Trump warns of a bad two to three weeks as the White House Projects 100,000 to 240,000 U.S. Coronavirus Deaths.
“This could be a hell of a bad two weeks,” Mr. Trump said during a briefing at the White House on Tuesday afternoon, then quickly expanded upon his own dire assessment: “This is going to be three weeks like we’ve never seen before.”
That’s an excellent video by Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Please play it.
The focus is on the next two to three weeks.
No Magic Bullet
“No magic bullet. No magic vaccine or therapy. It’s just behavior,” says Dr. Birx.
“This is tough. People are dying. It’s inconvenient from a societal standpoint, from an economic standpoint. But this is going to be the answer to our problems. So let’s all pull together and make sure as we look forward to the next 30 days , that we do it with all the intensity and force that we can,” said Dr. Fauci.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
I worry that the predictions are all wrong. Already we have gone from 2 million US deaths to 200,000. I’d bet the true number is a quarter of that. Why destroy the economy based on BS data?
What would be worse if Trump said the US will have a “bigly” death toll and then said “April Fool’s!”. But our president is not that crass…yet.
Only 4,516 CV19 deaths so far. 95k to go to hit the lower rung of this latest prediction.
btw: how many times has the Trump WH been correct in general predictions/projections? Not very many.
He won’t be correct on this projection, either. Deaths will not peak in two weeks. In some areas people are following social distancing guidelines, but in other areas they are not, so there is no reason to believe we won’t see continuing infections and deaths.
Last week you mocked it when there were only “99,200” deaths to go to reach 100,000. There were over 900 dead yesterday and the number is still growing, though the eventual death toll will be mitigated by the lockdown. Most people aren’t willing to risk the tens of thousands of lives you seem to think are expendable. When will the body count be significant to you?
When we exceed the normal average flu deaths in the USA, I will begin to pay attention. I think that is in the range of 30-40k. So still a factor of 7 to go to even get into the range where I think we MIGHT want to start paying attention.
Any moron can tell what happened, it’s seeing what’s coming that takes some smarts.
Italy is almost there (CV deaths exceeding annual flu deaths) and the US will probably be there in 2-3 weeks. The problem I see with waiting to take action is that by the time you pay attention, the disease is so widespread it’s essentially impossible to stop. As a society I realize we put values on human lives all the time, but I think the potential number of deaths in this pandemic if it is left unchecked are too great for most governments to tolerate, even if the vast majority of the dead are old or infirm. The fact that 61 Italian doctors have died of CV indicates this is much worse than the flu. I hope the mortality projections are wildly off to the high side but only the future will tell.
How about the potential damage to the economy, which will be in the trillions cash wise and will show increased suicides, increased businesses closing down, increased homelessness and more?
Human life is no better than any other type of life. It’s so easy to create more that we could easily lose 5-6 billion and it would leave the Earth a better place for all that remained.
Unfortunately, I think the government will need to play a big role in getting people back to work and keeping them off the streets. I say unfortunately only because of all of the graft and corruption that is certain to follow. No other entity, however, has the means of getting the economy going again. I may be wrong, but if the disease is allowed to run freely and the situation devolves like Northern Italy or Spain, the economy will largely shut down anyway at least in the hot spots.
Jim Bianco discussed restarting the economy briefly in the video Mish posted previously and knows more about the subject than I do. It will require massive printing and probably inflation down the line, but you want to get people working so the economy doesn’t lose their production any longer than necessary. I’m certainly more concerned about small and medium size business for whom this was a shock. I’m less concerned about large public corporations with highly paid professional (I use the term loosely) management that has mismanaged them so thoroughly they need a bailout within weeks of any disruption. To the extent any aid is given to them, I think it should be part of the bankruptcy process and focused on keeping the workers employed.
When it comes to human life, I’m not a relativist. I would kill an animal to save a human. I’m also all for reducing the human population if people freely choose to do so. Failing to try and minimize the human toll of a deadly virus is not how I would go about reducing the population.
I too reject the idea that “Human life is no better than any other type of life.” because I believe that human life alone was created in the image of its Creator.
And most of your (Schaap60) other views are not anathema to me either … But I think you present them better than I would.
You are always free to believe whatever you want, no matter how wrong it may be.
“Human life is no better than any other type of life. It’s so easy to create more that we could easily lose 5-6 billion and it would leave the Earth a better place for all that remained.”
So you’ve modified your position from ‘it costs too much’ to ‘it costs too much and who cares how many people die’ ?
