Category: Coronapanic

I like to check in on forecasts versus reality at three-week intervals. Maybe prophets are getting better!

Previous posts:

• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/05/24/did-doom-visit-the-swedes-yesterday-as-planned/
• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/05/03/doom-for-the-wicked-swedes-is-always-three-weeks-away/
• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/04/12/everything-the-gleeful-journalists-said-would-happen-to-sweden-has-happened-to-massachusetts/

From the first of those…

What’s the latest from the prophets at IHME? As of a May 20 update to the forecast, Sweden will have a gradually declining daily number of deaths, in more or less the same shape as still-shut-down Massachusetts. A total of 5,129 Swedes will die from/with Covid-19 (roughly one third the previous forecast). The virus will simply burn itself out, apparently, despite Sweden’s lack of shutdown. (But in other countries, the same shape decline will be attributed to a multi-month shutdown?)

That forecast for Swedish death was down from the 13,529 number in the early April forecast. As of June 5, 2020, the IHME model forecast 8,534 deaths for Sweden and the deaths will come in a Bactrian camel shape:

The forecast from June 5 predicts 60-70 deaths per day right around now. What are we seeing? Europeans refuse to work on weekends, so the reported deaths are zero for Saturday and Sunday. Even today’s report shows 0 deaths (so maybe tomorrow’s report will actually reflect three days of deaths?). The Friday report shows 12 new deaths reported in Sweden.

[Update: The Tuesday report included 69 new deaths. So that’s 81 new deaths spread over 5 days of reports (12+0+0+0+69) or 16 deaths per day compared to the forecast 60-70. In other words, the forecast was wrong by 4X.]

(Also from the Tuesday reports: Sweden has suffered 5,122 deaths from its population of 10 million. Massachusetts has lost 7,890 from its population of 7 million. In Month 4 of Shutdown, the Massachusetts rate is 2.2X Sweden’s.)

What about the former chief scientist of the European CDC who, when put on the spot, tossed out that coronaplague wouldn’t be worse than a bad flu season in terms of death? (note that assumptions regarding population fatality rate were not important for the Swedish plan; assumptions regarding the practicality of a non-Chinese country significantly changing the trajectory of infections were)

A bad season indeed was 1957-8, in which up to 116,000 Americans died out of a population of 172 million (compare to 330 million today). Applying that rate to Sweden’s 10 million people, 6,744 Swedes would succumb to Covid-19.

I don’t think economic arguments are highly relevant in a world where people seemingly care only about clinging to life. Nonetheless, since poverty often determines health outcomes: https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2020-06-16/one-economy-stands-out-as-crisis-reveals-striking-differences? (see “Most gunshot wounds are self-inflicted, coronaconomy edition”)

Readers: What’s your best guess on Sweden? How will the death rate from/with Covid-19 compare to the U.S. rate by early 2021? (right now the U.S. has roughly 71 percent of the death rate compared to Sweden, so the U.S. is better if we measure only by this one number)

[Update 6/24: the IHME prophets have released a new projection.

Instead of the Bactrian camel, Sweden is now on the dromedary shape. There is a new “what if?” capability in this model. For example, if only 10 million Swedes would put on masks, 2 lives would be saved on September 1. (but how many would be killed in car-pedestrian accidents due to fogged-up eyeglasses from the masks?). 5,754 Swedes will meet their end due to Covid-19 through October 1, 2020, a population fatality rate of nearly 0.06 percent.]

Related:

• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/06/21/most-u-s-states-are-now-on-the-swedish-plan/

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My Facebook feed is alive with righteous expressions of outrage at growing coronaplague in reopened Sun Belt states. A typical story posted, underneath some complaints about the unmasked, Donald Trump, etc., would be “Florida shows signs as next coronavirus epicenter as cases spike across the country” (CNN, June 18) or “Coronavirus Cases Spike Across Sun Belt as Economy Lurches into Motion” (NYT, June 14).

I wonder if the majority of U.S. states inadvertently adopted the Swedish approach to managing COVID-19.

Consider that the shutdown happened in a lot of states at a time when there was, in fact, hardly any virus at all. The shutdowns were therefore months too early to have any effect, even if one were to accept that shutdown accomplishes anything, because the virus does not spread in the U.S. suburbs the way that it spread in Wuhan, New York City, or Italy.

