the middle of the better estimates from serological studies. Their best estimate is 0.26% when adjusted for their asymptomatic percentage.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html
What percent of elderly live in nursing homes?
Given that nursing homes are about half of deaths, more than 80% in Minnesota, then for a given age, being in a nursing home is a huge risk factor.
MikeN,
According to an article in the WSJ, Minnesota’s governor did the same thing as Cuomo in New York, i.e. required nursing homes to accept infected patients from hospitals.
MikeN (Comment #185265): “What percent of elderly live in nursing homes?
Given that nursing homes are about half of deaths, more than 80% in Minnesota, then for a given age, being in a nursing home is a huge risk factor.”
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Indeed. 16% of the population of the U.S. is 65 and over. It looks to me like 4-5% is 80 and older, from this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_population_pyramid_(2018).jpg
0.4 to 0.5% of the population is in nursing homes, so it seems like that might be a much bigger risk factor than age alone. Of course, those in nursing homes are usually in much poorer health than those still living on their own.
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From what I could find, it looks like about 0.3% of Florida’s population is in nursing homes. Lower than the national average even though Florida has more elderly than any other state. I think that lucia gave a good reason for that above.
MikeN,
As far I can find, the total population in nursing homes is about 1,500,000; another ~ 1 million live in assisted living facilities. So total elderly care residents may be ~2.5 million.
I made the mistake of following up on a MSM outlet headline: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html
I do believe they have taken leave of their senses at the CDC, and are just not credible. In every one of their Covid 19 scenarios, they assume a) nobody has any natural resistance, and b) the majority of infections are symptomatic. Maybe they refuse to read the multiple documented reports of large majorities in prisons and elsewhere who carry the virus being asymptomatic? Maybe they don’t believe any of the reports of high levels of seropositive individuals in the general public (many, many times more than symptomatic cases)? I find it beyond bizarre…. entering the same twilight zone as the “always worse than we thought” scenarios offered by climate ‘science’.
Yeah… case 2 seems to use their highest fraction of asymptomatic cases, which is 50%. Now…. I can see where someone might have assumed that back in January. But I don’t see how someone can assume that now.
The asymptomatic transmission is both a negative and a positive of this disease.
On the one hand, it’s why contact is difficult generally, and even more difficult once time and people traveling means people with the disease are spread out all over the place. It’s why I’m pretty sure that by early March, when universities started closing because, the disease was sprinkled around everywhere in the country (including New Mexico!) Yes: if we detect someone, we might be able to try to identify contacts. But these can often include all sorts of people– including the person you stood inline next to at the grocery store! Meanwhile, many have had no symptoms, and for every one who you contact trace, you miss others with no symptoms. So you aren’t tracing those infectious people nor the people they infected.
On the other hand, it means that these people never burden hospitals, and the join the pool of (at least temporarily) non-susceptible. So, the contagion is over sooner than one would think based on the number of cases detected.
News stories like to report what I mentioned on “the one hand”, but ignore the “other hand”.
I do wish we’d have more random serology tests! (Perhaps there are some going on!)
If contact tracing reduced transmission by 30% that would still be significant.
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What is still unclear is how much asymptomatic people actually spread the disease. These might be mostly small dose people who don’t do nearly as much virus shedding as an active case. They sure aren’t coughing it out.
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Questions such as “How many people got the virus at home versus the community?” still remain difficult to answer.
Lucia,
NY State reported (weeks ago!) somewhere near 14% seropositive. There are ~19.45 million residents in the state, so that suggests somewhere near 2.7 million resolved cases. The confirmed (symptomatic) case total 5 weeks back (when those seropositive individuals would had to have been infected to have turned seropositive) was about 250,000. So that suggests ~11 asymptomatic cases per confirmed symptomatic case. I have no idea how that gets magically transformed to 2 (at most!) in the CDC scenarios. Even if you argue seropositive tests in New York and California are less than perfect, could they be wrong by a factor of 5? I don’t think so. The CDC is now pretty clearly either incompetent or involved in politics….. hyping the danger to frighten people into submission. Either way, it is not a good look for them.
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Edit: I was mistaken, the NY results were announced on April 24, the testing took place in the week before, and the positive individuals would had to have been infected no later than 2 weeks before… so about 160,000 symptomatic cases by then… making the asymptomatic cases about 15 times more prevalent than symptomatic cases. That means right now the people in NYC are likely approaching 50% seropositive! No wonder the new cases are falling.
Tom
I agree that it would be significant. I just caution people against thinking it that it has equal efficacy when used early (e.g. South Korea) rather than late when the virus entered through multiple locations and people had spread out.
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By March people had been returning from ski trips in europe. People had been going to conferences. Students had been returing from exchange programs in Europe. (On in St. Louis had been in France, flown back, and taken Amtrack from a US airport to her home in St. Louis. Then her family took younger sister to a party at school! ) People at Universities were still going to conferences– people at Sandia would have gone to meetings in Jan and Feb. People could drive back and forth to Arizona, Mexico and so on.
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The idea that NM was somehow isolated from all this and the first case detected meant that it wasn’t already all over NM is naive. In contrast: The time period for people to come in an out of South Korea had been short. They were monitoring and quarantining people. People could get past controls, but it just wasn’t the same.
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SteveF,
I agree asymptomatic/symptomatic cannot be 2. It must be higher.
Tom,
It’s true we don’t know how much spread is by the asymptomatic. That’s a different number in the CDC scenarios. Their “high” value is that asymptomatic spread just as much as symptomatic. They have a low value…. but I’d have to click SteveF’s link again. 🙂
We don’t know which point of the infection is most infective.
Tom Scharf (Comment #185277): “If contact tracing reduced transmission by 30% that would still be significant.”
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Indeed. That would not work if you want to exterminate the virus, as was done with SARS. But it would be a far more efficient way to flatten the curve than putting everyone under house arrest. That also is why lucia is wrong about contact tracing being useless when the virus has spread. Extensive spread might well make it impossible to exterminate the virus, as do large numbers of asymptomatic carriers. But contact tracing can still make a difference in such cases.
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Tom Scharf: “What is still unclear is how much asymptomatic people actually spread the disease. These might be mostly small dose people who don’t do nearly as much virus shedding as an active case. They sure aren’t coughing it out.”
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A good point. There was an asymptomatic carrier triggered an out break in an Albuquerque nursing home that infected over 100 people. But I very much doubt that you are going to catch the virus from an asymptomatic carrier who crosses your path at the supermarket.
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Tom Scharf: “Questions such as “How many people got the virus at home versus the community?†still remain difficult to answer.”
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If the CDC still can’t answer that, then everyone involved should be fired and banished to doing essential jobs. It would not take a whole lot of contact tracing to get a good handle on how the virus is transmitted. With 11,000 employees, the CDC ought to be able to manage a whole lot of contact tracing.
It would be interesting to see who has advocated for increased testing and contact tracing and who has opposed it tooth and nail. Oh, wait–that actually was out in the open, wasn’t it?
I will repeat myself here, but I think some posting and reading here have some misconceptions concerning the so-called Annan Bayesian model. That model is no more than a simple fitted SEIR model that was coded for Bayesian fitting. Frequentist fitting of the model with maximum likelihood would I am quite sure produce the same results. The model follows the empirical data by fitting the latent, infectious, and to death periods, the mortality fraction and the RO and RT parameters. The empirical conditions obviously change during the pandemic period and thus the model parameters must and do change in order to continuing producing a fit. The parameter that changes the most is Rt while Ro is set early in pandemic period and the latent and infectious period change little because those parameters are related more to the specific disease. Under real world changing conditions the model’s forward predicting capability is probably no better than a few days. With the Annan model graph the longer term prediction is nothing more than extrapolating a given period time Rt.
One could argue that the model is under simplified but in the case of models it is better to fit the empirical data with the simplest possible model. In this model I would suggest that it could fit the data with 3 parameters even though 6 are used. I have had issues with the Annan model in finding the code that produces the Ro and Rt values and determining exactly how it is done. I feel that I understand most of what the rest of the code does but not that part. I have taken to using several methods I found in the literature for making these determinations from the empirical data. While some of these methods produce similar results and some do not. Only one agrees with the Rt values I derive from the Annan model. These models different results appear to come from biases and not large uncertainty ranges. For anyone here interested in these methods the R code can be found at this link:
https://rdrr.io/cran/R0/man/estimate.R.html
There is also a SEIR function in R at this link:
https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/SimInf/versions/6.5.1/topics/SEIR
The best link I could find for model fitting with R was here:
http://web.stanford.edu/class/earthsys214/notes/fit.html
My solution, have summer camps to send kids, where they are guaranteed to get infected. Also try to get kids infected not in camps, with adults taking care as needed.
Not just kids but teens, 20s, 30s, not sure how high you’d go.
Most will not be affected, or have just mild symptoms. This is what used to happen with chickenpox, despite larger effect including severe risk for teenagers.
MikeM
I didn’t say useless. I said it’s very difficult. When done too late, it can’t achieve what was achieved in S. Korea.
Supposedly, right now 1% of Indiana are currently infected. The population of Indian is 6 million. Tracing each persons contacts means tracing 60,000 individual cases.
If the state were not social distancing, each of those people would likely “contact” … oh… between 1 and 200 people a day some even more. The low number if for bedridden people who are only seeing the meals on wheels lady.
I’m not stupendously social, but pre-social distancing, I often had a dance lesson in a shared dance studio. That meant 6 people during a private lesson. Then, the previous or following students might enter– so make that 12 people. I’d be face to face with a cashier. And sometimes, I’d tutor a student in person. So, 13. I haven’t added Jim to that total yet: so 14. On days with group lessons, I’d be in a studio with 30 people in it. On our regular dance party excursion we’d see 50 or more people in the Glendora– sometimes more. Some drove from all over the place.
There is some overlap with some people, but a low ball estimate was I would contact at least 60 people a week and I don’t take public transportation, don’t take elevators, don’t dine out much, and don’t go to bars!
Sure: come contact tracing would help. But it’s a labor intensive process, and you aren’t going to get a big bang for the buck.
An Oxford team working on producing a vaccine thinks there is only a 50-50 chance they will be able to successfully test the vaccine, because the number of new cases is so low. Thus the control group will produce bad results by not getting infected in sufficient numbers.
Here’s an article about transmission that seems fairly reasonable.
“But it would be a far more efficient way to flatten the curve than putting everyone under house arrest.”
I am with Lucia on when you can do contact tracing. Contact tracing, testing and quarantining (you need all of those) is resource intensive. You have to get caseload down to level that matches your contact tracing capability. Lockdown both reduces caseload and buys you time to build contact tracing capability, ramping up no. of labs doing testing etc.
As far as religious gatherings, it’s the singing.
Thomas–
It could be the singing. If so, I assume zero American Roman Catholic Churches will be hit. . . (Well.. maybe the choir. But not the congregation.)
Is there a count of grocery workers in hospitals, particularly cashiers?
I noticed that on worldometers.info Illinois and California both had more new cases yesterday than New York. The new case curve in CA bends upward, but not by much.
The question is what is the probability of someone bringing in the coronavirus to the house that they infect others? 100% 25%? I have no idea. How effective is isolation in preventing the spread? You have a couple days of transmission without symptoms here in close quarters. Is the severity worse because the dose is potentially larger?
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Wuhan said this was the biggest problem, but then dragging people out of the house by order keeps them from wanted to be tested.
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Wuhan recently tested 9M people in 10 days. They did this by pooling many people (5-10) into a single test, so they only ran around ~1M tests.
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This may be the way to provide employee testing, pooled quick turn around tests. Every day.
Tom Scharf (Comment #185314): “The question is what is the probability of someone bringing in the coronavirus to the house that they infect others? 100% 25%? I have no idea.”
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A very important question. I have not seen any solid numbers, but I have seen claims that it is closer to 100% than 25%. But without solid numbers …
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A hair cutter in Missouri went to work for over a week with mild symptoms. She infected a coworker who also continued to got to work. Then they tested positive and neither has been at work since May 20. Something like 150 coworkers and customers exposed in that time. So far, no other cases. But it is early.
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Tom Scharf: “How effective is isolation in preventing the spread? You have a couple days of transmission without symptoms here in close quarters.”
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Another good question. The Wuhan virus does not appear to be all that contagious, but people remain contagious for a long time, providing lots of opportunities to infect others. If potentially exposed people are isolated for even a few days, then tested if asymptomatic, it could help a lot.
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Tom Scharf: “Is the severity worse because the dose is potentially larger?”
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I have been wondering that myself. It might explain why so many hospitalized in New York were staying home.
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Tom Scharf: “dragging people out of the house by order keeps them from wanted to be tested.”
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There is a solution to that. Give people a choice:
(1) Stay home and risk infecting people you care about.
(2) Stay in a hotel with room service, wifi, full cable, etc. at state expense.
My guess is that most people would choose (2).
A one size fits all approach is always suboptimal.
More Florida covid analysis, data from Monday, May 25.
https://postimg.cc/gallery/JW5BWT1
The fraction of total deaths:
Below 40 years old – 1.7%
Below 50 years old – 4.5%
Below 60 years old – 11%
Below 70 Years old – 27.5%
The risk of death skyrockets after age 60, with the % fatality rate among confirmed cases rising almost 1% per year from age 60 to age 100.
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The interesting thing about case rates is for very young people: the test rate is very low through age 16 -17, then jumps to near maximum by age 30…. suggesting that Sweden’s choice of allowing kids up to 16 to continue school (while sending older students home) was not just a SWAG… the younger kids really have very low symptomatic case rates.
SteveF, that complicates my idea of infecting all kids.
MikeN,
I’m sure kids do get exposed, and certainly lots of them develop immunity, they just don’t often get sick enough to need medical care. At worst, it’s a cold for kids; most will never know they had it.
Well… even that probably depends.
Is “home” a 1 bedroom apartment occupied by 2 adults and 2 toddlers, with a window air conditioning unit and supply heated from a common boiler in the basement? Or is it a 5 bedroom house with 4 bathrooms occupied by two adults with good filtration on the furnace and a/c, and ability to crack open bathroom windows and run exhaust fans for ventilation? If it’s the latter and the adults sleep in different rooms, and do their bet to occupy different rooms most the time, the exposure is likely less.
If it’s the former, the exposure is likely more, and perhaps the occupants would spread germs through the common furnace or shared air in hallways.
I mean… seriously, we actually know why this has hit cities more than rural areas. This is on of the things that is not weird about this virus!
SteveF,
You could be right on the kids. The thing is, even with widespread testing available, the likelihood a person will request a test is higher if they have symptoms. I have no symptoms. As a result, I have no motivation to have a swab shoved up my nose.
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Until we have random testing– including kids– we really won’t entirely know.
Different pattern of pre-existing SARS-COV-2 specific T cell immunity in SARS-recovered and uninfected individuals
“We then show that SARS-recovered patients (n=23), 17 years after the 2003 outbreak, still possess long-lasting memory T cells reactive to SARS-NP, which displayed robust cross-reactivity to SARSCoV-2 NP. Surprisingly, we observed a differential pattern of SARS-CoV-2 specific T cell immunodominance in individuals with no history of SARS, COVID-19 or contact with SARS/COVID-19 patients (n=18). Half of them (9/18) possess T cells targeting the ORF-1 coded proteins NSP7 and 13, which were rarely detected in COVID-19- and SARS-recovered patients.”
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.26.115832v1.full.pdf
I’m just looking for some actual numbers. This should be something pretty straight forward to tabulate from public health data. Normal people can’t get access to address information, but the guv’ment should be able to. One could even separate it out by type of residence.
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There are approx. two days of max infectiousness before symptoms so the residence type may not mean that much. Compliance with isolation is also a factor, but how much? We have approx. 1 bazillion cases in the US now so that information should be fairly easy to get with 100 people working phones.
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Academia is all locked down though, and screaming at anyone who advocates differently. How about some information everyone can use? It’s not just that this seemingly available information is not accessible, but it is also that there appears to be no plan to get it, and there seems to be no plan at all. People just aren’t asking the right questions for personal risk reduction, and the establishment seems rather uninterested beyond “Trump won’t wear a mask that we authoritatively said was useless a month ago!”
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Why Creating the Post-COVID New Normal Is a Job for Individuals
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/why-creating-the-post-covid-new-normal-is-a-job-for-individuals
I suspect this is all related to patient privacy issues (HIPAA). However I find it curious that we are willing to close down vast sections of the economy for public health reasons, but won’t release address information, etc. to a trusted source to get this type of information sooner rather than later.
Coronavirus: Prevent Seeding and Spreading
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-prevent-seeding-and-spreading-e84ed405e37d
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“In China, outside of Hubei, around 80% of infections involved families and close contacts in the household. This is surely an effect of home quarantines, since mass gatherings were limited. But it illustrates how much the virus spreads in families.
Among these contacts, the highest risk by far is transmission to spouses: 28% of them end up infected, compared to 17% for other adults in the household and just 4% of kids below 18 years old.”
Then there is the unplanned experiment conducted at a Springfield, MO Great Clips.
https://apnews.com/0abab24fa86efb702a259185e3074273
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The last day either stylist worked was May 20 and it appears that none of the 140 customers or the other staff have gotten sick.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/great-clips-where-coronavirus-infected-stylists-worked-closes-after-threats/ar-BB14Knx5?li=BBnb7Kz
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That says something about the difficulty of transmitting the Wuhan virus. It does seem that both stylists and customers wore masks.
I have taken some time to R code my own SEIRD model where D is for daily deaths. I was motivated by the Annan model yielding some unexpected results as the data series for various regions became longer. The Rt values from the model never drop below 1 even when the daily deaths on the plots were declining and the Ro values would increase by large amounts from what was previously produced by the model. It has been difficult for me to determine how these unexpected values are produced by the model and thus I wanted to play with my own model where I do understand how it works.
My first thought was that the Annan model might be limited by its capability to fit the observed data without changing the Rt values on a more or less continuous time scale. I, therefore, started my model fitting by limiting my model to changes in the reproductive number (Rt) over time. I use Rt instead of Ro because R has become time dependent, although it is beta in the SEIR model that is changing and is related to Rt by Rt=beta/gamma. I want to next R code a SEIRD model for fitting the observed daily death or cases using primarily Rt, I think at this point, as the fitting parameter.
In this case I made a few initial guesses for Rt to fit the SEIRD model results to the IL Covid daily deaths/cases and cumulative deaths and cases for the 03/02 to 05/26 time period. I used a logistic distribution for Rt based on the equation:
Rt=(Ri-Rf)/(1 +exp(-k*(-t+x1)))+Rf where Ri is the initial Rt value and Rf is the final value; x1 is the inflection point on the Rt progression curve from Ri to Rf; t is the time in days and k is a parameter that changes how fast Rt goes from Ri to Rf. In the model its beta(t) that is time dependent. I changed Rf, k and x1 for my fitting guesses.
The results of my fitting attempts are shown in the link below with a comparison in four graphs of the observed data to modeled results for daily cases and deaths and cumulative daily cases and deaths. For initial guesses the fits do not look too bad. A fifth graph shows the progression of Rt over time used in my fitting exercise. The IL observed data were converted to a 7 day backward looking moving average in the plots linked below.
The Annan model for the IL data used above yielded Ro=6.8 ±1 and Rt=1.04 ±0.01 and for my model results Ro=6.2 ±1 and Rt=1.06 ±0.01. There were dramatic changes in the other fitting parameters from earlier runs.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/9x00zq99uigqk60/IL_Covid_03_02_to_05_26_Actual_vs_Model.pdf?dl=0
Kenneth,
Very interesting. I have two doubts: My eyes say that the graph of Rt falls at the end of the data to less than one (maybe 0.95?). Are my eyes deceiving me?
