As states start opening up here are some charts to consider.
New Covid-19 Deaths US States
The above chart is not population adjusted.
I made the chart as a spot check to see if new deaths were generally in line with the lead chart.
There are some new states, notably Texas and Florida, but they are not in the front of the pack, and the day-to-day totals are very noisy.
Changes in Deaths Per Million by Country
Three Obvious Standouts
- Singapore
- South Korea
- Japan
What Do They Have in Common?
- Aggressive Early Testing
- Cooperative Society on Social Distancing Rules
- Contract Tracing
The deniers say social distancing does not work and cannot work especially in in high population density cities like New York City and Chicago.
Let’s test that thesis with a look population densities.
Population Densities
Population Densities per Square Kilometer – Countries
- Singapore: 8,337
- South Korea: 515
- Japan: 334
- UK: 267
- Italy: 206
- China 144
- Spain: 98
- United States: 33
- Sweden: 22
Population Densities per Square Kilometer – US Cities
- New York City: 10,431
- San Francisco: 6,659
- Boston: 5.143
- Chicago: 4,582
- Philadelphia: 4,337
- Miami: 4,324
Population Densities of Cities Japan
Tokyo, Japan: 6,158
Yokohama, Japan: 8,534
Osaka, Japan: 5,200
Population Density of South Korea
South Korea is one of the planet’s most densely populated countries with a density of 503 people per square kilometer, or 1,302 people per square mile. Nearly 70% of South Korea’s land area is mostly uninhabitable due to it being mountainous and the population is established in lowland areas, contributing to a density that is higher than average. In 1975, an estimate was made that South Korea’s population density in its cities, each containing at least 50,000 people, was nearly 4,000 on average. As a result of the continued following of the practice to migrate to urban areas, the figure was much higher in the 1980s.
Seoul’s population density was estimated around 17,000 average persons in 1988, an increase of over 3000 when compared with 1980’s population density of nearly 14,000 people every square kilometer. The current density of Seoul is almost twice that of New York City. The density of Busan, the second largest city in the country, was just over 8,500 persons for every square kilometer in 1988, while this figure stood at a little over 7,000 people back in 1980.
Population Density of Singapore
With a population of around 5.7 million people in 2019 and a land area of approximately 720 square kilometers, Singapore was the second most densely populated country in the world, after Monaco.
High Population Density Does Not Necessitate High Covid-19 Deaths
That is the bottom line.
Of course, there is a tradeoff.
Singapore
, South Korea, and Japan all did three things that the US did not do and many in the US still do not want to do.
- Aggressive Early Testing
- Cooperative Society on Social Distancing Rules
- Contact Tracing
1: The US did not do aggressive early testing and it’s too late for that now.
2: The US was late in social distancing and some want to fight it
3: The US did not do contact tracing and may still view that as violation of personal privacy.
Too Late for Early Testing, But Not Overall Testing
Most do want aggressive testing, but despite Trump’s claims, the US is not where we need to be.
However, the number of tests is finally ramping up.
Coupled with spotty social distancing (compared to other countries) Is that enough?
I don’t know, but we are about to find out.
Want To Be More Like Sweden?
For further discussion, please see Want To Be More Like Sweden? What If We Already Are?
Was it Worth It?
I will not address that question because I will not change anyone’s mind.
Importantly, it’s impossible to know what would have happened if the US had not undergone these lockdowns.
But we do know that deaths are way underreported and the US is only as good as it is because of the lockdowns.
Was it worth it? The debate is on.
Mish
Interesting report from Axios: “More than one-in-five people in all five countries say that even after a vaccine is available, they will be less likely to travel by plane, use public transport and eat out at restaurants…”
If I were a sociologist I would be designing a study right now for funding that would track a sample of these people to be launched when a vaccine becomes available.
It seems to me that this may be the intention of about 20% of the population, but that they will not be able to maintain that position for long. Of course there are some people that are antivaxers and will just refuse to be protected, while others may feel that way they will eventually give in and get vaccinated because people who refuse to go back to normal are going to get left out not only socially but economically. There is only so much social distancing and avoiding one can do before they are simply written off by the larger society and shunned. For example at family reunions as certain releatives are left uninvited because they have refused to be vaccinated and parents will not allow their kids to be exposed to people who are intentionally potentially carrying the virus.
If I had to guess I would say you could predict a half life calculation to those that voluntarily remain in social distancing after the end of the threat. Of the 20% or slightly more that say they will still avoid social contact and flying or crowded places half will have given in within the first XYZ number of months, then in a similar time frame half the remaining avoiders will have dropped their opposition, etc.
I might even go on to state as a foundation of the study that the last 6-8% of the population out of the original 20+ would be vindicated but not for the reasons they remain unvaccinated. Once you get to below 10% with no vaccination immunity they will have herd immunity.
That would present a number of interesting sociological questions. And a ready to go study would provide far reaching answers that would demonstrate new information with a scope far beyond just Covid and social distancing. But on I would like to see considered is compulsary vaccination and real consequences for refusal. Herd immunity may be great at avoiding the type of pandemic we are now in, but, as long as there remains a pool of unvaccinated people the virus will continue to survive and eventually will roar back to life as a mutated version in which the majority once again has no immunity. As opposed to compulsary vaccinations which holds the promise of eradicating the disease entirely as we did with smallpox and nearly with polio.
Why do you not mention Taiwan?
Taiwan has the best effort so far the other three doesn’t even come close
Japanese media are praising Taiwan
Everyday
They sent every single case to negative isolation chamber from day one
They started mask factories so everyone has masks
They use contact tracing
If you cannot be safely isolated at home government will send you to subsidize accommodations
They rescued their people from Diamond princess with 1 doctor 3 nurses per passenger in a charter flight
If you are isolated at home you can get your meals delivered and trash taken out
So life was never interrupted during this pandemic
You can get haircuts go to the dentist everyone goes to school
Even baseball games now
And now they are sending masks to rescue the rest of the world
Hold off on that stat until the antibody tests of a large segment of the pop. have been conducted and publshed .
The real question here is what is the end game? Living in a police state while we wait for the miracle cure does not seem practical in the long run. Even when, or if, there is a vaccine, I won’t get it for a year or so after mass inoculation begins. Something rushed to market this fast may present bigger problems than the 2 or 3% chance I have of dying of CV. I’m in a higher risk age group. On the other hand, my risk of death from other causes in the next 2 years is about 3.5%. I only have so many years left and lockdown is wasting my time at the good end.
How long can economic activity be shut down without a major economic collapse that can’t be papered over with new money? I see a lot of schadenfreude here, with too many people happily ready to yell “I told you so!” when the whole thing goes to shit. Frankly, I’m getting ready to retire, and would not like my life’s savings wiped away in a credit collapse. It sucks to get old, but is sucks much worse to be old and poor.
Further, I have young grandchildren. They are only young once and I’m not waiting months or years to see them. I am no great risk to them, though they present some risk to me. I refuse to hide in my house like a scared little bunny afraid of the big bad covid. When I look at the risk of missing a couple years of their lives as opposed to a few percent chance of CV death, there is no question in my mind.
I don’t think CV is stoppable in any case. So, if we keep the medical system from being overloaded we will get to the end of the pandemic with minimum deaths. But, keeping the clamps on hard and chasing people around with contact tracing with no guarantee of an end is just economic and social suicide. CV is a bad disease, and people are going to die. Not our fault. Ruining the survivors’ lives because of guilt about it won’t make it any better. But it will make everything else a whole lot worse.
Well said WildBull!
What they are trying to do is “normalize fear” by constantly harping at increasing case numbers and death counts. I also don’t see what the end game is.
But posting on Mish is not going to get you heard where it matters.
You can reach CNN here:
White House here:
CA Governor Newsom here:
Anyone have other links/email addresses?
