An interesting work of journalism from the Washington Post: “U.S. deaths soared in early weeks of pandemic, far exceeding number attributed to covid-19”
The analysis is similar to the New York Times effort that was the basis of “Infidels in Sweden are refusing to die” (at the time, Sweden in its refusal to shut down had 1/25th the percentage of “excess deaths” compared to the shut-down-for-a-month New York City). The authors take a deeper look at the U.S. overall.
Let’s start by trying to raise everyone’s coronapanic with a chart that starts at 40,000 rather than 0. This makes the recent rise in overall deaths look a lot more scary:
Americans are dropping dead at an alarming rate, either from Covid-19 or from the shutdown of the regular health care system or maybe from eating too much while lying on the couch! (to the newspaper’s credit, a tiny zero-based chart is presented at the bottom right of the above figure)
Almost all of these excess deaths are from one place: the New York metro area. And it is difficult to know whether their Covid-19 death numbers are comparable to other parts of the U.S.:
No jurisdiction has been as aggressive as New York City, the U.S. epicenter of the epidemic, in revising its death counts from those early weeks. As of Saturday, the city had added 2,542 covid-19 deaths to those figures, driving the total from that period up to 5,085. The newly added deaths were almost equally split between cases that were confirmed through lab testing and cases that were deemed “probable” covid-19 deaths based only on symptoms and exposure.
How does it look around the bad parts of the U.S.?
(By applying the miracle of begging the question, the above charts, with their dramatic increases in deaths after the shutdown began, actually support continued faith in the Church of Shutdown. Asked how they know that shutdown works, the faithful in the Religion of Shutdown generally respond with “the high number of deaths shows that it would have been far worse if we hadn’t shut down.”)
Is the headline a good summary of the article? Are U.S. deaths soaring? We are all in this together, right?
But in dozens of states, the Yale analysis shows that the reported number of overall deaths are either unchanged or even slightly down compared with historical patterns.
Should we suspect from these data that the problems NYC has had with Covid-19 are idiosyncratic? Some other cities and regions also had exposure starting at roughly the same time (mid-January?) and those places locked down within a few days of the NYC shutdown. Yet excess deaths are fairly low (or actually negative) almost everywhere other than NYC.
Is it possible that we’re fighting a nationwide war against a virus that is attacking only a handful of cities for reasons that are peculiar to those cities? Or possibly peculiar to the strain of the virus that has been circulating in those cities? If we take out metro NYC, Detroit, New Orleans (they’re not going to have a second Mardi Gras this year, right?), and Boston, does the “U.S.” actually have excess deaths or any kind of problem with Covid-19 that couldn’t be handled with the most basic precautions?
(And how would we handle the apparently idiosyncratic problems with these cities? Tell New Orleans that Mardi Gras is henceforth restricted to the sober (90% reduction in crowding?). Reopen the United States economy and use the money to pay roughly half of NYC residents to move out to suburbs and other states. The super high density plainly has made NYC a breeding ground for any enterprising virus. Run more subway trains in Boston so that people aren’t jammed in like sardines and/or pay people to leave the city, as in New York. I’m at at loss to know what to do about Detroit, I must confess!)
In the meantime, we’ve got healthy young people in North Carolina who are under a stay-at-home order. Their personal risk from Covid-19 may be smaller than their risk of being hit by debris from the International Space Station. Have these young people lost their freedom and jobs (and their children their education for this spring) merely because of an accident of political geography, i.e., that they’re inside the same nation-state as plague-ridden New York City and Boston?
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We have a new infidel in Canada, speaking against the Church of Shutdown! His name is Josef Buttigieg.
Josef is an associate professor of biology in Saskatchewan, who claims that most people in the province had already contracted the novel coronavirus and recovered from it. In which case the virus deadliness would be much lower. This could explain the reported low numbers of infection and deaths out of Shanghai, which are still officially very low for the population.