If the Rt never falls below 1.06, how can there be a fall in the rate of death?
Lucia,
“Until we have random testing– including kids– we really won’t entirely know.”
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I assume you me serology tests; yes that will be the only way to figure out the fraction of asymptomatic cases and the plausible number of resistant individuals.
SteveF (Comment #185467)
No, Steve your eyes are not deceiving you. Look at the Rt versus time plot in the link and you will see that Rt is below 1 in my model which fits the observed data fairly well. I have given up attempting to determine why the Annan model starting giving very different and unexpected results as time passed and the data series got longer. That is why I coded my own model and now want to code a fitting model using different fitting parameters than those used in the Annan model.
The Annan model uses an intervention date whereby I believe the model assumes a single initial reproductive number, Ro, and then a single change to another reproductive number, Rt at the intervention data and over some short but unknown to me time period. Fitting the observed data where the Rt change is actually more gradual and over a longer time period then becomes more difficult with the assumptions that I believe the Annan model makes.
DaveJR,
That is encouraging. Here is the money quote from the paper:
I must admit I am shocked that infection with a related virus could provide some protection from covid19…. wait, what was that I read about cowpox and smallpox?
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The most interesting thing is that they saw T cells which are active against covid 19 antigens in 9 of 18 blood samples, all known to have been taken long before the covid19 epidemic or from individuals known to have never been infected with covid19. I mean, if that ~50% number is anywhere near accurate, it explains a lot of very peculiar data from the pandemic, like why the new case rate seems to drop as if the population reached herd immunity long before the rate of infections reaches the expected level needed for herd immunity. It also explains why there is an apparently wide range of susceptibility.
STeveF
Yes. Until we have random serology tests, we won’t know the number of people who have already been infected.
SteveF,
Yes. If past infection with corona gives partial or full immunity, then that would explain some apparently weird things.
It wouldn’t explain other things– for example, why it’s quite as horrible as it is to diabetics. There isn’t much reason to suspect that diabetics selectively escaped corona-colds.
On the other hand, that it’s worse to someone with a pre-existing bad condition is, perhaps, not all that weird. The effect of pre-existing conditions seems more marked than many other diseases, but maybe it’s an illusion because this disease kills people so we are scrutinizing this more.
Also, maybe we just didn’t have so much data on people in the past epidemics. I suspect we have no idea whether diabetics were more susceptible to the medieval black death than non-diabetics and so on.
I have to admit, I don’t want to rely on the notion that lots of pre-existing immunity has been proven or that it must exist. I think that’s far from the case. But it may be the case. If it is, we’ll see the contagion fall away.
Right no, GA’s opening is looking pretty good. Death’s per million are essentially flat and it’s two weeks out from the “18 days” (which Mike pointed out should be 23 days. But still… long enough for the opening to “matter”.)
NC… not so hot. The have a big enough uptick in weekly deaths to possibly not be “noise”. But that rise in weekly averaged death’s is much too soon to be due to the relaxing general restrictions. I don’t know enough what’s happened on the ground in NC to speculate about the cause.
The current riots aren’t going to help stem spread in place where the riots are happening. . . Glad they aren’t going on in IL (cross fingers.)
They really need to add those betacorona virus proteins found in patients without sars-cov or sars-cov2 exposure to the random serology tests. WIthout that we won’t know if the reaction found is effective in preventing cov-19. Reaction to those proteins weren’t found in sars-cov or sars-cov2 exposure in the study which could be because of cross viral immunity. Need more data to be sure. Since these were more mild colds than the sars disease, the best result could be a smallpox like vaccine.
On the spikes this week, looking at Ohio’s stats there is a definite stretching of the normal typical weekend skewing of reporting. I wouldn’t pay attention to any spike or dip until the end of next week.
https://imgur.com/a/246G16z
Lucia,
Unless behavioral changes are extremely effective (and I have doubts about that), I think that states with relatively low rates of infection until now really do run the risk of rising new cases and subsequent fatalities. That may not be the case in places like NYC where the rates have fallen by a factor of ~10-20 from their peaks… if the city region is well beyond herd immunity, opening up won’t have so much effect.
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I sure do wish there were a lot more serology results. I honestly can’t understand why the CDC a) ignores existing serology results, b) puts rubbish information on their web page, and c) shows no interest in gathering the critical serology data from random samples of the population that really would improve understanding of the illness. I am flabbergasted.
Small sample but suggestive: there are T cells responsive to Covid-19 in some people who haven’t had SARS or Covid-19. 9 of 18 persons, to be precise.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.26.115832v1.full.pdf
As a non-bio person, I’m not sure of the significance of this finding (as compared to antibodies). Any explanation welcomed. TIA
lucia (Comment #185495):
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Diabetics are very prone to heart and kidney disease and those are both associated with bad outcomes from the Wuhan virus. So the problem might not be diabetes per se; it might be the complications associated with diabetes.
——-
HaroldW,
I am also not a bio person. But I think the T cells involved are the helper T cells and I think part of their job is to make antibodies. Antibodies gradually disappear after you get over a disease. I *think* that long lasting immunity is down to the the helper T cells. But I don’t actually *know* that.
SteveF, my proposal is to deliberately infect as many kids as possible. With summer camps, and having college students come back a few weeks early.
Also have medical residents do four week on site rotations in Covid-wing.
SteveF,
I think in the US behavioral controls can only be fully effective for a short period of time. Two months is probably about the length. At that point, we start getting too many organized protests (which we are seeing), with people doing things like actually driving to other states to protest. (Yes. This is happening.)
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You also get disorganized collective ignoring of the rules– e.g. beach goers in California. You also get local sherrifs, mayors and so on simply not enforcing. We have that here in Illinois.
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We also get some violent rule ignores: e.g. party goers in Chicago actually shooting back at police.
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Meanwhile, we still have plenty of people isolating and they will continue to do so when orders are relaxed or withdrawn.
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I do think we’ll have people watching the news to decide how much they are going to interact. Then each will make judgements of which activities they will be involved in. I never go to church, so obviously, I’m not going to start now. I’m glad my mom can participate with online streamed masses. I’m going to do my best to only go to restaurants with outdoor dining.
(I’m looking for my mom. She absolutely adores eating in restaurants. I do not want to sit in an indoor dining facility yet.)
Lucia “.. On the other hand, that it’s worse to someone with a pre-existing bad condition is, perhaps, not all that weird. The effect of pre-existing conditions seems more marked than many other diseases, but maybe it’s an illusion because this disease kills people so we are scrutinizing this more…â€
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The “illusion†is most likely death “withâ€, not “fromâ€. That and forcing actively infected into assisted living centers where even the flu ravages these populations.
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The “madness of crowds “ is very evident in this entire situation and the numbers of “Chicken Littles“ in the population is truly staggering.
Lucia,
“I do not want to sit in an indoor dining facility yet.”
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I went to an “open air” restaurant with a “Harbor view” 2+ weeks ago. My impression is that most of the people there could not possibly have given a smaller sh!t about the social distancing regulations. Really, it was “no masks, no questions, no problem.” People in boats were hovering to find a spot to dock. As a first approximation, people who are not elderly, at least in Florida, no longer care at all about the disease. Which is not difficult to understand.
Ed,
I think most of those dying “with” are also dying “from”. I realize the possibiilty that someone “with” covid could get into a car crash, die and boost the count. I doubt this is significant. I also doubt this is much different from other diseases.
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In anycase, I don’t think this recording decision is what’s making it look like covid kills diabetics at high rates. Diabetes is largely controlled most of the time. Then they get covid and die. I count this as dying from covid, not diabetes.
lucia,
I should have said younger than “very elderly” no longer care in Florida, not the “elderly”. Plenty of those between 50 and 70 are horrified by people ignoring lockdown rules.
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Specific illnesses aside, the lockdowns simply will not continue. It is just not possible to restrain >85+% of the population on the basis of a modest risk to <15% of the population.
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Lucia,
“I do not want to sit in an indoor dining facility yet.”
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You only die once.
lucia,
I’ve been going to my local Italian restaurant about once/week since they reopened for sit down dining. But then the incidence of COVID-19 in my county is so low that I don’t think the risk is very high. If I lived where you do, or in Chattanooga for that matter, I probably wouldn’t be so sanguine.
Mike M,
“I *think* that long lasting immunity is down to the the helper T cells. But I don’t actually *know* that.”
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I *think* you are correct about that, but not more that 95%. Helper T-cells do appear to mediate long term resistance, quite independent of the sensibilities of the NY Times and Dr. Fauci. There is now so much PC rubbish floating about on the progress of the pandemic that one could easily choke on it.
In all the media reports on the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, with or without azithromycin, I have seen no mention of zinc other than in the comments about the extremely flawed Veterans Administration study. Are they purposely trying to make it look like those drugs are not effective just because Trump likes them or are they just stupid(real question)? And I do mean stupid, not ignorant.
Lucia,
Doesn’t sound like it’s to quite the same level, but there’s unrest in Chicago. Maybe it’s a good thing you’re not dining out yet.
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There’s even protesting down here in my beloved Huntsville, although I’m under the impression it’s been peaceful so far.
DeWitt,
“Are they purposely trying to make it look like those drugs are not effective just because Trump likes them or are they just stupid(real question)?”
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Of course they want to make Trump look bad. They are also very, very stupid (real answer).
DeWitt,
The incidence of covid is not that low in my county, nor the one my mom lives in. Also, people visit family, so there is the possibility of people from Cook county occupying the restaurant while I do.
I don’t plan to go to indoor restaurants soon. For me, that’s not giving up all that much. I’d rather grill outside and invite the neighbors over!
Now I have to go read the breaking news. I wanted to not have “unrest” here! I want to stay out of “stay at home”.
Ed and Lucia, There is a lot of evidence that covid deaths are overcounted. Dr. Birx is reported to believe its overstated by 25%. Colorado last week lowered their official count by about 25%. Then there are New York’s “presumed” deaths. My suspicion is that this is a particular problem in New York City where overworked doctors don’t have time to even look at the chart before writing down a cause of death. I also believe there is a financial incentive to attritube questionable cases to covid because the ultimate reimbursement from the Fed’s could easily be related to numbers of deaths. I saw a report that hospital reimbursement was already higher for a covid patient than a flu patient.
Perhaps in the early going there was undercounting because doctors were not familiar with the symptoms to look for and testing was in short supply. But most poeple have died after these factors were no longer operating.
DeWitt, not so much as stupid as verging on criminal
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https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/500236-massive-hydroxychloroquine-study-raising-health-concerns-about-the-drug
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“ A massive study that raised health concerns over hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malaria drug touted by President Trump as a coronavirus treatment, is coming under scrutiny from scientists who are demanding to see the data behind it.â€
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“An open letter from more than 180 scientists around the world raised concerns over what they said was inconsistent data in the report, noting that the average daily doses of hydroxychloroquine were higher than the those recommended by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).“
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“They also pointed out that data the magazine said was from Australian patients did not seem to match data from the Australian government, among other things.“
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“Another major concern was that the study’s authors did not release their code or data despite signing a pledge to share information on the coronavirus. “
Diabetes is really a terrible disease and virtually everyone will become diabetic as they age. The real issue is damage to capillaries and small blood vessels in vital organs. This gradually erodes their ability to function. So diabetics particularly those who have been diabetic a long time may appear normal but have multiple organs with serious “compensated” damage. Just as someone with serious cirrhosis of the liver may appear normal but still be pretty seriously in danger of rapid deterioration.
David
There is more money if listed with the virus
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/24/fact-check-medicare-hospitals-paid-more-covid-19-patients-coronavirus/3000638001/
DeWitt Payne (Comment #185513)
May 30th, 2020 at 3:35 pm
It’s not so much about Trump liking them, it’s more about where the money is. They want to find a new drug (which they can patent) that can treat people who become infected. They don’t want to find that an old (off-patent) drug can prevent people getting infected…. there’s no money in that.
The drug has been used safely for decades as an ANTI-malarial. It’s meant to be used as a preventative, not a treatment. The trials which I’ve read about are using the drug as a treatment for people who are already infected, which is not how this drug should be used…. and can actually produce some really bad outcomes if used this way. They should be trialing it on healthy, non-infected, front-line health care workers to see if it prevents them getting infected by this virus, but they won’t do that because they want this old and cheap drug to look bad.
Skeptical/Dewitt,
Or maybe it’s really not that great. . .
.
I realize it might turn out to be good as a preventative, but that’s harder to test. You need approval to treat people who are not yet sick. You need to give it to them and let them do stuff that exposes them (which is difficult if a state does stay at home.) And so on.
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Deciding to test it as a treatment instead of a preventative makes some sense for a drug maker, who is, after all, the one who is going to pay for the test.
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If it works as a preventative we’ll probably never know.
Mike M., SteveF –
Thanks for the comments above re helper T cells. And apologies to DaveJR, who cited the article earlier than I did.
lucia (Comment #185524): “I realize it might turn out to be good as a preventative, but that’s harder to test. You need approval to treat people who are not yet sick. You need to give it to them and let them do stuff that exposes them (which is difficult if a state does stay at home.) And so on.”
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There is a good way to test the drug’s use as a prophylactic: Give it to people whose family members, or other housemates, are sick. Since transmission is so high in such cases, it might not take a huge sample to get quite a bit of statistical power.
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Such a study was planned, but regulators insisted on all subjects first getting a basic cardiology exam. The organizers decided that sending potentially infected people to cardiologists’ offices was not such a good idea and scrapped the study.
MikeM,
There you go: It is harder. It’s harder because you need to get approval for people who are not yet sick. You describe a situation where the test organizers gave up because of the requirements the regulators imposed for testing on the not-yet-sick. 🙂
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It’s easier to get regulators to allow testing on the already sick. Maybe it shouldn’t be; maybe it should. Regardless, it is.
lucia (Comment #185535): “It’s harder because you need to get approval for people who are not yet sick.”
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Sure. But the proposed subjects are at *very* high risk of getting sick. Not to mention the fact that hydroxychloroquine is routinely prescribed on label to people who are not sick; that was the drug’s original purpose. Plus it is being extensively prescribed off label as a prophylactic for the Wuhan virus and as such is being taken by people who are at much lower risk than those in the proposed study. It is clearly a special case. But the regulators don’t do special cases.
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I am not against regulation. I am only against stupid regulation.
Brazil: 33K cases yesterday, that’s close to the US peak. They are at 500K now and still rising exponentially. Looking pretty bad.
The funniest thing I have heard recently is the credulous reporting without evidence that white supremacists are responsible for the violence in the recent riots (oops … riot is a banned word, I mean protests). I guess all those people wearing white hoods looting and burning down Target tipped them off, ha ha.
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https://www.mprnews.org/story/2020/05/30/outsiders-extremists-are-among-those-fomenting-violence-in-twin-cities
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“State officials, protesters and residents say they’re alarmed by the presence of extremists who may be using Twin Cities protests against the police killing of George Floyd as cover to burn down buildings and face off with law enforcement. ”
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* one paragraph later *
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“Gov. Tim Walz said state officials estimated that 80 percent of the people involved in the violence and destruction were from outside the state.
But according to an analysis of Hennepin County jail records, 83 percent of people who were booked in connection with the protests over a 24-hour stretch starting Friday were from Minnesota, and 56 percent were from Minneapolis or St. Paul.”
Tom,
The one thing “both” or “all” sides seem to be unified in believing is there are outside elements inciting violence. I’ve read accusations that it’s the Russians, White Supremecists, Antifa and so on and so on.
It may even be true some outside elements are involved. Who? Dunno. Also, if some outsiders are inciting, it’s not necessarily an either or situation. Could be Russians, White Supremicist and Antifa!! 🙂
” I’ve read accusations that it’s the Russians, White Supremecists, Antifa and so on and so on.”
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Nah, it’s not the Russians nor white supremecists, it’s just home-grown criminals who think looting stores owned by ‘rich white folk’ is the same thing as ‘justice’, and nutcake lefty agitators inciting them to loot because they want to destroy ‘evil capitalism’.
The problem with the ‘this time it’s white supremacist agitators’ argument is that burning and looting have been a hallmark of these sorts of protests turning into riots since the 1960’s.
I found a silver lining to all of the riot apologetics I’ve read on social media. My daughter was quite sympathetic to the rioters and supportive of them, to my dismay. I discussed it with her at length yesterday morning to no avail.
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By the evening however, after witnessing the way the leftists attacked her (very left) boyfriend on social media merely because he did not agree that the rioting was a good idea, including vicious ad hom and strident accusations of racism, her eyes were apparently opened. She called me in the evening to let me know she’d changed her mind.
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It gives me hope.
Marc,
As attributed to many:
“If you’re not a liberal at twenty you have no heart; if you’re not a conservative at forty you have no brain.”
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I was never really a liberal… but more at 20 after reading Steinbeck than now.
mark,
I have sympathy for people wanting police brutality to be handled, which it was not in the case of this one who choked George Floyd. The cop had a string of problems in his history and nothing was every done. Across the nation, these problems seem to be encouraged by police union contracts that make it much to difficult to discipline cops and qualified immunity rulings in courts.
I would imagine that some fraction those protesting intend peaceful protest and want change.
Unfortunately, at this point, there are almost certainly people who jump in for reasons of their own. These clearly include looting.
There is a video of someone who drove a rented UHaul into the display window of a store on the Magnificent Mile last night. That person’s main motivation in renting the UHaul truck was surely not the desire to correct injustice springing from police brutality. It was mercenary.
There are also almost certainly people who are merely attracted to mayhem, incidental looters, naive people who are curious, naive people who think they can lend “support” and so on and so on.
Whether or not they are the numerical majority, the people with mercenary or ill intentions have been ending up dominating the recent rallies.
One “protest” technique is to drive around and drop off strategic piles of bricks in the middle of the night ready for the next day.
Lucia,
Regarding sympathy for those protesting police brutality, certainly. Me too. Watching the footage and reading the accounts, it looks to me as if Derek Chauvin abused the authority of his position to publicly murder Floyd in cold blood, and I think that’s horrific. [Edit: Well… No premeditation. Slaughter, not murder I suppose.]
I have very little sympathy with rioters however. In my view, rioting is either: 1) essentially just terrorism under the cover of a crowd. or 2) opportunism for thieves.
I found particularly egregious the number of schmoes quoting MLK as if he would have supported rioting. “A riot is the language of the unheard.” For pity’s sakes. I’m no Martin Luther King scholar, but I’m pretty sure MLK is [was] widely recognized as a champion of peaceful protest.
Anyways.
Thanks Lucia.
SteveF,
Yeah, I keep telling myself that. Still, I worry about her.
Well we already know where some of the money for the riots is coming from. Black lives matter has a long contributor list including Soros and left wing churches and foundations. Perhaps with Antifa being declared a terrorist organization the FBI will get to the bottom of where they get their money.
Italy finally (weeks delayed has started large scale blood testing. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thelocal.it/20200525/italy-begins-mass-blood-testing-coronavirus-antibodies/amp
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Same old (nonsense) comments about antibodies may not protect you, but at least someone is doing serology.
Unless some remarkably different information shows up, this was clearly excessive force, and to keep kneeling on Floyd’s neck after he was non-responsive * while people were telling them that the guy was non-responsive * brings negligence and willfulness into the equation. A murder charge looks warranted here.
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Floyd apparently committed a crime and resisted arrest, but it’s not a death penalty situation.
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It’s not at all clear there was racial animus involved, it is just assumed by many. It really doesn’t matter because the murder charge will likely stick for the one officer. The rest of the officers are only guilty of not preventing it from happening, so I’m guessing they will get charged with something because the mob demands it, but may easily walk away without a conviction. It depends on how long they sat on him and if he was unresponsive when they were doing so.