Can we count a win in that you might be accepting that the predictions of very large numbers of people affected are real (even though there are only a few thousand now)?
No, I said nothing of the sort and your interpretation is faulty.
I still believe that the numbers of CV19 deaths will not exceed last years flu deaths of 34,200, but even if they did, we could lose millions and it wouldn’t make any big difference (except to the people that were close to a dead person, obviously).
This year’s flu is nearly done, and has killed about 24,000. Covid19 should pass it by April 15th, and of course, most flus are active for 16-18 months or so, so Covid won’t be done for another year.
It appears the impact on Italy may have been greater due to a milder than normal flu season.
The social distancing we are using will also mostly eliminate the spread of the regular flu, as well as common colds.
Lockdown, what lockdown? Sweden’s unusual response to coronavirus
By Maddy Savage Stockholm
29 March 2020
While swathes of Europe’s population endure lockdown conditions in the face of the coronavirus outbreak, one country stands almost alone in allowing life to go on much closer to normal.
Sweden so far has 259 deaths and 16 recoveries, and deaths are running about 10% of new cases. It’s good that we have someone following this path as we will be able to see what the consequences are, either good or bad.
It is important to note that while they have no lockdown, they are increasing work from home, and many other things that we call “social distancing”.
Sweden’s toll two days ago was 180. The day after, it went up 59.
The UK’s death on 20th March was 177. The day after, it went up 53.
On the face of it, both countries are on a similar trajectory up until now, but obviously the lockdowns (however poorly adhered to) will start to take an effect in the UK – we are nearly two weeks into these, so you would expect some divergence now.
But….
Note that Sweden has almost 1/7th of the population of the UK. The 259 deaths mentioned by Carl should be multiplied by that number to get to a truer comparison – in other words, Sweden has proportionately the same number of deaths that the UK had 3 days ago. But the UK locked down ten days prior to this.
Expect things to get bad quickly.
From what I know about Sweden, they have some natural social distancing built into their country and culture. As a result, the natural rate of growth is slower than in some other places. You don’t see it growing at 25-40% a day, but it is growing at a steady 12% a day, and as you pointed out, the death rate is now soaring. It will be interesting to watch.
Hyping the virus for clicks should be a felony, punishable by death, especially when it is creating this level of unemployment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39S1kf2Jgrc&feature=emb_title
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/politics/the-health-forecasts-are-politically-motivated/
I have read that Fauci is leaning on the IHME projections — which are based on some “best case” assumptions (such as ceaseless strong and effective social distancing measures) in contrast to the Imperial College work.
The more I read, the more I get the sense that epidemiologists are making educated guesses about anything beyond two weeks in the future. There is just too little data to project robustly how the pandemic plays out in May and June.
This is the best model there is. It has a large variance from now on. Eventually we will end up somewhere between 41000 and 177000 deaths. Best guess right now is 81k based on this model.
How does one know that the IHME model is “the best”?
Well put another way, the best I’ve seen. There may be others. I’m open to understanding them. I’ve not seen a model that takes into account variables such as ICU beds and ventilators available to predict death rates.
As they say, every model is wrong but some are useful. I’m taking the IHME curves as a fair guess, noting that they keep changing as time goes on.
Here is an article about it:
Thanks, good one!
Yes. It reminds me of Google Maps when you put in directions and it automatically adjusts the time as you are driving. You have to remember what it said when you started and compare it to actuals. I doubt there is a linear model to predict this. You would have to build a really complex non-linear, multi-variate model to even come to close to reality. If we are predicting deaths, I think it is hard to say if it will be 5 or 6 figures but it feels like high 5 figures or low 6 figures could be right.
Seems to be many epis unimpressed with the IHME model:
No model is perfect. It feels like we will come out even on the higher side of this model (closer to 177k deaths rather than 81k deaths).
I have serious questions about it’s assumption that it can be stopped by June 1. In any case, it does not address the possibility of a second wave in the Fall.
The death toll can not be held to 200k, nor can the shutdown end by the end of April. For that to happen, people would have to actually follow the guidelines, but there in a free country, people will always resist that. You will have young people who think that what they do won’t matter, and they will go out and get infected, and will go out and spread it, so cases will continue. You’ll also have people holding super-spreader events, such as this:
Sadly, the fact that not everyone will follow the lockdown will mean that the lockdown can’t end, and it will have to continue in some form for the full 18 months until there is a vaccine. It also means that the death toll will be in the millions, not in the hundreds of thousands, and that the economy will be destroyed, and that the economic future of the country is mortgaged for years to come. It would be much simpler if we could just all be good for 6-10 weeks, but it won’t happen.