I have searched high and low for MSNBC but can’t find a contact point for them.
This data seems pretty convincing. What contrary data have you seen and would you please post links to it here?
So I’m trying to get my head wrapped around these various claims. One approach that might help is to see if there is any “excess deaths”.
One of the problems is “excess compared to which year?”. The 2017-18 flu season was a big one and this is the most recent info I can find so it covers the 2017 part: (sorry in advance if the formatting isn’t right)
Stats of the State of New York
Stats of the State of New York
Causes of Death, 2017 Deaths
———————— ——–
Heart Disease 44,092
Cancer 34,956
Accidents 7,687
Chronic Lower Respiratory Diseases 7,258
Stroke 6,264
Flu/Pneumonia 4,517
Diabetes 4,176
Alzheimer’s disease 3,521
Hypertension 2,699
Septicemia 2,296
Drug Overdose Deaths 3,921 (listed separately under “mortality”)
So about 120,000 for 2017. We are 4 months into 2020 and I would expect about 1/3rd (40,000). The site only shows 2014-17. All 4 years show about 120,000.
Do you know of any site with 2020 statistics year to date?
Thanks
Okay found it thanks to some help from user dwestall over at wattsupwiththat
Click New York state and then go through weeks 1 to 16 and then get the “Total Deaths” from the bottom right. First 4 months is 39,005
The yearly data on deaths for New York state are here and 2014-17 average about 120,000 a year
So we expect approximately 40,000 deaths in 1/3rd of the year and we have 39,005. Now this doesn’t take seasonal variations into account or other factors but it will be interesting at the end of the year to see.
There were 2 reasons I chose New York state. It is the hardest hit area and if it was going to show anywhere it would show there. I didn’t want to get accused of “rigging the numbers” by including less hard hit areas.
It is sad that using accurate nation wide numbers like you suggest is called “rigging the numbers” by some.
Wouldn’t a better headline and story be ” Excluding NY and NJ, the other more than 90% of the US population only has .14 people per 1000 dying from Covid-19″
More doom porn from Mish.
The areas that are the worst give us a worst case scenario for what could happen elsewhere. The places with low deaths tell us what can be achieved with the best management.
In your part of the country, is the emphasis more on how your state can be more open, or how it can be better managed to reduce cases?
It’s poetic justice this beast is loose in the White House. Maybe some of our leadership will actually lose some of their arrogance and hubris and start wearing masks. Good leadership leads by example.
Miracles only happen in the United States. Full stop.
Nothing a modest bleach injection won’t solve.
Lol!!
I have it on very good authority that COVID-19 is a hoax!!!!
Lol!!!
Another thing the three top performers (Singapore, South Korea and Japan) have in common is that they have a lot of fish in their diet. This would tend to keep their vitamin D well above deficient status. Low vitamin D has been shown to correlate well with Covid death, and normal vitamin D levels (in the blood) correlates well with minor symptoms for those infected.
Months ago, a regular observation was that this virus would hit Asian people the hardest, on the basis of some flawed research on ACE2. The opposite seems to be true, possibly for the reasons you give.
Nice!
Not many obese Asian. American have horrible diets, lost of diabetics and pre diabetics.
!4. Wear masks in public
Went on long hike of 10.5 miles Sunday. MANY people on the trails. I did not wear a mask. Maybe 40% did not wear masks.
Went grocery shopping afterwards. Had to wear a mask. Put it on to cover my mouth loosely but left my nose uncovered. I’m a natural born rebel.
‘I’m not saying we won’t get our hair mussed, but I am saying no more than 2-3 million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks,’ so says advisor to the President, General “Buck” Turgidson
….During McEnany’s press briefing Friday, Associated Press reporter Zeke Miller asked about the coronavirus cases that had infiltrated the White House, which for weeks has implemented temperature checks and virus testing for those close to the president.
“Why should the average American, whose workplace doesn’t have access to these rapid tests, feel comfortable going to work if the White House isn’t even safe?” Miller asked.
“As America reopens safely, the White House is continuing to operate safely,” McEnany said.
It’s a bullshit non-answer because it has to be one
There always seem to be a number of reporters in the White House briefing room and i notice that Associated Press reporter Zeke Miller was there to ask the question he posed. Obviously, Miller seems to feel comfortable enough to go to work.
I was watching the KTLA Morning “News” on Saturday and they had a segment called the 8:38 stretch. A camera showed people in the news room and one woman did a cartwheel. She wasn’t wearing a mask and when she finished her cartwheel she passed a co-worker wearing a mask at a non social distance compliance.
People can’t sit home and watch TV unless someone is working.
Grocery stores here are open. I haven’t seen any stories on the local news saying that grocery store workers are dying in droves. However, it was reported that half the deaths in California have been in nursing homes.
L.A. County has some 10 million people and the number of reported cases is only in the low tens of thousands.
It seems many people are breathing some relief, and I’m not sure why. An epidemic curve has a relatively predictable upslope and once the peak is reached, the back slope can also be predicted. We have robust data from the outbreaks in China and Italy, that shows the backside of the mortality curve declines slowly, with deaths persisting for months. Assuming we have just crested in deaths at 70k, it is possible that we lose another 70,000 people over the next 6 weeks as we come off that peak. That’s what’s going to happen with a lockdown.
As states reopen, and we give the virus more fuel, all bets are off. I understand the reasons for reopening the economy, but I’ve said before, if you don’t solve the biology, the economy won’t recover. https://www.erinbromage.com/post/the-risks-know-them-avoid-them
Exactly. In the UK, lots of criticism of our government now. People criticise empty hospitals and missing ventilators (which have not been needed). But this virus will be back.
“As states reopen, and we give the virus more fuel, all bets are off.”
What states actually closed? Hospitals were never shut down. “Essential” businesses were never shut down. I know the local grocery stores were not shut down or the local Walmart, Target, Lowes, etc. If states were actually closed, the number of new cases and deaths should have dropped like a rock from the date of average incubation after the state shut down.
Locally, traffic has been quite less than normal, but i still saw a lot more cars driving the city streets during work hours, than i would have expected during what is supposed to be a shut down.
More to the point. The corona kill rate is 6%. Used to be 2% .. now its 6%. 1 in 17 people who get the virus will die.
No, 1 in 17 so far who have tested positive for the virus have died.
It is unlikely that even 1 in 100 people who have had the virus have died.
COVID-19 Can Spread 13 Feet, Travel on Shoes https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200414/cdc-covid-19-can-spread-13-feet-travel-on-shoes
Fortunately few of us have 13 feet. And those who have can’t afford shoes.
Welp … you win the internets today! This made me stop; think; laugh.
Throwing around numbers like “2 milllion dead” or “over 1 out of every 1000 people die” is very misleading – if not disingenuous – if we aren’t also told their ages and co-morbidities (which we are not). Were we expecting these people to live forever? Or perhaps more likely, they died a few months sooner than they would have anyway.
Trump’s approval rating among older voters is dropping- is it any wonder why?
Government should protect US from EVERYTHING.
Whatever they don’t “protect us” from (or at least make a half competent effort at), they have no business interfering in how we choose to protect ourselves from, either.
Either way, you still end up with de facto mandated social distancing. Just in the latter case, you do it Freedom-, or Afghan-, style: People maintaining effective-range-of AK distance from eachother, out of self preservation.
For 4,000 years, the historical purposes of government are to maintain order (laws, military), and to maintain the public health (zoning, garbage handling, sewage, food preparation, pollution, etc.) So long as they stick to these, they are within the historical range of government. When they start doing bailouts, and handing out welfare, they are outside the historical range.
It is a lot more deadly than the flu. Anyone who says it is not, does not know what they are talking about…
“ It is a lot more deadly than the flu. Anyone who says it is not, does not know what they are talking about…”
50 million died from the Spanish flu
A disingenuous reply.