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Cities will really burn if they don’t convict the main officer, but I just don’t see him walking away without 10+ years.
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Looting and burning are the defacto behavior for race riots, and so this one is no different. A bunch of criminals seize the opportunity for mayhem. The police let them burn off a bit of steam and then crack down.
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What I find really strange is this officer(s)’s behavior given the high profile of these type of events and that people were clearly openly filming the incident. There were body cameras involved as well. The officer looks to be the proverbial bad apple, needs to get his day in court, and needs to go to jail.
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There’s a lot of cops out there and painting the entire force with this brush gets tiring. The virtue signaling in media coverage makes it unwatchable. Citizens with cameras has changed the game though, for the better.
Tom
I saw a video of the shop owner who called the cops. Floyd tried to pay with a bill the clerk identified as counterfeit. We don’t know if Floyd knew it was counterfeit. The store owner said they had their own store video and Floyd was not resisting arrest from their camera POV (just as he wasn’t in the video that went viral.)
The Cop pretty clearly just killed Floyd. In a single case, you can never know whether it was racial animus or whether the cop would have killed a white dude too.
The other cops not intervening is also horrible.
Obviously, this doesn’t indict the entire police force across the country. At the same time: you have an clearly overzelous pretty much maniacal cop, and other officers present do nothing.
If the cop had just been alone. If there had been any threat to the cop. If yada, yada… one might be able to see a possibility the cop wasn’t just basically a horrible person using his position to kill someone. But here– we see he just killed the guy. And the other cops did nothing to interfere!!
Cameras are a good thing.
This is the WP’s version of events:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/05/26/minneapolis-police-man-died-video/
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There was a struggle at the police car, apparently he refused to get in the car. It’s all a bit vague.
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Not doing something gets you fired, it doesn’t get you charged with murder unless police are are on a different legal standard. We shall see what their statements are, right now there seems to be very little information. They should have stopped it if they knew what the situation was, I’m waiting to see information on that. There are some criminal laws that everyone involved in a felony in which a murder takes place can also be charged with murder, but I don’t think that applies in this case.
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There is no doubt that the police have a problem here and they seem unwilling to sort out their own bad apples. However there are 800,000 police in the US and millions and millions of citizen encounters every year so it needs to be kept in perspective. It’s not hard to believe a lot of these type of encounters were allowed to be “disappeared” in the past though, more than I would have assumed a few years ago.
Tom Scharf, Lucia,
The few people I have personally known from my youth (just three) who became police officers were exactly the kind of people you would NOT want having the option to use force against anyone; ‘head-case’ is the description that comes to mind. I hope and believe that anecdotal information is not at all a reflection of most police officers, but when I see something like that video, I’m not certain. Choosing to be a police officer may reflect a tendency toward aggressive behavior and a tolerance for being involved in violence that most people do not have.
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If it turns out the officer who has been charged has a history of inappropriate and excessive force (and it appears that is the case) and especially if that history reflects racial prejudice, then those in charge need to lose their jobs. If efforts were made to get rid of him but a union kept that from happening, then the politicians who allowed a union share responsibility. Bad police officers being protected by a union is about as stupid a public policy as there can be. I mean, why stop at police officers, why not unions to protect solders who commit war crimes? Just as crazy.
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WRT the other officers who were involved: Already been fired. They should all be charged as accessories to murder and convicted. I doubt they will be charged.
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All the officers should have personal civil liability as well, but I suspect they are immune from civil suits; another law that needs to be changed. Police officer or not, every individual should be held responsible for their unlawful acts, criminally and civilly.
lucia (Comment #185559): “The Cop pretty clearly just killed Floyd.”
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How do you know that? What was the cause of death? What specific action or actions caused Floyd’s death? Real questions.
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Preliminary reports on the autopsy indicate that Floyd died of a heart attack caused by coronary heart disease with a number of possible contributing factors, such as drugs, alcohol, the stress of being arrested, and mistreatment by the arresting officer.
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Under what circumstances, if any, can a person be charged with murder when someone else dies of a heart attack? Real question. I don’t know how strong the chain of causality has to be.
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The cop clearly abused Floyd. He deserves to be fired, at a minimum. But manslaughter, let alone murder, is by no means clear to me.
Police officers have a difficult and at times dangerous job. As long as they are legitimately trying to do their jobs within the parameters of their training, they should not have to worry about either criminal or civil liability. Otherwise, we will not have effective policing. Note that I did not say that a police department should not be subject to civil liability.
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We must not forget about that which is unseen. The good that police do is largely invisible. No police means no police brutality. But it also means that the total amount of brutality suffered by the public will increase by orders of magnitude.
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Individual police officers should not be held responsible for the inadequacies if their training and supervision or for the culture and leadership of their department. When I see something like what happened in Minneapolis I find myself wondering if the real cause is that the people in charge of the department have not been doing their jobs and are now just throwing their underlings under the bus.
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What happened in Minneapolis ia wrong. But it is not clear to me where the real blame lies.
Mike M,
Sure police do a job most people don’t want to do.
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Yes, that the system allows a psychopath to be a police officer is terrible and clearly not the fault of the psychopath.
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He will be convicted of manslaughter, if not murder, and will spend several years in prison. Protestations about heart disease will not erase the video: the officer clearly caused the death. He was behaving like a monster, and that is probably unfair to monsters…. behaving worse than a monster. The other officers may escape prosecution, but I think they are just as culpable…. they should all be sitting in prison right now awaiting trial.
SteveF
The principle of qualified immunity often protects them if the violate civil rights that have not been legally “established”. Definition: there has been no previous ruling saying you can’t do that.
This can be taken to ridiculous extremes, as in “Well.. here a court case that says you can’t choke a random person for 10 minutes. But 9 minutes? How was he to know that violates a persons rights? No. You can’t sue.”
I pulled that one out of the air. But that’s what it can be like.
On the one hand, police do need some immunity from some ridiculous suits. But often the current interpretation is any violation of civil rights no matter how obvious cops are immunized from suits on with if there is no ruling on the books. (This doesn’t mean their forces can’t discipline them– but that’s more the union thing.)
MikeM,
If Chauvin’s kneeling on Floyd’s neck was not in fact the proximate cause of death, it might as well have been. It was an inherently unsafe and apparently unnecessary tactic that put life at risk. I find no particular consolation in the notion that perhaps Floyd died of a heart attack rather than strangulation under the circumstances. Chauvin appeared to show a reckless disregard for the possibility that his tactic might kill the suspect, despite the protestations of crowd and apparently the protests of at least one other officer (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/05/29/george-floyd-criminal-complaint-against-derek-chauvin/5286757002/)
and kept applying the tactic for two minutes after a fellow officer told Chauvin he could not find Floyd’s pulse.
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It’s always good to look at all sides of issues dispassionately, so I appreciate your devil’s advocacy. Chauvin should and will get a trial where points like these can be raised in his defense. Still, I think it’s not unreasonable to think based on available evidence so far that Chauvin was likely in the wrong.
MikeM,
Sorry, but the principle for murder is taking the victims as they are. If you press on someone neck, constricting their windpipe for minutes and they die of a heart attack, normally you are considered to have murdered them. This is true even if they have diabetes, heart diseases are drunk and so on.
If you pull a persons arm and break it, you broke her arm even if it turns out she had osteoporosis which made her frail.
If you toss a baby around and shake it’s brain and it dies you killed it. You don’t get a pass because baby’s brains are more vulnerable to this than adults.
Saying: “They should have been stronger and healthier than they were” is not a defense to a murder charge and never has been. There’s no reason to suggest it’s some sort of defense now.
There’s a video. There’s also an interview of the shop owner who saw the scene (and who reviewed his own video.) Likely clerks too. The shop owners has been asked to not air his video, but he says it shows the same damn thing the other video shows.
Oh… I think people believe the people in charge of the department are at fault. Absolutely. But that doesn’t make this particular cop with a history of bad behavior not culpable.
I said strangulation above and meant asphyxiation, not that it’s particularly important. Not the same thing though
I think the country wide lockdown, which apparently has a disproportionate effect on minorities, is a major contributor to the intensity of the protests.
I would like to see more details on the counterfeit bill. I think a criminal charge requires intent to defraud, i.e. a claim that you didn’t know the bill was counterfeit is a defense. So why was Floyd arrested (real question)? Was the bill obviously fake? In which case the lack of intent to defraud becomes questionable.
mark bofill (Comment #185571): “If Chauvin’s kneeling on Floyd’s neck …”
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I question that description since it implies that Chauvin’s weight was on Floyd’s neck. I have not watched the whole video. From this still, it looks to me like Chauvin’s weight is on his right knee, so that he can control the pressure applied to Floyd’s neck:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:George_Floyd_neck_knelt_on_by_police_officer.png
Admittedly, that is hard to tell. But I would think that not much pressure would be needed to enforce compliance.
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mark bofill: “… was not in fact the proximate cause of death, it might as well have been. It was an inherently unsafe and apparently unnecessary tactic that put life at risk.”
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Not at all obvious. His knee is not on Floyd’s throat; it looks to me like it is against the muscle on the side of the neck. Painful, with even modest pressure, but not inherently dangerous. And it seems that until recently that technique was taught to Minneapolis cops:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_George_Floyd#Police_officers
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The fact that Chauvin maintained that position after Floyd was cuffed was surely excessive force. But murder? I am not seeing that.
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mark bofill: ” I find no particular consolation in the notion that perhaps Floyd died of a heart attack rather than strangulation under the circumstances.”
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But there appears to be no evidence of either choking or strangulation.
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mark bofill: “Chauvin appeared to show a reckless disregard for the possibility that his tactic might kill the suspect …”
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Assuming facts not in evidence. But I think you might accidentally have gotten something right.
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mark bofill: “… despite the protestations of crowd …”
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I do not blame the cops in the slightest for ignoring the crowd. That is as it should be.
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mark bofill: “and apparently the protests of at least one other officer …”
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Now *that* is disturbing. But maybe not entirely for the reason you think.
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mark bofill: ” … and kept applying the tactic for two minutes after a fellow officer told Chauvin he could not find Floyd’s pulse.”
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That is downright bizarre. It makes me wonder if Chauvin did not just freeze up at some point. If so, unacceptable. But not murder either, since murder requires intent.
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From what I have seen, the junior officer wanted to turn Floyd on his side to prevent positional asphyxiation. That should have been done and the failure to do so may have caused Floyd’s death.
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Positional asphyxiation is a recent discovery and was not normally a part of police training at the time of that incident in Staten Island a few years ago. So it would not have been part of the training of Chauvin or the other experienced officer on the scene. It might have been part of the training of the junior officers; it seems that at least one other officer was aware of it.
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mark bofill: “Chauvin should and will get a trial where points like these can be raised in his defense. Still, I think it’s not unreasonable to think based on available evidence so far that Chauvin was likely in the wrong.”
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Indeed. My main objection is to the calls for lynching. I don’t think there is any question that Chauvin was in the wrong; what I question is the degree of his culpability.
I would not be surprised to see the defense challenge any murder or manslaughter charge on the grounds that it can not be shown that the cops caused Floyd’s death. But I have no idea where the legal bar is set for that.
I would also not be surprised to see the defense put the police department on trial. What actual training Chauvin received is a key issue.
We need more of this kind of karma. The wealthy morons who cheer on these ideologues don’t seem to realize that they are the face of what they fight against. Do they believe they’ll continue to live their cushy lives when the revolution they support comes calling for their dues?
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https://districtherald.com/you-love-to-see-it-rich-writer-cheers-rioters-burning-poor-areas-calls-them-animals-when-they-get-to-his/
Mike M.,
If you, say, commit armed robbery and a customer at the time has a heart attack and dies, I’m pretty sure you can be convicted of murder even if you had no physical contact with the victim. I don’t know if that applies to a police officer using excessive force, but I don’t see why it couldn’t.
That’s ridiculous Mike.
MikeM,
I also would not be surprised if the defense presents a defense. He might even get off. OJs did. That doesn’t mean OJ didn’t kill his wife.
If Mike M is on the jury, I’m boarding up my house the day of the verdict, ha ha.
The neck houses the attachment of the spinal column to the brain. I read that of particular importance to survival are the upper vertebrae C3-C5. Damaging these are often life threatening. The trachea is also contained in the neck. Damaging the trachea can be life threatening. Given the choice between control techniques, control via the neck is inherently more dangerous to the person being controlled than most other options, because a mistake in techniques applied to the neck can result in fatal injury more readily than a mistake in application of control techniques applied to other areas of the body. I should think it obvious that regulating the amount of pressure being applied via a knee is more difficult than regulating the amount of pressure being applied via an arm.
There is definitely a concern of mob justice here, but guilty is guilty. The full body cam footage may show something different, but I doubt it. Remember the early days of the “gentle giant” in Ferguson?
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I suspect the other officers were not likely to challenge another officer on his detainment methods, this being the brotherhood of cops problem. Cops can feel legitimately besieged over the past several years. I’m inclined to give police a bit of slack in how they do their business in a rough environment, but definitely not that kind of slack. The best thing police can do here is to throw this guy under the bus. Indefensible.
mark bofill,
You left out the carotid arteries, which are on the sides of the neck. Compressing the carotid arteries is the object of the sleeper hold.
Thanks DeWitt. [Highlighting the difference between strangulation and asphyxiation]
The NYT’s version of events, a bit more detail.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-investigation.html
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It looks like Floyd was already in physical distress before they … uhhhh … helped him get in more distress. “Get up and get in the car!” “I can’t (because you have a knee on my neck)”.
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Just doesn’t look reasonable.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #185578): “If you, say, commit armed robbery and a customer at the time has a heart attack and dies, I’m pretty sure you can be convicted of murder even if you had no physical contact with the victim.”
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I did some checking and in some states that is true. It would come under the felony murder rule. And such cases are cited by reformers arguing against the felony murder rule.
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DeWitt: “I don’t know if that applies to a police officer using excessive force, but I don’t see why it couldn’t.”
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Felony murder would not apply because the officer would have to have been committing a felony that qualifies under the rule. But the logic that allows felony murder to be charged when a victim or bystander dies of a heart attack would apply. So it would seem to come down to details of Minnesota law.
MikeM,
“But murder? I am not seeing that.”
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I watched the video… you may not see it, but I’m pretty sure you are in a tiny minority on this. He killed the guy, handcuffed on the ground, and not at all a threat. This in spite of of many pleas from both the victim (while still conscious) and the many bystanders. The police officer is a monster; he may not last very long once in prison. If not, I will not mourn.
We have been told for three years that General Flynn “lied” about discussing sanctions with the Russian ambassador. The transcripts of the calls have been released and it turns out that Flynn never discussed sanctions with the ambassador.
https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/01/new-flynn-transcripts-confirm-mueller-team-lied-to-the-court-and-the-country/
I wondered how all the densely populated countries in Africa have managed to not suffer much from covid19.
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It is their demographics: Nigeria, with over 200 million people, has a median age of 18 (yes,18 years). The number of people in the age range likely to die (say >55) is only 7.3%. It is very difficult for the virus to spread in Nigeria…. and in many other African countries with very young median ages. Nearly all of Africa has a median age below 20, with several countries below 16.
A case study in doublethink and cognitive dissonance.
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The Protests Will Spread the Coronavirus
Even so, some public-health scholars say they should happen.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/06/protests-pandemic/612460/
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“These protests are currently the primary channel to seek accountability for the governance systems that have led to extrajudicial killings and police violence, but also for the disproportionate death from COVID-19 experienced by black and brown Americans.â€
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“Ultimately, however, the responsibility to prevent the spread of COVID-19 rests not with protesters, but with the police and government officials. Phelan said: “The state is the one with the duty to protect public health.â€
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There is endless hilarity in this article from public health “scholars”. It sure seem Team Science know all about motivated reasoning in others, but is unable to see it in themselves.
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NPR chimes in with similar thoughts:
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/06/01/867200259/protests-over-racism-versus-risk-of-covid-i-wouldn-t-weigh-these-crises-separate
“But the risks of congregating during a global pandemic shouldn’t keep people from protesting racism, according to dozens of public health and disease experts who signed an open letter in support of the protests.”
“Local governments should not break up crowded demonstrations “under the guise of maintaining public health,” the experts said in their open letter.
Well… I’ll be looking at Covid rates in Illinois. That’s the same damn thing I was going to be doing anyway. My guess is they will go up but of course it will take several weeks to see that. Hopefully, if the demonstrations die down, they won’t go up too much or too fast. If the time period for the demonstrations is short enough, it might be difficult to way the demonstrations were a cause of a very short blip.
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MikeM, there was an article in Feb 2017 in The Daily Caller, where Flynn specified that he discussed expulsions but not sanctions. Obama’s executive order treats the two separately.
The sanctions were against the US properties of about ten Russians.
In the indictment, Mueller’s team has combined the two together.
The edited Strzok 302 does not match the interview notes, with questions invented to pair with Flynn’s answers.
Nevertheless, ‘sanctions’ does not appear in the 302.
Conservative Treehouse has a theory that Floyd and the cop were both working at a firm that was a CIA front. With COVID shutdown, Floyd was short of money and threatening their operations which included money laundering. Note he was arrested for selling counterfeit bills.
I’ve seen conflicting reports about the arrest. Some say he resisted arrest, while CT says he was cooperative until told to get into Floyd’s car.
One report said he was put in the car after he refused to get in, then taken out of the car, but no detail was given as to why he was taken out or how they got him in the car.
Mike N
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-investigation.html
Around 3:50-4:01, it looks like Floyd is mostly in the car with his feet out one end. One of the cops seems to be trying to get his feet in. Then Chauvin pulls him OUT. At least I think it looks like that.
BTW: Never heard of conservative treehose. That’s quite an elaborate theory. They should write movie scripts. 🙂
“But the risks of congregating during a global pandemic shouldn’t keep people from protesting racism, according to dozens of public health and disease experts who signed an open letter in support of the protests.“
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Of course the triumph of socialism is far more important than individual lives; just ask Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot. The left is so predictable, dishonest, and evil.
It seems to me that a lot of the recent activities like protesting white privilege, reparation demands and Black Lives Matter are designed to make racism more, not less prevalent. I seriously doubt that a lot of Hillary’s ‘deplorables’ feel like they are privileged compared to anyone. That being said, there is no excuse for what Chauvin did and he should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. The results of other cases, though, make it seem unlikely he’ll be convicted.
SteveF,
Worrying about how groups are treated, but not the individuals in those groups, seems to me to be a hallmark of a lot of progressives.
DeWitt,
The collective is what matters to the left. Individuals rights and liberties do not. It is a constant for the left that is independent of the passage of time, policy question, or issue of the day. Competitive admission (or hiring)… disregard individuals. Coronavirus lockdowns…. disregard individuals. Freedoms of press and speech….. disregard individuals. Impacts of lawless immigration…. disregard individuals. It is a fundamental and irreconcilable disagreement with the Constitution and the history of the country, which is why the left constantly tries to distort and undermine both.
As we all know treating groups as monolithic entities is the hallmark of being “anti-racist” today. This type of double-talk is baffling. As far as I can tell this is just cover for being prejudice against the right people in their view. All prejudiced people think they are doing so for valid reasons.
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They could make the same arguments without the contradictions of pretending to not be prejudiced against perfectly fine people within their disfavored groups, but that would injure their imagined prestigious self image. You can be inoculated from guilt by proclaiming yourself a progressive, but the progressives fail to understand (or mostly pretend to not understand) that one could be against racism and not be a progressive for perfectly valid other reasons.