Third week of March, China reopened cinemas. 27 March, they closed them down again, fearing a second wave. Seemingly, the Chinese lock down didn’t mean much.
As Denninger mentioned, until you have herd immunity, when a lock down ends, the virus spreads again.
The economy has already been destroyed. People locked down, are not going to work. Yesterday, it was reported that a worker here or there, at a few grocery stores, had come down with CV-19 in the L.A. area. What if essential businesses wind up being shut down?
A vaccine is untested and is just a hope, just as was complained about hydroxychloroquine. What if testing fails to produce a workable vaccine?
They were able to produce a safe effective vaccine for SARS, which is similar. I have no reason to believe that they won’t be able to produce one for this, especially with all the people working on it. It’s just a matter of time. The problem is that the more people that willingly spread this, the more severe the economic consequences for all.
What is the name of the SARS vaccine you reference, and which company manufactures it? According to the South China Morning Post this past February, there is no vaccine. Source: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3051853/there-was-no-vaccine-sars-or-mers-will-there-be-one-new
Here are a couple of articles about it. While it was developed, and tested in mice and humans, it was never needed as the SARS outbreak was over by the time it had completed testing.
If you read the article you linked, it mentioned that there actually was a SARS vaccine, but that testing was shelved because the epidemic was over. Taken together, it would seem that there was a vaccine, and it worked in animals and was successful in early human tests, but the human testing was not completed as the epidemic was over.
Is there a vaccine for SARS?
I linked to a couple articles about it above. The vaccine worked in animals, and was safe and effective in early human trials, but once the SARS epidemic was over, the trial was shelved. So, yes, there was a vaccine, and it appeared to be safe and effective, but since it was never officially “approved”, the statement that “there is no SARS vaccine” is also technically correct. What is not true is to say that “they could not develop a vaccine for SARS”.
We need time. We have to buy as much time as we can. There are vaccines in trials and there is a known protocol for treating this with drugs. It isn’t just hydroxychlroquine. I won’t mention the protocol here for fear of a run on the drugs. Many doctors have already put in their orders for them to treat their patients.
As you say, people need to follow them. We live in a road with 5 other houses. We’ve been locked down for 2 weeks now – only essential trips to buy food, or walk the dog, or let our daughter get some exercise. No contact with anybody.
All of our neighbours have had visitors this week. The guy next to us had some kind of get together and BBQ on Sunday, the family opposite – complete with wife undergoing chemo for breast cancer – seem to have the entire extended family around for lunch. The couple next door hosted some sort of bible study group for kids. The lady opposite, in her 90s, was visited by her grandchildren.
We call them “early adopters” or “beta testers.”
R U SERIOUS? 18 months? Ain’t going to happen in any wet dream you apocalyptic’s are having. Wall street wouldn’t put up with this. And no one is going to sit around and let China get a large economic leg up while USA snowflakes are cowering in your closets.
Here in the SF Bay area, I was on a popular local hiking trail and of the 100 or so people I estimate that I saw on my time there (that doesn’t include all the people I didn’t see who were on other parts of the trail when I was not), just about ZERO were maintaining any kind of social distance and maybe 20% had masks on. Lot of kids in the 17-22 range, I’d guesstimate and they were all hanging together, goofing around like people that age do.
Many people are not going to allow themselves to be be scared by fake hysteria. We will do what we want and then find out if we are living in a democracy or under the hand of a new Gestapo.
You people are all freaking crazy!
jojo, that is why China could control it, and the US and Europe can’t. I realize that what you say is happening, and will continue to happen. I also recognize that there will be consequences. Deaths can not be held to 200,000, and that has become obvious. The question is, if millions die, what then? Will the millions of deaths lead to breakdowns in society? Will the next phase be starvation? The US was on it’s last legs anyway, will this end it? If so, will it be followed by a utopia, or post-apocalyptic breakdown?
There are far more questions than answers at this point.
You know you sound like a person named wearing a tin hat who is extrapolating far too freely. We should be reacting based on what is actually happening, not what might be the worse case happening.
Since January I have made many forecasts. So far, all of my forecasts have been low. I initially forecast 1000 deaths by the end of March, then upped it in mid March 10 3500, and we ended up just over 4000. I initially forecast that we would hit 20,000 by April 15th, and it appears that we will reach that far earlier.
