On Cuomo: I wonder whether…

The New Neo Posted on by

…these revelations will dim Andrew Cuomo’s newish luster for the Democrats:

Nursing homes in New York were required to accept people with COVID-19, rather than have them go to other settings with less vulnerable populations. This policy easily could have resulted in a significant increase in the death toll.

What did Cuomo know and when did he know it? Does anyone on the left care?

Cuomo’s star has risen on the left for a couple of reasons, all of them coming down to the fact that the left is desperate for a candidate who can talk in some sort of coherent manner and is not really really old. At 62, Cuomo isn’t actually a spring chicken. But he seems nearly fetal compared to the alternative facing the Democratic Party right now.

The COVID curve: apples vs. oranges

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the many problems with evaluating what’s going on with COVID-19 is that no place on earth is quite like any other place. So one can pick and choose statistics from different areas, depending on what one wishes to prove. And even if a person is trying to be fair and logical, sorting it out is really really hard.

There are a number of articles such as this one claiming lockdowns are irrelevant because the virus seems to follow a similar pattern no matter what is done. There are obvious differences between countries and between states and even between cities, but the patterns of why are not clearly related to social distancing policies.

That doesn’t mean such policies are useless. It simply means we don’t know how important they are, and one of the possibilities is “not very.”

But be very very careful what you choose to compare. Just as an example, to compare Sweden with Michigan (as a recent commenter did) isn’t really a good choice, although it may seem on the surface to be one. After all, Sweden has a population of about 10 million, and so does Michigan. And they’re both kind of cold. And as we know, Sweden has one of the least intrusive social distancing strategies compared to all the other developed countries, and Michigan one of the strictest.

But the two places are very unalike in many ways that matter. Just to take one example, the black population of Sweden is very small (hard to get exact statistics because Sweden doesn’t compile them that way, but here’s a start), whereas the black population of Michigan is large: 13.4% in the state and a whopping 78.6% in the city of Detroit, where most of the COVID cases and deaths are occurring. We already know that for a number of reasons (probably mostly a high number of pre-existing conditions that increase vulnerability), black people are dying in higher percentages from COVID-19 than white people.

And that’s just one difference, but it’s a difference that could make a huge difference.

The population density of Sweden is 64 people per square mile, and for Michigan it’s 177 per square mile. That’s another big difficulty with any attempt to compare Sweden and Michigan.

The better comparison for Sweden is with Norway, which is far more similar – although Swedes and Norwegians might tell you different. You can see that the Swedish death rate per million is 225, whereas in stricter Norway it’s 38. In very strict Michigan, it’s 342. What can we conclude from this about shutdowns and their effectiveness? IMHO, not all that much, although the Sweden/Norway data goes in the direction of indicating they may have some preventive or delaying effect. I think we’ll learn more as time goes on, but I doubt we’ll ever know anywhere near enough to guide us definitively in the future.

Fear is an opportunity for tyranny

The New Neo Posted on by

And ’twas ever thus.

One of the many lessons of the COVID-19 response is how easily public officials embrace tyranny, and how many people accept it because of fear.

I’m afraid of COVID-19. I’m in a relatively high-risk group, and I’m laying very low. I’ll probably lay low for longer than my state tells me to, but that’s my decision. I didn’t like the initial 2-week shutdown, but I thought I understood the reasons – flatten the curve and keep the health care system from being totally overwhelmed – and I knew it would buy us time to learn more about the illness.

Mission accomplished. It’s been far more than two weeks, and the damage from the shutdown itself has gotten to the point that it becomes crystal clear it needs to be removed. The benefits have been less clear, too. There doesn’t seem to be much evidence that shutdowns mattered all that much in the curve of the COVID-19 toll in various states and various countries. We understand more than we did, but although we don’t understand enough, we have to take a few leaps because one thing we do understand (and was clear from the start, actually) is that the shutdown itself is causing tremendous damage. And that damage is not limited to economics; it involves mental and physical health as well.