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There are no counter-protests for racism, so this entire repeated saga leaves one once again with very little actionable intelligence. One wonders what exactly they are asking for that people are against. I’m all for more accountability for police and specifically they need always on cameras that cannot be disabled. Failure to do so should a firing offense (as it was in KY recently).
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There are lots of words for structural/systemic racism that seem rather vague and without malicious intent or obvious fixes. The “my identity group is just a bunch of wonderful misjudged people” lecture while cities are being burned and looted by the same identity group is hard to take on face value. It cannot be unseen. Treat people as individuals and demand they take personal responsibility for their actions is now dismissed as “responsibility politics”. Everybody wants to be fair, and where things aren’t fair, as in equal opportunity, they need to be fixed.
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Are disparate outcomes due to unequal opportunity? Who has the burden of proof? I think it lies with those who claim disparate outcomes are due to prejudice. This is the basic argument that cannot be addressed honestly in our current environment.
CT did meticulous research on the TrayVon Martin case. Explained the spying on the Trump campaign very early, explaining Collyer’s redacted memo on FISC abuse that no one else has picked up on.
I think it is difficult to have discussions about current race relations without using the past treatment of minorities as context. This does not mean that the current generation of white people are guilty or responsible for past behavior.
It does mean that we whites should remember the era of Jim Crow and lynching at the extreme, redlining in more recent times, and the simple fact that minority children growing up in one parent households on a diet of lead paint and junk food are not going to look, feel or act the same as middle class Americans, something that we see immediately when we look at the success of middle class minorities raised without those handicaps.
This can all be classified as systemic racism without modern intent. Middle class white Americans are astonishingly ignorant of our own history–hell, by and large we are ignorant end of sentence. Distressingly large percentages think evolution is a scam, the earth is 6,000 years old and cannot name their governor, congressperson or neighboring states. Their ignorance of key elements of the causes of racial tension is just part of the pattern of ignorance that made Dumb and Dumber painful as well as funny.
Yup. There are thugs and idiot antifas on skateboards crashing the protests and I hope they end up in jail. That’s not the issue. A cop killed a black man slowly, on camera and three of his colleagues sat there and watched. Given that similar shocking incidents have happened in the recent past, protests are not just understandable. They are warranted. Where’s Colin Kaepernick when we need him?
Thomas, FYI https://deadline.com/2020/05/colin-kaepernick-legal-defense-fund-other-celebs-fund-bail-1202947629/
Thomas
I don’t feel like we’re the ones hijacking the issue. Tell it to the rioters would be my response.
Okay, Lucia–maybe I should have said primary issue. The protestors don’t want the thugs any more than the business owners who are getting looted. I saw on TV several occasions where the protestors stopped the antifas and looters–they took one up and handed him over to the cops.
People trying to focus on the side show instead of the main event, as is happening now on Fox News, may legitimately be asked if they have an underlying political motive for doing so. Just as you might legitimately ask me if my attempt to relegate those morons to sideshow status has a political motive.
But I’ll be more comfortable with my answer (which is no).
Mark, we are talking about ‘rioters’ because Trump can’t deal with yet another 20,000 new cases today and 1,000 deaths today due to covid-19.
He has shoved Dr. Fauci off stage, tried to distract us with tales of Joe Scarborough murdering an intern, etc. But it isn’t working.
Sweeping the peaceful protestors off the street so he can hold a Bible in front of a camera isn’t going to work either.
There are two studies that indicated that Black men aren’t killed at a higher rate than white men. I am citing magazine articles linked to the actual pdfs — pdfs don’t seem to have any other url. One study was done by Roland Fryer a black man. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jul/11/no-racial-bias-police-shootings-study-harvard-prof/ Fryer did find that Black men in lesser confrontations were subjected to more force than white men.
Here is a quote from Fryer study: “blacks are 27.4 percent less likely to be shot at by police
relative to non-black, non-Hispanics. This coefficient is measured with considerable error and not
statistically significant. This result is remarkably robust across alternative empirical specifications
and subsets of the data. Partitioning the data in myriad ways, we find no evidence of racial
discrimination in officer-involved shootings. Investigating the intensive margin – the timing of
shootings or how many bullets were discharged in the endeavor – there are no detectable racial
differences.”
Other study done by PNAS https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/white-cops-dont-commit-more-shootings/
Should note that Fryer study says lesser interventions with police occur at about a 50% higher rate than whites but that as the interventions get more serious the disparity decreases.
I would even disagree it’s “primary”. I think the violence and looting is on the same level as historic police brutality and ongoing racism.
I agree most protestors don’t want the thugs.
That makes it all the more important to discuss the thuggery. During this discussion, protestors need to think about ways to protest that will reduce the potential for thuggery and looting. Thing that I think would help:
(1) Protest in parks, not near commercial retail establishments. (E.G. Marquette Park instead of Gold Coat.)
(2) Agree in advance when they plan to disperse. Make that before night fall.
(3) Possibly the protestors could, select outfits that communicate they are not the thugs. So avoid both all black and any “white supremicist” choice since those are the uniform of someone else.
There are probably other things they could pick to do.
The main reason I have never thought to ask that question is I haven’t seen you trying to relegate those morons to a side show status. But I’m glad to hear your tell me you don’t have political motives! 🙂
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What I’ve seen you seem to do is suggest people shouldn’t discuss the looters. That seems to be the opposite of making them a sideshow since it prevents anyone– including the protestors– from developing strategies to take the wind out of the looters sails.
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As long as the looters are looting, they are taking center stage. If you want them to not be a sideshow, you need to figure out how to stop the looting. Lecturing people to ignore them isn’t going to work– and the looters know this. If the protestors don’t, the protestors are naive. (They may well be btw.)
Thomas
Uhhmmm…. That sure sounds like a talking point someone ginned up.
I don’t know who you think “we” are but I’m talking about riotors today because there were riots in the town next door and helicopters over flying my house last night.
There were riots in the second town over the night before. People are still boarding up and sweeping the streets.
Trump is an ass hat and dealing with things badly. I have no objection to your criticizing him– he richly deserves a shit-mega-ton of criticism. But sorry… if you think his desire to not talking about Covid is the reason “we” are all talking about riots, you are horribly mistaken.
I’m not asking anyone to ignore the thugs, the antifa, the looters. I’m asking everyone not to conflate them with the real protestors, not to promote them, not to give them the media attention some of them want and not to turn the legitimate protests into the sidebar. Is that too much to ask?
What Lucia said. I’m talking about rioters because there are riots.
Lucia, I’m trying to explain Trump’s motivation, not yours.
I live in Portland, Oregon, (right near dhogaza! How sweet…). We have our share of protests, tear gas, antifa, white supremacists. Summers here feature a rugby scrum between the latter two. We have broken windows, looting and our own very special curfew.
But the people here have a different point of view about it all. Like in other cities, the police kneel with the protestors and look more exasperated than anything else by the antics of the antifa.
I don’t conflate them with the real protesters. As a matter of fact, let me take a moment to note that some of the real protesters are apparently people of principle who have defended police and shops against the thugs (don’t have time to find the links, but google for it. It’s out there), and I think they deserve recognition and admiration for that.
But on the pyramid of concerns, possible rioting in my hometown and whether or not I can defend myself and my family properly if things escalate outweighs my concern about the heinous public murder of George Floyd while in police custody.
Mark, you could just as reasonably talk about the protests because there are protests. You made a choice.
We could and probably should at some point talk about Trump crawling out of his basement to threaten to invoke the Insurrection Act so he can ‘dominate the battlespace’ that used to be called America.
We all make choices Thomas. We could talk about the weather too.
[Edit: As usual, this is becoming pointless in a hurry. Ciao Thomas.]
Thomas
Ok… well perhaps you did. But a bit of editorial advice. If you want to describe Trump’s motivation for discussing looting, perhaps you should have written “Trump is talking about looters because….
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Actually, yeah….it is sort of.
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First: I’m already not conflating the two groups. So asking this seems superfluous to ask me to stop doing something I am not doing.
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Second: I am not “promoting” the looters. As far as I can tell, no one here is. Most are criticizing and condemning them, which is the opposite of promoting them.
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Third: None of us are “the media”, so we are clearly the wrong person address if you wish to ask “the media” to do something. Write the head of CNN. Or the Chicago tribune. Or whoever… But if you are hoping we will somehow magically make “the media” not cover the looting, and trying to get us to fulfill your request to control the media? that’s a bit much. If you think getting them to change is something that can be done, you take that task on.
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Fourth: It’s not people discussing the looters who are turning the protests into a sidebar. It’s the looters themselves who are turning it into a sidebar. The other group doing it is are those protestors who are allowing themselves to be used (by not making decisions that would impede the looters from looting.)
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Police were hugging the protestors in Aurora two days ago. It was quite peaceful Then the looters arrived.
The police and protestors were getting along just fine in Naperville. Then the looters arrived.
Don’t delude yourself into thinking you somehow have more clarity or special insight on this issue just because you are in Portland.
People are discussing the looters because they are looting.
Well, if it’s too much to ask, I guess it is. But Fox follows its ratings, not vice versa. I’m at least happy you are joining the protestors in condemning the looting.
I didn’t (and don’t) claim special clarity or insight because I live in Portland. Where did you dredge that up? I mentioned it just to say that I see the protests and looting too, after you and Mark made a point of your proximity to such. Sheesh.
Thomas
Sure. And I did bring up a discussion about what the protestors could do to avoid being made a sideshow by the looters. But you didn’t want to engage that. You made a choice.
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But just because you missed the first opportunity to jump at a chance to continue a conversation about the protestors, let me repeat it here:
So now Thomas: You can take up this opportunity to discuss what the protestors can do to make people focus on their messages rather than being distracted by the sideshow put on by the looters. Or you can continue to chose to discuss something else!
Most of the organized protestors do have guidelines, schedules and training to address each of these items. They usually have ‘captains’ that talk to cohorts of protestors about behavior and demeanor if they find themselves face to face with law enforcement. You’ll notice that they start in parks, march to public buildings and perhaps you don’t know, but they consult with law enforcement and other officials on subjects like traffic management and stop/start times.
This stuff has been standard since the 60s–I’m surprised it needs to be brought up.
Uniforms are considered threatening and when protests follow a breaking news event there isn’t time for color coordination.
Thomas
Ok… Evidently, you want to discuss Fox News instead of the protestors. I don’t really know what you are trying to say with that. I should think CNN and MSNBC follow their ratings just as much. But I would also think it’s pretty clear their ratings follow them. Whatever that really means.
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And, FWIW: I don’t watch FOX news.
From the preface to that paragraph which reads like something that suggest that you have a “different” pov from everyone else.
As far as I can tell, your pov isn’t different or special or anything. You just seem to want to drop in and complain that people here are for some reason not discussing some particular aspect of the current situation you want to focus on this particular minute.
The reason rioters are being conflated is that the lecturing going on by every elite person with a megaphone to us ignorant commoners is that a certain identity group in total is being * unjustly * maligned. Well a certain part of that group is being justly maligned based on a mountain of evidence. Try YouTube and looting and searching the FBI’s violent crime statistics.
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Instead of acknowledging this, we get fed a diet of their behavior is (start waving arms) due to society’s mistreatment of them. Look at the looters, they aren’t exactly homeless people.
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The stereotypes are being validated here, not cleared.
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Peaceful demonstrators should be treated like the law abiding citizens they are. They should be judged by their actions. The key point here is we are basically being demanded to treat this identity group as a monolith of good citizens while simultaneously being excoriated for treating parts of this identity group as a monolith of bad citizens. How about get rid of monoliths? It’s rather confusing. This group has both and the way to handle is to treat good behavior like good behavior, and bad behavior like bad behavior.
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In the end the protesters are venting rage, which is fine. They look the other way at rioters, which is fine. Nobody has to herd their own cats. We can do our best to reform bad police behavior without demanding other people accept rioters don’t exist and pledge fealty upon the white guilt altar.
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Historical racism is irrelevant to forward progress. The demands for performative weeping here is nuts. What do people want to do about this today? This seems to never be talked about.
Well… I have noticed where they are starting around here. Yesterday’s protests in Naperville did not start in a park around here. Whatever some other groups of protestors may have been doing since the 60s, Naperville’ protestors started right smack dab downtown.
Well perhaps it’s good you finally did bring it up so I can disabuse you of the notion that the protests around here are starting in parks. ONE was in a park yesterday; it stayed peaceful. Two others started downtown.
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Other “protests” are being proposed in other local towns. And no the protestors are not starting their protests in parks.
And no, yesterday’s Naperville group did not adhere to any negotiated stop time.
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Maybe you can contact these groups and lecture them about what’s been done since the 60s. Because they seem to have lost the rule book.
Or maybe if a true protest group disapproves of a looting-non’protest’ group that is forming, the true protest group can start writing letters to the editors, and getting media interviews where they criticize the looters in a more formal way.
Well… Floyd died on May 25. Not yesterday. I suspect most could find red t-shirts pretty quickly if they thought of the idea and decided to do it. Walmarts are open. It doesn’t take that long to buy an inexpensive red t-shirt.
Lucia, I mentioned Fox once. Then I discussed the things you wanted me to discuss.
Yep. Some protests are organized. Some aren’t. And yep. Some start in parks and some start downtown. Yep. They don’t often line up at Walmart to buy t-shirts.
But the protestors have been in front of the cameras complaining about the thugs, looters and antifa for a week now–if you haven’t seen it, most have. Even those of us without special clarity and insight have run across it.
Thomas
And I engaged your comment. My point is: despite your very recent criticism that others discuss something other than the protestors you choosing to raise topics other than the protestors. These include Fox news, Trump, or whatever you like. So you really have no leg to stand on in criticizing others for discussing multiple topics of their choice.
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I didn’t say they should. You seemed to suggest that current protestors would not have time to color coordinate. But, the reality is they had plenty of time if they wished to do it. A week is more than enough time for people to color coordinate.
Ok… before you said “most” were doing something…And you throw in “This stuff has been standard since the 60s–I’m surprised it needs to be brought up.”… which tends to communicate the idea that somehow every knows this is what most do.
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But now it’s somehow only “some”. And in fact, I would suggest that all that blather about what “most” do is… well… to be backed away from because, in fact, this batch is not organized, and, rather is acting willi-nilly. (And consequently, getting taken advantage of.)
I’ve seen some. I’ve certainly not seen any head organizer getting out in front of this and criticizing these others.
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In fact, it seems to me they may need someone who read that available-since the 60s rule book are familiar with to educate them. Perhaps you can get in touch with them and explain to them the proper way to organize.
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That would certainly help them distinguish themselves from the looters, and help them push the looters to the sideshow. It would help them more than coming here and lecturing us to ignore the looters!
Gee Lucia, have you been getting straw man lessons from ThingsBreak?
I know you read this because you responded to it: “I’m not asking anyone to ignore the thugs, the antifa, the looters. I’m asking everyone not to conflate them with the real protestors, not to promote them, not to give them the media attention some of them want and not to turn the legitimate protests into the sidebar. Is that too much to ask?”
Fuller’s wish of erasing the looting and rioting is being attempted by the usual suspects in the media, but this is such transparent and expected manipulation that it doesn’t matter anymore. The blanket decision to not use the word riot is case in point. What the news organizations can’t do is censor live TV footage. It’s all rather unhelpful and makes one quite cynical. Narrative before news. Why are all the police and national guard around when there isn’t apparently any rioting and looting???? The conflation of protesters and rioters are being done by the media because they aren’t discriminating between them in most cases with their words.
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Front page searches:
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WP:
Riot: 0
Loot: 1
Trump: 32
Protest: 34
NYT:
Riot: 0
Loot: 1
Trump: 14
Protest: 6
NBC:
Riot: 2 (complaining about Trump using the word)
Loot: 2
Trump: 22
Protest: 33
CNN:
Riot: 0
Loot: 2
Trump: 18
Protest: 14
Fox:
Riot: 21
Loot: 5
Trump: 21
Protest: 22
Thomas
Huh?
Yes. And I gave you an extensive response to that.
Presumably you intend to make a point. Perhaps someone knows what that might be. I suspect most are either taking wild guesses or not bothering to try to figure out what it might be.
Lucia,
You’ve got quite the amazing ability to keep Thomas discussions on track. I admire your patience. I can do that [edit: (er, exercise patience)], but only with things that don’t annoy me (like the bus captures I’ve been crawling through this afternoon).
I think Mark had the right idea in leaving.
Tom: I’m not asking anyone to ignore the thugs, the antifa, the looters.
Lucia: It would help them more than coming here and lecturing us to ignore the looters!
Stay safe, Lucia.
Stay free, Thomas.
Thomas Fuller,
“I’m not asking anyone to ignore the thugs, the antifa, the looters. I’m asking everyone not to conflate them with the real protestors, not to promote them, not to give them the media attention some of them want and not to turn the legitimate protests into the sidebar.”
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I have to admit to being puzzled by that (and other) comments. I think it is a horrible outrage that a psychopathic police officer in Minneapolis slowly, and painfully, murdered a black man on the street. I am even more horrified that at least three other officers did nothing to stop it. I think all of them should be convicted and sentenced to long prison terms, where I expect they may not survive very long. They are cruel monsters, nothing less.
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I also think that the Minneapolis PD can have such people working as officers is a condemnation of the entire organization, and every single person up the chain of command should be immediately fired and replaced. The mayor should be voted out of office, if he can’t be recalled and removed.
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I have no problem with people complaining, protesting, marching, editorializing, about this incident. More power to them. Maybe they will get elected officials to change the culture in many police deparments; I hope they do.
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But rioting, looting, assaults, stealing cars, arson, beatings, etc all over the country, is far worse and far more destructive than the horrific murder that took place in Minneapolis. You are indeed asking people to ignore a much greater evil, perpetrated by many thousand of criminals in dozens (or hundreds) of cities. It is not going to happen.
Thomas
When you say one thing and the gist of everything else is to contradict it… well sorry. You are criticizing people for discussing everything other than the group you deem the “protestors”. Then in words claim you don’t want us to “ignore” the other thing. But… then, turn around and lambaste anyone who discusses the other things.
So: yes you are telling us to ignore those other things at least in the sense of not discussing them. I get that you might prefer I not describe what are telling us to do on your long complaints. But I’m not giving you a pass on that just because you happen to write a sentence that makes a false claim that you are not telling us to do what you are spending lots of time telling us to do– but in longer more complicated ways.
Stay safe Thomas. Perhaps you can go find some naive protestors who haven’t read “the book” on how to organize and give them tips on how not to act as dupes to the looters.
In terms of the looters v protestors discussion, I think it is useful to look at the big picture. Bernie Kierik discussing Washington Post numbers for 2018 (with paywall hard to look directly at Wapo numbers)
“So, here’s the 2018 breakdown of the 995 people shot and killed by the police.
403 were white, 210 were black, 148 were Hispanic, 38 were classified as other, and 199 were classified as unknown.
Out of that 995, 47 were unarmed — 23 were white, 17 were black, 5 were Hispanic, and 2 were unknown.” https://www.newsmax.com/bernardkerik/police-shootings-crime-statistics/2019/01/22/id/899297/
At least 4 people have been killed in the riots associated with Floyd, (so far as I know, none with weapons drawn against anyone — a black security officer was killed in Oakland by drive by killers) which is nearly 25% of the number of unarmed black men killed in one year. Don’t know how anyone can ignore or not give serious attention to these deaths which have occurred during protests.
Also, apparently, close to Lucia, 2 people were killed in Cicero last night. https://wgntv.com/news/chicago-news/2-killed-over-60-arrested-in-cicero-as-unrest-continues/
S
There’s a protest planned for tthe city center here tomorrow (small city). Fingers crossed it goes ahead peacefully.