I’ve saved your post and link and added it into my “told you so” file. Let’s see what happens. I wish I could wager with some of you people on this subject but that is not allowed here in the USA.
“We should be reacting based on what is actually happening, not what might be the worse case happening.”
You keep making this mistake — you are dealing with an exponential. Our experiences are largely linear in nature – it’s ‘hot’ if it’s a few degrees warmer one day vs. another; it’s a ‘long time’ if it’s more than an hour vs. less than 10 min (or something similar); it’s ‘heavy’ if something is 50% more mass than a similar size object. In all these cases, you can make a reasonable assessment of a new condition based on a previous condition or state.
An exponential will not work like this. For the short term (now) you can act like it is linear, but eventually it will change so much and so violently that you don’t have the frame of reference to extrapolate correctly. However, the change is predictable — and has been predicted ad infinitum. You can choose to believe those predictions or not; but the way to interrupt those predictions is to change behavior enough that the exponential is no longer a valid prediction. Changing that prediction will not happen by doing nothing and complaining about the cost of doing something.
Don’t argue with me, go argue with some experts.
Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?
Current estimates about the Covid-19 fatality rate may be too high by orders of magnitude.
By Eran Bendavid and Jay Bhattacharya
March 24, 2020
If it’s true that the novel coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines, then the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are surely justified. But there’s little evidence to confirm that premise—and projections of the death toll could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high.
Fear of Covid-19 is based on its high estimated case fatality rate—2% to 4% of people with confirmed Covid-19 have died, according to the World Health Organization and others. So if 100 million Americans ultimately get the disease, two million to four million could die. We believe that estimate is deeply flawed. The true fatality rate is the portion of those infected who die, not the deaths from identified positive cases.
….
It’s like anything else – you can find “experts” who support almost any opinion. Time will tell us what happens, but even that won’t answer the real questions, of “what would have happened if we did nothing’ or “what would have happened if we had had a hard lockdown earlier”.
Some things we do know, however. We know that if we act too slowly, as happened in Wuhan, Iran, Italy, Spain, and New York, things get really ugly, and then the death rate isn’t 2% of cases, it soars to 6%, 8%, 10%, or even higher. Italy is now at 12% of identified cases. How many unidentified cases are out there? Obviously no one knows. That allows people to make up whatever number fits their agenda. Let’s imagine that there are 100 cases for every one that we have identified. Then the death rate is only .12%, not bad at all. Is that realistic? Of course not, but hey, if we are making up numbers, we can make them anything we want.
One of the best data sets we have is the Diamond Princess, where they tested everyone, and found 712 infected people. They all got top quality medical care, not care in overcrowded facilities. Even so, 11 are dead, and 15 more remain in serious or critical condition. If three of those 15 end up dying, that will be 14 dead, from 712 infections, a 2% death rate.
The other good data set we have in South Korea. They have conducted hundreds of thousands of tests, and they are free and anyone can get one. Only one in 200 people gets a positive result, so it would seem that they are catching nearly everyone with Covid19. By testing everyone and tracing them, and quarantining them, they have nearly eliminated Covid19, another sign that they are catching nearly everyone. Out of 9976 cases, 169 have died. Another 55 are in serious or critical condition, if 11 more of those die, that would bring them to 180 of 9976. That would give you a 1.8% CFR, not far from the estimate we got from the Diamond Princess.
Now, what happens when hospitals get overcrowded, and they can’t give proper care? Obviously, the death rate goes up. To 3? 4%? 6%? Obviously it doesn’t go down, to 0.12%, but if someone believes that 100 people are infected for every identified case, that’s what they believe. I think it’s possible that only 1/3 of the cases are counted, in which case the CFR in Italy is only 4%, not 12%, but I can’t imagine it more than that.
Asked “The question is, if millions die, what then? Will the millions of deaths lead to breakdowns in society? ”
Nope. There is too much Prozac in the water these days. Everyone is medicated, which is why everyone seems so laid back about crashing the economy in exchange for saving the lives of a relatively few already sick people.