Almost six weeks ago I wrote this:

So here’s my question for all you epidemiologists and infectious disease experts out there –

Wouldn’t it be better to have only high-risk people stay home? People over 60 and those with pre-existing conditions? That way, if all those at low risk kept mingling, a lot of them would get a mild flu and herd immunity will be achieved fairly quickly, to the benefit of all, without overwhelming the health care system.

I’m not suggesting this as an actual policy right now, but I’m just wondering if my logic is flawed. I suppose the question is how long would it take for it to run its course and achieve sufficient herd immunity, and when would it be safe for us old folks to finally emerge. Also, would there be a lot of deaths among the younger ones in the meantime?

I just don’t see the end game for the current mitigation strategies.

It wasn’t rocket science to question what was happening back then. And that was before the worst of the draconian measures were put in place by governors such as Michigan’s Whitmer, which are not only startlingly strict but seemingly unrelated to any public health goal or logic involving such goals.

What’s going on? People in power like more power, particularly people on the left. Tyrants of all stripes have long used emergency powers to increase their control over the people. Sometimes those emergency powers become semi-permanent or even permanent. It certainly doesn’t surprise me that some governors are trying to stretch it out for as long as possible.

I believe that’s one of the reasons the MSM is trying to stoke fear, and has been doing so from the start. There’s plenty of fear to be had, of course, just from the basic facts of the matter without trying to increase it further. But the MSM is strongly motivated in various ways to do just that: in order to get Trump, to give petty tyrants like Whitmer more reasons to clamp down, and to increase traffic because “if it bleeds it leads.”

The real wild card in all this is how long the people are going to take it. Spring is stirring even in northern climes, and it’s fully flowering further south, and people are ready to burst forth from their own enforced isolation. Some people’s livelihoods depend on it, and a lot people feel their sanity does as well.

And some people are just tired of being told what to do without seeing sufficient reason to obey, when all they’re asking for is the freedom to go about their normal lives – or as near normal as possible, taking precautions to protect the most vulnerable.

[ADDENDUM: See also this.]

Bar songs

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not sure why I decided to do a post on bar songs today. Cabin fever, perhaps?

As you may know, I hardly drink alcohol. And even the shutdown hasn’t gotten me to do much drinking, except for maybe a thimbleful an evening of my favorite brew, Amaretto. And I only drink that because it’s my substitute for dessert.

But the other night the genre of “bar songs” came into my head, and so bar songs it is.

First this one:

And next, of course:

A story-song from Harry Chapin:

I guess this next one isn’t really a bar song. But it’s a drinking song, and I loved it when I was very young:

Joni Mitchell being her unique self:

This is more about alcoholism than bars, but it’s close enough and I like it:

Let’s skip all those numbered bottles of beer on the wall. You’ll be glad we did.

How about this one? (originally a Russian song with completely different lyrics and meaning):

Those were the bar songs that came to mind. But I thought I’d look up a few more, and when I did I found a huge number of country songs about drinking. Huge, huge. I often like country music, but not most of these.

For example, this one is obviously mega-popular because it’s got 68 million views. But it doesn’t do much for me:

Merle Haggard, IMHO better:

Oh hey, why not?:

How unique is COVID-19?

The New Neo Posted on by

A lot of the COVID-19 coverage posits or implies its uniqueness. And of course, every virus is somewhat unique. Is this one that much more unique than others?

It resembles regular seasonal flu in its age distribution of deaths, although it seems to spare the youngest group much more. It may be somewhat more contagious than flu, but flu is very contagious as well, and by a similar mechanism (as far as we know, and we don’t know nearly enough although we don’t lack for speculation). As for the possibility of asymptomatic spread of COVID-19, which is strongly suspected but still unproven as far as I can tell, flu is also supposedly spreadable before symptoms occur, although (as with COVID) we are not 100% sure of that.