Yes; the flu has morphed into a true killer in the past. Very similar to the current pandemic. But context of the original statement is easy to see — a normal year of the flu does not match in comparison to the current pandemic’s results. Dancing around that context with semantics just makes your argument weaker.
I’m not the one making the argument, I’m just pointing out that the one made is factually wrong. There is a reason the argument was not limited to certain flu strains, because it sounds more convincing when you make a categorical statement. Problem is, it is just not true.
Sweden’s death rate is higher than the US and much, much higher than its neighbors, you can keep repeating a false narrative all day long, but it does not make it true..
Since it’s no more deadly than a flu (1 in 1,000 infections), the good news is over 100% of the population of NY and NJ have already had the covid-19 virus. It’s over.
I know you’re joking, but we’ve learned a lot of people are stupid enough to believe you, so maybe you shouldn’t!
the shutdown of the country was NOT worth whatever lives were allegedly saved. And were going to find that out when many of the businesses shut down never reopen.
“And were going to find that out when many of the businesses shut down never reopen.”
I realize that I’m going to be castigated for this, but I have to ask – is this a bad thing? If we had actually followed this prescription during the last financial heart-attack in 2007-2009, wouldn’t we have more resilient businesses that would have taken into account the possibility of this sort of disruption?
I’m not making light of the effects of loss of these businesses on their employees and owners — but from the macro standpoint, were these operations healthy enough to begin with or should they have been shunted aside anyway, allowing room for someone else to provide a better widget/experience/etc.?
No, Japan did not do much testing. See here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-tests-per-thousand-since-100th-case?country=JPN. And there is strong evidence that population density is a key factor. See the UK data: https://twitter.com/excel_wang/status/1254535818804449282; and US data: https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/04/22/there-is-no-empirical-evidence-for-these-lockdowns/. International comparison is always difficult since there are many other confounding factors (including data quality), but within the same country where the socio-demographic and public health policies are similar the relationship between pop density and covid19 is quite clear as above.
Cos the lock downs only occurred after the virus was rampant. Too f’g late. No point comparing shit results to shit results. Look at other nations that did is successfully
“No point comparing shit results to shit results.” No, if it is shit anyway why lockdown which produces shit anyway? It is simply “too late” then lockdown having no/little effect then we should lift lockdown. “Look at other nations that did is successfully” it is far too early to assess this. Swedish scientists think all nations will have similar results eventually anyway.
The question is if starting at a similar point, if lockdowns or other measures have an effect, both immediate and in sum after the pandemic is done with?
The timescale is very important, because contact in big cities is a multiple of rural values. If a virus starts in a big city, as they tend to, within the two weeks to a month for initial casualties to register it will be extensive already. If you reduce R0 on that by lockdown, the effect of the virus will still be extensive. Not so for rural. So it will look like lockdowns are pointless, compared to rural, for big cities, and in a circular kind of logic, this will imply they are even more pointless for rural.
The comparison between asian and western cities is so full of variables that it is hard to draw comparison. If the initial outbreaks in asia were better contained, due to preparedness for example, then the effect on the rate of propagation of the virus will be immense. Basically if you have two people starting individual outbreaks in a city, and you catch one after only a few infections, the result will be half the number eventually infected (that is not pure math but it gives a sense of how important when any measure is actually implemented, and how sensitive the eventual data is to one small act).
So, to transcribe that onto lockdown, distancing, mask wearing, testing and tracing, in a circumstance where the virus is endemic, well I am not even going to try to , except to say that all measures that are tolerable that slow the spread of the virus are worthwhile.
That does not even bring in questions of reinfection or immunity, economic costs,
of perception of excess mortality over timeframe chosen, etc. etc. etc.
So “nothing is obvious” with any of this, and for a lot of it we are speaking only in hindsight and with imperfect information at hand.
Not population density as such but interaction density without mouth covering, especially unrestricted (international) travel.
Mish, I’ve been following you for 10+ years, thanks for the amazing insights.
I have lived in Thailand for 15 years, and am now amazed at how Thailand gets no recognition for how they have controlled the covid situation.
Cases? 50 per milloon
Deaths? 1 per million
Way better than almost any other comparable country, except Taiwan.
Yes and Vietnam and Taiwan. Had plans. Closed down travel, tested, traced. Populations smart enough to understand the danger without ideological derangement and arrogance. Even some whitey countries managed it Australia and NZ.
The Fed’s ought to mandate all companies provide paid sick leave for the duration, as well as making sick employees stay home. It would be nice to see the Fed subsidize the delivery of necessary supplies to those mandated to stay at home and don’t have anyone to shop for them.
States should mandate mask wearing in public in high population density areas: big city downtowns, stores, factories and offices. Couple that with decent sanitation procedures and open up. It’s not rocket science. But we’re to goddamn stupid to even get that right.
The Northeast US DOES mandate masks in public where social distancing is not possible, such as in stores and sidewalks. Because of the increased use of bike paths, masks SHOULD be used there too. Running tracks at high schools have been closed. Playgrounds are off limits, but town athletic fields are OK to use as long as 6 ft distancing is maintained. People can still do batting practice and kick the soccer ball, but no one-on-one drills.
Just got note an an LA tennis club is opening up again. You have to go directly to the courts, no clubhouse, each player has to have distinct balls (so players don’t touch the other’s.) Not explicitly stated, but I suppose no both players going to the net at the same time… A SoCal sunbaked open court in summer, has got to be a pretty hostile environment for any virus, as well.
All completely out of the realm of central banking.
What we know about those who died of coronavirus in NJ: Underlying illnesses, race, age
Here’s what we know and what we don’t about the deceased so far:
From the fatality data available, 58% were male and 42% were female, and ranged in age from 20 to 103 years old.
Most of those deceased, or 78%, were 65 and older. Of the data New Jersey collected:
Only 1% of those who died were under 30 years old.
4%, were 30-49 years old.
17%, were 50-64 years old.
33%, were 65-79 years old.
45%, were 80 years old or older.
The leading underlying illness was cardiovascular disease, which was found in 29% of known cases. About 15% had other chronic diseases.
Next is diabetes, in 17% of known cases, followed by 10% of known cases with chronic lung disease.
About 7% of cases had chronic renal disease, 7% neurological disorders, and 6% had cancer.
Exactly. I can’t believe the fear that has been drilled into the souls of people, I can call those 30-somethings “kids” even, who I see wearing masks out of doors and expressing fear re returning to normal. “Was it worth it?” Is a distracting question. The question is how to use the established data to amend the restrictions to something more rational RIGHT NOW. People are just not realizing the effects to our financial structure, things like CMBS that are held everywhere. And….I fear that the amendment to the restrictions is being is partly to force more Fed bailouts and related profiteering.
Children are dying of Covid19, too, but they aren’t counted. Instead their death is attributed to “Pediatric Multisymptom Inflammatory Syndrome”, or to Kawasaki disease. Most children who have “Pediatric Multisymptom Inflammatory Syndrome” will probably recover. Only 5 of 73 in New York have died so far. Yet, Kawasaki disease typically leaves behind permanent damage to the heart, so Covid19 most likely will, as well.
It is worth noting that if you hospitalized with Covid19, you are permanently ineligible to join the Armed Services because it is implied that you will have permanent damage to heart, lung, or other organs.
More kids die of the flu. Although rare, kids can stroke out from the flu. A big contributor to COVID-19 mortality is your own hyperactive immune system.
Early on they were treating this like the flu, and thinking of it as a respiratory infection, which was why they expected to need a lot of ventilators. In recent weeks they have changed course, and now think of it as a disease that, while it enters through the respiratory system, does it’s primary damage to the lining of the blood vessels. Thus, medical treatment is shifting towards anti-inflammatories and anti-coagulants, and away from ventilators. As you mention, they are also giving medications to quiet the cytokine storm.
