Category: Coronapanic

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)

A friend harvested this from a (helicopter?) mom’s discussion group:

I want to vent but don’t want blow back. Our 18 year old who works 6-7 hours a week filed for unemployment benefits and then filed for the additional federal benefit of $600 a month,unbeknownst to us. She has received 1950 so far and spent 1200 already on clothes etc over 800 today alone. We found out about this earlier tonight. We are horrified and ashamed and at a loss. No federal money should ever have come her way. She’s a full time student and a dependent completely cared for. She made at most $2600 a year and she’s receiving the salary if someone who makes 40k a year at least (her benefits aren’t taxed). Right now we are deciding what to do. You can’t give the money back. By the time it’s over she will have received $8000!!!!! What do i do? We are contemplating have her give it to the charity of her choice. She is not loving that idea. I’m disgusted and just want her out of the house. I’m resisting that impulse but it’s a strong one

Personally, I think the soon-to-be-well-clothed gal is entitled to the money (but, unless she heads to the South, where can she go and wear her new clothing?). Before this started, she took the initiative to get a W-2 job, even if only one day per week. Despite her near-zero personal risk of dying from Covid-19, she has lost what used to be her Constitutional freedoms, e.g., of assembly. Unless she chooses a career of harvesting tax-free child support cash from a portfolio of married dermatologists, dentists, and radiologists, she will be paying for all of the costs of coronapanic via higher tax rates for her entire working life (the shutdown was sold as an attempt to protect Boomers, but the shutdown is being paid for with bonds whose interest payments will fall due mostly after Boomers are long-retired and/or dead).

A journalist friend posted on Facebook asking how people greet each other in the mask age.

Her friend:

I greet someone who is wearing a mask this way “GOOD MORNING, thanks for wearing your mask.. oh by the way, I am smiling” To the people that aren’t wearing one I turn my back and walk away.. I’ve started saying “nice mask, so clear, where did you get it?”

Me:

I like to scold unmasked teenagers here in our suburb who are having fun on skateboards and scooters on the road near our house. I remind them that their personal risk of dying of Covid-19 is at least as high as their chance of being struck by debris from the International Space Station and therefore I expect them to be diligent in mask-wearing.

“Get off my lawn!” has become “Stop breathing into my air!”