Month: May 2020

I had searched in vain to find the Swedish equivalent of the IHME model that Americans love. Surely there had to be an academic in Sweden who wanted to be interviewed by hysterical journalists about the forthcoming doomsday. Yet I couldn’t find anything in English, at least. I thought that maybe Swedes simply didn’t care how many people would get sick, when peak deaths would occur, or how many of their fellow citizens would die. They seemed to be content to let the 15 epidemiologists on the governor’s team be their only soothsayers (example).

As usual, I was dead wrong! “Can we trust Covid modelling? More evidence from Sweden” (The Spectator) shows that Sweden had its PhDs willing to make a few assumptions and then stick them into a simple model. And the ones who came up with the most dramatic forecasts of doom got some media attention. Demand for critical care was going to be “16,000 patients per day” in early May:

Another team upped this to over 20,000:

The government team thought Sweden would have 1,700 patients in the ICU right now. The actual number is around 500.

The doomsayers thought that doom was inevitable even if the Swedes converted to the Church of Shutdown:

And obviously, there is an argument that these models scared us into changing our behaviour and ramping up capacity, and so helped us to avoid a disaster. But they were also clearly based on faulty assumptions that would always result in absurd predictions. We know this, because both models actually assumed that it was already too late, and estimated that ICU capacity would be exceeded by around 10 times even if Sweden switched to strong mitigation.

The need for ICU beds in Sweden will be ‘at least 10-fold greater [than capacity] if strategies approximating the most stringent in Europe are introduced by 10 April’, wrote Gardner et al.

Those strategies were never introduced in Sweden, and yet, additional ICU capacity is 30 percent and the number of patients in intensive care has been declining for two weeks. The newly constructed field hospital in Stockholm, with room for hundreds of patients, has still not received any patients. It will probably never have to open. Here’s a zoomed-in graph of eventual ICU: numbering in the hundreds, not the predicted thousands.

(i.e., the Swedes also built a temp hospital that was never needed!)

I’m kind of curious as to why Americans have placed such faith in the prophecies offered by epidemiologists given that epidemiology is primarily a retrospective activity and there is no historical data on how virus transmission is affected by a Western-style “porous lockdown”. It is as though people in the 1980s had decided that the “complexity” theorists of the Santa Fe Institute, who also could spin a few assumptions into an interesting tale, could be relied upon as reliable oracles. People don’t have the same faith in models of the future stock market. Nobody says “I’m going to hire three PhDs, download R, and become fabulously wealthy starting next week after my team’s model tells me the future prices of stocks.”

At the end of March, I wrote “First friend with COVID-19: mild symptoms for 5 weeks”. He recently got an antibody test:

So… he’s positive for antibodies to coronavirus, but “sensitive information, such as the sex of your baby” remains private.

His reflections on the experience:

• “Maybe I should have taken off work when I had it.”
• “It was like having three flus in a row.”
• “I did some of my best work during that period.”

Science-deniers defy and deny the settled science and, what’s worse, suggest that Covid-19 may not be a more serious problem than influenza:

Yealy was asked whether people should worry about COVID-19 more than the regular flu. He said people should be “worried differently,” pointing out that both take their heaviest toll on the elderly, especially nursing home residents, and people weakened by other medical conditions.

Yealy said he “would not think of it as more or less, just two different illnesses that share some features, but have some distinct differences.”

These people are reopening their business, prioritizing money over human life, justifying their lust for cash by claiming that “the death rate for people infected with the new coronavirus may be as low as 0.25%”.

Related:

• “What’s the penalty for reopening your business early? For a Dallas salon owner, it’s seven days in jail”

Happy Mother’s Day to those readers who identify as “mothers”!

Conversation with a 10-year-old:

• Why do they tell us to wear masks and avoid crowds if we can’t catch coronavirus?
• When adults want children to do something for their benefit, one good strategy is to tell the children that it is actually for their own benefit.
• Like Mother Gothel in Tangled!

For readers unfamiliar with this epic retelling of the Rapunzel story, the senior citizen Mother Gothel (a witch who identifies as Rapunzel’s mom) keeps the healthy 18-year-old imprisoned by telling her that the outside world is full of danger and peril.

Look at you, as fragile as a flower
Still a little sapling, just a sprout
You know why we stay up in this tower

That’s right, to keep you safe and sound, dear
Guess I always knew this day was coming
Knew that soon you’d want to leave the nest
Soon, but not yet

Listen to your mother
It’s a scary world out there
Mother knows best
One way or another
Something will go wrong, I swear
Ruffians, thugs
Poison ivy, quicksand
Cannibals and snakes
The plague

(Lyricist Glenn Slater should get a prize for that last line!)

Although the typical Covid-19-tagged death in Massachusetts is of an 82-year-old with “underlying conditions” (more than 98 percent), our media tends to feature healthy young people cut down in their prime by the evil virus, an ever-present lurker in any activity that young people might formerly have enjoyed. The result is a remarkably high number of healthy young people isolating themselves out of personal fear, just as Rapunzel isolated herself voluntarily until shortly before the movie picks up her story.

BBC story, April 29:

Swiss authorities say it is now safe for children under the age of 10 to hug their grandparents, in a revision to official advice on coronavirus.

The health ministry’s infectious diseases chief Daniel Koch said scientists had concluded that young children did not transmit the virus.

This week, garden centres and hairdressers have been allowed to open their doors. Schools and shops selling items other than food will be allowed to reopen in two weeks’ time.

Dr Koch told a news conference this week that the original advice to keep distance between children and their grandparents was made when less was known about how the coronavirus was transmitted.

“Young children are not infected and do not transmit the virus,” he said. “They just don’t have the receptors to catch the disease.”

So they have known for a while that there was no way that children could be involved in coronaplague transmission, but the teachers still needed at least two more weeks of vacation!

Related:

• “University of Miami professor resigns after reportedly sharing porn bookmark on Zoom” (NBC)