Thanks for the info, Blurtman, not the first time you’ve made a useful post.
A couple days ago I read in a pre- version of medical journal article that the top indicator for dying from covid (in the US) was obesity. I’d say that was useful information but 1) everyone in the US is obese, right? and 2) the publication didn’t try to correlate degree of obesity with mortality. It’s one thing to have an extra 30 lbs, it’s quite another to tip the scales at 300 lbs. Do you know anything about this?
I have a more recent post on this thread that describes how obesity affects normal breathing. One has to be pretty fat for that to occur. But you can imagine that the pandemic is providing a boon to research initiatives so stay tuned. Exercise, and give your lungs a workout as well as you heart. Don’t smoke anything, even marijuana. Eat it if you must imbibe. Eat well – get rid of carbs.
Most of the best performing countries eat more seafood.
Vitamin D?
…and wear hats
And speak a weird language….
That may be relevant, actually. Covid19 is not really a respiratory disease. It is a primarily a disease that causes inflammation of the blood vessels. Omega 3 fats are a natural anti-inflammatory.
The infection is propagated by mouth emissions and by mouth emissions only. The notion that mouth coverings do not work to decrease propagation is ludicrous.
I’m sure it is then. But I provided a link to the meta study from which I conclude the effect is very limited. As I have said before I would be happy for someone to tell me how I misinterpret the data I provided. Merely saying it is ludicrous does not help. I think if that was ludicrous it would show up clearly in the 22 studies investigated.
Studies that control for one target variable are few and far between on COVID. Just because it would be nice to have informative studies does not mean they exist.
Your study wasn’t even relevant. I looked at it, and it concerned the use of masks as PPE. Yes, we know that masks provide limited protection for the person wearing it, but that isn’t what is being discussed. The question is, if an infected person is wearing a mask, will their ability to give it to others be reduced? As JanNL says, it would be ludicrous to think that sick people can spread the disease as easily while wearing a mask as not wearing one.
Since you have no way to know which person is healthy, and which is an asymptiomatic carrier, the only way to make sure all sick people are wearing a mask is to have all people wear a mask.
If 80% of Americans wore masks, Covid-29 infections would plummet
https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/85315
Spread by fecal-oral as well, which is why washing hands is important too. Not disagreeing about masks.
I can’t imagine using a public bathroom for the next 5 years.
There are only 2 stable outcomes: root it out, R=0, or let it go like wildfire, R>>1.
Root it out: requires a very major concerted effort for 5 weeks or so, subsequently everyone coming in must prove clean (quarantine and testing).
Let go like wildfire: lots of deaths and sequelae, takes a long time because people scared, probably herd immunity in the end.
US and most of Europe seem to tend to the unstable middle, R=1 with ups and downs. Probably takes a very long time with possibly herd immunity in the end.
New Zealand is an example of a country that goes for rooting out.
I suppose you can say the same thing for a nuclear chain reaction: It’s only really stable once you either remove the fuel, or at the end of a runaway……
Doesn’t necessarily mean that managing it in an unstable middle state, can’t be the optimal solution, though….
Sure. Optimal politically? Scientifically? Has anybody done a good cost-benefit analysis yet? It seems that the balance of clamor will rule.
I would much rather be living in New Zealand than Sweden at this point in time.
I also read humidity is a factor in the virus surviving minutes in high humidity vs hours in lower humidity. Please note all 3 nations are islands with higher humidity in warmer months.
There is also evidence the strain in Asia isnt as virulent as the one in Italy and New York. Too many variables in this cold-like virus which seems to mutate like a cold.
I think the talk of different strains with varying outcomes is pure conjecture at best. The genetic variance is too small to have any real effect.
And yet it is taking off in Brazil, an equatorial country with high humidity. Unfortunately, people get out of high humidity areas by going into buildings with humidity and temperature control, and higher densities of people.
+1
In poor (‘ish), equatorial places with warm, great weather and an attendant culture of living outside, say Bali, or much of Africa, perhaps parts of Vietnam; weather serving as a dampener on transmission makes intuitive sense. But in Singapore and Hong Kong, where the Armani armies are stacked high in buildings climate controlled to facilitate wearing three piece wool suits all day without any unsightly sweat nor discomfort, much less much.
“The deniers say social distancing does not work and cannot work especially in in high population density cities like New York City and Chicago. “
Maybe some say that, but the biggest objection flying around these days that I am seeing is that the cure (lock-downs, which is social distancing cubed and therefore not the same thing) is worse than the disease (which is real and nasty but not virulent enough to justify tanking the entire economy and possibly damaging lives for years to come).
So you are offering up a bit of a straw man.
Not a straw man at all.
I am fully aware of the issue.
Read my post on Sweden
Snip:
Was it Worth It?
I will not address that question because I will not change anyone’s mind.
Importantly, it’s impossible to know what would have happened if the US had not undergone these lockdowns.
But we do know that deaths are way underreported and the US is only as good as it is because of the lockdowns.
Was it worth it? The debate is on.
“But we do know that deaths are way underreported”.
You had a lot of kickback in the thread where you first proposed this. But I guess if you keep repeating it, at least some people will believe it…
Fair enough. But the point remains that there are many who feel the opposite, namely that the covid numbers have been way over-reported. Like the pol in Italy a couple of days back. And similar stats are coming out in the US.
“The member of the Forza Italia party slammed the closure of 60% of Italian businesses for 25,000 Chinese-Coronavirus deaths from the floor of the legislature. “It’s not true,” he said. “Don’t use the deaths for rhetoric and terrorism.” According to the National Institute of Health, 96.3% did not die of coronavirus, but of other pathologies stated Sgarbi – which means that only 925 have died from the virus and 24,075 have died of other things claimed Sgarbi, “….the virus was little more than an influenza. Don’t lie! Tell the truth!”
Many links at bottom of this one.
I am not saying the above are right, but I am saying that there are many out there who disagree with Mish’s assertion that Covid has been ‘under-reported.’ And they are not unfounded reservations.
My objection here is that I believe too many people are assuming that the data they are reading is accurate / trustworthy. It is being treated as a medical event only, a scientific conundrum with any political & warfare aspects being glossed over or outright denied. Truth is the first casualty of war, as is often said and always true. Trying to separate Covid19 medical analysis from the geopolitical asymmetric war context really isn’t good enough – at least in my book.
Additionally, too many are so obsessed with Trump that they turn everything into a referendum on him, pro or con, thus viewing the entire CV issue through that confirmation bias lens.
Put another way: there is a titanic struggle underway, but it’s not about Covid19 data, although such data may well be used in the public domain as part of narrative manipulation – which goes back to that first casualty of war business.
Hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, but when a region’s number of deaths skyrocket compared to similar time frames during past years, it seems that something is up, and that something is the coronavirus. While some small percentage of those deaths might be explained by folks not seeking medical treatment for other conditions, that is likely offset, at least in part, by fewer traffic and other accidental deaths. So, the more logical conclusion is that these skyrocketing excess deaths are more likely than not attributable to COVID. And these excess deaths are worldwide – yet folks want to explain this as a coincidental power-grab by politicians? Does that really make any sense other than to the conspiracy minded?
My understanding is that net mortality rates, far from having skyrocketed, are around normal. This is true even in NY, I believe. It’s true in Italy despite the seemingly huge Covid outbreak there. So if you look at the Covid numbers alone, it looks horrific. If you step back and look at total mortality rate, it’s a bit of a nothing-burger. Recent studies in the US, for example, indicate that if you are not in the high-risk population, especially the less than 1% in nursing homes, Covid really is no more than a nasty flu. The one-size-fits-all response has been misguided. It has nothing to do with conspiracy theories.