Many people in this country understand little or nothing about data. I see comments here and elsewhere where people think they can calculate the death rate this way: (current completed deaths)/(current active cases). Wrong! From anecdotal evidence, a person can have the virus for 4 or 6 or more weeks before the die. So… to accurately calculate the death rate you need a population of people who caught the virus on the same day. This is the formula: (people who contracted virus on Feb 1st and then died) / (all people who contracted the virus on Feb 1st). The virus spread accelerates geometrically each day, so the worst thing you can do is compare number of deaths for people who contracted the virus in say early February to active cases in March. A lot of people who contracted the virus in early March will be dying in the next month or so. Those infected in late March will be dying in May or possibly June. If we had no new cases starting today, we would know the death rate maybe in about 8 weeks as the virus finished killing people who contracted it through yesterday, assuming we knew how many people had the virus. So… please tell me what genius thinks they can calculate a death rate from this? We have no data on the day each person contracted the virus hence there is no controlled population we can use to calculate the death rate. Also, the lack of testing and even the lack of properly counting people who died from the virus make this calculation absurdly impossible. What do we know? The death rate is far higher than the flu, and it was obvious in Feb from the China data that we were going to be obliterated by this.
True. That’s why what I do, and what you should do if smart, is calculate the infected and use this formula, which is from the China data (and I think is accurate, even though I don’t trust CHN data for total numbers): 80% of C-19 victims experience little or no symptoms, 20% the opposite, and 5% of the total severe symptoms that can lead to death. This is the ‘gold standard’ for data, if you believe the China data. And since C-19 has no sure, I doubt US hospitals do much better than China hospitals, if anything China hospitals may have better or at least more equipment like ventilators.
We also know that people die faster than they recover. Most people who are going to die do so in the first couple weeks after the infection. Most people who recover take at least 5 weeks to do so. As a result, the “closed cases” which is deaths/(deaths+recovered) has been running with a computed death ratio of about 20%. The CFR will ultimately be a lot lower than that.
First Squawk (@FirstSquawk)
NY DOCTORS SAYS SUCCESSFULLY TREATED 400 PATIENTS WITH CORONAVIRUS INFECTION USING A COCKTAIL OF HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE, AZITHROMYCIN, AND ZINC SULFATE WITH ZERO DEATHS AND SIDE EFFECTS
NUTBAR POSTS HYSTERICAL RUMOR IN ALL CAPS!!,
Alll caps per original Twitter poster.
Pejorative to call Twitter market commentator a nutbar. His info is probably accurate.
Just imagine if every patient going forward was treated with this cocktail and most, if not all recovered nicely. You would look rather foolish.
You are the kid in the classroom with his fingers in his ears shouting “lalalalalalalalalala” because he doesn`t like the truth. You have the cheek to call it rumour while soaking up the sh*t from CNN like a moronic sponge.
The epidemic is not spreading uniformly across the country. Where we live in northern Idaho, we are a couple weeks behind, say Seattle, in western Washington, viz. “the curve.” Effectively, we’ve had lead time to prepare and settle in for an extended stay-at-home quarantine, which just recently was mandated by the governor. The first cases have just hit our county and it is from community transmission. Forewarned can mean being better prepared. Yet many people around here think that they’re going to somehow miss the epidemic because there have been no cases (or just recently in the past day or two). So, they haven’t prepared.
Still those with ‘it’s nothing different than the flu”.
Yeah sure, the overwhelming of medical resources happens every year at this time.
Just listened on the radio to an ER nurse at North Memorial Hospital (Minnesota !!) say that they were instructed that if someone codes out at the hospital, they are told to not start chest compression and to let it go–which the nurse said it goes against everything they have been taught.
Indeed and those same nurses ay North Memorial are asking/begging for masks which many folks like my wife are trying to produce as fast as they can despite the deficiencies of those masks.
89 of 6620 is over 1%, not 0.2%, of those with the disease.
I’m going by of those TESTED 46,935 – rounded .2% – Which means a whole lot of people are NOT dying outside the normal death rate(s) of all things death.
But why on earth would you calculate it that way? That makes no sense.
If you’re going to include both infected and non-infected in the death rate, you may as well make the entire population of MA the denominator and come up with a microscopic number.
“89 of 6620 is over 1%, not 0.2%, of those with the disease.”
Of those known to have the disease. Supposedly, some 18% of those with the virus will never have symptoms. Some percentage of those have never been tested, as well as others who will have symptoms, but are still asymptomatic.
Which is why the data is shit. The deaths are now classified as “viral related”, because they know that if you’r old or already in bad shape, the virus is just a catalyst like one with the flu and you drown.
