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.]

All things China

The New Neo Posted on by

I grew up in an era when China was not only considered an enemy, but an unknown country that was rarely visited and from which little information came that filtered down to the American people:

US policy toward China during President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration remained essentially what it had been during the Kennedy and Eisenhower administrations — non-recognition of the People’s Republic of China (P.R.C.), support for Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government and its possession of China’s seat in the United Nations, and a ban on trade and travel to the PRC

So when China finally was opened up, and I heard that over time it would become more capitalistic and free as a result, I had some doubts about the latter in particular. It made some sense that the two would or at least could go together, but it certainly didn’t seem like any sort of inevitability. And, as time has gone on, it’s become more and more apparent that modernization and world trade have given China the tools to oppress its people in more efficient ways. There is less need for violence these days; control is accomplished for the most part through technological means, and Orwell’s telescreen was rather primitive compared to today’s methods.

It is also apparent that China has long been in an intense competition for world opinion and influence, both political and economic. Trump ran in part on challenging that influence, which was thought by his opponents to be one of his more pernicious goals, and one doomed to failure.

Fast forward to the COVID-19 crisis and we have a situation that has only highlighted what was already going on. Now I’m going to provide a few links that are really just the tip of the iceberg.

The media and China.

China’s disinformation campaign.

What’s going on in the South China Sea, and China’s plans.

The virus came here from China earlier than previously known.

And at Ace’s there’s a list of links in this post that you can find if you scroll down a bit and look under the heading “Foreign Affairs, International.”

In which Michael Moore proves his ignorance to be abysmal

The New Neo Posted on by

I never considered Michael Moore to be a mental giant. But I always thought he was a basically intelligent person, and certainly one who’s smart about manipulating facts to make effective propaganda films.

But he seems until recently to have been ignorant of the most basic – and I mean basic – scientific principles, by his own admission:

Moore said that he, like many people, thought electric cars were a good idea, “but I didn’t really think about where is the electricity coming from?”

“I assumed solar panels would last for ever. I didn’t know what went into the making of them,” Moore added, referring to raw materials, including quartz, and the fossil fuels needed to manufacture the panels.

Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me but – WTF?

I’m no engineer nor am I a physicist. But I did take high school physics. And although I have forgotten far more than I remember of that course, it doesn’t even take high school science to understand certain facts about energy that, if memory serves, were well-learned by 6th or at the latest 7th grade.

Rather simply put, energy has to come from somewhere. It isn’t magic. Does Moore not have any curiosity whatsoever? Could he, like, maybe do a search for the answer to a question for which he doesn’t have an answer? But to do that, a person has to be asking the question. A person has to “really think about where is the electricity coming from.” Or maybe just think about it at all.

As I already said, I’m no scientist. But even seven years ago, when I wrote this post, I had encountered what we might call the Michael Moore theory of electric cars. Here’s what I wrote back then:

I am convinced that a certain not-insignificant percentage of people believe that electric cars don’t have any environmental effects at all — that they run on magic or they run on air, and that electricity comes out of the wall socket in some mystical process that doesn’t need to be considered in the equation.

Yes, indeedy.

A day or two ago I was talking to a friend about COVID and when on earth we might be allowed to resume semi-normal lives. She mentioned that some official (I wish I could remember who it was) mentioned that from now on – meaning, indefinitely – airplanes would need to have six feet between passengers. I chuckled and asked how long the person thought airlines could remain economically viable if that continued. After all, it takes a lot of money (and energy) to fly a plane. She seemed startled by the question and had no answer. But it was clear to me that the issue had never even occurred to her. And she’s ordinarily a very intelligent person.

[NOTE: I used to really like reading the blogger Steven den Beste, back when I first discovered blogs. He gave up blogging long ago, and died a few years ago, but some of his work is still online. He dealt with the problem of energy production/conversion/usage in many of his posts. Here’s one I found just now, written in 2002. I don’t have time to reread it at the moment to check it out, but I recall being impressed by a lot of his work back when I first read it.]

A figure we need to know…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is the percentage of COVID-19 deaths that involve very debilitated people in nursing homes.

Some states are releasing those numbers, although even then they tend to not be easily accessible – for example, Minnesota, which Scott Johnson of Powerline writes about here:

One had to stay tuned in to the briefing’s last few minutes for data I can find nowhere else. Of the 160 deaths to date in Minnesota, 113 are associated with long-term residential care.