“Ah,” you say, “but what about the fact that so many people with COVID never have any symptoms at all?” Well, guess what? Same for flu:

“‘77% of flu infections’ have no symptoms, say experts,” reports ITV News.

The news is based on a large community-based study carried out in England, which found that most people with influenza (“flu”) don’t have symptoms, and even if they do, only a small proportion go to a doctor.

Of course, “flu” is not just one thing, not by a longshot, although it is caused by viruses of a certain type that are related to each other and are different from COVID-19, which is a coronavirus. H1N1 in 2009 killed a much different and younger demographic, as did H1N1 in 1918 (which also was highly contagious and incredibly lethal). Even without those pandemic years, each flu year tends to be at leat somewhat different than the others.

And then there are rare but possible effects of COVID-19 that we’re just starting to learn about, such as the possibility that it can precipitate strokes in young adults. Frightening indeed. But it is not unique in having that effect; several other viruses can increase the risk of stroke even in young people. It’s just not widely known or publicized.

But everything about COVID is being publicized as though it’s uniquely able to cause certain things. Each virus is unique, of course, but some of these supposedly unique characteristics of COVID are not actually so unique.

For example, there’s something called a cytokine storm with COVID-19 that’s been much talked about and is responsible for one of the main ways it can kill. It’s a terrible terrible thing. But when flu kills (including H1N1), the cytokine storm is one of the common ways it kills, also. How many people know that? How many knew that in 2009-2010, when H1N1 was going round – and 80% of its victims were under 65 – that a cytokine storm was the way if killed many of its previously healthy victims?:

…[E]very year, flu carries away perfectly healthy young adults and children, and tens of thousands of people over 65.

How does flu kill, and why does it sometimes kill so quickly?

Doctors who study the body’s immune response say there are three main reasons: co-infection with another germ, usually bacteria such as strep; aggravation of existing conditions such as heart disease and asthma; and a so-called cytokine storm, marked by an overwhelming immune system response to infection…

“In certain individuals there can be a very pronounced immune response that can result in a lot of damage to the cells in your body including the cells in the respiratory tract,” Adalja said.

When a virus is new, like the 1918 strain of H1N1 and the 2009 H1N1 “swine flu”, it usually kills far more people. One theory is that the immune system can become overwhelmed by the never-before-seen invader and sends so many troops to fight it that perfectly healthy tissue in the lungs and other organs gets killed, too.

That article appeared in January of 2018, long before COVID-19 reared its ugly head. I knew something about all of this because I had a very good friend who died that way and another who came within a hair of dying but recovered. But I know that most people weren’t aware, and although the press covered it somewhat, it was subdued.

Now, though, just about everyone who follows the news knows about the cytokine storm. And I suppose that’s a good thing in general. But it’s bad in that many people have the false impression that COVID-19 is unique in this respect.

We don’t know nearly enough about COVID-19, but we’re learning more every day. I doubt we’ll ever know everything we’d like to know, though – just as with flu, which has been studied far longer.

Why does Joe Biden want to be president? (And why did Trump want to be president?)

The New Neo Posted on by

I think that Biden’s desire to be president, which has lasted for more than three decades and apparently was formed much earlier than that, is an example of pure ambition of the personal sort. Obviously, virtually all presidential candidates are ambitious. But we prefer their ambition to come at least partly from something more than the naked desire to be such a powerful person.

This isn’t a question of political partisanship. For example, Obama wanted to be president from an early age, but I think it’s fairly clear why. He was personally ambitious, to be sure. But he also saw a chance to not just be president but to be the first black president, which did mean something. He also is a leftist and has been one for his entire life as far as I can tell. He wanted to move the country in that direction, and thought he was just the person to do it.

And he was.

Trump is also an ambitious man and always has been. But he had already achieved great fame and fortune when he announced his run in 2015. He said – and I believe him – that he ran because he saw things that needed doing, and he wanted to Make American Great Again.