So essentially the shutdown never happened from the perspective of the virus. The typical U.S. state now has the general population running around and mingling more or less as in 2019, while retirement homes and nursing homes are “locked down” as best they can be (temperature checks, etc. for the staff; restrictions on visitors). The immunocompromised, otherwise vulnerable, and healthy-but-fearful are hiding in individual bunkers (apartments/homes). Mass gatherings are canceled. How is that different from the Swedish policy?

Stockholm, 2016:

Related:

• the former chief scientist of the European CDC explains the rationale for Sweden’s approach: video (the former chief “scientist” denies “science”!)
• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/06/06/karens-mask-law-compliance-update-boston-to-minneapolis-and-back/
• my 1998 pictures from Sweden
• WHO statistics (as of yesterday, Sweden had suffered 5,053 deaths of people with/from COVID-19, roughly 0.05 percent of its population, a similar percentage to flu deaths in the U.S. during the 1957-58 influenza season)

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Let’s see what is left of the rights in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in a world shut down by old rich people anxious to avoid their date with coronadestiny.

Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.

This is gone, unless you’re protesting Black Lives Matter.

Everyone has the right to education. … Elementary education shall be compulsory.

Gone! Unless a Black Lives Matter School of Protest can be started?

Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.

If “full development” means “sitting at the computer” and “respect for fundamental freedoms” means learning how to be a Mask Karen, I guess kids still have these rights. (My friends’ middle schoolers have not left their house/yard since mid-March. They say that they haven’t learned anything from the local public school.)

Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

This is gone, unless the License Raj thinks you should be allowed to work.

(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

This is gone!

(1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution

Also gone? Or can asylum-seekers still walk across the U.S. border and sign up as customers for the welfare state?

No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

What if your property was a daycare business? Given the lack of evidence that young children spread coronavirus, haven’t you been arbitrarily deprived of it?

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

Is it “liberty” for a healthy young person, whose life is not at risk, to be locked down in an apartment?

Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

What’s the “community” if everyone is stuck at home connected only by Internet?

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Religion in “community with others” is gone, right? Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, and other enforcers of coronaplague orthodoxy have eliminated “freedom of thought”, right?

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

As noted above, you still have freedom of expression, but just not on any platform that contains an audience. (Maybe some Virtue-brand toilet paper will help keep the censors at bay? (from a Target near Portsmouth, New Hampshire).)

All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.

Hmm… coronashutdown hit the working class like a ton of bricks: unemployment, poverty, alcoholism, opioids, strife with other household members in tiny apartments. For a lot of upper-middle-class Americans, especially government workers, it meant continued paychecks, a reduced workload, zero commute time, and going for jogs in low density suburbs before turning to the spacious single family house. That’s not “discrimination”?

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

Why isn’t being locked into a small apartment “detention”?

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Given the lack of scientific agreement on whether young children can spread the coronavirus, whether Western government lockdowns are effective at reducing the total number of infections and deaths, etc., would it be fair to say that the shutdowns are “arbitrary interference”?

In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.

Maybe this is the escape clause. A state governor can say “I think there will be more public order and general welfare if everyone is locked down in apartments and houses, except for those whom I specifically let out.”

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Masketologists have declared victory against coronaplague. If a population of humans is ordered to wear masks, coronavirus will pack up and go home. Example: “Identifying airborne transmission as the dominant route for the spread of COVID-19” (PNAS) and one of the less hysterical popular media summaries.

[6/18 update from the Department of Coronascience is Settled: researchers from Stanford, John Hopkins, and University of Colorado say that the above PNAS paper should be retracted. “While we agree that mask-wearing plays an important role in slowing the spread of COVID-19, the claims in this study were based on easily falsifiable claims and methodological design flaws”]

I was fully prepared to believe this, since it is consistent with my idea that whatever people are doing in Japan, China, Korea, and Taiwan is probably the right thing to be doing. However… the governor of Massachusetts imposed a strict mask law that was effective on May 6. Faith in the Church of Shutdown’s Ritual of the Mask becomes a little tougher to sustain when looking at stats from the New York Times:

If masks are the way to slay the Covid-19 dragon, why isn’t there an observable discontinuity in these curves as a result of the restrictions imposed on May 6? If anything, it looks like there was a bump in cases followed by a bump in deaths roughly correlated to a change on the May 6 date.