That’s over two-thirds. And how many of the rest are people who don’t just have one of the listed co-morbidities – some of which are very common – but are people who have many extremely serious health problems although they are not in facilities?

We need to know, in order to evaluate our own risks as states slowly start to open up.

As a person over sixty myself, with one very common pre-existing condition, I live a basically normal life and would like to go back to it ASAP. But if my risks are high, I will desist. I’d like the tools to know, at least statistically speaking, how high my risks might really be. I know that each case and each person is different, and even young healthy people can be killed by this nasty virus, but figures can help gauge relative risk and I want the right to look at them.

If anyone can find overall figures on this, or something that indicates a lot of states are releasing that information and what it is, please let me know. But in the absence of the availability of such information, I can’t help but suspect that the government powers that be fear that if we knew the true figures we might get too sanguine about the whole thing and defy their orders.

I don’t think I would. I’m a naturally cautious person. But I think we all have a right to know at this point, because by now the health authorities have gathered enough information to give us some valid statistics on it.

[ADDENDUM: I was in a hurry when I wrote this post, and I meant to add – but neglected to add – that an even more important figure for us to know would be the death rate and case fatality rate (two different things) for people in each decade of life, and in particular the death rate and case fatality rate for people in each decade of life with each pre-existing condition and also with various combinations of them.

Plus, I’ve written before about another thing I really really want to know. Without it, those charts of pre-existing conditions are meaingless:

Yes, the disease kills a lot of very debilitated extremely elderly people in nursing homes, the same group that has a high death rate every year from “ordinary” seasonal flu. But COVID also seems to kill younger old people in fairly high numbers, and those with rather common pre-existing conditions such as obesity, asthma, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension.

At least, that’s what we’ve been led to believe so far. But it’s not easy to get good statistics. For example (and I’ve mentioned this before) a lot of people over 60 have one or even several of those conditions. Are we just talking about age being the real factor? Are people over 60 with those conditions dying in higher percentages than the frequency of the conditions in the general over-60 population?

For example, in this NY chart helpfully provided by reader “JFM,” it lists co-morbidities and their percentage in each age decade of COVID deaths. Seems helpful, at first glance. But without knowing what percentage of people with COVID (not deaths from COVID, but COVID cases) are in each decade to begin with – and therefore whether those with each co-morbid condition are more likely than people of the same age without it to die of the disease, and without being able to compare those figures to the percentage of people in each age group in the general population who also have that co-morbidity, the statistic is nearly meaningless.

Let’s just take people in their 70s. You can see from the “Fatalities by Age Group” chart that there have been 4070 COVID fatalities in NY who were in that decade of life. That is about 26% of the total fatalities in the state. But it would be helpful to know what percentage of the general NY population is in that age group.

Then, when you go to the chart titled “Top 10 Comorbidities by Age Group,” you can see that in that same decade the number of people dying of COVID who also have hypertension is 2,537. That would be about 62% of the total number of deaths of people in their 70s in NY. Sounds like an awful lot had hypertension, doesn’t it?

After a quick look for figures in the general population for that age group and hypertension, I came up with this, from US figures from 2013-2016:

Percent of noninstitutionalized persons with hypertension (measured high blood pressure and/or taking antihypertensive medication) (2013-2016)

Men aged 65-74: 61.1%
Men aged 75 and over: 67.4%
Women aged 65-74: 67.4%
Women aged 75 and over: 78.7%

See how high those figures are, as well? Based on that, it doesn’t seem to me that the figures for COVID deaths in that age group are higher than in the general population. And those general hypertension figures for people in approximately that age group are for noninstitutionalized people, whereas the COVID death figures include institutionalized people, whom one might imagine would be more likely to have at least one of the listed co-morbidities.

And that’s not even getting into the number of people with other pre-existing conditions as well. The NY chart provides no information on that. I added up all the figures for comorbidities among those in their 70s (quickly; hope I didn’t make an error) and got a figure of 8157, which is approximately twice the number of people in that age group who died of COVID. So obviously a lot of people who died of COVID in NY have more than one pre-existing condition.

This could all be expressed on the chart, because I am assuming the information exists, but that hasn’t been done. And yet that site is one of the very best I’ve seen.]

I’m starting to think that Joe Biden’s VP pick will be Michelle Obama

The New Neo Posted on by

The only limiting factor is whether she’d accept – in other words, whether she wants the job.