This post is about why Biden is running for president, but I’m going to ask you to make a little side trip into Trump’s history and take a look at this NPR article, written around the time of Trump’s inauguration, and offering quotes from about 30 years of Trump’s on-again-off-again presidential ambitions. For the most part there is a remarkable consistency of theme and motivation there. For example, from a 1988 interview with Oprah [emphasis mine]:

Asked if he’d run for president, Trump said:

“I just probably wouldn’t do it, Oprah. I probably wouldn’t, but I do get tired of seeing what’s happening with this country, and if it got so bad, I would never want to rule it out totally, because I really am tired of seeing what’s happening with this country, how we’re really making other people live like kings, and we’re not.”

More about a presidential run and winning. He even uses his signature “believe me:”

“I think I’d win. I tell you what, I wouldn’t go in to lose. I’ve never gone in to lose in my life. And if I did decide to do it, I think I would be inclined — I would say, I would have a hell of a chance of winning, because I think people — I don’t know how your audience feels, but I think people are tired of seeing the United States ripped off. And I can’t promise you everything, but I can tell you one thing, this country would make one hell of a lot of money from those people that for 25 years have taken advantage. It wouldn’t be the way it’s been, believe me.”

Much more at the link. You don’t have to like Trump or agree with him to see that his basic goals are clear and have barely changed in all these years.

But what does Joe Biden want, and why would he think that he’s the man to do it? Is he running merely to stop Trump? That certainly wasn’t true in his previous bids. To bring a divisive America together? But on that score he offers nothing but intermittent and lukewarm lip service. Not rhetoric, not energy, not unity, not a record of achievement, nothing but the desire to be president. one he’s had since he was a very young man:

When [Biden] first met [future wife] Neilia’s mother, she asked what he wanted to do for a living. Biden informed her he intended to become president of the United States.

Biden had met wife-to-be Neilia when he was 22 years old and married her at 24, so this encounter with his future mother-in-law must have occurred during those years between 22 and 24. That’s how early he had the ambition to be president, and had not only formed the notion but it was firm enough that he was willing to state it to his future in-laws as a solid intention and qualification to marry her daughter.

Now, that’s ambition. But again, to what purpose?

I assume that at any point along the way, Biden could have articulated a convincing reason why he – of all the mediocre career politicians in the US – should become president. But I don’t think that reason ever would have been convincing. It certainly wasn’t convincing to the American public each time he ran:

Until Saturday’s [February 29, 2020] South Carolina primary, Biden had won zero presidential nominating contests across three campaigns and 32 years.

But now he’s the last man standing. At least for the moment.

[ADDENDUM: And remember Ted Kennedy?]

Christopher Steele: somehow it all disappeared

The New Neo Posted on by

Why is this no surprise? [Emphasis mine]:

Christopher Steele told a British court last month that he no longer has documents and other information from his meetings with the main source for his Trump dossier, suggesting that the former British spy has no way of backing up his side in a dispute with the Justice Department’s inspector general (IG), according to a deposition transcript obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Steele also told the court that his communications regarding the dossier, including with Fusion GPS, were “wiped” in December 2016 and January 2017, the transcript shows…

It is unclear if Steele made audio or video recordings of the debriefings with the source, or if the retired spy was referring to written or electronic documents. It is also unclear whether Steele got rid of the information himself, or if it was lost through other means…

The status of the information was revealed during an exchange Steele had on March 18 with Hugh Tomlinson, a lawyer for Petr Aven, German Khan, and Mikhail Fridman, the owners of Alfa Bank.

The three Russian bankers are suing Steele for defamation over a memo in the dossier that accused them of making illicit payments to Vladimir Putin…

The lawyer asked Steele about the existence of the documents and recordings that his attorneys mentioned in their rebuttal to the IG report.

“But none of these documents exist, so they have all been destroyed?” a lawyer asked Steele.

“They no longer exist,” Steele said.