SteveF
Oh… but you see. I ‘m pretty sure Thomas point is he said he doesn’t want you to “ignore” that. He just doesn’t want you to make the legitimate protestor a “side bar”….
And as far as we can tell, the way to not the the legitimate protestors a “sidebar” is um.. uhmmm not discuss the looters or rioters, and perhaps not to watch media reports that report on looters or rioters.
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So.. evidently… he’s not asking us to ignore that the topic… just gosh whats the word for the behavior he wants from us….? Oh… it’s usually called ignoring the topic. Tricky this.
DaveJ,
If they:
1) Do it in a park away from retail fronts. STAY away from retail. (No march toward retail areas.) Announce that the plan is to STAY IN THE PARK.
2) Have an announced stop and end time with the total time being less than 4 hours,
3) Have an official organizer who will announce the end time, and thank people for their support and say the protest is over. and
4) Will call out elements who arrive and start to incite violence. (IF necessary, repeat the plan to NOT GO NEAR RETAIL.)
5) Possibly ask people who are merely onlookers to stay away and observe from a far.
6) Welcome the police and thank them for being there to protect.
It will likely be fine. A few of these can be skipped, but really, they need to do most of them. Planning to stay away from retail is key.
Otherwise… some well intentioned but naive protestors will get used by other elements. Some of the well intentioned but naive will be hurt themselves.
It’s basically the Streisand effect. The demand to not pay attention to something is causing more attention to it. Conversely I think it is true that non-violent protests get much less attention. A Catch-22. Violence never works is a platitude.
Tom Scharf,
“ Violence never works is a platitude.â€
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It sure works if your objective is to loot 5 new TVs from Target. It will continue until the consequences for criminals are more costly than their personal profit from violence.
Was there a killing in Minneapolis last year where someone called the police that she was raped, and ended up being shot by the cops?
Mike N: “Was there a killing in Minneapolis last year where someone called the police that she was raped, and ended up being shot by the cops?”
Yes. Justin Damond was unarmed and killed by a black cop in Minneapolis who was convicted of murder. About 2 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Justine_Damond
Reasonably good evidence along Rudy Giuliani comments about Floyd killing that the police force in heavily Dem Minneapolis was poorly trained. Makes much of the criticism against Trump look very hypocritical.
MikeN,
Yes, that incident is included in this story: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/05/28/before-george-floyd-s-death-minneapolis-police-failed-to-adopt-reforms-remove-bad-officers
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She was an Australian woman, and ended up dead.
As far as the KY incident where a BBQ shop owner was killed by police, that one looks to be cleared up.
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CNN: McAtee was shot while trying to protect his wounded niece
“McAtee’s nephew, Marvin McAtee, told CNN affiliate WAVE that a niece of the chef was wounded when the gunfire erupted. She survived. McAtee was fatally shot in the chest while reaching out to grab his niece, Marvin McAtee said.”
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Not so much.
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NPR: Louisville Police Release Video It Says Shows David McAtee Firing At Officers
https://www.npr.org/2020/06/02/868126425/louisville-police-release-video-it-says-shows-david-mcatee-firing-at-officers
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He definitely was taking pot shots at the the police. Unclear he really knew what he was shooting at, or who actually shot first. A bunch of businesses in the area were subsequently looted during protests including a Kroger.
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The Chief of Police was fired because the participating officers didn’t have active body cameras of the incident.
MikeN:
The lady who called the police in Minneapolis said she heard someone else being raped or sexually assaulted in an alley. Then when the police showed up she smacked the side of the police car near the back drivers side and the cop in the passenger seat shot her (reaching around the driver). I guess the sound startled him (and it was dark).
Anyway – it was a tragedy.
But she was not the rape victim – just the person who called in a report.
The NYPD evidently has a whole bunch of protestors corralled on Manhattan bridge! Pictures on twitter with #ManhattanBridge.
Ok… other stories say they can leave on the Brooklyn side but are only blocked on Manhattan side. . .
Ok…. the protestors reached the Brooklyn side and are walking off.
How to show appropriate solidarity with protestors (warning: this video contains cringe). https://youtu.be/-7SvMK1yEwc
At this point, I think there are few, if any, “peaceful protestors”. Certainly those who are “protesting” after curfew are not protestors, they are rioters. I don’t think it matters if some, or most, of them are not personally smashing things or looting. They are providing cover for those who are smashing and looting and as such are accessories to the criminal acts.
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It might be that there are some genuinely peaceful protests taking place in the spirit of the rules that lucia (Comment #185681) outlined. But not much.
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It is not conservatives who are conflating the protestors with the rioters. It is the leftist new media, Democrat politicians, and the “protestors” themselves who are doing that.
The guy who pretty much set off the violence in Naperville is captured on video by an onlooker
https://www.facebook.com/Dont.Listen.to.the.Radio/videos/10105095245658979/
It’s probably not good enough to ID him. But it does show what he’s doing, what he’s wearing and so on.
Lucia –
FB link above goes to “content not found”. At least for me.
MikeM
I think you are a.most certainly wrong. I suspect quite a few peaceful protestorsnot thinking through what is required to keep the protest peaceful and ensure the crowd they have gathered is not co-opted as cover by others.
3) And no… the 60s playbook Tom Fuller seems to think exists (and it may– there are probably several), a playbook that involves allowing a planned protest to even migrate to retail not the correct playbook in the current context. Being co-opted by looters, anarchists, whitenationalists or any group with different goals is the current huge danger. A playbook that is organized to protect from the police brutality is not not one that will get the peaceful protesters what they want– which is for their message to be heard above the message being sent by the rioters and looters.
Beyond that, the fact is the message the peaceful protestors want is already largely heard. Police have spoken in solidarity with BLM. Shop keepers have both before and after they have been looted. Even the AFL-CIO– a union organization– has spoken out against the racist corruption of the union in Minnesota. The individual officers in Minn have fired, and some charged. People are calling for higherup to be dealt with.
With some luck many of the members of the AFL-CIO will also recognize that Minn. is not the only place where unions are protecting police who are merely violent, those who are racist and those who are simultaneously both. Union recognition that their history of protecting members against anything and everything and tweaking qualified immunity to not be ridiculous can go a long way to improving the police problems that do exist. Unions can also focus on better training. They can do a lot of things.
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So to a large extent the message peaceful protestors want to communicate has been heard.
But the fact is they need to act to prevent themselves from being used by people who (a) don’t really give a shit about that message and want to advance a different agenda, (b) people who are merely criminals, and (c) people who are, frankly, bored out of their gourd in part because they have been cooped up with nothing to do.
I know it will be difficult for the peaceful to distinguish themselves. But it’s not impossible. MLK was able to distinguish himself from others.
Teacher unions protect bad teachers, police unions protect bad police. The unions aren’t going to police their members. One of the benefits you get for union fees is legal representation for free. They are there to protect unjustly accused officers (which happens frequently) and justly accused officers. They have to defend them.
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I don’t expect much help from the police union with the age old question of who polices the police. The police are going to be in bunker mode for a long time, and the us-vs-them mentality is just getting worse as they get tarred with the behavior of their worst actors.
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The union is going to press for the least accountability possible, but they just need to be ignored. Legislative action can be done to force accountability.
lucia (Comment #185716): “I think you are a.most certainly wrong. I suspect quite a few peaceful protestorsnot thinking through what is required to keep the protest peaceful and ensure the crowd they have gathered is not co-opted as cover by others.”
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Maybe. If so, then what are the legitimate protestors trying to accomplish? What needs to be done to satisfy them? At whom are the protests aimed?
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My *guess* is that the protests are aimed at “white privilege” and the role that they see the police playing in maintaining that. They want law-and-order Republicans out of office; that goes double for Trump. They want to pull the teeth of the police and the criminal justice system. As such, the protests are aimed at civil society as a whole.
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*If* I am right (I am by no means certain), then the protestors and the rioters are one, distinguished only by what they are willing to do personally rather than vicariously.
>smacked the side of the police car near the back drivers side
What was the result of the case? That’s what happened to the driver in Charlottesville before he sped forward thru the crowd and hit a car.
I imagine there are a lot of mixed goals for the peaceful protesters. It seems to be in the cry of anguish phase now. It would be useful to get past the “admit you are a white supremacist and kneel before me” phase. (I’m trying very hard to forget the video DaveJR posted, ha ha). This isn’t very conducive to lasting change. Performative rage/empathy to impress your in-group has been in vogue since Nov 8, 2016.
Today’s WSJ is full of interesting stuff:
Heather MacDonald:
That reduction in law enforcement in the Black community, whether they admit it or realize it, is what Colin Kaepernick and the Black Lives Matter movement is going to accomplish.
For those who might still think that COVID-19 hasn’t caused much in the way of excess mortality here’s Robert Rosenkranz:
Yet the MSM continues to accept the ridiculous idea that Andrew Cuomo is a heroic role model and by implication it was all Trump’s fault.
Then there’s this by the WSJ Editorial Board:
I’m not going to bother to quote from the editorial, it kind of writes itself.
Holman Jenkins:
And also this gem which I hadn’t seen before:
In yesterday’s WSJ:
Gee, that sounds familiar.
It now seems very likely that we will never know if the hydroxychloroquine, zinc and azithromycin regimen is effective as a treatment for early stage COVID-19 or as a prophylactic to prevent infection.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #185739),
The Lancet study appears to have been much worse than the WSJ thought. It appears that Surgisphere is a bogus company run by a con man and that the data were fraudulent.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/03/covid-19-surgisphere-who-world-health-organization-hydroxychloroquine
It looks like the studies that were cancelled as a result are back on.
Harold,
Sorry, the video is a contribution to a “group” called Naperville talk. I didn’t realize it was one that wasn’t totally public. If I see it somewhere public, I’ll post the link.
Mike M,
Yep.
DeWitt,
“It now seems very likely that we will never know if the hydroxychloroquine, zinc and azithromycin regimen is effective as a treatment for early stage COVID-19 or as a prophylactic to prevent infection.”
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I suspect we eventually will, just not any time soon. Certainly not soon enough to make a big difference in treatment protocols. Most likely not until Trump is no longer in office.
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Places already hard hit will not have many more cases, but the rest of the country (indeed, much of many other countries) probably faces many months of constant, slowly declining, or even slowly rising cases and deaths. I will not be surprised if by the time a vaccine is available, there will be little need for one.
SteveF
Little immediate need. But I doubt the virus will be eradicated. So it will probably still be useful at least for people being put in assisted living and nursing homes. It might be prudent for people working in meat packing. As long as there are pockets of people to have local populations below herd immunity in locations where spread can be large, the vaccine will be useful.
I’ll get it.
Harold,
the video is also here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ActualPublicFreakouts/comments/gv4xxi/rioters_throw_explosives_at_police/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
The facebook page made a slow motion bit of the part near 0.7 seconds.
Lucia,
Where did the throwing of explosives take place? Chicago?
Mike M.,
Wow! And the articles published by the NEJM and The Lancet were supposedly peer reviewed. How embarrassing! Talk about confirmation bias.
On worldometers.info LA County had more new cases of COVID-19 (1,150) yesterday than New York state (1,087).
And yesterday Brazil had both more new cases (27,263) and new deaths (1,232) than the US (21,882 and 1,134). We’re no longer number one. I doubt we’ll stay number one in total cases either.
Downtown Naperville. On the corner of Chicago and Washington. You can catch a glimpse of the Barnes and Noble in the video. This is the google address
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Chicago+Ave+%26+Washington+St,+Naperville,+IL+60540/@41.7715069,-88.1501744,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x880e57b8bb40e9a7:0x8508f4ad63f46e07!8m2!3d41.7715069!4d-88.1479857
BTW: Reports describe the object thrown as a “firecracker”. The guy who threw it had quite an arm. Possibly good quarterback potential.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #185750): “On worldometers.info LA County had more new cases of COVID-19 (1,150) yesterday than New York state (1,087).”
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Indeed. Back in early April the lockdown fans were praising what a great job California did, how that set an example for the rest of the country, and that it proved that lockdowns worked. But after a brief dip, new cases in California went back to rising and are now more than double what they were in early April. Funny how that seems to have been ignored.
MikeM,
I don’t think they are being ignored.
Mike M,
No MSM outlet will ever use rising cases and deaths in California to question governor Newsome and his policies, nor will they ever stop the endless adulation for HRM Cuomo, despite his policies killing a lot of old people with via !diotic nursing home regulations.
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But I don’t think that rise in cases in California is being ignored by everyone…. just the nutty left and their MSM enablers.
Mayor Lightfoot raised the bridges!!!! She raised the bridges!!! Just like a Batman movie! (I’ve always wanted to see this.)
https://twitter.com/YasmeenTV/status/1268305133034770432
Lucia,
Aren’t those bridges (officially called bascule bridges) regularly opened to allow boat traffic to pass? In most cities, there is some kind of schedule of openings, usually coordinated so that a boat can pass all the bridges that are close to each other without stopping for each one (usually after a long initial wait). There is a bridge operator 24/7 who sits in the little building you can see on one side of the bridge, and who communicates with boat operators over marine short wave radio.
Never saw a batman movie with drawbridges. Maybe I need to get out more.
Lucia,
I checked on the bridge openings on the Chicago river. The City got agreement from the Coast Guard in the 1990’s to stop operating the bridges in the city like other bridges around the country. They now open only two days a week (Wednesday and Saturday) in the spring and the fall, to allow bigger boats to get to the lake (from their winter storage) in the spring and back to winter storage in the fall. The bridges have 17 to 19 foot clearance, and I am sure that clearance is a consideration for anyone buying a boat in that area.
SteveF,
They are rarely opened. I think there is a day in the spring and a day in the fall when they are all opened to let tall ships through. (Ok… started answering before reading your 2nd comment….)
Anyway, I’ve never see one open or up. Looks like I should go on a Wednesday or Saturday. I also don’t know if they open all the bridges at once. Hypothetically, for the sake of traffic, they could open 2, let a boat under those, make it wait while they closed those and opened the next 2 and so on. It would be slow, but OTOH, the boats going to the lake do eventually need to sit in the lock so it’s not as if you can just zip back and forth.
The Batman movie doesn’t say it’s Chicago. But they have a scene where people are on “the Island” and all the bridges get opened. There’s another scene where the Batmobile drives like a madman on Lower Wacker. Then he emerges onto the surface. Looks like he’s driving west… to Stately Wayne Manner. (Where as you know there are caves and cliffs and such. Pretty funny to think of how far he’d have to drive to get to some place with anything like a cliff. Probably Galena?)
Lucia,
I have waited on my boat for hundreds of bascule bridges to open. I guess it is interesting the first few times, but it quickly becomes a PITA, since you are usually fighting wind and current the whole time you are waiting.
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I passed Trump’s Florida residence a couple of times on my boat, and there is a bascule bridge very close to there. It opens every 30 minutes. A couple of Coast Guard boats, with manned 50 caliper machine gun turrets on the front, “shadow” you until you get to the far side of the bridge. The sailors don’t seem all that friendly… they won’t even return a hand wave.
SteveF,
I used googlemaps to highlight the location of the bridges
You can see 7 trunnion bascule bridges all in a row. Raising all of those dramtically impedes all traffic from the loop into river north and streeterville. The “Gold Coast” is further north.
It’s worth mentioning that the idea people were “trapped” in one area or another is an exaggeration. You could travel in and out by going south of the loop. I’m not sure how far you had to travel because I don’t have a full list of bridge closures. Raising the bridges was definitely a huge inconvenience to anyone wanting to travel in and out of the loop for any reason.
Lucia,
“I used googlemaps to highlight the location of the bridges.”
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It’s like a nightmare. Much worse than Miami. Fortunately, my boat would go under all the bridges without opening, so it would be a non-event for me. For those who can’t fit under….. nightmare. There are apparently alternative water routes to avoid Chicago. The river in Chicago is part of what boaters call the “great loop”. You have to be quite rich to travel the great loop. https://explore.globalcreations.com/theblog/adventure/americas-great-loop-6000-miles-on-the-water/
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I’m not the least interested. Costs a fortune in fuel.
MikeN:
Sorry for the late response – I just noticed your question.
The cop was found guilty of 3rd degree murder and sentenced to 12.5 years.
https://www.startribune.com/the-fatal-shooting-of-justine-damond-by-mohamed-noor/435431563/
Early on, I was saying that it is not possible for the fatality rate to be high as well as being very contagious, with a low number of deaths to that point.
Now I’m wondering if the reverse is true. I am seeing reports that:
masks are useless, fatality rate is at most .2%, asymptomatic do not spread, lockdowns are worthless, etc.
All of these were in a long blogpost backed up by research articles that I can’t find now.
However, can all of these be consistent with 100,000 deaths?
This would mean 50 million infected at .2%.
MikeN,
There is not a lot of solid serology testing to draw upon. There was a random selection test in Spain which indicated about 10 people with active antibodies for each confirmed case. There was the testing in New York (less random, but not bad) indicating 21% in NYC had antibodies by mid April (3% of people in upstate NY), and the mor dubious testing in California. All these are consistent with at least 10 times as many asymptomatic cases that generated an immune response as confirmed cases. Confirmed cases in the USA stand at almost 2 million, so that puts total cases at about 20 million. 112,000 deaths in 20 million cases is 0.56%.
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Of course, that is probably somewhat distorted by NJ and NY where they caused a lot of infections of the very old in nursing homes, where case fatality rates are very high. But the chance of death per infection looks significantly higher than 0.2%… maybe 0.4% to 0.5%. I don’t much like the IFR, because it obscures the true social impact. Based on FL data, and assuming 10 asymptomatics per confirmed case, the average number of life-years lost (not quality of life adjusted, just straight life-years) per infection is about 0.07 year, or about 26 days. Of course nearly all those deaths fall on those over 50, and especially on those over 65.
MikeN,
The IFR is strongly dependent on the age and health of the infected population, old, sick people are much, much more likely to die. We know that a large fraction of deaths were patients in nursing homes and long term care facilities ( over 80% recently in Minnesota ) whose residents are in one or both of those groups. It’s likely that the IFR for people under 50 is on the order of 0.1%.
We still don’t have a very good estimate of the total exposed/infected. Fifty million seems a little high, but isn’t beyond the bounds of possibility.
MikeN (Comment #185912): “However, can all of these be consistent with 100,000 deaths?”
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Is 100K deaths a lot? Is half the deaths being in nursing homes a lot? Real questions.
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Second one first: I have seen a scientific paper that stated 20-25% of *all* deaths are in nursing homes. So 50% of deaths from a specific cause being in nursing homes might not be all that strange.
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As to the former, I downloaded a CDC data set that started with the last quarter of 2015. I ditched the 2020 data on grounds of incompleteness and split out the pneumonia and influenza deaths in the rest of the data. Annual averages are 2.8M deaths, 176K from pneumonia, 6K from influenza.
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We are told that flu deaths are 5 to 10 times that, a conclusion that come from some sort of regression analysis. So I looked at the correlation between all deaths and flu deaths and found a slope of 7.4. That would mean 45K deaths statistically associated with flu. I don’t know if that is what they did, but it is in the ballpark.
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A correlation between flu and pneumonia has a slope of 1.4. So of the deaths associated with flu, for each 1.0 from flu itself there are 1.4 from pneumonia and 5.0 from other causes. Those are probably heart disease, kidney disease, and other preexisting conditions.
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Total deaths correlate quite well with pneumonia deaths; the slope is 4.8. That implies 850K deaths a year (30% of all deaths) statistically associated with pneumonia, most of which are listed as being due to preexisting conditions.