And by “Joe Biden’s pick” I mean Biden or whoever is handling him, which in part may be Barack Obama.

I have long completely resisted the idea that Michelle Obama will be the 2020 Democratic nominee, although others have insisted it’s a good possibility. I have never seen her as wanting the job. And I initially thought the Democratic base would be too angry to accept any substitutions. But the VP position under Biden is different. I’m starting to think that she could be talked into it, in order to save the party and her husband’s legacy, and with a promise that she’d be somewhat of a figurehead for her more experienced husband, who would be the one really steering the ship.

I usually reject such convoluted ideas unless they are extremely plausible. But once it became clear that Biden was the candidate the DNC wanted, as the most “electable” without being an outright and declared socialist, and as Biden’s cognitive limitations would become more and more obvious, I started to consider that Michelle might actually decide to save America from both Trump and Biden by becoming Biden’s running mate.

Everyone would know she was the “real” candidate, and Biden a place-holder. She wouldn’t have to compete with any other person except Pence. She has tremendous popularity. She’s a woman (Biden has said it must be a woman) – in fact, she’s a black woman, which is even better. She would double, triple, or quadruple whatever positives Biden gets from his long partnership with Obama. And it doesn’t involve any controversial shenanigans at the convention. Biden, who has the most votes, would be the candidate, and the candidate ordinarily gets to pick his running mate, who is not limited to those who dropped out of the original race.

Obama himself is still popular, and although he’s not able to run for president himself, I don’t think he’s been happy at relinquishing the reins of power. He still has some power with his party, but I will assume it’s a given that he wants more, and with his wife as president (or shadow president) he would have it. His much-touted legacy would be intact. His old advisors could come back and they could reverse whatever Trump has done, and build on it.

It could be a very seductive prospect indeed for Michelle and Barack Obama, and that would go a long way towards explaining why the DNC has been so eager to have Biden as candidate, and why the Democrats and most of the left are still protecting him. I don’t know whether it will happen. But the only wild cards in the mix would be whether Michelle Obama would accept the Biden offer, and whether enough Americans are nostalgic for another Obama go-round that they would vote for the ticket.

Hillary Clinton was going to continue along Obama’s path in 2016, till that plan was cruelly thwarted. But perhaps it was only delayed for four years, and the Democrats have come up with a plan to reinstate an even better version of it.

Sorry to be a downer. But it’s become something I feel is plausible enough that I need to talk about it.

Trump temporarily suspends immigration

The New Neo Posted on by

Some of the details are coming out during his press conference, occurring right now.

I’ve been watching for about fifteen minutes. Trump seems very sharp, and the MSM grandstanding seems somewhat reduced compared to a while back.

In addition, a deal seems to have been reached on small business relief.

There’s so much news happening each day that I can only begin to scratch the surface. But you can talk about whatever you want in the comments here.

The 2020 presidential race: whither Joe Biden

The New Neo Posted on by

Joe Biden continues to be in line to become the Democratic nominee, although I have no idea whether he will actually be the candidate the party officially picks. I continue to blink in disbelief that he ever got as far as he has. But he was a good party player and Obama saw his utility as a VP who would toe the line and bring supposed “experience” to the ticket, and that’s why he’s the Democratic frontrunner today.

Now, though, Biden is 77 years old and fading – fading from a peak that was never all that high in terms of functioning. I’ve said before that even when I was a Democrat I felt he was a mediocre (at best) self-serving blowhard. Now he’s a faded one. But almost everyone I know would vote for him if he happens to become the nominee, because they hate Trump and would vote for literally anyone who opposed him.

So it’s almost futile to try to figure out Biden’s appeal (although I will proceed to try in the remainder of this post), because he doesn’t need to have any appeal at all except for the “D” after his name. The MSM will prop him up, the Party will pretend he’s playing with a full deck, and half (or nearly half?) of America will vote for him.

Biden has always been two things: very ambitious, and what might be called a schmoozer: someone who knows how to talk to people in a friendly way, especially to get what [he] want[s]. Hail fellow well met demeanor, with a core of nastiness underneath. If you look at Biden’s Wiki entry, especially the early years, you may be struck (as I was) by three things.

