Professor Johan Giesecke, former chief scientist of the European CDC, and most of the rest of the 15 state epidemiologists in Sweden, started out from the position that Western government “lockdown” policies would have a minimal effect on the evil coronavirus’s ability to infiltrate a naive population (video). That’s been a primary motivation for Sweden’s decision not to bother tilting at the windmills (and “herd immunity” pops out as a side effect, but the Swedes would say that herds all around Western Europe will get there pretty soon too, if they haven’t already).
Were the Swedes correct in this assumption?
“Full lockdown policies in Western Europe countries have no evident
impacts on the COVID-19 epidemic.” (medrxiv, April 24) chronicles Thomas Meunier’s attempt to find discontinuities in the growth of the coronavirus as a result of various Western policies. He’s a Ph.D. in physical oceanography (essentially applied physics), not a physician, and testing policies vary from country to country and from day to day, so he is looking only at the output numbers (daily deaths attributed to Covid-19).
Meunier’s conclusion is that the “home containment” policies tried by some of the worst-hit countries (“when lockdown doesn’t work, try more lockdown!”) had no effect compared to the more basic social distancing policies, such as adopted in the Netherlands. The virus was already burning itself out when peoples and governments went into full panic mode:
This observational study, using a generalized phenomenological method based on official daily deaths records only, shows that full lockdown policies of France, Italy, Spain and United Kingdom haven’t
had the expected effects in the evolution of the COVID-19 epidemic. Our results show a general decay trend in the growth rates and reproduction numbers two to three weeks before the full lockdown policies would be expected to have visible effects.
What about the Swedish infidels? What happens when a country goes completely off the reservation? (as pilots like to say, “We don’t need Elizabeth Warren to tell us what a bad idea that is”)
results for Sweden suggest that taking no action at all may yield a more variable decay of the epidemic.
(The Swedes did, of course, ban gatherings of more than 50 people, and took some other medium-weight measures with the goal of preventing ICUs from being overwhelmed.)
In aviation, delay between input and output is one of the biggest challenges for a beginner pilot and leads to accidents even for experienced pilots via pilot-induced oscillation. Trying to hover a helicopter? A little forward cyclic doesn’t do anything for a second or so. Then the helicopter moves forward over the ground at an alarming rate. Pull back on the stick? The helicopter tilts back almost immediately, but keeps going forward. Instead of waiting, the beginner will…. pull back more! This keeps instructors busy and, every now and then, keeps helicopter factories busy building replacements (see “Teaching Hovering”). The same thing happens when trying to land a heavy jet. A little low? Thrust levers forward. Due to inertia plus a bit of spool-up time for the engines results in no big result for 5-10 seconds, at which point the airplane is above the glide slope. Thrust levers dramatically back! 5-10 seconds later… Well, you get the idea… (and then, at least in Toronto, the captain says “Nobody was born knowing how to fly a 53,000 lb. jet”)
I’m wondering if the same thing has gone on with human responses to coronavirus. Outputs (deaths) occur 2-4 weeks after inputs (exposure to the virus, changes in behavior). People are reacting this month to something that actually happened last month and may no longer be happening. (Will we look back on this and say it was like the tired mom of a sleepless two-month-old baby taking 31 birth control pills in hopes of undoing the damage?)
Related:
- “Chinese use Danish technology to mock the United States regarding coronavirus” (video that YouTube will no doubt be taking down soon!)
- still my favorite video, also on YouTube until the censors figure it out
> I’m wondering if the same thing has gone on with human responses to coronavirus.
Yes, but the goals about the flight plan for the helicopter are changing. It’s an interesting article and I applaud you for highlighting it, but let’s get real: a physical oceanographer? He has about as much chance of being listened to by the media as an unreconstructed Dr. Phil.
This isn’t just a public health crisis precipitated by a novel coronavirus any longer. The character of what we are “figthing” in this war is changing fast: it’s a climate change crisis, and a political crisis as well. The economic crisis is going to require radical change.
