Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

We don’t get too much news about our southern neighbor. Given that it is Cinco de Mayo, however, can we ask how Mexico is faring? The charts at ft.com suggest that the country’s experience of coronaplague is fairly typical. Yesterday’s WHO report shows that Mexico, with 2,061 deaths, is substantially less plagued than Canada or the U.S. and that emigrating from Spain to Mexico would have been a smart move, from a Covid-19 perspective.

How about the economy? It is tough to imagine that tourism and oil are doing well. With the U.S. economy in shambles, can the manufacturing plants near the border be prospering? Americans are stuffing themselves like pigs, so maybe Mexican agriculture is thriving?

Related:

• “As World Comes to Halt Amid Pandemic, So Do Migrants” (NYT) says that Mexicans no longer have to play host to half of the world’s asylum-seekers (instead of “fleeing violence” in their home countries, they are now returning home to the violence about which they were prepared to spin a tale on arriving for processing by the American refugee industrial complex)

All over the United States, a principal source of revenue for Native American tribes has been shut down by orders of the (primarily white) state governors. But if Indian nations are sovereign, which is how they’re able to run casinos in the first place, why do they have to abide by the White Man’s shutdown order (which may violate their First Amendment right to assemble in any case)?

There is no “scientific” research to support the idea that Indian-run casinos have contributed to the spread of coronavirus. Many such casinos are in states with a minimal infection rate. If the Indians take basic Chinese shopping mall-style precautions such as checking forehead temps at the front door, how is the White Man entitled to starve them out on a “this might help us” pretext?

(If public health concerns trump (so to speak) the Constitution, why can’t the casino closure order be made permanent? “Gambling Disorder” is a public health concern, complete with DSM-5 code. Plainly having casinos in nearly every state will contribute to the spread of Gambling Disorder. That’s a legitimate public health concern, with potentially fatal consequences, just as much as Covid-19.)

Related:

• “Harvard Says Pandemic Casino Shutdown Is ‘Immediate Threat’ to Native Americans”: “The COVID-19 crisis poses an immediate threat to three decades of improvement in economic conditions across Indian Country,” the letter to Mnuchin said. “Prior to the total shutdown of their casinos, tribes’ gaming enterprises alone were channeling more than $12.5 billion per year into tribal government programs.”

Want to stop coronaplague? The Church of Shutdown says it is as simple as social distancing. But an analysis of social distancing by the Maryland Transportation Institute shows that the very places that are best at social distancing are the ones that are suffering from the worst coronaplague:

Right near the top, the most plague-ridden states: NY, NJ, CT, MA.

Are the wicked being punished? Wyoming and Montana are at the bottom and people there are not dropping dead.

In “Data on nationwide excess deaths” I wrote the following:

Should we suspect from these data that the problems NYC has had with Covid-19 are idiosyncratic? Some other cities and regions also had exposure starting at roughly the same time (mid-January?) and those places locked down within a few days of the NYC shutdown. Yet excess deaths are fairly low (or actually negative) almost everywhere other than NYC.

Is it possible that we’re fighting a nationwide war against a virus that is attacking only a handful of cities for reasons that are peculiar to those cities? Or possibly peculiar to the strain of the virus that has been circulating in those cities? If we take out metro NYC, Detroit, New Orleans (they’re not going to have a second Mardi Gras this year, right?), and Boston, does the “U.S.” actually have excess deaths or any kind of problem with Covid-19 that couldn’t be handled with the most basic precautions?

(And how would we handle the apparently idiosyncratic problems with these cities? Tell New Orleans that Mardi Gras is henceforth restricted to the sober (90% reduction in crowding?). Reopen the United States economy and use the money to pay roughly half of NYC residents to move out to suburbs and other states. The super high density plainly has made NYC a breeding ground for any enterprising virus. Run more subway trains in Boston so that people aren’t jammed in like sardines and/or pay people to leave the city, as in New York. I’m at at loss to know what to do about Detroit, I must confess!)

Is the above chart proof that there is something about NYC and Boston that makes them ideal hosts for a viral epidemic? People in these cities have given maximum effort to observe the tenets of the Church of Shutdown, yet Covid-19 continues to infect and kill while leaving nearly the entire rest of the U.S. alone. Could this be just bad luck? France and Spain went off the rails with Covid-19, while Germany, at least if we believe their official death numbers, was barely touched. On the other hand, if we truly have faith in the Religion of Shutdown, aren’t we forced to conclude that Boston and New York are simply incompatible with a world of 8 billion humans interconnected by air travel?

(What would be ironic if not sad, at least for people like me who live in Boston, is that when this plague was new people in Boston and New York confidently predicted doom for the Deplorable-infested southern states. Intelligence and virtue would protect Boston and New York while stupidity, racism, and sexism would prevent Florida and Texas from responding competently. Now that Massachusetts has 10X the death rate of Florida and 20X the death rate of Texas, the jeering seems to have stopped.)

Also, does the chart falsify the familiar refrain from self-satisfied Californians that the reason they were substantially spared is that they purportedly shut down earlier than New York? The chart shows that, in fact, New York was socially distanced a week prior to California.

Related:

• states ranked by Covid-19 death rates

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

“NYC subways will close overnight for coronavirus cleanings” (New York Post):

New York’s 24/7 subway system will shutter nightly from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. to facilitate coronavirus cleaning, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Thursday in a historic move.

“You never had a challenge of disinfecting every train every 24 hours,” said Cuomo in an Albany press briefing, a problem he earlier this week directed the MTA to solve. “It can best be done by stopping train service from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. every night.”

The “massive undertaking” is expected to impact 10,000 riders nightly, according to Cuomo, who said buses, vans and for-hire vehicles will be provided to pick up the slack.

“You do have essential workers who are using our trains and subways, and they will have transportation during that period of time,” Cuomo vowed.

The larger push to clean up the subway system has been made for those workers, who Cuomo said deserve better than dangerous, unsanitary trips to and from the front lines.

“It is our obligation as human beings to reciprocate, and make sure we’re doing everything we can,” he said.

Fine words, of course, from a guy who will probably not be working at 2:00 am with a bottle of Formula 409. But is there any evidence that touching surfaces previously touched by the plague-infected is a significant source of transmission? Is it touching door handles and subway poles that have turned New York into Wuhan-on-the-Hudson or is it sharing air, while actually together inside the subway and buses, that is primarily responsible?

For those of us who don’t live in a plague center (Boston and New York are the only ones left in the U.S.?), should we be touching everything with a cloth, OCD-style, or not worrying too much if we’re not in a crowded space?