That said, to regard the huge power grabs being attempted right now as entirely unrelated to the medical situation is, I believe, naive. Whether or not there is any connection with the over-hyping of the early model projections and/or current counting protocols (inflating CV morbidity rates), it is undeniable that many power networks have managed to jump on a political revolution bandwagon in response. That being the case, one has to take the ‘scientific’ data with a grain of salt.
Take Fauci, for example. He oversaw CDC getting patents on all corona tests and has been involved in Big Pharma vaccine development for decades. He’s as big a Big Pharma shill as you can find anywhere. Can you really trust all his ‘facts and figures’ and recommendations? Well, maybe you can, but again, from my pov that is way too naive.
Do I have a conspiracy theory about it all? No, not really, other than the whole thing stinks to high heaven and it feels to me like we are in the opening phase of what could be a protracted, world-wide civil war. It seems to explain much of what is going on. However, it could be entirely wrong. My favorite one right now is optimistic and unlikely but here goes:
In order to take down the bankster / Money Power etc. which has been dominant the past century or so (esp. since 1913), Trump, Putin and Xi have created a master alliance with the aim of decentralising the money power and establishing a bona fide multi-polar world in which each nation or bloc can put their own interests first (the nationalist quotient) whilst also respecting equitable trade practices and abiding by mutual non-aggression practices. To do this they have given the Globalists (for lack of a better term) an historic power grab opportunity which, coinciding with their need to unseat Trump for a variety of reasons not least of which are the upcoming prosecutions, but this grab will prove to be the rope with which they hang themselves (and hopefully some of them in the US actually will hang). So whilst some are trying to use CV lockdowns as a way to crash the existing order so as to set up some sort of totalitarian utopia, others are using it to finally strangle and decapitate a rotten, corrupt world financial system which has had its boot on the neck of ordinary peace and plenty for far too long.
Do I ‘believe’ in this ‘conspiracy theory?’ Not at all.
But I do like it!
(Because it too makes sense of quite a lot that is going down which is otherwise hard to fathom. And also because I haven’t read it anywhere else, so it’s a true original idea which is always fun!)
According to the CDC the deaths for New York City is up 130%, New Jersey 40%. Overall down 2%. Connecticut is down 79%!?
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm (8 May 2020)
Then you have that ~40-60% of deaths in New York City is from nursing homes. Nursing home residents typically have a 6 month life expectancy. Not helped by Governor Cuomo forcing nursing homes to accept Covid patients discharged from hospital.
The flattening the curve idea behind lock-down is that the same amount of people will get infected as without. Except that, with lock-down, nobody would die because there wasn’t enough medical capacity available. So lock-down assumes people will die without access to hospitals. Not that I’ve seen them being anything other than palliative support at present. Obviously eventually they might discover a more effective treatment protocol.
So if you’re not managing lock-down to get hospital capacity as close as possible to “full”, you’re wasting time and wastefully killing the economy. Which is where we’re at. Wastefully killing the economy.
Thanks for that link. Prior to March 28th, the “excess deaths” were consistently about -3000. Suddenly, starting the week of March 28th they turned positive:
Week ending March 28: 3000
Week ending April 4: 14,000
Week ending April 11: 22,000
Week ending April 18: 17,000
Data for weeks following are not compiled yet, but just these four weeks accounted for 53,000 deaths. If the next three weeks averaged 15,000 a week, that would give you an estimate for Covid19 deaths of 98,000, not to far from the official number of 81,000. If you add in the extra 3,000 a week of “pad” the model builds in, that’s another 21,000 deaths, getting to 119,000 deaths.
It looks like the official number is in the ballpark, but slightly low, as you would expect. Obviously there are going to be people who die from Covid that don’t get identified, such as a person who is in a traffic accident due to sudden hypoxia or stroke, or a person who dies at home of unexplained causes where no one knew they had covid (or people in a nursing home, where the management does not want it known that covid is present).
Please present some data to backup your “understanding is that net mortality rates, far from having skyrocketed, are around normal.” and your “belief” that “This is true even in NY, I believe”
Because the vast bulk of data I’ve seen says exactly the opposite. One example.
I missed this query. Will see if I can find out where I read that stuff and report back!
…
Hmm, I saw a couple of articles a short while back with graphs but cannot find them anywhere. And it’s surprisingly difficult to get previous and current gross mortality rate – everything popping up on the CDC Weekly Mortality tables is covid-related and I can’t find the overall figures.
This article is tangential, but deals with numbers issues generally, and I generally don’t trust nearly all the numbers published right now because am treating this as more of a political than a medical crisis. If am right, then the numbers are used to score political points more than to provide accurate data.
This one from an obscure site I visit from time to time to see if it’s really getting colder or not (very hard to know of course, but it’s fun seeing them get snow in Egypt and Israel sometimes) is this guy:
Not only the site, but the author is controversial. A dedicated environmentalist, he has written articles and a book about how most of the Green movement stuff is BS (and he is right). In any case, he has tables he says he got from the CDC site (I couldn’t find them anywhere) which show a more or less typical mortality rate thus far in 2020.
Another tangential point is that CV deaths are being over-counted because of the way coroner and doctor cause of death guidelines from the CDC during the pandemic have encouraged them in two ways to attribute CV as cause of death with or without test evidence because
a) there is a financial incentive for hospitals to report CV cause of death, plus even more if they use ventilators (which may do more harm than good, truth be told) and
b) for whatever reason, they want to maximise the pandemic death count.
This is why the net mortality numbers would be good to see. They are surprisingly hard to get even though you think it would one of the most obvious statistics to be keeping track of.
I’m just taking amateur pot-shots here mainly from general reading – since am retired and quarantining because forced to by local ordinances – and a general pov formed over decades that most of what you read in mainstream publications, esp. govt sites like CDC etc., is disinformation at best. I like Mish’s site because the man thinks for himself – more or less – and puts together provocative arguments backed by data. I might not always trust or agree with his data, but he makes his points well so this is about the only such blog I come to (started during the Brexit days where I found his coverage refreshingly almost objective and numbers-oriented vs raw political invective).
And since Italy was not shown among those charts, this from the NYTimes … “In its first report of the epidemic’s impact on Italy’s mortality rate, covering 86% of the population, ISTAT said that from Feb. 21, when the first COVID-19 deaths occurred, until March 31, nationwide deaths were up 39% compared with the average of the previous five years.”
My replies are not going through to you. Sorry.
I read something very different on Italy only a week or two ago, but cannot find it now.
There are numbers out there proving any point of view you may have. There always are. But I don’t go to NYT for anything any more. It’s an extremist paper these days and no longer a ‘paper of record.’
I hope I’m right – because then less people are dying and we can get back to living again, and you’re wrong – because then we can’t. But if you are right, then you are right and it will soon become very clear as places opening up will face massive upticks in mortality, even though thus far that has not proven the case in Georgia…
Not that it matters, but I am more or less generally assuming that the ‘truth’ is more or less along the lines of the following:
There are several new coronavirus strains this year, some of which are really nasty, liquifying the lungs etc, but about 95%+ of those dying from it have one or more co-morbidities, which means they were most likely about to die this winter anyway. My suspicion is that CV is being used to effect political change and this is a big push not a small one, which means that CV data is part of partisan information war, with both (or all) sides no doubt distorting things in their favour. The debate about quarantining the healthy and collapsing economies versus not is a valid debate which has been barely conducted in mainstream society, which makes me further suspicious. I don’t trust the Trumpians any more than the anti-Trumpians on this. But I do hope the US opens up soon, and successfully so, because otherwise I think the Republic is toast and the entire world will do much worse without it and we will rapidly devolve into some sort of world-wide totalitarian CCP model of governance. So I hope this doesn’t happen.