Maybe the answer is that masks do work, but the state reopened in early May and therefore the viral spread from reopening canceled out the viral suppression from masks? Definitely not! From the License Raj:

Construction and manufacturing were allowed to reopen, “with restrictions, some capacity limitations, and a staggered start”, beginning on May 18. There was no significant change until May 25 (hair salons) and June 8 (hotels, some childcare (with masks on children older than 2; see the happy preschooler below), retail with occupancy limits).

The anti-Karen wrote:

What I don’t get: If masks work, why aren’t we back at work? If masks don’t work, why are we being asked to wear them?

This mask-loving Karen wonders:

If masks work, why don’t we see a collapse in “the curve”?

Readers: Should we believe “science” or our own eyes looking at the NYT graphs? I picked Massachusetts because that’s where I live (unwisely, it seems). Is there another state that adopted a mask law and in which the coronavirus waved a white flag and packed up?

Related:

• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/06/06/karens-mask-law-compliance-update-boston-to-minneapolis-and-back/

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Anecdotal evidence that my cherished hope of summertime relief from coronaplague is illusory: a friend in Austin, Texas has developed Covid-19. If the virus can survive not only summer, but the Texas summer, that is indeed sobering.

His Facebook post:

I had a 100ish fever last Thursday night/Friday, with none of the other effects I’ve read about. Got tested just in case so I didn’t increase anyone else’s risk.

No fever or anything else since then except occasional headache and maybe some fatigue. My primary care doc thinks I may have gotten a very small exposure and fought it off quickly – we’ll see. He may have me do an antibody test in a week or two to rule out a false positive.

Be safe – remember that even being very careful, wearing a KN95 mask and gloves at the grocery store with plenty of hand sanitizer, social distancing, etc are not 100%.

UPDATE 6/17: Low grade fever early this morning (100.1) but responded to ibuprofen and now I feel pretty normal. Still no other symptoms.

UPDATE 6/16 – Q from the comments: Do you have a feel for where/how you got it?

A: Not sure. I’ve mostly stayed put since early March since I work from home.

Could have been at the store – KN95 is still 5% failure rate, and even though I bought the masks at Staples, it’s hard to know the quality of the Chinese manufacturing.

We’ve seen a small number of people while socially distancing in recent weeks – that would be my bet, but none of those people (already notified) have reported symptoms so far.

My guess is I’ll never really know.

He’s in his 50s so he is not statistically invulnerable to the plague, but he is otherwise healthy as far as I know, so I am not heading down there to dig a grave for him.

A friend recently traveled on JetBlue (empty middle seats, unlike on American) and was surprised to see a fellow passenger in full Ebola doctor PPE: respirator mask plus face shield. Maybe this is the way to dress for the next 2-3 years!

Alternatively, could we be (very slowly) proving the Bishops of the Church of Sweden correct? They said that the virus would wait for us to come out of bunkers. The U.S. right now has a Covid-19 death rate roughly 30 percent lower than Sweden’s, but we have years to catch up. (And don’t forget we have all of the shutdown-related deaths, e.g., from delayed health care, from unemployment and poverty, etc., that nobody is bothering to tally.)

[Update: his fever went away by Wednesday. So it was a one-week fever with “occasional headache, fatigue, and tight chest but really nothing else.” Both children, age 6 and 11, got it (“mild” and/or “brief” fever), but not the wife. Maybe that tells us something about the typical amount of physical intimacy in an American household with children…]

Related:

• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/02/25/austin-and-lockhart-texas-10-barbecue-restaurants-in-72-hours/ (too bad that brisket does not prevent coronaplague!)