The claim is there are not enough tests. If that is true, and there’s no way to do scaled population random sampling, then the data, what little there is, doesn’t tell anyone what the virus is actually doing. It’s all speculation based on inadequate data. Anyone that claims that we don’t need scaled sampling to come to better conclusions on virus BEHAVIOR either never took statistics or is trying to promote a false narrative. We could be doing worse, but we could also be doing better, but there is zero data to support either without the aforementioned sampling.
If only it were just scientific speculation. Instead, what we have here is fanning the flames of hysterical panic!
Really have to question a lot of things since there is zero random sampling, supposedly due to lack of tests. Of those tested (in MA) 46,935 – 6620 tested positive and 89 died. That’s 14% infected, and a .2% death rate, only one was under 60 and had other issues, and only one (in their 90’s) had no underlying issues.
We’re charting test trajectory rates, not what the virus is actually doing. Of the data we do have, as weak as it is, it’s slightly worse than the flu. So we shut state and national economies down on crap data, and the data we do have, doesn’t justify shutting everything down.
The only solid number is the death rate, and that’s still increasing exponentially. Reason enough shut down.
Another solid number is the CHN stats on infected C-19 people: 80% show no or mild symptoms, 20% the opposite (severe symptoms, and you can bet these people in the USA will be rushing to hospitals, since most Americans rush to hospitals even if they have a chest cold) and 5% of the people with very severe symptoms that can lead to death. The sample size for the above was a large portion of the 82k (official) people who were infected in China, and this is one China stat that I think is true.
Absolutely no reason for a shutdown here in MA. One case under 60 with pre-existing conditions, and ONE with none, who was over 90. Folks dying are already in bad shape are getting hit. We didn’t have to shut everything down for that.
The fact that attitudes like yours are still very common is why I am confident that we can not hold this to 200,000 deaths. People are not willing to self quarantine, so it will continue to spread. That, in turn will take the death rate to 10% as has been seen elsewhere. If we generously assume that 75% of the cases aren’t counted, that means when 60% of the people have been infected, and it slows on it’s own, you will have:
198m infected
49.5m people counted as infected
4.95m dead
A high price, but that it the price of freedom.
I can’t be knocked down to zero infections worldwide, so until there is a vaccine, there will be quarantines and shelter in place. If people get adequate care, the death rate is about 1%, as in S. Korea. The upper end seems to be Italy at 6%. With R0=3, it will propagate to about 250000000 people in the US before there are enough immune people that it dies out on its own. So, at BEST look for 2.5million dead. If adequate care can be give to 100,000 new severely ill patients per day, that is 10% of 1million newly infected per day, this could be over in 8 to 9 months with 1% death rate, and a collapsed economy. If we let it blow through, it is all over in about 90 days, with 15million dead. There is no good solution to this until there is an effective treatment or a vaccine.
As far as the talking heads and total deaths,
As far as the economy
I don’t disagree. There is no perfect solution. The optimal solution, in my opinion, is to keep R0 low so that there is a slow progression of cases, which allows the CFR to stay in the 1% range. How do you keep the R0 to ~1? It takes a combination of social distancing, a lot of testing, and case tracing. I think another mandatory part is to require everyone to wear a mask in public. South Korea has shown it can be done.
On the other hand, between young people unwilling to comply, and other foolish people, and a CDC that is telling people NOT to wear masks, I am not optimistic that we can do as well.
I agree with Duncan. Looking at the most recent data for reported deaths in New Jersey, over 94% were 50 years of age or older, and over 77% were 65 years of age or older (Source: https://www.nj.com/coronavirus/2020/03/nj-coronavirus-deaths-surge-to-267-with-18696-total-cases-more-than-2k-new-positive-tests-reported.html). In addition, underlying health conditions play a significant role in the severity of the disease as evidenced by CDC data (Source:
The bottom line is that it makes no sense for a prolonged lockdown of all people in this country when those at the greatest risk appear to be the elderly and those with underlying medical conditions. My father is elderly and has underlying medical conditions. He has no problem reducing his own risk by staying home and utilizing delivery services to bring him whatever he needs until the risk reaches a level at which he is comfortable venturing out. We both agree that it makes very little sense for healthy, young people, who are at comparatively much lower risk, to have to be locked up for months when a much simpler solution is for the higher risk groups to limit their movement outside of their homes. The damage that these restrictions on movement and commerce are causing unnecessary hardship to young people and their families.
I knew that the “it’s just the flu” argument would pass once the deaths on this started to ramp up. It’s unexpected to me, and appalling, that we’ve gone directly from there to “so what if 5m old and infirm die, we don’t want to be inconvenienced”.