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Pneumonia is typically the result of a respiratory infection, either directly in the case of viral pneumonia or indirectly from an opportunistic bacterial infection secondary to a viral respiratory infection. So it seems that some 800K deaths a year are associated with respiratory infections, 70-80% of which are attributed to a preexisting condition.
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What if we took those 800K deaths, determined the cause of the initial respiratory infection, and attributed those deaths to the virus responsible for the infection. How many of those deaths would then be attributed to rhinovirus? Or the established coronavirus strains?
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Admittedly, I am drawing big conclusions from little data. But it does suggest that the high Wuhan virus death toll may be largely due to counting the deaths differently.
Mike M,
The best data I can find shows an annual death rate from pneumonia in the USA at ~2100 er year per million for people 70+ years old. There are about 27 million people in that age group, so somewhere near 55,000 to 60,000 deaths per year. Covid19 will probably end up killing about two to three times than number in the 70+ age group in 2020.
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I think it is pretty clear that covid19 is worse than common colds and worse than the typical annual flu. But I agree it makes sense to put the threat from covid19 in some perspective: it is worse that these common causes of death, but has a very similar age profile in who it kills, and is a at most 3 to 5 times worse, not orders of magnitude worse. Before the leathality of covid19 was defined, I could understand governments instituting draconian and economically destructive policies. I can’t any more. The potential number of life-years being saved simply does not justify the huge costs (financial and personal) the current policies bring, not to mention the many knock-on negatives that will surly cost many lives. The lock downs need to end, and effort focused mainly on reducing risk to those over 70.
SteveF (Comment #185924): “so somewhere near 55,000 to 60,000 deaths per year.”
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That agrees with what I thought was the number, until I downloaded the data set from this site and used it for my analysis:
https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/mortality.html
The graph in the upper right shows “Percentage of all deaths due to pneumonia and influenza”. That is normally between 6% in summer and 8% in winter, so something like 150K to 200K deaths per year. Which is what I found in the downloaded data.
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I don’t understand the discrepancy.
———
OK, after some digging. For the data I used “The NCHS surveillance data are used to calculate the percent of all deaths occurring in a given week that had pneumonia and/or influenza listed as a cause of death.”
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/overview.htm#Mortality
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But this says:
“Number of visits to emergency departments with pneumonia as the primary diagnosis: 1.3 million”
“Number of deaths: 49,157”
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/pneumonia.htm
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So maybe one is primary cause of death and the other is pneumonia as a contributing factor?
In any case, there seems to be a big apples/oranges question.
SteveF,
Honestly, I think the lockdowns are pretty much ending. We in Illinois were coming out of phase 2 and into phase 3. But compliance in the private sector is going to fade…. and fade….. Governors enforcing it is going to become a practical impossibility.
Eventually, the practical reality will be people are out there.
I have no idea what is going to happen with Covid deaths. I’m waiting to see the next two weeks of data. The combination of (a) the weekly reporting cycles (b) the riot/protests/what have you and (c) the openings all happening will make it difficult to attribute changes to any one thing. The weekly cycle/ reporting lag makes it difficult to see when exactly anything happened. (The former is due to the latter. Sweden posting two data sets suggest the lags in reporting can be 10 days, so it’s not necessarily just a “catch up” on things on the weekend issue.)
Mike M,
“ So maybe one is primary cause of death and the other is pneumonia as a contributing factor?â€
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Could be, but I think it doesn’t matter much. Before the current madness, nobody beyond friends and family gave a second thought when someone over 70 died, no matter the cause. We are but flesh and blood after all, and we all die from something. Death among the elderly is a very normal part of life. The covid19 illness has changed all that, and not in a good way. Very destructive policies have been adopted, indeed, insisted upon, which are driven primarily by an irrational preoccupation with deaths among the elderly (and the younger unwell), rather than being driven by a rational evaluation of the costs and benefits of those policies to the whole of society. I am pushing 70, and so I am myself at some risk, but I still find the public policies very troubling. I suspect my long dead dad, who went ashore day two at Normandy, would also be troubled: sometimes the greater good is worth risking your life for. Somehow, that perspective has been lost.
Lucia,
I hope you are right, because the madness has gone on far too long.
SteveF (Comment #185927): ” sometimes the greater good is worth risking your life for. Somehow, that perspective has been lost.”
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Indeed. In the early days of the madness, Texas Lt. Governor Patrick made that very point. The Left was aghast.
I was looking at the US and IL COVID-19 daily cases and deaths in comparing the shape of those time series with those I could construct using my SEIRD model using various changes in Rt values over time. I will post my results on that analysis at another time. I’ll say here that the Rt values appear to be changing over longer time periods and more gradually than some might expect.
I was somewhat struck by the change in death rates to cases over time that are seen when using a smoothed daily death count lagged by 12 days to the daily case count. The results are in the link below. There are a few conjectures that might be put forth as an explanation of at least partial explanation for the changes found. Early nursing home cases and deaths might influence the rate. Noisy data could be a factor but smoothing should have obviated some of this effect. Better medical care of COVID patients could also be a factor. The rate does appear to be leveling off are 0.04.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/vh79gksdxki2ixv/IL_US_Covid_to_Early_June_Death_Rate.pdf?dl=0
Mike M,
“Texas Lt. Governor Patrick made that very point. The Left was aghast.”
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Ya, I saw that interview. He was a normal person saying normal things: we have an obligation throughout our adult lives to try to not take more than we give. He was shouted down by moral midgets and infantile fools; in a rational world, those are the people who would have been criticized. The world is less than rational.
Kenneth,
Thanks. Very interesting graphs.
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I suspect the biggest change has been who/how many have gotten tested. Very early in the pandemic the very sick were mostly getting tested. Right now, if you have any symptoms at all you are tested. Here in Florida, I believe the negative/positive ratio is 20 or so. So, there are ~20 people with symptoms consistent with Covid19 for every person who actually has covid19. They are absolutely NOT testing asymptomatic people. Today there are just more mild cases being documented, which drives down the apparent death rate.
SteveF (Comment #185932)
Steve, you make a good point, although I wonder how cases and positive tests are counted and aligned. The current testing for the US shows 2,296,561 tested positive out of 20,384,850 tested or about 11 percent (from the CDC) while the current daily cases number is 2,001,819 (from Worldometer).
If you look at only cumulative data you do not see how noisy the data actually is. I attempted to do some model fitting to the data using cumulative data and found that the residuals are highly correlated. I should not have been surprised.
I continue to attempt to determine why and how the Annan model results began giving unexpected and unrealistic results when the death series became longer. I think that fitting model suffers from changing death rates, use of a single intervention date for a one time Rt change and the noisy data -plus that fitting models with multiple fitting parameters can have problems finding global maxima where there are local maxima.
Lucia, I just had a post go into moderation. No links and nothing nasty or even controversial. I was thanked for my comment. That was nice.
SteveF,
Oh? That’s really stupid. In TN, anyone who wants to can get tested and we have about the same 20:1 ratio of tests to confirmed cases. So, how do you know people being tested in FL are all symptomatic? If I wanted to get tested and being symptomatic was required, I would claim to have symptoms. It’s still allergy season, so lots of people have runny noses and headaches.
It’s looking like treatment protocols for COVID-19 are reducing the case fatality rate.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-good-news-11591399491?mod=hp_opin_pos_1
SteveF,
There are no restrictions on testing in FL. They’ll test anyone who walks or drives in.
I agree that there are more mild cases being detected now. The daily number of cases has risen recently (since re-opening began), but the daily number of hospitalizations has not. Although I haven’t broken down the numbers, I suspect that we’re seeing a generally younger group being infected, with a correspondingly lower fraction of those infected requiring hospitalization.
What I notice in the media is mention of the increasing number of cases, not the decreasing effects (fewer hospitalizations & deaths). Seems that some folks want to accentuate the negative.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #185936): “In TN, anyone who wants to can get tested and we have about the same 20:1 ratio of tests to confirmed cases.”
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That has been the case in New Mexico since at least mid-May, although the ratio of tests to confirmed cases has been 40 or 50 to one. For quite a while before that, anyone who had been exposed to a person with the virus could get tested, even if asymptomatic. There was one week in early April when they hit a supply bottleneck and the ratio of tests to confirmed dropped to 10:1, but otherwise it was 20:1 even back in March.
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Frankly, if New Mexico can do it, any state ought to be able to do it. We had a candidate for the Republican Senate nomination who liked to complain that New Mexico is first in everything bad and last in everything good. Quite a bit of truth in that.
HaroldW, DeWitt,
In my area of Florida at least, they request you only ask for an appointment for a test if you are symptomatic (fever >xx, cough, etc). I don’t know how many people fib about symptoms to get a test done. I guess some do. But it seems a lot of work if you don’t have any symptoms. I would be surprised if there are many people who get tests without symptoms, but who knows.
Kenneth,
Your comment should be released.
DeWitt,
I can confirm that the fatality rate for people 80-81 YO in Florida for confirmed cases (since the first deaths were recorded) is 16%, and rises to ~30% by age 94. I have not looked to see if there is any trend over time in fatality rate for the over 80 age cohort.
HaroldW,
The greatest positive rate in Florida is for people 20 to 65; they represent about 70% of all positive tests, but only ~16-17% of all deaths (and that is almost all among the 45-65 YOs, of course).
I have a link below of some SEIRD model plots of daily COVID cases I made where the Rt change was varied using a logistic function. The plots show that the curve shape for the daily cases is the result of the k parameter value which determines the length of the Rt transitions. When compared to the IL daily cases the curve shape for IL indicates a long gradual change in Rt.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/d5fs6gkq8vt4ol5/Curve_Shape_vs_Rt_Change.pdf?dl=0
Kenneth,
The simulation with k=0.1 looks more realistic (more like actual data), but is there any other reason to think it took that long for Rt to change? I mean, the transition from high to low with k=0.1 looks like two months.
Kenneth,
I just realized something. With some opening (and protests, and rioting, and parties) the positive case rates are very likely to rise, but the death rates maybe not much at all, they could even continue to fall. The individuals who will become infected due to opening are going to overwhelmingly be relatively young and so with a much lower (near zero) chance of death from the virus. But the people at risk of dying are not out protesting, rioting, etc… they are staying home, and with good cause. The daily case rates are already up significantly in FL, but not deaths; we’ll see what happens over the next couple weeks with the death rate.
For those of you who haven’t been keeping score:
NYT editorial page editor James Bennet fired after allowing a US Senator’s op ed that supported a miltary crackdown on violent protests. He’s just not left enough I guess.
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Philadelphia Inquirer editor fired after allowing headline “Building Matters Too” on architectural article.
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Sacramento Kings TV announcer of 38 years fired after tweeting “All Lives matter”.
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Saints QB Brees forced to apologize after saying kneeling during the anthem is disrespectful.
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The people technically resigned. The only discipline available is termination? Newspapers are terminating people for wrong think in opinion pieces and architecture articles? It all seems very reactionary and extreme. Freedom of expression is under attack, it’s too bad that can no longer be reported. It’s quite unclear why anybody would want these people in charge of anything.
Mr Bennett has learned the hard way that the left is never satiated, and ultimately eats its own. If he has a lick of sense, he will become a strident critic of the NYT. I doubt he has a lick of sense.
SteveF (Comment #185949): “With some opening (and protests, and rioting, and parties) the positive case rates are very likely to rise”
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I see no reason to expect that since it is based on “science” and it seems that every non-trivial “science” based prediction regarding the Wuhan virus has been wrong. So I expect the streak to continue.
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Note: By “science” I mean cargo cult science rather than actual science.
SteveF (Comment #185928)
June 7th, 2020 at 11:15 am
I have to disagree with you on the point of ‘madness’. As it stands now, you certainly should be in a position where your health system can cope with a surge in cases. That was definitely not the situation when this virus began. Your whole country was unprepared for something of this magnitude… you were short of PPE and vital equipment like ventilators. Allowing the virus to roam free in those early days is what would have amounted to ‘madness’.
Sure, now you should be re-opening America and you should have adequate protections in place for people in aged care facilities (I’m not saying that you do, just that you should). You could say that maintaining the lock down any longer now is madness, but that’s different to saying it was madness all along.
You haven’t liked the lock down from the get-go, and you still won’t admit that it was necessary. Lucia showed that the lock downs correlated with a reduction in deaths, but that doesn’t seem to matter much to you… maybe because you’ve already bid granny goodbye.
You missed the memo, the moral scolding about granny conveniently disappeared about a week ago. Public health experts have informed us that the virus cares deeply about politics.
skeptical
Which doesn’t tell us which element of lockdown worked or is most important.
I do think we are going to see cases rise. I also think that, despite that, lockdowns are going to fall apart. We were getting lockdown fatigue anyway. So people were going to find reasons to not comply. Now that huge numbers of people have visibly found a reason to not comply (for the Floyd George protests) and the governor and mayors largely won’t enforce the lockdown against that, the really will find themselves unable to enforce it for other reasons.
So: like it or not, the Floyd George protestors decided their cause is important enough to kill granny or at least risk killing granny. Sadly: if cases rise enough, the lockdown will have been futile despite the fact that they work as long as they are in place. But… they are over.
skeptikal (Comment #185971): “Lucia showed that the lock downs correlated with a reduction in deaths”.
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But they do not correlate. Lucia looked at Illinois; that is a data point, not a correlation. In Illinois, the lockdown was followed by a leveling off of cases and deaths, not a reduction. And after a while, both went up again, cases more than deaths. Cases finally started down in May, some 6 or 7 weeks after the lockdown. I have not checked, but I suppose that deaths have also finally started to drop.
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In California, with a severe lockdown, cases have continued to rise. The same in Virginia and Minnesota. The last is especially extreme since new cases started to rise dramatically starting about a month after the lockdown was imposed. The last I checked, Iowa (no lockdown) and Minnesota (strict lockdown) had very similar numbers of new cases per capita. But I think Minnesota has had a lot more deaths.
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I can’t find anything in the data to indicate that we have had a meaningful effect on the progression of the epidemic.
skeptical,
“You haven’t liked the lock down from the get-go, and you still won’t admit that it was necessary.â€
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It was probably necessary in places like New York City and a few other high density areas, but not everywhere. It is long past time for it to end, especially in new York City, were it looks like there are not enough susceptible people left to allow much spread. Effort should focus on protecting those who are at significant risk, not further damaging the economy.
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BTW, some people call me grandpa, and I have not bid granny goodby. That is a cheap shot that reflects poorly on you. You must be a progressive.
MikeM
Leveling off rather than increasing is still working. Rising at a slower rate is also “working”.
Also: deaths were dropping slowly (still did this week.)
I have no idea what standard you are applying to decree lockdowns don’t work. It seems you think that they don’t work if they don’t bring deaths and cases to a grinding halt instantly. (Or something….) I don’t think anyone claims they do. While it would be great if they did that, that’s not the standard for “working”.
Deaths have been dropping. Identified cases went up. But this may have only been the explosion in tests that happened. We were very limited on test availability. (In Illinois and at least a few other states, tests per day rose dramatically ad have now…. fallen! I suspect near the peak there was pent up demand that is now gone. )
lucia (Comment #185985): “Leveling off rather than increasing is still working. Rising at a slower rate is also “workingâ€.”
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Only if it would have been rising more slowly without the lockdown. We don’t know that. For one case, there is no way to know. But looking at the various policies and various results in different states does not seem supportive of a correlation.
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lucia: “deaths were dropping slowly (still did this week.)”
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Looking at the 7 day average of deaths for Illinois, they seem to have peaked around May 10. 8 weeks after the big change shown by Google mobility data. The COVID tracking project is showing 73 deaths a day over the last week, about where it was in mid-April.
——
lucia: “I have no idea what standard you are applying to decree lockdowns don’t work.”
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I made no such “decree”. I only claimed there is no actual evidence that they do work. If such evidence exists, I’d like to see it.
Lucia, Mike M,
I suspect there is no hard and fast answer to the question of how effective lockdowns were. Most likely they were silly at best in most places with low population density and very few cases, and more effective in places with high population density and much higher risk of infection. My biggest criticism is that the lockdowns were ‘one-size-fits-all’, when that is plainly not the case. I think the extent of economic damage could have been reduced substantially if people had been more rational about where/when lockdowns made sense.
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What I know for certain is that the adoption of rules suitable for Chicago made no sense for a rural farming area in southern Illinois. If there is ever another similar pandemic, I hope at least that much is remembered.
Mike M,
My response to all that is, so? I mean… seriously? Yes. The people who were already ill did not magically become uninfectious. Instead, they remained ill and some died.
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Your definition of “no evidence” is absurd. That a measure was taken to achieve a result which then happened is evidence. It may not be conclusive. But deeming it not evidence at all is ridiculous.
SteveF,
I agree that there has been a rush toward advocating one size fits all lockdowns. One can certainly argue about whether the cost benefit made sense. Rules for Chicago make no sense for Morris, Il.
Lucia,
The problem with the lockdowns is governors insisting on uniform rules. An a$$hole like the governor in IL could have deferred to local (county?) level people to select the appropriate measures. He didn’t, he insisted on acting like a dictator. That caused a lot of unnecessary economic damage and social conflict. I am happy I don’t have such a jerk as governor.
lucia (Comment #185990): “That a measure was taken to achieve a result which then happened is evidence.”
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What result was that? Real question. Cases and deaths eventually reached a peak and then declined. That was guaranteed to happen anyway. So your claim requires a stronger result than that. I do not know what that might be.
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Almost everyone who has taken hydroxychoroquinone as a prophylactic did not get sick. Almost everyone who took it after getting sick, got better. But neither fact constitutes evidence that hydroxychoroquinone is effective.
” I only claimed there is no actual evidence that they do work. If such evidence exists, I’d like to see it.”
They are the parsimonious explanation to explain the drop in R. NZ appears to eliminated covid19 for now. Trying to invoke herd immunity as explanation is clearly nonsense. It is pretty self-evident that reducing options for virus to transmit “works”. When someone gets it, how do you stop them from infecting other people? Lockdowns are extreme measure, which mean the virus can only infect people within their “bubble” and no further. Other kinds of social distancing will also work but not as well. What kind of data would change your mind?
Phil Scadden (Comment #185993): “They are the parsimonious explanation to explain the drop in R. NZ appears to eliminated covid19 for now.”
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Was that the only action taken in New Zealand? Was there no contact tracing or isolation of the exposed? Real questions, I have no idea what was done there.
SteveF, cases rise but not deaths due to infected population being low risk. Then this population might spread to others who are at high risk. However, two-three weeks later that population now is a buffer against spread of the virus.
MikeM
The rate of increase in deaths and cases both dramatically slowed in exactly the time frame we would expect them to do so if the measures worked.
When the peaks were reached is not relevant to the diagnosis of whether it worked. So… yeah.. eventually those would have happened. Sometime.
SteveF,
Your argument was being made by those in the collar counties. They didn’t want to be forced to stay in quarantine just because Chicago needs it. In the end we were all let out at the same time.
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Also: The sherriffs and mayors in the collar counties were pretty much announcing they were not going to enforce. So the governor was going to be left on his own. There would never be enough state troopers for the Governor to implement, and he couldn’t even be sure the supreme court would decide he had the legal power once everyone was filing court cases.
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I don’t think he’s going to be able to go back to making everyone stay at home at this point. It’s going to be really difficult to claim it’s ok for throngs of people to march but in the meantime people can’t get hair cuts!
Well at start of lockdown, we had primitive contact tracing with minimal resources. We also started with limited testing capacity. Obviously, that was scaled massively but that took time, and of course there was isolation of exposed. That is absolutely the strategy going forward. But it didnt exist at the start – the lockdown was to buy time and to bring community transmission to full stop. I believe other places doing lockdown did so for same reasons. Lockdown surely got China under control. They scaled up contact tracing and testing very fast as well, but lockdown bought them time.