Here’s the news we’re going to be reading: the summer is coming, and the hurricane season is coming with it. The shutdowns are going to extend because they have to. People are going to be sweltering in place, and dying from hurricanes caused by climate change, which will compound the economic misery they’re suffering as a result of the collapse of our capitalist, carbon-fuel based economy, which is destroying the planet. All all of that is going to combine into most perfect of perfect storms. All these concepts are going to be glommed together into a completely different propaganda campaign about what we’re fighting and where we want to fly the helicopter.
It’s the Revolution! The Left is not about to squander this once-in-a-century chance.
>(as pilots like to say, “We don’t need Elizabeth Warren to tell us what a bad idea that is”)
This parenthetical deserves elaboration in its own post.
Perversely, the lockdown has probably been far better than the alternative for most business owners. Being ordered to close by the government due to a public health emergency is a special status that allows them to collect business interruption insurance, receive bailouts, etc. Being “open” but without customers removes most of those benefits. Lots of places around here shut down or were close to it in March but the wave stopped pretty quickly once the lockdown went into effect on the 16th (how many places just don’t reopen remains to be seen, of course).
Not specific to this topic, but one of the best articles I have read, explaining why very few fully understand this pandemic, yet many come up with simplistic theories about how to deal with it: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/pandemic-confusing-uncertainty/610819/
Gordon: Thanks for this great example of how Atlantic readers want to see the world. The article opens by reminding them how stupid/wrong Donald Trump is. It begs the question of whether our shutdown saved lives by simply asserting that “it seems to be working”. There is no mention of the people who will die because of the shutdown. Nor of Sweden of course!
@Gordon:
It’s an interesting article, and it’s valuable. Yong is certainly dedicated to giving his all to this subject. He works very carefully to exonerate the WHO, which is as close to an official editorial position of the Atlantic as anyone can get.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/why-world-health-organization-failed/610063/
That article deserves its own response but we can summarize it as: “China contols it. They’ve done terrible things. They misled us, they misled everybody, Taiwan was right not to listen to them, they “…seem to remember its principles only when they align with China’s interests.” but Trump is wrong to defund them, he’s the bully, and what we need to do is somehow restructure and rebuild an organization that’s completely contolled by the Chinese, who took control of it expressly to prevent anyone else from doing just that. But we should keep giving them 15% of their budget until we can figure out how.
I think he should be much more skeptical and critical of an institution that was completely co-opted by China in 2017, but that’s not how they play it.
But let’s stick to one thing at a time. Whew:
After you get through all of its lengthy disquisition (and Yong has written many of them recently, including one about masks: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/coronavirus-pandemic-airborne-go-outside-masks/609235/
“The mask debate is so intense because both the stakes and the uncertainty levels are so high. “We’re trying to build the plane while we’re flying it,” Hanage said. “We’re having to make decisions with quite massive consequences in the absence of secure data. It’s a nightmare for your average cautious public-health professional.”), you come away from it more convinced that this is a huge collection of experts all trying to come up with partial answers to a rapidly changing situation. I sum that up as: “Nobody knows anything. They’re doing the science and making up the policy as they go along.”
I liked this part especially:
“To work out if widespread testing is crucial for controlling the pandemic, listen to public-health experts; to work out if widespread testing is possible, listen to supply-chain experts. To determine if antibody tests can tell people if they’re immune to the coronavirus, listen to immunologists; to determine if such testing is actually a good idea, listen to ethicists, anthropologists, and historians of science.”
That’s a lot of people to listen to, and presents a huge problem in reconciling their views. Meanwhile we’re here in May with 30+ million people unemployed and growing. We know what’s wrong with the supply chains: They all lead back to China. Why can’t we make ventilators? Because we can’t even make hoses and blower motors for much simpler CPAP machines!
https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/01/building-cpap-machines-us-supply-chain/
“But what we found when we began to procure the most basic parts needed for production was that, due to outsourcing, none of the components were currently being made in the U.S., including basic items such as hoses, masks, and blowers. Outsourcing to China had led China to outsource to Vietnam, and so on. Despite the free-trade mantra that outsourcing to lower-wage countries leads to lower-cost products, there has been a persistent creep in the availability and cost of almost everything that Americans need to manufacture our own products.”
We don’t make anything anymore, and we did that to ourselves over the course of more than 25 years.