Steele indicated that many other records related to the dossier were deleted, including from a personal email account he used for the Fusion GPS project.

“As I understand your position, you have no contemporaneous notes or emails, save for your notes of interactions with the FBI; is that right?” Tomlinson asked.

“I believe that is true, yes,” Steele replied…

“You have no record of anything, have you?” Tomlinson asked.

“I haven’t got any records relating to the creation of 112,” said Steele.

“Or indeed any of the other memoranda?”

“No, they were wiped in early January 2017.”

More at the link.

One of the many things that’s interesting about this (to me, anyway) is Steele’s use of the passive voice without any prepositional phrase telling who the actor might have been. The records were wiped, as though some magic eraser came down from the sky. The documents no longer exist, having evaporated in a puff of smoke.

Wonderful hoped-for news on Sharon W’s husband

The New Neo Posted on by

In case you missed it, I thought you’d like to see the update commenter “Sharon W” posted yesterday:

I am waiting for the oxygen delivery as my husband will be discharged as soon as I receive the home instructions and I arrive to pick him up. I spoke to a nurse on the floor and she told me to call first as the staff intends to line the hallway in honor of his survival. He gave permission for the hospital to do a video about his case. This is truly a miracle and we are grateful for every prayer and blessing. He only needs some oxygen support and no medications. We are humbled and grateful for this hoped-for outcome.

He’s now home. This is extremely good news.

COVID and smoking (also, a little review of H1N1)

The New Neo Posted on by

It seems counter-intuitive, but it may be that smoking confers some sort of benefit regarding COVID:

French researchers want coronavirus patients to wear nicotine patches to study whether it helps prevent or control the disease.

Their review of more than 480 patients with COVID-19 at a large hospital found about 5% of the people to be daily smokers, according to an article on Qeios. An estimated 25% of the French population smoke daily, the researchers said…

The findings are similar to data from China published last month in the New England Journal of Medicine, AFP reported. Out of 1,000 people infected in China, about 12.6% were smokers compared with about 26% in the general population, according to the news outlet.

On reading that, it occurred to me that older people have significantly lower rates of smoking than younger and middle-aged people. Older people also are more likely to have co-morbidities that have caused them to stop smoking, and they are more likely to be the very serious cases that require hospitalization and ICU care and might lead to death.

However, going to what I think must be the actual study (which I always prefer to do if I can find it, because newspaper reports tend to leave out a lot of important information), I noticed that the researchers did correct for age and for sex. So age is not the reason for the lower rates of smoking found.

There were two groups in the study, inpatients and outpatients. Both were compared for rates of smoking to the average French population (adjusted for age and sex):

Eligible patients were those with a confirmed diagnosis of COVID-19 at the APHP Pitié- Salpêtrière Hospital, Paris, France, either hospitalized in medical wards of medicine, but not in ICUs (inpatients) or having consulted for this infection in the infectious disease department and who did not require hospital care until the end of the acute infectious episode (outpatients).

You can see that two other groups were not studied: asymptomatic patients, and those in the ICU. So the study didn’t deal with the mildest or the most severe cases, but it did compare the rates of smoking in mildly symptomatic and somewhat severe (hospitalized) cases to each other and to the ordinary French population in terms of present smoking behavior. The milder and more severe hospital groups both resembled each other, and both featured a great deal less smoking than the matched population. The inpatients in the study tended to be older and to have more co-morbidities, and the listed co-morbidities for the inpatients seemed significantly lower than I’ve read for other studies: hypertension (41.4%), diabetes (27.7%), obesity (14.4%). This could possibly have some significance for the results.