The first is a lack of academic interest or ability (which in my book does not necessarily mean a person is not intelligent or capable). The second is a tremendous ambition to go into politics and rise very high indeed. And the third is a history of plagiarism. Here are some quotes:

Academically, [in high school] he was a poor student but was considered a natural leader among the students and elected class president during his junior and senior years…

He earned his bachelor’s degree in 1965 from the University of Delaware, with a double major in history and political science, graduating with a class rank of 506 out of 688. He impressed his classmates with his cramming abilities, and played halfback for the Blue Hens freshman football team. In 1964, while on spring break in the Bahamas, he met and began dating Neilia Hunter…He told her he aimed to become a senator by the age of 30 and then president…

During his first year [at Syracuse Law School], Biden was accused of having plagiarized five of 15 pages of a law review article. He said it was inadvertent, because he did not know the proper rules of citation. He was given an F and required to retake a course. This incident was cited in 1987, when plagiarism accusations arose during his first run for president. Biden received his Juris Doctor in 1968, graduating 76th of 85 in his class.

Right from the start you have the themes of affability and ambition, as well as lack of academic interest and abilities and the willingness to cheat (or abysmal ignorance of what the rules were). And yet, here he is and here we are.

One curious point is that Biden is a teetotaler, and for much the same reasons as Trump:

Negative impressions of drinking alcohol in the Biden and Finnegan families and in the neighborhood led Biden to be a non-drinker.

I think having two lifelong non-drinkers running against each other for president is somewhat unusual.

[NOTE: Odd that Biden (or someone handling him) has decided to try to attack Trump for being too soft on China. Only someone who already detests Trump or who literally knows nothing about his attitude towards China would buy that. What’s more, Biden is extraordinarily vulnerable to the same charge coming back at him, and it’s far more likely to stick. Even Peter Beinart at the Atlantic doesn’t think this is a smart move on Biden’s part.]

Will New York be the comeback kid?

The New Neo Posted on by

One opinion in the NY Times:

The very features that make New York attractive to businesses, workers and tourists — Broadway, the subway system, world-class restaurants, and innumerable cultural institutions — were among the hardest-hit in the pandemic. And they will take the longest to come back. Half of the hotels in the city are not operating, and with no reliable forecast for when tourists might return, many may stay shut. Nearly the same portion of the city’s smallest businesses — some 186,000 shops employing fewer than 10 people — could fail, city officials fear.

A lot of people hate New York and would say “good riddance.” I have a much more personal stake – many of my relatives and friends still live there. It’s my home town, although for reasons that remain somewhat mysterious to me I knew in my gut early on that I probably wouldn’t settle there for my adult life.

And yet I still enjoy – enjoyed? – visiting, which I usually do several times a year. I understand why so many people I know still live there. It’s the energy, the availability of almost every world-class cultural thing you might want, and the “if you can make it there you’ll make it anywhere” mentality. Quite a few people from my youth have “made it” there, and from where I sit they’ve led rich full lives loaded with activities (work and play), family, culture, and friends.

Will it continue? The first line of the article is:

It took just a matter of days to shut down New York City, once the coronavirus took hold. Restarting it will take much, much longer.

Well, duhhh. Of course it will. But the question no one can answer is: how long? The article contains this quote:

“I don’t think the New York that we left will be back for some years,” said Gregg Bishop, the commissioner of the city’s small businesses agency. “I don’t know if we’ll ever get it back.”

I don’t know either. And you may not care, but New York is part of this country’s lifeblood and if it falls into some sort of ruin I think you may come to care more.

But here’s my guess. I don’t think anything ever comes back in exactly the same form. So there will be changes, and certainly some businesses will die. But I also believe that the following will happen within the next year: several treatments will be found to be quite effective and this will decrease fear of the disease, more people will become immune (particularly in a city as hard hit as NY) and the disease’s incidence will die down, and a vaccine will be developed (see this for a discussion of the slow pace of the mutation rate and the fact that it is unlikely to impede vaccine production).

And I believe that when that happens there will be huge burst of renewed energy, and New York will be one of the beneficiaries. People will be happy to congregate again, and they will be unafraid – until the next frightening pandemic. If that comes soon, all bets are off. But chances are nothing big will come for quite a while, and perhaps (accept on the “perhaps”) we’ll be more ready.