Here’s something more recent. It doesn’t again give comparative mortality rates, but at least in Hamburg, a major German city, a chief medical practitioner – actually the Head of Forensic Pathology there – has determined through autopsies that every single death had co-morbidity factor or was heavy smoker or obese. This doesn’t prove anything necessarily, but it does indicate a strong likelihood that overall death rates are little changed from CV infections in a population – at least if Hamburg is anything to go by.
And this doctor agrees with me: what’s going on has more to do with politics than medicine. (Which is the case with the climate issue as well of course.) So in a way, arguing about the medical facts, or basing arguments on them, is going down a false piste.
It seems when I post a twitter link it doesn’t show. Andrew Bostom is the poster’s feed name.
China alone represents an enormous undercounting. Tens of thousands at a minimum, but a six figure number is just as likely.
Or are you refusing to look at global totals and cherry picking certain regions instead?
But to make it clear I will add that to my post
RE: “but about 95%+ of those dying from it have one or more co-morbidities, which means they were most likely about to die this winter anyway.”
LOL! With that kind of non-sequitur reasoning at your disposal I can understand how you can convince yourself of just about anything! But you can’t convince me, and others …
I also chuckle when you (1) say you can no longer find the information you base your positions on (2) say “the numbers issues generally, and I generally don’t trust nearly all the numbers published right now” and then go right ahead and introduce your own, always from some source considered “trustworthy” because you want to believe it and because it’s “controversial” / outside the mainstream. I think you (correct me if it was someone else) even posted stuff from that Judy Mikovits the other day, for crying out loud!
Look, I can be just as much a conspiracy theorist as the next one (just ask my friends) e.g. I believe that Fauci supported policy-wise and financially “enhancement of function” research at the Wuhan lab, that the lab did make “modification” to some natural virus, that most likely through some kind of accident it escaped the lab, and that at some point the well-known “bat lady” of the lab contacted Fauci, after he had been dispensing the “no big problem in the US, only in China” malarkey, and told him “our enhancement research was successful, but it’s OUT, and it’s BAD”
Do I KNOW that? NO .. But I suspect it far more than what I believe is the “wet market” cover story. For the “wet market” story to be real and for the CCP to allow it to re-open a couple months later is either INSANITY or STRATEGY … OR knowing that the “wet market” story was indeed pure cover-up.
Nor have I ever doubted the elation of the “never let a crisis go to waste” crowd … the “how we siphon even MORE out of the Fed, out of the population” crowd.
BUT IMO, denying the reality of the medical crisis, because of all those issues … whether possibilities or realities … is foolishness.
When you are confronted with a new virus you know next to nothing about (except that I believe TPTB knew it was bad) you have to respond as quickly and drastically as possible. But now?
To me the only valid discussion at this point is “How can we plan and prepare to open the economy in a staged and vigilant manner that will provide the most protection to the most vulnerable as well as sensible precautions to all who return to providing/consuming goods and services?” Based on the delayed and chaotic US response so far (I give Trump credit for quick action on travel from China, after that he’s focused on himself/re-election way too much) the odds of that being successful don’t look good to me.
I desperately hope I am wrong … but friends who work in hospitals have told me they don’t think so …
“To me the only valid discussion at this point is “How can we plan and prepare to open the economy in a staged and vigilant manner that will provide the most protection to the most vulnerable as well as sensible precautions to all who return to providing/consuming goods and services?” Based on the delayed and chaotic US response so far (I give Trump credit for quick action on travel from China, after that he’s focused on himself/re-election way too much) the odds of that being successful don’t look good to me.
I desperately hope I am wrong … but friends who work in hospitals have told me they don’t think so …”
Well said.
Again, not the mortality rate numbers I was looking for yesterday, but this is similar in that the beast might not be as ferocious as many now believe:
A quick, succinct presentation about two recent studies showing IR (Infection Rate) at around 0.1 – 0.2%, which puts it way under the pandemic threshold, and means we need to stop destroying our economies now to prevent irreversible damage.
Do you know when that video was done? I ask because it’s either fairly old, or the presenter doesn’t realize that the Stanford study was widely criticized for its methodological flaws including 2 of the most serious (1) the sampling was anything but random, basically asking for people who wanted to be tested in a Facebook ad! (2) the antibody tests used were so poor in their sensitivity and specificity (~90% at best) that the researchers themselves acknowledged that the range of possible error took their “infected” count as low as ZERO
The 2nd problem also afflicted the other study … only much more recently have antibody tests appeared with much higher sensitivity and specificity but so far I’ve seen no reports of studies that have used those tests.
Because you research these things pretty thoroughly, I have to believe that you also are ware that both of these studies have been widely dismissed as “not such a nice try … try again”
There is even a more damning report about how the wife of one of the researchers advertised the testing and it also mentions the suspect tests that both studies used.
You correctly identified three of the four significant differences in Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. The one you missed was the wearing of face masks in public.
I favour all the three measures mish mentions, but facemasks appear not to do much if anything. At least I have not found scientific publications yet that show a real and tangible effect. But if you have a solid study I would love to see it.
especially when so many of us pull it down below our noses or pull it below our chins until/if some store employee tells us we have to pull it back up. [lol]
Indeed. The 22 studies that I’ve seen analysed together point toward an average odd ratio of 0.1, i.e. 10% less chance to catch the virus than without mask. But that is among health care professionals, in health care settings. I expect less effect among the public and in open spaces. Perhaps I misinterpret the table though: https://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/2765801/%5BXSLTImagePath%5D
They have an effect, it is relative to how often other forms of transmission occur to reach a conclusion of if they are worthwhile. For example, if people catch the virus by just looking at each other, wearing masks to stop respiratory transmission is probably not going to be worthwhile. There are not many full and controlled studies in a civilian setting, probably because they cannot get one large enough population wearing masks properly and one not, in a similar setting, because all would have to wear masks in one group to note a greater effect (or not). Even where whole countries wear masks and note a difference, there are usually other factors coming into play as well (other restrictions, change of public mood etc.).
This has an overview
and personally I’d be happier if the person in front of me was also wearing a mask, but I would not force them to. Where the question is say on public transport which people must use, the question is more difficult, but in private settings and businesses where we have a choice to disassociate if we don’t like, then that is not as much a problem. I just recommend people wear masks where they are in closer contact or confined spaces in public, it just makes sense with where we are currently at in our knowledge of the virus.
As with most things like this, one has to pay attention to language. The word ‘mask’ seems to have a clear meaning, but it doesn’t. First, not all masks are created equal. Second, they work better or worse depending on fit. Third, for some people they are truly unhealthy because of pre-existing conditions involving immune-system weakness especially in lung complex, or when you have incubated the virus for a while in the throat and it’s reaching critical mass, in which case wearing a mask for a while increases the probability of a deadly storm developing.
There is another danger to wearing masks: they are a form of auto-hypnosis that there is something pervasive and deadly out there over which we have no power, which can kill us blindly, on a whim, or because we stand too close to a family member or person in line, or touch something familiar. This sort of mindset seriously undermines our immune system for one thing, and also promotes a complacent, submissive attitude making us more prone to buy into the sort of brainwashing that is part and parcel of today’s densely populated, information-saturated world. I wear one in my little Pacific coast beach town with only 10 cases and no deaths in 90 degree high-humidity situation (= low risk environment) out of respect for those who believe it protects them. But I take it off as soon as I can because I am a high-risk person for whom wearing a mask is ill-advised and I personally hate living in fear for no good reason. If I were travelling the NYC subway (which I would never do right now), I’d for sure wear a mask, but only a high quality N95 one (which I have, at a cost of $8.00 each bought early February before they became entirely unavailable). Location and context matter. One-size-fits-all guidelines are rarely wise guidelines.