The researchers also write:

…[T]hese studies included mostly hospitalized patients, and the low rate of current smokers may be related to high rate of patients with comorbidities (smokers having been advised to quit) and thus to COVID-19 severity. This could therefore introduce a confusion bias…

…SARS-CoV2 is known to use the angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptor for cell entry, and there is evidence that nicotine modulates ACE2 expression]which could in turn modulate the nicotinic acetyl choline receptor…

Our findings should be interpreted cautiously and we are aware of its limitations. First, the study was performed in 2020 and the results were compared to data obtained from the French general population’s smoking rate in 2018. However, it is very unlikely that a dramatic decrease in tobacco use may have occurred in France since mid 2018. The SIRs were estimated with the assumption that the studied population who lives in a limited area around a Parisian hospital has the same smoking habits as the general French population. Actually, smoking rates differ across socio-professional categories, and therefore may differ across geographic areas. It should also be noted that in the present study, healthcare workers were over-represented in the outpatient group, due to systematic testing at their work place when they become symptomatic, but not in the inpatient group (data not shown). It is, however, very unlikely that the very low SIRs that were estimated both for the out- and inpatient groups are the result of the study setting. Under or over-reporting of smoking status may also be a concern for studies on smoking habits.

The elimination of ICU patients may be a significant flaw in the study. For example, there’s this:

…[A] study of more than 1,000 patients in China, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that smokers with COVID-19 were more likely to require intensive medical interventions than those who didn’t smoke. In the study, 12.3% of current smokers were admitted to an ICU, were placed on a ventilator or died, as compared with only 4.7% of nonsmokers.

It will be a long time before we understand this disease. I don’t think that makes it so very different from a whole lot of other diseases, either. For example, do really understand why H1N1 killed mostly people under 65? The hypothesis was that older people had been exposed previously to a similar virus, but in an admittedly quick search I can’t find any proof of that. One reason we (the public, that is) are not still puzzling over the details of H1N1 infection is that although the H1N1 virus killed a lot people, it didn’t kill quite as many as feared. And then, a vaccine was developed and has been incorporated into regular flu shots). But this was the toll in the pandemic’s first year:

Few young people had any existing immunity (as detected by antibody response) to the (H1N1)pdm09 virus, but nearly one-third of people over 60 years old had antibodies against this virus, likely from exposure to an older H1N1 virus earlier in their lives. Since the (H1N1)pdm09 virus was very different from circulating H1N1 viruses, vaccination with seasonal flu vaccines offered little cross-protection against (H1N1)pdm09 virus infection. While a monovalent (H1N1)pdm09 vaccine was produced, it was not available in large quantities until late November—after the peak of illness during the second wave had come and gone in the United States. From April 12, 2009 to April 10, 2010, CDC estimated there were 60.8 million cases (range: 43.3-89.3 million), 274,304 hospitalizations (range: 195,086-402,719), and 12,469 deaths (range: 8868-18,306) in the United States due to the (H1N1)pdm09 virus.

Additionally, CDC estimated that 151,700-575,400 people worldwide died from (H1N1)pdm09 virus infection during the first year the virus circulated.** Globally, 80 percent of (H1N1)pdm09 virus-related deaths were estimated to have occurred in people younger than 65 years of age. This differs greatly from typical seasonal influenza epidemics, during which about 70 percent to 90 percent of deaths are estimated to occur in people 65 years and older…

On August 10, 2010, WHO declared an end to the global 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic. However, (H1N1)pdm09 virus continues to circulate as a seasonal flu virus, and cause illness, hospitalization, and deaths worldwide every year.

Also, Obama was president in 2009-2010, which made the press far less likely to criticize our H1N1 response or blow the situation up.

The Getty challenge

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the few good things to have happened during this pandemic is the creativity demonstrated out there among people at large. I love to watch comic videos about the shutdown on YouTube, for example, most of them made by non-professionals who are funnier than most pros.

I’ve already posted a couple of those, and here’s another:

And here’s something I recently discovered: people recreating famous artwork with the objects, humans, and animals at hand. Some are them are pretty funny, too (go to the link and scroll down).

It’s the Getty Museum in LA that has mounted the art challenge (scroll down again). I think my absolute favorite one is this. It’s simplicity itself – except maybe for getting the dog to cooperate.