Contact tracing data is pretty interesting. Once level 4 (hard) lockdown Mar 26 began community trasmission practically vanished – last known community transmission was April 29th. Everything after that was linked to known cases. Lockdown eased on Apr 27th, expanding the businesses that could open but had to be contactless. 4th May was first day with no new cases detected and then moved to level 2 May 14 which saw most businesses reopen but with social distances.
I think it is also important to distinquish between “Lockdowns work” and “Lockdown are only thing that works”. I think the evidence that lockdowns work is very strong but they are not the only solution. Other solutions can work if you have compliant population and adequate resourcing.
I have a link below to plots of the daily cases and deaths for the 8 states recorded at Worldometer. I believe these are the states with the most cases/deaths. I also plotted for these states the death rate per case with a 12 day lag. After doing this analysis for IL and the US I wanted to see what kind of variations to expect from various states. The 8 states compared are CA, TX, FL, NY, NJ, MA, PA and IL.
I found that there are significant differences between the 8 states with regards to current trends. The good news is that all states show a downward trend for daily deaths. The death rate per case is generally downward but with large differences in starting and ending rates. CA and TX have death rates approaching 0.02 while NJ and PA are closer to 0.08. CA, TX and FL have daily cases trending upward and daily deaths trend downward. Those 3 states show some upward and downward movement in daily cases over an extended period of time. NY and NJ while having the worst experiences with COVID-19 cases and deaths show a more classical shaped curve indicating an Rt change over a relatively short period of time. MA, PA and IL show the concave rounded shape curve indicating a longer Rt transition period, but shorter than that for CA, TX and FL.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nk9tj68n9zfzedy/Several_States_Covid_Cases_Deaths.pdf?dl=0
Phil Scadden
Yep.
Phil Scadden (Comment #186001): “Well at start of lockdown, we had primitive contact tracing with minimal resources. We also started with limited testing capacity. Obviously, that was scaled massively but that took time, and of course there was isolation of exposed.”
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Lots of places tried lockdowns without contact tracing and isolation. It did not work. South Korea and, I think Japan along with some of the other East Asian countries, did contact tracing and isolation without lockdown. That worked. So it looks like contact tracing and isolation is what works.
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Maybe lockdown could be helpful to buy time while contact tracing and isolation spin up. I thought that was what we were doing here and I fully approved. But we left out the important parts. And then as the lockdowns didn’t work, they just got extended and made harsher. There is no evidence that lockdowns alone work.
East Asian countries had previous experience with SARS so many had effective contact tracing systems already in place as well as effective epdemic plans. Furthermore, if their governments say, “social distance, wear masks”, then by and large their population will do it.
To say that lockdowns wont work by themselves suggests you think that the virus is capable of spreading without human contacts. I dont buy it, it isnt magic, but a lockdown approach by itself would have to be hard (our level 4) and prolonged. Looking at google data, lockdowns in USA (and UK) look pretty half-hearted and ineffectual. But, indeed the important part is very rapid scaling up of contact tracing, testing and isolation.
Question then: how many “give me liberty or give me death” types would regard being asked to isolate because of suspected exposure as an infringement of their constitutional rights? As outsider, I have to take media with grain or thousand of salt, but partisan politics seem so bad in US, that if group decided not wearing masks, and refusing isolation was part of their group identity, then that they will ignore. Similarly, it looks like lockdown = dems way, so is that impeding scaling tracing and testing? Effective action stymied by seeing everything through group identity.
Should also say, contact tracing cant cope with huge case load. You have to match case load to resource. Lockdowns help.
Phil Scadden
Some. Not all. Most the early-anti-lockdown from the right weren’t against having people individually suspected of being exposed quarantined. They were against everyone on mass being quarantined even with zero suspicion they were exposed as as an individual. So it is a bit different.
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Right now, the major group violating stay at homes are more left of center (i.e. dems). It’s more of a civil rights protest, and it’s pretty huge. Those people would consider not being allowed to assemble cheek by jowl to express their political views a violation of their civil rights.
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They aren’t technically criticizing lockdowns. It’s just that they are wildly not complying and not criticizing those not complying.
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FWIW: Our first amendment does guarantee the right to peacefully assemble to make political views known. So ordinarily not allowing it is a violation of civil rights. OTOH: so is not allowing people to go to church or worship. It’s the same damn amendment that guarantees both! But at least so far no one argues that they couldn’t prevent an actually infected person from participating in group activities, and probably don’t argue that a person who the knew had been exposed can’t be quarantined. This is not to say things might not change. So the idea that lockdown can be violated to exercise free speech seems to be equally strong on the left and the right. AT the same time, each would deny the other groups 1A rights. (This is kinda sort of why we have the 1st amendment!)
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Having said that: there are definitely people on my facebook feed whose attitude seems to suggest their view on masks, vaccines and so on is starting to be something of a “left/right” wing identity issue. (I follow individuals. But I also subscribe to some “town” type lists — like one for the town of Naperville.)
Yep. We see the pictures. Rallies here even. My reaction is “you idiots” and wonder what that will do for infection rates. Only saving grace would be that indoor gatherings are apparently 8 times more likely to cause spread than outdoors gatherings.
A little less “standing up for my rights” and a little more “doing what needs to be done for everyones sake” would help from everyone.
Phil “.. A little less “standing up for my rights†and a little more “doing what needs to be done for everyones sake†would help from everyone…â€
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Always nice to hear from someone who knows exactly what needs to be done to help me, to see it done regardless of my concerns, or take any liability for the harmful consequences their help causes.
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Sorry Phil, I have no time for the wantabe tin pot dictators that have shown their true colors and who deserve to be thrown from office with extreme prejudice.
Phil,
I’m hoping the indoor/outdoor difference will help. So far increased infection rates aren’t showing up. Maybe, despite the dramatic appearance, the numbers are actually low compared to what we had with commuting in public transportation, taking elevators, working in telephone call centers and so on. But… yeah…. It also is mostly young people marching– but it’s not exclusively young.
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So… we’ll see.
Phil Scadden,
Like most people, you have multiple policy blind spots which are based on never-to-be-questioned personal priorities. I will point out two.
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“A little less “standing up for my rights†and a little more “doing what needs to be done for everyones sake†would help from everyone.“
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No Phil, it is not for everyone’s sake. It is to help those at significant risk from covid19, and that is most certainly not everyone. Your analysis is simply factually wrong. What is more, there are far less costly and far more effective ways to protect those truly at risk.
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“ My reaction is “you idiots†and wonder what that will do for infection rates.â€
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Here it the thing: not everyone shares your personal priorities about covid19. I rather suspect all those people you saw protesting on TV would object to your characterization, and in fact, many would probably apply that description to you. Actually, some would likely punch you in the face if you ever had the cojones to make that evaluation directly to them. Same with those who want to attend church services or protest continuation of lockdowns, or even just go to work to make a living. You are not the world’s only moral and political arbiter, shocking though you may find that. ‘Self-rightious scold’ and ‘political progressive’ seem so tightly correlated that they are difficult to separate. A lot less scolding PITA and a lot more thoughtful humility would really help to reduce the partisanship.
Phil Scadden (Comment #186008): “To say that lockdowns wont work by themselves suggests you think that the virus is capable of spreading without human contacts.”
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That goes to the nub of our disagreement. You think that I should believe in lockdowns on based on a hypothesis, whereas I demand evidence. And you don’t even state your hypothesis in anything but a vague form.
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Yes, it seems like lockdowns ought to make a difference. But “seems like” is not evidence. If you isolated everyone from everyone else for a few weeks, you would surely stop the spread of the virus. But nobody is seriously suggesting that. You, and all other lockdown advocates, want to decrease certain types of contacts while increasing other types of contacts. That works only if you decrease the right contacts and don’t increase the wrong contacts.
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The number one locale for transmission of the Wuhan virus is in the home. Lockdowns increase that; especially for people in crowded dwellings with little or no access to the outdoors. On the other hand, parks beaches and such are not places where transmission occurs. Lockdowns surely reduce transmission via certain types of contact, but if they enhance other transmission routes any advantage can be nullified.
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I don’t know about New Zealand, but in the U.S. people are told that if a family member gets sick, they should stay home with the sick person. That alone might be enough to nullify any benefit of lockdowns.
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So far, relaxing lockdowns has had no great effect. I will not be suprized if the riots have no great effect, just like spring break crowds in Florida never had the predicted effect.
It is now official. Of the 146 people exposed to the Wuhan virus by those two hair stylists in Missouri, none got sick:
https://www.kmbc.com/article/health-department-says-no-clients-contracted-covid-19-coronavirus-from-springfield-missouri-great-clips-exposure/32803389
MikeM,
Ok Mike: Do you think the virus can spread without human contact?
Yes. Note that Phil criticized the US version of lockdown as half-hearted.
And yet, the results indicate it didn’t nullify. The rate of increase in in case rates declined– just as predicted. That’s not “null”.
Sure. We went from light lockdowns to lighter ones. It may be enough. You don’t know that the spring break crowds had no effect. A huge feature of the spring break crowds is kids traveled back and forth. Locals aren’t all on the crowded beache. That means the cases aren’t going to appear in Florida, but wherever the kids transported it to. Then there were outbreaks all over the place after spring break.
And now the WHO is saying that asymptomatic people rarely transmit the Wuhan virus.
https://www.foxnews.com/science/coronavirus-asymptomatic-spread-rare-who
If true, that undermines much of the logic behind the lockdowns. It also would greatly simplify the job of contact tracing and isolation.
Of course, it is the WHO, so “if true” is a big if.
Kenneth Fritsch (#186003) –
Thanks for those graphs. Speaking only of FL and MA, the states’ websites provide considerably smoother sequences. [Presumably more reliable.] The states (presumably!) bin deaths according to date of death, while it seems that Worldometer takes the difference of consecutive days’ reports of total deaths, so is affected by reporting delays. The state data should reduce some of the scatter in those charts. [Of course, your filtering also does this.]
MA: follow link to .zip file at https://www.mass.gov/info-details/covid-19-response-reporting
FL has a graph at their website but only for the last 30 days, not for the entire period you plotted. They provide a “Case line data” file, but it does not contain date of death, only “case date”, which I believe is the date of earliest positive test.
MikeM,
You are having a talent for overstating. It doesn’t entirely undermine the “logic” behind the lockdowns. Before the lockdowns, people with symptoms still took public transportation. The still went to restaurants. They still went shopping at retail and so on. Lockdown stops this. So the “logic” is not “undermined”. The logic is not “undermined” unless we learn Covid is not transmitted from person to person at all.
For example: if we really learn it’s unsanitary water or mosquitos, then the logic is undermined. But not transmitted by asymptomatic people does not “undermine” the “logic”.
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Learning it is not transmitted by asymptomatic people does mean we can try to educate people to not go out when they have any symptoms. We need to implement practices like taking everyone’s temperature before they work in jobs that mix with people (this is nearly everyone who works). Social venues need to take people’s temperature. Hotels need to take people’s temperature.
We need to do all of this in addition to contact tracing. That way, we identify people before they have been in contact with zillions of others.
Can we implement this policy? Probably partially.
It’s still quite a trick because people will (often correctly) insist their sneezing and coughing is allergies. They will (often correctly) point out that lot of people sneezes or coughs a few times a day. They will go to restaurant even though the sneezed or cough. Some of these people will insist they are “symptomless”. But of course, having you can have covid and allergies. You can also cough every day and have covid.
Many people will object to having their temperature taken. Many “Karen’s” who claim they personally do ‘everything’ and criticize others for ‘not doign their thing’ will find reasons why “I, Karen” am an exception to the rule — and to out– and cough on someone.
Look: I cough every day. Every day. Right when I drink my first coffee. Every. Single. Day. Jim and I have definitely noticed this since March. I’d cough and say “see! I have covid!” Jim would say, “You cough while drinking your coffee EVERY morning.” Next morning: same conversation. Every single day since March. Should I get covid, I won’t know I have “symptoms” until I cough a lot or I have a fever. (I’m taking my temperature twice a day btw. I do want to notice issues if they arise. )
I know other people will go out. They will consider themselves “symptomless” and only notice the “symptoms” in retrospect. So no: that truly symptomless people are uninfectious does not totally undermine the logic of lock down!
It does mean that other alternatives may be more appropriate. But overstating your claim only makes you say something in correct. It doesn’t make your claim stronger.
What the WHO says is Chinese propaganda. A doctor on NBC this morning says there are lots of studies large and small that show asymptomatic and presymptomatic transmission.
For example, there’s this from the CDC:
Evidence Supporting Transmission of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 While Presymptomatic or Asymptomatic
“how many “give me liberty or give me death†types would regard being asked to isolate because of suspected exposure as an infringement of their constitutional rights?”
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In China they would knock down your door and haul you off to covid internment camp if you tested positive to prevent in home transmission. That would never fly in the US. The US will mostly comply with reasonable orders, but if that is combined with “or else state authority will be used” then the compliance rate will fall. A few crazy people not complying isn’t really an issue for the disease spread.
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A demand for 100% compliance under state authority with lots of politically based moral scolding is counterproductive. I have had it up to here (hand over my head) with the intelligentsia lecturing the rubes only to contradict themselves when it is just a little bit inconvenient for them. (masks, protests, etc.). Academia has lost all moral authority, and are quickly losing any authority at all. The political infestation needs to be purged, I don’t know how they can stand it themselves.
lucia (Comment #186041): “You are having a talent for overstating. It doesn’t entirely undermine the “logic†behind the lockdowns.”
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You are the one overstating. I never said that. I said it undermines *much* of the logic.
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lucia: “Before the lockdowns, people with symptoms still took public transportation. The still went to restaurants. They still went shopping at retail and so on. Lockdown stops this.”
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No, lockdown did not stop such things. In particular, in some cities public transit was more crowded during lockdown than before. Many essential workers still needed to use transit to get to work, but cities dramatically cut service.
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The only reason to quarantine the healthy is if you don’t know who is healthy and who is sick. Otherwise, quarantining the sick is far more effective and far less costly.
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And no, I am not talking about trading lives for money. The biggest cost of lockdown is all the people it is killing.
There are two type of asymptomatic transmission:
1. Shedding virus a couple days before you start showing symptoms
2. Shedding virus when you never show symptoms.
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I think #1 still exists in full force. Your body has a lot of virus building up.
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#2 is debatable, this one is probably where you have low levels of the virus and never reach a peak.
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One table I saw said asymptomatic transmission was maybe responsible for 10% of transmissions. I don’t think there is any good data here.
My wife coughs every single day. Usually after eating. Brain: Aaaaaggggh, covid just started! Aaaaggh Aaaaggh! She was probably doing this for years and I never noticed. Everyone is running around suppressing their normal coughs.
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Florida is definitely changing behavior in the past week relatively. Traffic is way up and I know many more people who are going to restaurants and so forth. I’m not going anywhere with enclosed spaces, limited airflow, and lots of people. I do play golf (notice how I conveniently structure my rules, ha ha).
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The most recent data suggests that if everyone wears masks in an enclosed space then risk is lowered.
MikeM
Sure as heck reduced it around here!
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Sure quarantining the sick gives you more bang for the buck. But that doesn’t undermine the logic of lockdown which is to reduce transmission when we don’t have other means yet. Lock down does that. And unless you have a time machine, we didn’t have the means for adequate contact tracing back when we (a) didn’t have sufficient testing capability, (b) didn’t have large numbers of trained contact tracers in place and (c) couldn’t distinguish what all the symptoms were. Merely coughing– which lots of people do every day– is a symptom of Covid.
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I haven’t accused you of trading lives for money.
NYT: The W.H.O. walked back an earlier assertion that asymptomatic transmission is ‘very rare.’
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A top expert at the World Health Organization on Tuesday walked back her earlier assertion that transmission of the coronavirus by people who do not have symptoms is “very rare.â€
Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, who made the original comment at a W.H.O. briefing on Monday, said that it was based on just two or three studies and that it was a “misunderstanding†to say asymptomatic transmission is rare globally.
“I was just responding to a question, I wasn’t stating a policy of W.H.O. or anything like that,†she said.
Dr. Van Kerkhove said that the estimates of transmission from people without symptoms come primarily from models, which may not provide an accurate representation. “That’s a big open question, and that remains an open question,†she said.
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(NOTE: The WHO changing its scientific story based on political blow back should be noted).
Tom Scharf
Also, the woman from who spends quite a bit of time comparing and contrasting the difference between assymptomatic (truly no symptoms) and mild disease. The ones with mild disease seem to be ones who were identified by contact tracers and once identified by the test now, look back and decide they have… well.. been coughing and such. So had the contact tracers not found them most people would have called them “asymptomatic”.
But note: she distinguishes these from asymptomatic.
Then she goes on to say the aysmptomatic transmit rarely. But no one stops to have her clarify if she mean that those with mild disease — meaning so mild that normal people would think “asymptomatic–transmit rarely. So she never actually says.
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These people with “mild” disease would be found by contact tracing only (if it exists.) If they do transmit, then the “logic” of lockdown is not undermined at all. If pre-symptomatic also trasnmit, it’s not “undermined” at all.
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It may no longer be the optimum method, but that’s different from saying the “logic” is undermined.
Tom Scharf
I’m skipping the golf. But I am taking my private dance lessons…. and I went to outdoor Zumba.
This is my favorite current example of people gonna do what people gonna do….
Tom Scharf,
We had a stretch of 10 days (ending last Thursday) with 22 inches of rainfall; lots of local street flooding, and even a few buildings damaged…. some people drove their cars into water that was too deep; very bad idea. The golf courses are unplayable, so no golf for a while.
Speaking of sports, the Nassau County Executive (Long Island) issued rules for playing tennis in the time of COVID-19:
DeWitt,
It’s amazing they don’t let you play doubles. I guess you risk running into each other. . .
Just schedule a protest match.
Lori Lightfoot has just cancelled all big outdoor events in Chicago through labor day. I have no idea whether her main concern is riots or corona.
I predict there will be “events” regardless. Just not big organized ones.
DeWitt,
I saw the video of that mindless diktat.. it was almost too much to watch. These are people who really need something more useful to do with their lives than torment people. Pure idiocy.
SteveF
“Like most people, you have multiple policy blind spots which are based on never-to-be-questioned personal priorities.”
With that, I am in 100% agreement. I am human.
“What is more, there are far less costly and far more effective ways to protect those truly at risk.”
At start of epidemic, with minimal testing available and a long wait to get results, protecting the vunerable is a challenge to say the least. It was seriously suggested by epidemilogist here that all vulnerable be moved to an isolated spot, and let it rage. Somewhat impractical. Half our deaths were from single dementia unit affected before lockdown. Some heroic staff in nursing homes locked themselves in with their patients during level 4 but obviously that is not an option for more than a few weeks. A significant percentage of deaths are from vunerable people who are not in institutional care. At early stage, protecting the vulnerable, means also protecting everyone they will be in contact with. I still think early, very hard lockdown is effective strategy.
” A lot less scolding PITA and a lot more thoughtful humility would really help to reduce the partisanship.”
Fair comment. I withdraw the idiot characterization.
Mike
“You think that I should believe in lockdowns on based on a hypothesis, whereas I demand evidence.”
But apparently you wish to discount evidence from places that did really hard lockdown, and where R dropped rapidly as a result. If you dont want to consider lockdowns as a strategy however, I doubt that any evidence will satisfy you.
People with covid were asked to isolate within home, with extreme measures to prevent other family catching it. Of course, if you were shedding virus before tested, other family were likely to get it. But a household with covid19 would not be in contact with anyone outside household. Groceries delivered, etc etc.