This is absurd. Are you really alleging that young people may feel inconvenienced? I would hardly call young people losing jobs and being wrecked financially an inconvenience.
Decisions and risk analysis also need to be made based on actual data, not just models, which may very likely have faulty assumptions. Have you read anything by any of the esteemed medical experts at Stanford recently? If not, here are some links to consult:
I think the info at
is somewhere close, I have seen the articles above critiqued also. So maybe we are looking at under 50’s with an IFR somewhere around 0.2 %, here is compared to flu from that site
So where do you draw the line for who is “enabled” to shelter ? Should older people really expect younger people to expose themselves to the virus, or should younger people have a choice, is it possible to keep an economy going when older management are isolated? Could you even oblige people over a certain age to isolate, on the ground of what it would cost others otherwise ? These questions and similar are fraught, and I don’t have the answers .
I’m sorry. I guess it is asking to much of young people to have expected them consider not taking a Spring break this year, or similar. Those would be terribly inconvenient, but also would have deprived them of an important right. Sadly for them, by doing those things, they increased the spread, and that will cause more harm to economy in the long run, so in the end they hurt themselves, but hey, you are only young once, and you’ve got to party while you can.
As for the various forecasts, yes, you can find people with a wide variety of opinions. Which opinion turns out to be right, we will find out in time. Until you have data that shows otherwise, you have to prepare for the worst, and hope for the best.
I find it incredible that the standard retort from people like you is to point out college kids taking spring break. Apparently, you failed to understand my post. I am referring to gainfully employed people in low risk groups who now are unemployed or have had their businesses shut down. I’m sorry. I guess it’s asking too much to ask those in high risk groups to stay at home and avail themselves of the many services at their disposal which could provide them with whatever they need to shelter in place comfortably. You do not seem to understand that the young adults in the low risk group are the people needed to keep this economy going for older Americans.
It’s not just kids on spring break. It’s kids at the skate park, or wherever. What they don’t seem to realize is that any spread means a longer lockdown, so when they play, it costs everyone money. I run a small business. We are still open, barely, but the longer that people refuse to follow the social distancing guidelines, the stricter the lockdown will have to be, and the longer it will have to be. Thus, when kids are playing at the skate park, they increase the chance that a total lockdown will be required, rather than just social distancing, which will shut me down. They also increase the length of the shutdown, and with every day of lockdown, the chances that I ever re-open gets smaller, in which case the jobs I provide will be lost forever.
Yes, we could just skip the lockdown, but the consequences would be that the epidemic wouldn’t stop until 60-70% of Americans were infected, and all of those would come in April and May. The hospitals would be overwhelmed, and the death toll would be gruesome. 80-200,000 by June is pretty gruesome as it stands, with the lockdown. Without one, the death toll would be in the millions, and that’s Dr. Fauci’s estimate, not mine. I just can’t fathom anyone preferring that alternative.
What is gruesome about 80-200k deaths? There are 350 million people in the country. That number is insignificant. The cost to reduce that number is too great economically.
Wrote this dumbness ” “so what if 5m old and infirm die, we don’t want to be inconvenienced”.”
It isn’t about inconvenience. It’s about unnecessarily shutting down the whole damn economy for no justifiable reason. Throw the damn bodies in the Soylent Green tanks and let’s move on. It’s easy to make more humans.
I don’t think you can expect people to die right after they are tested. Which it looks like you are assuming.
Comparison to flu has been affected by the quarantine. This type quarantine doesn’t happen with flu so the only way to compare the two diseases would be to not quarantine.
Let’s quarantine for the flu next year and see if we can create the same degrees of panic!
I partly agree. Firstly the data we are being given, how it is presented, the intricacy of solutions possible, is very poor.
There are different levels of dealing with this virus.
1 Would be to have locked China down from the rest of the world.
2 Would have been to close own borders early, quarantine new arrivals, test for presence of virus part randomly, ask for people to be cautious.
3 Once the virus is present and expanding, it would have been possible to isolate all groups that were most susceptible, and demand people outside of that take precautions.
All of those involve testing, there is a blur between “acceptable” fatality rates in younger population, it is known western society does not follow demands like this (quite the opposite, including authority). The problem then is that you end up with a sort of managed chaos, people don’t know what benefits or rights they have, gaps appearing in placements here and there as people get ill, etc. So I figure they have just chosen full lockdown/control and standard reply to all as simpler, I don’t think it would have been nescessary if organisation was better, in fact sometimes it looks like the situation was encouraged in that direction, by allowing the virus to spread. Now you have a large part of the population infected, and it is going to cause a lot of disruption either way.
