Category: Coronaplague

Norwegian TV series for the Age of Corona: Occupied

by philg

A (tenured professor) friend recommended Occupied, a 2015 Norwegian TV show on Netflix that is surprisingly timely. In the first episode, the prime minister has to decide whether it is better to die on one’s feet or live on one’s knees. Citing the priceless nature of even a single human life, he decides that Norwegians must accept subjugation by the EU and Russia.

(The initial plot premise doesn’t make obvious sense. Norway shuts down its oil and gas production in a noble effort to save Spaceship Earth from climate destruction. The EU wants Norwegian oil and gas and brings in the Russians to force Norway to turn it all back on. But since the Russians compete with Norway in oil and gas production, why would the Russians want to pressure Norway? Wouldn’t the Russians be better off just selling EU its own production at a higher price? This is never explained, but if you can suspend your disbelief on this one point, the rest of the series makes sense.)

As the episodes unfold, Norwegians gradually surrender what had been their rights. Just like Americans facing the threat of coronaplague, about half of the people simply assert that their rights have not been eliminated, just slightly adjusted (e.g., children who get a weekly email from a teacher and two hours/week of Google Classroom hangout are still receiving their right to an education) while a clandestine resistance emerges of people who want their former constitutional rights as they were previously understood.

I’ll be interested to hear what readers think about whether this movie captures the mindset of government leaders around the world today when it comes to dealing with the threat of coronaplague!

(My Dutch friend: “All of the rights that Americans fought and died in multiple wars to defend, they gave up in one governor’s press conference.” The screenwriters thought it would take a war for people in a Democracy to lose their rights, but a respiratory virus turned out to be sufficient to erase liberty!)

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Swedes are too polite to call us stupid…

by philg

… instead they call us crazy.

The leader of the Swedish government’s epidemiology team is interviewed in “Sweden’s Covid Expert Says ‘World Went Mad’ With Lockdowns” (Bloomberg):

The man behind Sweden’s controversial Covid-19 strategy has characterized lockdowns imposed across much of the globe as a form of “madness” that flies in the face of what is known about handling viral outbreaks.

Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s state epidemiologist, said he advised against such restrictions on movement because of the detrimental side effects they often entail.

“It was as if the world had gone mad, and everything we had discussed was forgotten,” Tegnell said in a podcast with Swedish Radio on Wednesday. “The cases became too many and the political pressure got too strong. And then Sweden stood there rather alone.”

Tegnell admits he misjudged the deadly potential of the coronavirus in its early stages, but has refused to consider abandoning his strategy. He says restricting movement to the radical extent seen across much of the globe can create other problems, including increased domestic abuse, loneliness and mass unemployment.

“In the same way that all drugs have side effects, measures against a pandemic also have negative effects,” he said. “At an authority like ours, which works with a broad spectrum of public health issues, it is natural to take these aspects into account.”

What would he think of Maskachusetts? Our kids might not have learned anything for the past three months and maybe won’t get to return to school in September, either, and they may have gained weight and lost muscle tone as they go into Month 4 of shutdown, but at least they are masked!

Tegnell also advised against using face masks, arguing there’s little scientific evidence they work. And he says it’s clear that closing down schools was an unnecessary response to the pandemic, a notion that’s actually supported in a recent French study.

Have you enjoyed being shut down and throwing rocks at the reckless Swedes? Dr. Tegnell says you’ll probably get to do it every year for the next few decades:

Tegnell’s underlying argument is that Covid-19 isn’t going away any time soon, meaning sudden, severe lockdowns will ultimately prove ineffective in addressing the longer-term threat. Meanwhile, the virus has recently resurfaced in a number of places where authorities thought they’d brought it under control, including Beijing.

The article is a good illustration of American journalism. Because Tegnell is a infidel relative to the Church of Shutdown, his credentials are left out. He is just some guy who works for the Swedish government, not a Scientist (Wikipedia by contrast: “Tegnell obtained a PhD in Medicine from Linköping University in 2003 and a MSc in Epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 2004”).

The section in which the article appears is “Sweden’s Coronavirus Experiment”. In other words, it is not the U.S. that is conducting an “experiment” by trying something that has never been tried before (i.e., shutting down a modern society/economy and health care system). It is Sweden that is engaging in a wild “experiment” by doing what humans have always done when confronting a new virus.

From my Sweden pictures:

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New hate speech phrase: “Thank You ALL Workers”

by philg

Like righteous Lexington, Massachusetts, our white heterosexual suburb loves to hang banners celebrating Black Lives Matter and a rainbow of LGBTQIA+ victimhood (see “Our faith calls us to affirm Black Lives Matter…”).

To these, neighbors have recently added “Thank you essential workers,” “Thank you frontline workers,” and “Thank you first responders” signs.

Driving west on Rt. 117 to some suburbs that contain at least a few authentic working-class people, if not a significant number of black or LGBTQIA+ people, there is a glaring exception: a house sporting a “Thank You All Workers” sign.

Is this sloppiness? Or hate speech along the lines of “All Lives Matter”?

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How is Sweden doing with coronaplague?

by philg

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

Previous posts:

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.]