Maybe a reverse barrier would suit some, i.e. fresh air in but outgoing filtered some.
I agree there is a lot of psychology/”psychology” (depending how anyone views the subject) to mask wearing, and that affects our wellbeing. I have a lot of thoughts on this and they aren’t always as negative as you describe (for example masks are already workplace practice in some circumstances and without great implication… through to scuba or skiing if you want accepted examples), but on the other hand the mouth is part of the language of communication, sometimes very subtly so, and to hide that has a profound effect. For example, we are one of few if any creatures to show their teeth when happy, to be seen to do so or not is very important in conversation and understanding. Even how the lips are held to a very subtle degree, is part of what our society and culture work with, is part of any normal understanding between people. In fact wearing a mask could be read as walking around with a hand over your mouth, with all that implies. Deserves to be understood, because if you start changing all this the results might be a kind of loss that no one is able to explain.
Nice reply. On a lighter note, this is what I saw on opening up Twitter:
Odd. Even after all this time, there are still people posting who think that the point of wearing a mask is to protect yourself. The point is that if everyone has a mask, even the asymptiomatic people who don’t realize they have an infection will wear a mask, and the spread will be reduced dramatically.
If you go to a doctors office, or to a hospital, you most likely will not be allowed in unless you wear a mask. Why? The doctors want protection from you. Masks are worn to protect other from you, not to protect you.
I don’t believe that asymptomatic is real. I think it was created to scare everyone who isn’t sick into complying with the orders. Which is why I ignore the orders.
If you look at the scientific studies, you might be surprised. The virus goes through an early stage where all it is doing is replicating and spreading. The viral load (i.e. how much virus you are emitting, and how contagious you are) peaks during that early stage. Once you start showing symptoms, the viral loads are declining, and by the time a person is hospitalized, the viral loads are much lower.
That is also, by the way, why antivirals such as HCQ and remdesivir are more effective when given very early. They work by stopping the replication. Once the virus has replicated and taken over, it’s too late for an anti-viral to do much good. Thus, when the VA gave HCQ to people on respirators, nothing good happened. On the other hand, when they looked at people in Italy who were already taking HCQ for lupus or arthritis, out of 65,000 people, only 20 ever tested positive, and not one even had to go to the hospital. I would bet that a significant number of them would test positive for antibodies though. My guess is that they had the infection, but with the help of early anti-virals, their body defeated it easily, and they never had symptoms.
Masks don’t seem to give the wearer much protection but they DEFINITELY help others. Why else would doctors wear them when treating people?! I suspect that we’ll look back on the mask debate in the same way as we do the “just like flu” debate; ie that the answer is quite clear and why did it take so long to sink in? The question remains though whether societally Americans value others sufficiently to actually do it?
Well, I would have expected that too but the data seems to show otherwise. Also, people on the street would be unlikely to get the same quality masks as doctors. And they’re out in an open space, already at 6 feet distance. So based on the data provided it in the actual scientific publication it seems to me to be pointless to wear facemasks other than to make people feel safer. But as I said, perhaps I’m misinterpreting the data in the tables provided.
Without knowing, I betcha that these countries enjoy significantly better health profiles (including far better diets), plus they all put in place epidemiological response protocols after the last SARS episode, whereas the US, for example, did the opposite, depleting stockpiles, allowing CDC to patent all corona tests (and not have any) and so forth. In any case, as we all now know, healthy people have little to fear from this virus. In the US, there are huge numbers of people walking around with the aid of pharmaceuticals, which ruin their immune system, but help them stay upright in a manner of speaking. Obesity is rampant, whereas in most busy Asian cities, it’s relatively rare.
That whistleblower whose videos were immediately censored has interesting perspective on all this. Dr. Mikovits Plandemic: (https://d.tube/#!/v/ava1anch3/QmUJkyqupMox7875Ms8oHdQGauN9GfT9eMNpkKMiU5ksqb ) Ned Nikolov on twitter is also all over various fraudulent aspects of the whole thing. Although the latter is not a health specialist, the former most certainly is (viruses, AIDS etc.) and has done jail time for bumping up against the institutional status quo including Fauci specifically who she regards as an essentially criminal player. And she really knows her stuff. Nikolov is a smart cookie who developed an original, and provable, climate theory which is somewhere on his Twitter feed, but no doubt he has a website. The point being: our healthcare systems are riddled with corruption, serious, deep, endemic corruption. Which is another reason not to blindly trust any of the official CV19 stats flying around.
A note about masks: acc to Mikovits, some people really cannot wear them, they will immediately increase infection (people with COPD etc.). But also those who are about to develop a storm inside, if they wear a mask, are essentially increasing the likelihood of it lifting off compared to breathing in fresh air each time – recirculating virus-laden air is not helpful.
This thing has been handled all wrong, basically. At risk people should lay low and in homes strict disinfectant protocols etc., but the young and healthy should be out and about. As Mish rightly points out, there is no way to know one way or another. There never is. But if the lockdown phase doesn’t end soon, the socio-political-economical damage will dwarf anything the virus might have been capable of doing even if the initial (clearly wrong) stories were true.
Americans certainly are unhealthy along many metrics. But countering that, it is also younger than many other developed countries. In Japan, even the “kids” are in high risk age groups.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.13553.pdf
South Korea may be about to lose control again. Worse case happened for them. Gay nightclub super spreader event. Being gay is still very taboo there. The contact tracing will be tough. I wish them the best.
I have just about quit talking about this to the nay sayers in my circle. I just stay away from them and wait. They just opened churches back up and our daily growth has been increasing for the last 3 weeks. Hope is not a strategy.
2,000,000 dead is a lowball estimate. The number of permanently maimed will be in the 10s of millions.
Prepare for a second much less stable shutdown.
Ha ha ha. Thanks for the comedy. With only 280k dead so far, you are an order of magnitude off with the CV19 season drawing to a close. There has to be a CV19 end date each year, just as with the flu, which runs from Oct 1 to May 31.
But even if there are 2 million dead, that’s nothing against 7.5 BILLION world population.
We still have no idea how many are dead in China and some other countries seem to be uninterested in counting their dead, particularly in slums.
And that is not going to change.
Why do you assume their is an end date. There is no end date to the common cold viruses, which include coronavirus strains, no end to the ‘flu, no end to herpes.
Of course there has to be an end date. It’s never going to be eradicated and it’s always going to be with us in some form or another. There are going to be mutations, just as with the flu, which means there will be probably be different vaccines that apply to different variations and like the flu again, some variations will be more prevalent in a certain year than others.
I was talking about just the US. The world will be a much bigger number.
We have thrown the kitchen sink at social distancing and closing the US down and what was the outcome? We stopped the growth. We didn’t take the number down excluding New York. The curve just flattened. Now everything is opening back up.
Look at the meat packing plants and prisons. If people get in close quarters again they will get infected. Daily contacts is rising and with it the numbers.
Remember China destroyed their economy to stop this. They understood what it was.
What does testing accomplish if someone is not exhibiting CV19 possible symptoms? If you test clear at one point, why couldn’t you pick up CV19 10 minutes later? Are you supposed to get tested daily?
When they test someone you infect they might be able to trace it back to you.
You can’t know what you don’t measure. You test as many people as you can and pull them off the streets/work. That reduces further contamination vectors. Keep doing it, and less people would pick up the virus “10 minutes later” from the pool of infected who’ve been identified as such.
This only makes sense when you believe only a handful of people have brought a brand new disease into your population. So you try to isolate it ASAP. Once it’s spreading throughout – so-called ‘community infection’ – then the best thing is to keep high-risk people away as much as possible, and let the rest of the population duke it out with the virus until collectively we win.