I’m getting tired of people playing fast and loose with statistics

The New Neo Posted on by

Reading that title, you might say, “Oh yeah, neo? Get used to it, because it will always happen.”

I know, I know. But with this COVID thing, it’s more obvious because nearly everyone is crunching numbers and opining. And that includes me.

I try not to make egregious errors. And I try to go wherever the actual numbers lead me. That’s why this sort of thing makes me gnash my teeth, even if I basically agree with the position of the author:

As we, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, respond to the Wuhan pandemic by hunkering down, whimpering at the thought of society reopening, and searching in vain for a new set of brown trousers to wear with our fashionable face mask, an interesting experiment is underway in Europe. In Sweden, which has done basically nothing at all in response to the virus, the death rate per one million of population remains significantly lower than American states that have instituted the most draconian regulations.

Yes, a few of them. But far from all of them.

Which states have instituted “the most draconian regulations”? I would say that Washington state is way up there on that measure, as is California. The death rate in Sweden is 200 per million as of now. The death rate per million in Washington state is 95 at the moment, and in California it is 37. But it’s not that simple, either, because Michigan is very stringent and is at 299, which is somewhat higher than Sweden. New York is astronomical, but however stringent it might be at present it certainly wasn’t stringent early on. A friend in Ohio tells me that Ohio is strict as well, and I see on that same chart that Ohio is at 56, whereas Florida – not all that strict comparatively speaking – is at 47.

All over the place.

It’s also hard to measure strictness, because there are so many factors involved. I’ve looked at several articles purporting to do that, and haven’t found them all that helpful. Here’s one of the simplest ones. It’s from a month ago – which was an important time for instituting such measures, supposedly – and it lists California, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin as most comprehensive, with Mississippi and Oklahoma as least.

Again, if you look at the death figures for those states, there’s wide variation. I’ve already discussed California, Michigan, Ohio, and Washington. Illinois has a death rate of 122 per million, Indiana is at 106, West Virginia 16, and Wisconsin is 44. Relatively hang-loose Mississippi is at 67 and Oklahoma at 46.

The New York metropolitan area, including parts of urban New Jersey and the suburbs in Connecticut, is one of the very few areas of the country that exceeds Sweden in deaths, and it exceeds it by a lot (1060 for New York state, 431 in Connecticut, and 604 for New Jersey, with the vast bulk of the deaths in the New York metropolitan area). In fact, without the NYC area, the US would have one of the lowest death rates in the developed world.

The only other states that exceed Sweden’s total are Michigan at 299 (mostly Detroit), Louisiana at 343 (mostly New Orleans), and Massachusetts (mostly Boston) at 319, as well as DC at 203 (very similar to Sweden). The urban pattern is clear, and yet there are many US cities that have nowhere near that total – including blue cities, by the way, if you’re tempted to say it’s blue cities that are the culprits.

I’m not saying Sweden shouldn’t be doing what it’s doing. I am watching Sweden with interest, and it may indeed be that similar policies would have been better to have been adopted here in all but the big hotspots. Problem is, we didn’t know in advance what the hotspots would be.

Presently the statistics aren’t pointing with any significant clarity to a pattern that can tell us what is best to do in terms of preventing more deaths, although it is clear that there has already been a great deal of economic damage and hardship as a result of those policies. The damage isn’t limited to economics, either; it almost certainly involves other health costs as well as mental health issues.

[NOTE: I’m not really intent on picking on streiff, who wrote that Red State article I quoted at the beginning. He is by no means the worst offender. It’s something I see just about everywhere, and it grates on me whenever I spot it. I try not to do it myself, but it isn’t easy and perhaps I’m guilty of it at times, too.]

[NOTE II: Also please see the “ADDENDUM” to this post from yesterday, in which I tried to present a clearer view of what the pre-existing-condition statistics involving COVID deaths are all about.]