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“Can Coronavirus Contact Tracing Survive Reopening?” (New Yorker, June 12) could be the poster child for “TL:DR”. Some high points:

Massachusetts created a pioneering program to track COVID-19 cases. Its challenges are multiplying as the state reopens

The marginal position of the Brazilian immigrants in Massachusetts represented a potential hole in the monitoring system that the C.T.C. was trying to build. Welch had come up with a characteristically P.I.H. solution, which was to fill that hole not with a protocol but with a person, Comin, whose life experience meant he might be trusted by the people he interviewed. Comin had arrived in the United States at the age of nineteen, a punk-rock enthusiast who came to Massachusetts because his aunt lived there; after his tourist visa expired, he was grateful for the older immigrants who had explained the rules of a new country to him—how, for example, when you stopped at a stop sign, you really had to stop, in order to avoid being arrested. To Comin, teaching people how to isolate at home during a pandemic, when they might not be here legally or have health insurance, was something like explaining the full and complete stop.

Throughout the spring, the Massachusetts contact-tracing program got faster. It took between three and four days for the C.T.C. to learn of a positive test, but after investigators had that information they were able to reach seventy per cent of cases, and contact tracers were then able to speak to seventy-four per cent of those cases’ contacts. This still meant that nearly half of potential contacts never spoke with anyone working for the tracing program.

But, until June, Massachusetts remained under lockdown—a temporary and highly artificial situation in which each case had, on average, about two contacts. That changed with the George Floyd protests, when crowds returned to the state’s public spaces. … Wroe, the C.T.C.’s director of implementation and design, had her eye on the protests but said that they were simply too difficult to trace. When contagious people told investigators that they had travelled on a bus, or visited a nursing home, the C.T.C.’s protocol was to alert the local Board of Health and move on. Wroe also believed that Massachusettsans did not want a program that would find ways to track their public movements. She said, “I don’t think there’s much epidemiological advantage in chasing people down in public places, versus the very real risk of losing trust.”

The core of the problem is that we don’t have enough welfare for low-skill immigrants:

The social safety net for immigrants in Boston can seem so porous that it might as well be all holes. Baez has been trying to make it airtight. “What people really want is to feel secure,” he told me when I called him one evening in May, just after his shift had ended. He began to talk through the cases he’d worked that day. All of the adults in a household had tested positive for the coronavirus, and they wanted to know how they could safely share one and a half bathrooms without infecting the children, or re-infecting one another. Another call came from a pregnant woman—who, Baez said, was “the most nervous person I spoke with today.” She and her husband, who both work at McDonald’s, had tested positive and had to stay home for two weeks. She was worried about eviction, and money for the baby, if they lost their jobs. A call came from a woman who worked as a nursing assistant at an assisted-living facility, who had just tested positive, along with many of her colleagues. “Everyone on my floor got it,” she told Baez. She was isolating at home and needed a nebulizer for her asthma, but didn’t have a hundred dollars to pay for it, so she had to figure out a way to purchase the device and then find a volunteer to pick it up at the pharmacy and drop it off on her doorstep. Baez said that this work reminded him of the challenges he has had trying to respond to emergencies overseas: “If there was equity, period, there wouldn’t be a need for us to fill these gaps.”

Fortunately, we still have a good supply of taxpayer-funded opioids:

A thousand tracers, in the middle of a pandemic, gets you somewhere, but maybe only partway. In the evenings, when Baez walks around his parents’ neighborhood, he often passes Boston Medical Center, which runs a large opioid-addiction program, and where he can see clusters of addicts on the street corners. They’ve still been getting their methadone, but their presence reminds Baez of all the vectors for transmission that might still be beyond his compass, and the gaps in care he can’t cover. Baez told me, “Obviously, we can’t promise the world.”

So… the official story back in March was that we would lock down to “flatten the curve” (same number of infections, spread out a bit). This morphed by April into a “shutdown until contact tracing is ready” plan (nytimes). By May this was no longer sufficient. We needed a long shutdown, to hire more contact tracers, and to turn the state into “Maskachusetts” (i.e., don masks at least a month after the infection had peaked).

Now it seems that, because (1) we don’t ladle out enough welfare to low-skill immigrants (who are, after all, our greatest source of economic prosperity and per-capita GDP growth!), and (2) we have the occasional mass gathering, the magic of Asian-style contact tracing will be forever out of reach.

From our neighborhood, the ponies of Maskachusetts:

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Related:

• “Boston Mayor Declares Racism A Public Health Crisis” (NPR): Yes, we shut down for 4 months and have more than 2X the Covid-19 death rate of never-shut Sweden, but the real public health crisis is not coronavirus…

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