I don’t know, I just shake my head – not at the US in particular, this is going on in most countries.
In the meantime, here in Florida, our super governor Ron DeSantis is setting us up for the worst of both worlds: no stay at home order coupled with a complete collapse of the economy anyway. He’s a short-term hero for the Fox News crowd, but will go down in history as the idiot who finally destroyed the Republican Party in Florida.
Think about it. Suppose the virus is effected by hot weather. DeSantis could order a complete shelter in place order, let the warm weather do its work, watch the virus melt away and claim to be a powerful and visionary leader. He’d be reelected in a heartbeat. But no, he is allowing thousands of people out on the weekends to go shopping in nice, cool air conditioned environments to spread the virus with all the joy of typical unmitigated fools.
There is no indication that the virus is negatively affected by hot weather or high humidity. It continues to spread is the Caribbean, C. America, S. America, and Africa. It also continues to spread in the Middle East and North Africa, so hot dry air doesn’t stop it, either.
The SuperForecasters site says 76% chance of up to 350k US deaths due to C-19 within a year, see here: https://goodjudgment.io/covid/dashboard/
See the below that one ‘optimal’ lockdown for the entire USA would be 34 weeks, that’s 8 months cooped up with your loved ones…
RL
The optimal duration of lockdown – by Tyler Cowen March 31, 2020 at 7:05 pm in Current Affairs Law Medicine – Here is a new AEI paper by Anna Scherbina. I have not read it and am not endorsing (or criticizing) its conclusions, here goes:
We investigate the optimal duration of the COVID-19 suppression policy. We find that absent extensive suppression measures, the economic cost of the virus will total over $9 trillion, which represents 43% of annual GDP. The optimal duration of the suppression policy crucially depends on the policy’s effectiveness in reducing the rate of the virus transmission. We use three different assumptions for the suppression policy effectiveness, measured by the R0 that it can achieve (R0 indicates the number of people an infected person infects on average at the start of the outbreak). Using the assumption that the suppression policy can achieve R0 = 1, we assess that it should be kept in place between 30 and 34 weeks. If suppression can achieve a lower R0 = 0.7, the policy should be in place between 11 and 12 weeks. Finally, for the most optimistic assumption that the suppression policy can achieve an even lower R0 of 0.5, we estimate that it should last between seven and eight weeks. We further show that stopping the suppression policy before six weeks does not produce any meaningful improvements in the pandemic outcome.
I think R0 is high for the first few weeks of lockdown as the virus transmits in households, then drops to much lower.
I’m wondering how the Chinese are managing any outbreak outside Hubei. If there were another Wuhan there we would have heard of it, but I’m still dubious on if the Chinese (or Korean or other) methods are functional in the long term. I just see too much possibility for an epidemic to break out quietly somewhere – at least it is known what to do in reply, depending on country I guess.
BusinessInsider had a good article on what measures they use to suppress a new epidemic in China.
If any country, after passing a first wave of infections, loosens restrictions and has a second wave, then we can expect other countries to keep their restrictions in place longer.
And then what? Does this wipe the virus out? Do we remain under house arrest forever?
I’m guessing… a lot of testing and lesser restrictions until if there is a vaccine or treatment .
Still, if you test everyone with even mild symptoms, then trace back possible infections from that, you aren’t going to catch every route the contagion is taking, so it would be continuous lower background of cases for however long.
This is going to mess with how anything is organised, because there would be either virus ahead or loss of freedom and activity behind. It puts a new set of tools in the hands of those who would like to manage society – an opportunity for trust maybe, or to be done over.
In reply to that previous question on how long US could have 100 000 cases a day with hospitals still working.
In Spain they are about a week ahead of US on the curve, and have around 10k cases a day for a week now, which population wise is around eq. 50k cases a day there. This week intensive care will exceed limits nationwide
So, and assuming roughly same quantity of intensive care units per population, in the US a week or two of over 50k cases per day and intensive care units will be full. Its a rough guess, occupation of intensive care units goes up by about 5% per day in Spain, if cases were higher then higher, and that figure of 5% counts as some leaving ICU now. I guess there would be a certain amount of ICUs that would be able to handle a continuous 10k per day infected there, or say 100k per day in US, I don’t know what that number is.