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Most U.S. states are now on the Swedish plan?

by philg

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:

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What I learned about teaching computer nerdism remotely

by philg

My favorite kind of computer nerdism class is the lab class. Software development is a skill and the only way to learn it is by doing. A lecture from a successful programmer will not turn beginners into successful programmers.

In mid-March we got kicked out off campus. We had been teaching successfully (at least from our self-serving point of view!) in a classroom at Harvard Medical School. Three groups of three students each in the same room. By walking around we could fairly quickly see what was on everyone’s screen, help as necessary, and talk either to the entire group of 9 or to one group of 3. Groups of 3 could talk amongst themselves without disturbing the others.

Using Webex and Zoom reduced productivity by at least 70 percent. We could work with only one student’s screen at a time and essentially only one team at a time. Switching from screen to screen is a cumbersome time-consuming heavyweight process.

Now that we’re going to stay home for the next 20-50 years (even if we cure coronavirus, we still have influenza as our mortal enemy, right?), what would the ideal infrastructure be for teaching our brand of computer nerdism?

In addition to a personal monitor or two, the teacher needs an array of 9 monitors, each one at least as large physically as a student’s screen (teachers have older eyes than do students, typically!). This will enable the teacher to see what each student is doing and interrupt with help as necessary. We need four voice chat channels: one for each student group and one for the entire class. Each student needs two physical screens. One for himself/herself/zerself/theirself to use for editing and running SQL and R code and one as a mirror of the teacher’s screen (how else will students know which sites teachers like to visit?).

If we had had this infrastructure, I think we could have been 80 percent as productive as we had been during our physical meetings.

Readers: What else would help for hardware and software infrastructure for teaching?

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Most gunshot wounds are self-inflicted, coronaconomy edition (Sweden v. the Shutdown Karen Countries)

by philg

I personally don’t think economic performance is relevant when evaluating coronaplague policy. In a world where people don’t care about anything other than Covid-19 death risk, what difference does it make if they’re getting richer or poorer? That said, unemployment and poverty do lead to poor health outcomes and death. It just takes a while. So there is also a health angle to economics (see this post from March: “If All Lives Have Equal Value, why does Bill Gates support shutting down the U.S. economy?”).

“‘Striking’ Crisis Gap Exposed as Swedish Economy Stands Out” (Bloomber, June 16):

In a report on Monday, Capital Economics presented data that give Sweden an irrefutable edge. From peak to trough, Swedish GDP will shrink 8%; in the U.K. and Italy, the contraction is somewhere between 25% and 30%, according to estimates covering the fourth quarter of 2019 through to the second quarter of 2020. The U.S. is somewhere in the middle, it said.

Sweden has kept shops, gyms, schools and restaurants open throughout the pandemic. But the strategy, which the government says wasn’t shaped with the economy in mind, has resulted in one of the world’s highest mortality rates. Sweden’s state epidemiologist recently acknowledged he would have opted for a tighter lockdown with the benefit of hindsight.

(The article is written for American members of the Church of Shutdown, so the journalist points that Sweden has “one of the world’s highest mortality rates” without noting that the U.S. overall, in Month 4 of various degrees of shutdown, is only about 30 percent behind Sweden, that plenty of U.S. states have experienced higher death rates so far than Sweden, and that some countries that did shut down actually have higher mortality rates than Sweden. And, of course, Sweden is not actually planning on a “tighter lockdown” even when the inevitable second wave hits (Sweden’s latest plan).)

A figure from the article:

A gun enthusiast friend is able to say, in response to about 90 percent of news articles about companies or universities, “most gunshot wounds are self-inflicted.” These economic data from the Shutdown Karen countries add some ammunition to his theory!

(Again, since nobody cares about how poor they become, as long as they can be saved from the evil virus, I don’t think the self-inflicted impoverishment of the shutdown nations is relevant except that it will inevitably result in a shorter life expectancy and more deaths in the long run than any conceivable savings of Covid-19 deaths from the shutdown. See the Preston curve of life expectancy vs. per capita income.)

There might be some measurement errors for the U.S. A lot of our GDP for this quarter, for example, is going to be cleaning up cities after riots, the classic broken window fallacy. Also, people have been spending like crazy to try to adapt to the shutdown. Americans would prefer to go to a gym, but they’re buying home exercise gear as an interim stopgap. (Sweden’s gyms never closed, so they wouldn’t have as much of this type of no-added-value spending.) Americans would prefer to meet people in person, but they’re buying webcams for the Zoom sessions that they don’t enjoy. Ordinarily, Americans don’t need everything in the house or yard to be perfect, but as long as they’re locked into their houses why not fix everything up and tell the landscapers to go deluxe? (Anecdote: We had our shrubs mulched for the first time! I wanted to give Joe the Electrician some work, so we had him do a bunch of low-importance fixes (bad news for the Democrats who envision themselves as champions of the working American; like Joe the Plumber, Joe the Electrician is not easy to persuade: “The thing about Trump is that he does what he said he was going to do.”). Maybe all of this will cost $3,000 and add $500 in long-term value to the house?)

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Coronashutdown versus UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights

by philg

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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If masks stop coronavirus, why no discontinuity in the numbers?

by philg

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?

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Friend in Texas runs, but cannot hide, from coronavirus

by philg

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…]

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