” If you isolated everyone from everyone else for a few weeks, you would surely stop the spread of the virus. But nobody is seriously suggesting that”
Actually, that is what hard lockdown looks like. “Crowded public transport” – all but ceased to exist. There were some provisions for essential workers (free, get in back of bus, masks, 1/4 full) but I think most were too scared to try.
The Annan-Hargreaves models continues to be interesting. James attempts to estimate R more continuously in latest. https://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2020/06/blueskiesresearchorguk-more-covid-19.html
Effect of lockdown pretty pronounced in the latest one, though my daughter in UK, thinks the UK version very half-baked.
Phil Scadden (Comment #186084)
I agree with Annan when he says:
He added that using a continuous Rt is difficult for the model to handle, but in most regions of the world I have found that the Rt is changing continuously and over long periods of time.
Kenneth,
I agree also agree that keeping R fixed for a long time doesn’t work. It actually shouldn’t. We know from the mobility data that people in the US tended to make sharp transition in behavior near the time of actual government action and then …. slowly oozed back toward movement.
It might have been different with a truly hard lock down enforced by troops or something. . . 🙂
Of course, things like mobility data aren’t neither precise nor specific enough to use as input to get a prior on “R”. But we do know people’s movements change and that should change R.
Swamp golf! Hit the ball, go dig it up, and hit it again. All while it’s 90F outside and high humidity. All the snowbirds have blessedly left FL and the golf is now cheaper and faster. Soon it will be time to start dodging the lightening bolts.
Cops and Live PD have been canceled. For political reasons.
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We mustn’t allow * anything * that contradicts the preferred narrative be seen by the rubes. Live PD is a show that they follow cops around in 6 cities with live cameras and shows action in real time on Fri and Sat night. I’m sure the police departments pick their better cops for this assignment but this seems like the least propagandized way to view police behavior.
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At this point we have one narrative that is amplified by the media relentlessly and the other side’s speech has been outright banned and ostracized by culture warriors. Gone With The Wind was also pulled, not to be allowed to be seen again without a long discussion about “context”.
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/hbo-max-pulls-gone-with-the-wind-11591754904
Tom Scharf,
Police body cams are better than staged videos, when officers would (for certain) be on their best behavior. I do not doubt that nearly all police officers are neither racists nor psychopaths. But at least a few clearly are.
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Too bad about gone with the wind. I have it on DVD. I hope they don’t come after me.
Tom Scharf..
Well… as long as we still have quality shows “Cheaters”, the couch potatoes who watched “Cops” will still have entertainment. 🙂
Cheaters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheaters
Tom,
“Swamp golf! Hit the ball, go dig it up, and hit it again.”
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Only if the course is open for play. But dig every shot out of the muck? No thanks. I’m late going north this year…. covid and its many, many complications.
Complications of protests: Jim’s patio brick cleaner delivery is delayed due to civil unrest.
On plotting the daily cases and deaths from Worldometer for several nations using a cubic spline to smooth the data, I have found that, like the states New York and New Jersey, those nations with the worst Covid deaths per million population tend to have case and death curves indicative of a fast transition of Rt from initial and to current. Germany with a lower death rate appeared as an exception. One might conjecture that those states and nations had more motivation to push for stricter lock downs on a more urgent time scale. There might be other factors involved here and I believe that when the lock downs in those states and nations are loosened to more normal conditions the trends in daily cases and deaths can be informative.
The good news in all these observations of data from states and nations is that, no matter the trend in the daily cases, the trend in daily deaths is definitely downward.
I have been posting my plots via pdf files in drop box, but as HaroldW has noted these data in graphical form are available in several places with Worldometer having the most comprehensive coverage. I prefer looking at my smoothed curves when comparing the observed data to my SEIRD model simulations.
Well, this is interesting. Here are results of antibody testing in NYC, percent positive for various groups:
10.5 NYPD
12.2 healthcare workers
14.2 transit workers
17.1 FDNY/EMT
19.9 general population
That suggests that people staying at home were more likely to have antibodies. The article is from May 13 and does not say when the tests were done.
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/coronavirus/cuomo-ny-frontline-workers-test-positive-for-covid-antibodies-at-lower-rate-than-rest-of-state/2415595/
Maybe PPE and adhering to stringent hygiene works?
PPE certainly can work if it is of the proper grade and properly fitted; but my wife (a hospital nurse) is skeptical that General Public would even wear N95 masks correctly if they had them. I would’ve thought Transit Workers would fall in that category — they don’t normally wear masks and are not trained in using them correctly. Also they were initially told not to wear masks, and there’s multiple stories from early April (after the guidance changed) where workers are complaining they still haven’t been given masks or were expected to make a single mask last for a week.
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Stringent hygiene for NYC transit seems most improbable. Of course, it’s not the trains and buses getting sick, so maybe no one knows better than transit workers how important it is to wash your hands!
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I don’t think it’s beyond the realm of possibility that driving a bus is safer (for covid) than spending the same amount of time inside high-density housing.
Nobody seemed a bit worried about the police picking up the virus from somebody in the protest crowd.
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Once this period of performative self flagellation is over, is anything really going to change? Police will get more stringent rules and hopefully mandatory cameras. Will the tiny percentage of 10M arrests per year that end badly change much? It didn’t last time, and it may be that these are such small numbers that there are no easy answers. The number of undetected sociopaths in policing may not change, the number of cops having a really bad day may not change, the behavior of our citizens may not change, etc. The trigger for these shootings and killings may have little to do with the assumed narrative.
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Twitter mobs ruining people’s lives for decades old indiscretions and demanding thought conformity at the point of a gun is going to breed resentment from the population. The current purging of people’s careers is in full bloom. It’s crazy and there are no dissenters from the love and tolerance crowd, because part of being a wonderful human being is getting somebody fired for dressing as a Puerto Rican 19 years ago.
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During the last upheaval the murder of 5 cops in Dallas pretty much ended all sympathy for the movement. It will be unsurprising to see this happen again.
Tom Scharf,
“The number of undetected sociopaths in policing may not change”
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Maybe, but I suspect changes in rules/laws will force most of (the very few) psycopaths out of police work. I believe most instances of use of unjustified force are not isolated; the same officers tend to have multiple instances.
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If bodycams are always in use, that will cut down on fraudulent claims of excessive force.
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I don’t think the support for all the crazy stuff is broad, only very vocal, and more than a little unhinged (see Seattle). Police departments are not going to disappear.
DaleS,
From the beginning, I’ve been skeptical of nurses and ER peoples focus on the idea that masks are only useful for the general public if they are used in the same way they are used in ER rooms!! 🙂
It may be that they reduce spread merely by very slightly filtering, and mostly changing the direction in which expired breaths travel, and by reducing momentum of jets in breath. That by itself would tend to reduce viral load even if it is far from perfect at filtering out virons.
In this article you’ll find schleirens showing how masks interfere with transport.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2843945/
I’m not going to say this is why they work, or that it’s not. But I am definitely skeptical when someone claims that they won’t work by the general public because the general public uses them differently from how they are used in ER. Mask do multiple things– each one could contribute to reducing spread even if the one people in ER focus on is not happening.
Tom Sharf
Perhaps. But firing the detected sociopaths is still a good start relative to allowing them to remain in the force.
Also: I think quite often when we have video, we aren’t seeing examples of a cop merely having a bad day.
Twitter mobs exist already. These police laws won’t change the behavior of those who go through twitter to find decades long ‘bad tweets’. They also won’t cure world hunger. They aren’t intended to. So this really isn’t a valid objection to the rules similar to those in the Colorado bill.
With respect to the “twitter” issue and cops: those are generally related to fairly recent actions by cop– not something decades ago. Making sure all police have their own recordings, and those are available to those who are policed should either not make any difference to the “twitter” mob issue or reduce it– because there will be an alternative recording that will have started at the beginning of the contact. Right now, the ones we see tend to start in the middle. A bystander starts recording after the claimed aggressive behavior by the perp began, so the recordings tend to make the police look bad. The Colorado law should correct this problem somewhat.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some changes some people are calling for might not be counter-productive. But the items in the colorado bill strike me as mostly good.
There is a lot of mixed messages in the protests.
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I’m mostly referring to the Twitter rage mobs getting people fired for their insufficient anti-racism and cultural appropriation, but that wasn’t very clear.
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There is the “end bad police behavior” demands which could be productive, but will still be disappointing to the “end all bad police behavior” and zero tolerance crowd.
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The “end systemic racism” crowd is bound to be disappointed in my view because the demands are opaque and there are a lot of extremists in this crowd who don’t even realize their views aren’t shared by the “treat people as individuals based on their character and behavior” crowd. This belief system is very firmly held by many of us oldsters and the arguments against it aren’t very compelling, yet this is a banned argument in any alleged “honest” discussion on race by those who say they want one.
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I still don’t understand what the proposed solution is, but there seems to be a large dose of pretending individual bad behavior doesn’t exist or should be ignored. College admissions no longer being based on testing for some deranged form of equity is an example of this mentality.
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There is an increasing vocal contingent of the anti-racist movement that is blatantly anti-white.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/the-nytimes-is-woke.html
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This is poisonous to any progress. I still believe this is a much smaller contingent than one would believe by reading the media which seems to be on a social justice crusade. The lecturing from on high that people like you are the problem based on your skin color (and of course who you vote for) is tiring. The tell here is tirades against racism without identifying any actual racists, the now ubiquitous racism without racists argument. The pro-racism crowd is basically non-existent, so now they after all the secretly racist and the newer and trendier racist and you don’t know it crowds. See the recent brouhaha at the NY Poetry Foundation for some insanity.
SteveF,
Speaking of Seattle, did you see what’s happening there, i.e. CHAZ? Note that when the governor was asked about it in a press conference early on, he apparently had no idea what was going on and mocked the reporter who asked the question. Of course now Trump has injected himself into the situation so now it’s his fault.
I’m approximately a Trump supporter, as in I like him better than any alternative I see right now.
This said, (excerpt from Trump interview):
God have mercy…
DeWitt,
That is exactly what I was referring to. It’s bonkers. Nobody in Washington state is going to do anything about it either. They reap what they sew in that crazy place.
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mark bofill,
He is never eloquent, even when reading from a teleprompter, but that is worse than usual. I am reminded of Bill Clinton contesting the meaning of ‘is’.
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I listened in on some of the Flynn/Sulivan/Justice Department hearing by the DC appellate court. Sounds to me like two of the judges are going to let Sullivan do pretty much whatever he wants to Flynn. Which is unfortunate, since Sullivan looks to me to be infringing on executive function. Judges are not prosecutors. I suspect Sullivan mostly wants to punish Flynn by dragging out the process for several more months, then will sentence Flynn to a couple of months in prison, in early October, daring Trump to pardon him. I hate politically motivated judges like Sullivan. If Trump were smart, he would preemptively pardon Flynn now for all Federal crimes committed between the date of the FBI interview and now, and end Flynn’s nightmare; get it over with before we get any closer to the 2020 election.
Tom Scharf
The other reason “end systemic raceism” will fail is that one has to identify every element of “the system” that is racist. There was a time when we have facially racist policies. But now to the extent they exist, the “system” has rules that are mostly facially neutral. So it’s difficult to identify what to end.
And beyond that, we can probably identify a plenty of systemic racism in access to better or worse public schools. BUT many of the steps to improve access to better public schools for african american’s — especially school choice or vouchers– are opposed by teachers unions!
Once kids go to bad public schools, their bad SAT and ACT score themselves do correctly diagnose they are ill prepared. There really aren’t any cures to fix that because no matter what you do, they are going to struggle and often fail in rigorous college course. (Yes… grit can help them be more likely to stick to it and overcome. But they aren’t all going to have a super amount of grit!)
Mark
Yep. It’s hard to imagine a worse series of Tweeting thatn we are getting out of Trump. That said: he may get even worse. He’s very creative that way.
The madness of the left is terrifying.
In Maryland, school officials called the cops on a kid because a BB gun was visible in the background of a virtual class meeting.
https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/12/school-calls-police-on-student-with-bb-gun-in-background-of-virtual-class/
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And a majority of Democrats now support defunding the police.
https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/12/poll-defunding-the-police-is-now-a-majority-position-for-democrats/
Proving once again that no idea is so nutty and dangerous that it might not become policy if the Democrats gain power.
Ultimately what they will do with colleges is make the classes easier (turbo grade inflation) to make them more “equitable”. They have no choice.
Lucia,
Haven’t you heard? The SAT and ACT are just tools of white privilege, designed to oppress minorities. Just like every other merit based entry requirement. The California state school system is eliminating those tests… because they interfere with getting the correct balance of races in every freshman class. OK, the standardized tests oppress every minority except East Asians, and Jews. But schools have too many of them already.
Tom,
Except if all schools do that, some novel sort of standardized test company will pop up that is some sort of post college level course exam students people can pay $100 to certify basic grasp of at least entry level courses .
AP tests already exist for high school kids to get college credit. If schools start letting the level of rigor decline, employers are going to want to start seeing graduates have external certifications to confirm college grades! College students will then take their classes, take their college tests and then… take an “AP-like” or “CLEP” like exam at least for standard courses. (Calculus, Physics I, II etc).
What’s more likely is some schools will scrap SAT/ACT and then make some courses easier. Other schools won’t. The reputations of schools with less easy courses will rise; that of others will sink. Employers will develop a preference for schools whose graduates know something,.
While out to fetch take-out yesterday evening, I passed a group of demonstrators with signs. One read “white silence = violence”. Do these persons [mainly white, young, and I’m guessing middle class] really believe this? Real question.
Lucia,
“ The reputations of schools with less easy courses will rise; that of others will sink. Employers will develop a preference for schools whose graduates know something.â€
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Maybe, but that will take a very long time, during which many incompetent ‘graduates’ will be hired. Big employers might have their own testing, but they would then be liable for claims of ‘discrimination‘. I think the entire point of eliminating academic rigor is ensuring equality of outcome (in everything) rather than equality of opportunity. At bottom it is all the pursuit of the socialist ideal of complete equality. To hell with competence.
HaroldW,
In agreement with that concept, you lower the window as you drive by and shout “Idiots!â€. You can’t remain silent.
Harold,
I think they do, after a fashion. When I ask people who spout such slogans what they mean, I find that they generally have some brief set of points or ideas that they believe justifies the slogan. In this case, I doubt the justification is particularly well thought through in most cases. At least I hope not; the border between being wrong and being evil lies somewhere down that road AFAIC.
mark bofill (Comment #186323): “the border between being wrong and being evil lies somewhere down that road AFAIC.”
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Indeed. Most people spouting nonsense slogans like “white silence = violence†and “defund the police” are well intentioned fools. But they are being led by people who are indeed evil. So although the fools will sort of explain that “defund the police” does not actually mean abolishing the rule of law, the evil leaders actually do mean to abolish the rule of law.
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Of course, the rule of law will have to be replaced by something. The evil ones try to make us believe that they are in pursuit of the stoner fantasy of “Imagine” since that helps them recruit fools and/or to not be taken as a serious threat. But they know that there will have to be rules backed by force. They just plan to make the rules and apply the force in a manner that suits themselves.
And on that note:
Opinion
Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police on the New York Times.
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Not much excuse for ignorance of what the goal really is any more these days…
mark bofill,
Abolishing the police has been the goal of BLM since its founding, whether they stated it specifically or not. But it’s all about who has the power, not making people’s lives better. They don’t mind the US becoming Venezuela as long as they are in charge.
DeWitt, MikeM,
…”plan to make the rules and apply the force in a manner that suits themselves”…
…”all about who has the power”…
Yes. I agree with both of you in this regard.
Yes silence is violence, and looting and rioting are “speech”, ha ha.
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The latest Twitter summary execution goes to University of Chicago economics professor Harald Uhlig, whose contract was terminated by the The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
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Just look at this racist bilge:
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“Earlier this week, on Twitter, Mr. Uhlig said Black Lives Matter had “just torpedoed itself, with its full-fledged support of #defundthepolice†and said it was “time for sensible adults to enter back into the room and have serious, earnest, respectful conversations about it all.†He later said “my tweets in recent days and an old blog post have apparently irritated a lot of people. That was far from my intention: let me apologize for that.â€
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“I speak for my colleagues throughout the Federal Reserve System when I say there is no place at the Federal Reserve for racism and there should be no place for it in our society. Everyone deserves the opportunity to participate fully in our society and in our economy.â€
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Cower in the corner, yee of faint heart. What we have here is one side who can say absolutely anything and the other side whose opinion is outright banned by threat of a career ending mob. They are handing out capital punishment for jaywalking accusations at this point.
Any fair academic test at this point is going to result in racial disparities, at least until the underlying dysfunction is solved. A post college test to rank graduates is going to be viewed in the exact same way as the SAT/ACT and all the state K-12 tests are.
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Competence itself is under attack as being unfair. In a sense this is quite true, people with a natural ability in something such as sports have an unfair advantage in the grand scheme. Being 7 foot tall increases your chances of being in the NBA by magnitudes.
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The self contradictory narrative that we must remove competency tests to make things fair is beyond the pale. These type of systems no matter the wonderful intentions are going to dissolve into corruption and nepotism.
I suspect that if Kurt Vonnegut were still alive and had just written Harrison Bergeron, he would also have been attacked by twitter mobs and ostracized by the cancel culture.
I believe the phrase used by Lenin to describe people like those who hold up white silence = violence signs or solicit signatures for petitions to end white privilege (Austin, TX several years ago) was “useful idiots.”
Yes, I’ve heard they were called useful idiots as well, and when they finished being useful, they were just idiots to be removed for the greater good.
SteveF (#186322):
tehee…actually I would have stopped to have a brief discussion about the inanity (imo) of that slogan, but I didn’t want to ruin the takeout.
I mentioned the differences to my wife, and she wasn’t surprised by the transit workers infection having a lower rate than general population, which had surprised me. She said they were already wearing gloves routinely and knew not to touch their face. She’s of the opinion that if we in general public all washed our hands and didn’t touch our faces — which we shouldn’t be doing anyways, especially in flu season — there would be no pandemic. I pointed out that Americans weren’t good at that, and she says that’s the real problem.
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Improperly worn N95 masks, or even cloth masks, are likely helpful to reduce spread if worn by people who are already sick and coughing/sneezing — that’s certainly the case for flu, or so I’m told. What they’re unlikely to do is stop healthy people from getting sick due to other people’s germs.
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Though it may be my information is out of date due to the nature of this specific disease and all the things they’re finding out about *exactly* how it spreads. I would’ve thought that would be a top priority during a pandemic, but I have the impression that little is known now that couldn’t have been safely assumed back in February — and that if cloth masks for general public really are helpful now, they also would’ve been known to be helpful back in March. Maybe my perception is wrong and the issue is with my comprehension and/or media communicating information.
Dale S,
Ask your wife. But looking at pictures of crowded buses in the CTA, it seems that passengers seats are often filled and passengers are standing elbow to elbow. The driver is behind a partial plexiglass screen and also has a window (which they probably don’t open in winter.) The entry door next to the bus driver also opens quite often resulting in lots of ventillation near the driver. (That’s probably chilly in winter, but will also result in dilution air.)
Nowadays, the drivers also rarely handle money directly. So it seems to me the driver isn’t likely to be sneezed on.
Anyway, drivers spend a lot of time on the bus. But their location may be a bit better than the location of a typical customer.
But– of course what I say depends on pictures. I don’t know what fraction of the time busses are sufficiently crowded to have passengers elbow to elbow, nor whether the passengers might not also open window and so on.
Whatever the reason, I’m glad to hear bus drivers are generally doing ok!