The same thing happens in the plant kingdom. Many plants are willing to allow about 10% of their foliage or population be consumed by predators. But if it goes too far, they fiddle around with changing their chemical composition and/or summoning different insects with scent-based signals until they find out what works. Then they transmit that information through fungal/neural networks in the soil so that their peers rapidly know the right chemicals or signals to emit, and ‘bob’s your uncle:’ herd immunity.
Believing that we can use cute tricks or simple devices like masks to prevent viral spread is hubris. But people get attached to such ideas because they are easy to formulate and process. And that’s how we got here: in order to prevent deaths which happen every year like clockwork since the dawn of time, we have allowed ourselves to be persuaded that a complete collapse of our political and economic reality is justified.
What are we ACTUALLY more afraid of? Death by virus or having to admit that we have been played?
Not sure I understand who ‘played us”. China warned the WHO and quarantined a large industrial hub and was building temporary hospitals. If you mean our government, I agree they tried to play us. Masks and other PPE devices work, that’s a factual statement. Testing/measuring the spread of a pathogen in a population is a necessity in quantifying the problem and developing a response to it. It is likely, but not a given, that the human race will develop herd immunity to this disease. The issue at hand is that the human life cost would be too high and can be lessened by social distancing, tracing and testing.
Sounds like you’re a proponent of strong privacy laws, something which European countries have and the US does not. I agree with you on that front. Let’s vote for those who support that view.
The ‘being played’ aspect is that the responses thus far – especially in rich western democracies – are skewed in order to effect political outcomes which are largely hidden – or at least not discussed overtly – whereas most of the discussion is about how dangerous the virus is and arguments back and forth about that.
A more specific example is how Fauci was telling people as late as February not to wear masks, whereas there is considerable evidence that they help. (Either he is ignorant, or he wanted the virus to spread for a while so he would be sure to have a major crisis to manage, a crisis which can finally topple the Republican-led WH and Senate so they can bring about the sort of globalist world order that he is a part of. Or maybe he was right then and everyone advocating mask-wearing is wrong. All sides of the argument have good sources and references to back up their view.)
Masks: of course they have to be the right type of masks – which the West did not have available due to their own inefficiency in giving China almost exclusive manufacture of them, and also China locking down exports until recently and then exporting bad quality when they did – and some people are hurt by wearing them so basically they should stay away from others during the initial infection phases. So perhaps Fauci was telling people not to wear masks because the US didn’t have them to go around, and if he had said that people should wear them, there would have been national panic. In any case, most Trump supporters don’t like masks now and they cite ‘established science’ to justify it. Anything to do with science seems to have pro and con arguments ad infinitum. Science is more of a belief system at this point than a valid discipline, so much is it abused, corrupted and misrepresented in our media-driven world.
I live in Oaxaca, Mexico. It took a few weeks after the shut-downs in early April (after the virus had already spread far and wide from extensive tourist traffic in Jan-March) for people here to be able to wear them. I bought my N95s in mid-February to be on the safe side at a time when Amazon was already selling out and delivery wasn’t promised before mid-April to May. But I was probably before most others. In any case, in early April, with beaches and hotels closed, only one in a hundred had a mask to wear, there weren’t any in the farmacias. I did find some one day, for about 10c each, but they are the ones that loop around the ear, have flimsy fabric, and probably do more harm than good. And to add a typically surreal / absurd Mexican element: here masks are called ‘covra-bocca’ which means ‘mouth-coverer;’ consequently, more than half the people here working in shops still open and wearing masks were doing so whilst letting their noses stick out, obviously, obviating any help the masks may have been contributing to reducing infection rate! (And more seriously, since we live in a very hot, humid climate, as soon as you get the northerners from US and Europe to leave, it will have petered out very quickly on its own, but of course this has never been discussed.)
I think I mentioned in another post that details matter. Not all masks are created equal and yet most arguments just use the word ‘mask’ as if they are. It’s the same with HCQ: HCQ without zinc doesn’t work well as an antiviral therapeutic, though it can work alone as a prophylactic. (But medical authorities have shut down HCQ as prophylactic and encouraged its use only in hospitals.) And once infection has set in, then an antibiotic is needed as well because the infections include bacterial pathogens in the lungs which the HCQ & Zinc won’t deal with. Details matter. Many of the studies showing poor HCQ results were administered a) without zinc and/or b) without antibiotics even though the patients were already far gone with pneumonia, which can be fatal. Maybe that is stupidity on the part of the testers; maybe we are being played.
Lastly, if the world is pushed into a major depression by fear of this virus – as Fauci is in the process of pushing for in the Senate hearing right now this minute – then the damage to peoples’ health and lives will FAR outweigh the damage from the virus which seems to most hurt those who already have co-morbidities and least hurt ordinary people without them. The figure seems to be around 3-6% of those who die from it don’t have co-morbidities. If this is true (one never knows with any figures of course), then this is NOT a major pandemic and we have indeed been played to believing it is one. Yes, it may be a nastier way to go than most typical flu deaths, but numbers-wise – if this 3-6% figure is true – then mathematically it is impossible that it is contributing much more than 3-6% to the typical death rate from infectious diseases. There are a lot of screwy numbers out there which self-contradict. They can’t all be right. That’s another reason why I suspect in many cases ‘we are being played.’ This crisis is being used for purposes far beyond those related solely to ensuring people don’t get sick and die from the latest virus.
PS A generally pro-Trump voice (into organic supplements) who thinks the information about masks has been terrible. He too, though, fails to point out that not all masks are created equal.
So we are going to test 350 million people in the next month or so?
Not 350 million. That’s what the contact tracing is for. Just testing people who have a higher probability of being infected because they have been in contact with someone known to be infected.
Contract tracing sounds good but how is it going to be done? I’m not going to run a tracing app on my phone and I am not going to provide anyone with info on who I have been in contact with short of a court order requiring me to do so. And I know there are many people like me.
You don’t need to test everyone. You do need to test anyone with symptoms, obviously, for purposes of determining a course of treatment. To minimize spread, you need to sample on an ongoing basis a percentage of the population. Testing 1-2 percent of the population a week should give you a handle on the extent of infections. Then, if you identify a hotspot, you increase testing in that area. Thus, if they can test .5-1 million people a day, it should be sufficient to keep the spread under control. They ran 1/2 million tests today, so that is certainly achievable.
Possibly I’m being a jerk here, but I don’t feel good about the government knowing who I had contact with (contact tracing). However, perhaps I misunderstand what it is, can someone here set me straight?
As I understand it, contact tracing is basically mapping where you and your cell phone have been and determining if you and someone with covid were in the same place at the same time. If this was bubonic plague that would perhaps be acceptable but, frankly, covid ain’t that. What worries me is the govt deciding at the next “emergency” that everyone has to be traced. God knows what they’ll do with that information but I’m pretty sure it won’t be good. Or, just as likely, since it’s pretty clear covid is going to be around for a good while, tracing will be done “for the duration” which will never end, of course. It might just become top secret stuff, something like metadata collection of phone calls.
On the other hand, if someone comes down with covid and tells the govt that we were in contact recently, then I’m OK with the govies tracing that down.
As I understand, if you test positive to Covid19, they will ask who you might have exposed in the last few days, and where you have been, and then they will trace down your contacts, and test them. If i test positive, I would be happy to give that information. I would hate to think I infected anyone.
Good info Mish. There’s a typo, No.3 Contract Tracing should be Contact
UK are supposedly going to ramp up contact tracing soon.
Thanks
Fixed
Please identify your source of information for ” Singapore , South Korea, and Japan all did three things that the US did not do and many in the US still do not want to do.
Seriously, everyone knows the Wuhan Virus data is BS. Even doctors have said they are being told to characterize deaths as COVID19 deaths when it does not make sense.
You are truly an Illinoisan….you engage in the kind of calculus that has put IL in the financial shitter.