Video of Josef is in the middle of the article.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/u-of-r-biology-prof-draws-ire-of-sask-scientists-1.5541748
“the Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) has demonstrated ‘gross ineptness’ in its handling of the pandemic”
How could there be gross ineptness in a Canadian government enterprise when Justin Trudeau is plainly excellent? We are informed by our media that 22+ million federal, state, and local government workers are effective if and only if there is someone excellent serving as president.
Separately, can this guy possibly be right? How do people in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan ever get any infectious disease? Were a lot of tourists from Vancouver and Toronto showing up there in February? I wouldn’t have picked Saskatchewan as one the first places in the world to have near-100-percent exposure!
Separately, I don’t think antibody tests will convince any observant members of the Church of Shutdown. Suppose that 50 percent of the population simply can’t be infected for some reason, just as about 50 percent of Europeans may never have been susceptible to the Black Death (80-100 percent death for those who actually were infected and developed any kind of symptom). Then assume that some people have infections so mild they don’t have much in the way of antibodies in their blood. Then assume that your antibody test isn’t perfect. Even with a 100-percent exposed population, therefore, you’re going to get positive antibody tests for about 30 percent.
When followers of the Religion of Shutdown heard that a section of the Boston area sampled had 32 percent positive for antibodies (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8232857/One-people-Massachusetts-study-tested-positive-COVID-19-antibodies.html ), the reaction wasn’t “Well, almost nobody there died so we can chill out.” It was “This shows how dangerous and infectious Covid-19 is and we need to re-double our shutdown efforts.”
philg, Justin Trudeau, did manage to win by TKO against a Senator Patrick Brazea back in 2012 in a boxing match. Maybe we should setup a Trudeau vs Trump boxing match? Hold it in Las Vegas, this would be a great way to get the economy going again. The Canadian government has launched so many support programs in the last month that everybody in Canada will be a government employee. I would estimate that the Canadian government can probable hold this level of support 12 weeks, at that point the entire system will collapse faster than the Berlin Wall or we will be come a province of the PRC. As my gramma used to say “You do not have to think, because the communist government will think for you”.
Josef Buttigieg is just using Saskatchewan as an example, because that is where he lives, this is normal for people that live in the prairies. Similar thinking to people in Texas. The most important point that Josef makes is that the current over reaction will hurt any future reaction to a virus that has a much higher death rate and kills young health people.
Religion of Shutdown cannot be proven wrong because like all religions it depends on faith and not facts and evidence.
Getting reliable testing for large statistical samples of the population for the virus and anti-bodies would be very important to find out what is really going on, but unfortunately special interests and politics will get in the way, so we may never find out what the spread and death rate really is. This will benefit the Church of the Shutdown greatly, because then the small sample numbers from a statistical point can be twisted to fit the faith and dogma of the religion.
NYC has a much lower level of cleanliness than most of the rest of the US — this is obvious and ranges from vagrants defecating on the subway trains to scaffolding left up for years that prevents sunlight from reaching the street to the drug addled wandering the streets who haven’t bathed this decade to liter and general filth. So is it really such a surprise that NYC has worse numbers than Duluth or wherever? What is surprising is is that unlike say Duluth NY collected in 2019 $48 bil in income tax alone and that plus sales, property, excise taxes etc. does not seem enough to address these problems.
https://nypost.com/2020/04/27/subway-operator-confronted-by-defecating-straphanger-on-2-train/
I believe the point made by the article (and graph) is very important: Clearly there is a significant issue. Obviously there can be a lively discussion on how to deal with it. But it does counter the idiotic stuff that is being tossed around that everything is now incorrectly attributed to COVID and that there really is no issue.
And to people like Jack… I generally believe that the “maker” states that are currently getting hammered by COVID would generally be fine with the concept of being separated from the “taker” states.
The healthy young people here in NC are out playing a lot of golf etc.
They have to revise the numbers now otherwise there’ll be riots by the people who were forced out of work!
Note: I was an early proponent of being careful early on but also getting over it when we knew it wasn’t killing the young in large numbers. Again none of this is inconsistent, just follow the data as it comes in and have a reasonable model (as in mental model!)