I’m basing my opinion on what I called – in 2005 – “the forgetting”:

Stranger still is the lack of common knowledge about the 1918-9 influenza epidemic that disrupted most of the world (with the exception of Africa and South America) at the same time WWI was ravaging Western Europe. It was an event medieval or even Biblical in its apocalyptic scope. How many people died worldwide? Estimates vary, but the most conservative state that the death toll was 25 million. Other estimates go much higher, up to 70 million or even 100 million. And, as this transcript from a fascinating PBS documentary on the pandemic relates, “As soon as the dying stopped, the forgetting began.”

“The forgetting;” yes. Virtually forgotten by all but scholars or epidemiologists, although it happened within the lifetime of many people still living today: more US soldiers dead from flu than were killed in WWI, many US cities running out of coffins and burying the dead in mass graves, homeless orphans wandering through the streets, schools and factories closed, wild rumors (“the Germans started it”) and familiar theologic explanations (“it’s a punishment for sin”). Read the links to get an idea of the all-encompassing horror of the thing and then tell me, if you can, why my history courses (and perhaps yours?) failed to even mention it.

Since I wrote that fifteen years ago, we’ve had our memories “refreshed,” as they say in the law biz. But the forgetting still happened, and people and cities not only recovered but stopped talking about it. I grew up among people who had been alive then; my mother was a young child in 1918 and my grandparents and great-aunt and uncle were in their 30s, which was a prime target age for the worst of the 1918 flu. They lived in New York and a large city in New Jersey. And yet, although my mother and grandmother in particular used to talk to me at some length about the past, they never once even mentioned the 1918 flu pandemic. And as I wrote in 2005, I never learned a thing about it in my history courses, either. I don’t think my grandparents literally forgot, but the experience simply was not a focus at all.

I learned about it on my own long ago, however. I had an interest in epidemiology even when I was young, so I became far more familiar with the facts of the 1918 pandemic than most people. Many cities were devastated. Here’s a description of Philadelphia, a major city at the time that was one of the worst off [emphasis mine – and note also the very significant amount of social distancing that was practiced]:

Philadelphia had one of the highest death rates in the country, 4 times higher than Boston. The daily death toll from influenza alone in Philadelphia [population at the time: 1.7 million] would exceed the city’s average weekly death toll from all causes. In a single day, 759 people died from the pandemic alone. In an average week, 485 died from all causes. Within 10 days the city went from 2 deaths and hundreds ill to hundreds dead each day and hundreds of thousands ill. Every hospital bed in 31 hospitals were filled. People who were healthy a couple days ago were fighting for their lives, some dying within a day of contracting influenza. For over three weeks, influenza paralyzed the city. Schools were closed. Public meeting banned. Yet the population continued to get sick. Despite declarations on October 4th and 5th, the peak of pandemic didn’t happen until the week of the 19th when 4,597 died from influenza or pneumonia. Despite the numerous deaths though, many more survived and recovered from the illness.

As influenza spread, so too did fear. People isolated themselves, not speaking to anyone, avoiding crowds, not having anywhere to go but stay at home, where there may be people sick or dead. The rapid rate of death, and the fact there were so many dying, meant the city and its undertakers and morgue couldn’t keep up with dead bodies. The city morgue was designed to hold 36 bodies. It was quickly overrun, with nearly 200 bodies crammed into every available space. Exacerbating the overload, besides the rapid influx of the dead, was the lack of available undertakers and grave diggers. For some families, it was easier for them to dig a grave themselves than wait for someone else.

During the height of the flu the city established 5 additional temporary morgues, but even that wasn’t enough. Bodies piled up in hospitals, on porches, on the streets, and in the home. Rooms, if there were any to spare, were sectioned off when family members couldn’t arrange for or find someone to take care of the body. Without embalming, the bodies began to decay; bodies oozed and blood would flow out. The smell was everywhere. Philadelphians could walk down the street seeing and smelling dozens and dozens of bodies. Death was everywhere.

It seems to me that people were much tougher then (and recall, they were fighting a world war overseas at the same time). They were used to disease. There were no antibiotics. Child mortality was still high. TB took a huge toll. And yet the 1918 flu was absolutely catastrophic, and killed not just the old and young but a huge number of people in the prime of life.

But I think that afterwards, that generation just put it behind them and moved on. By the time I came around, they’d gone through that, World Wars I and II, and the Depression. They were happy to forget about it, or at least not to place the heavy burden of its memory on me and other young people.

And although we’re far less resilient today, I still think that the forgetting will happen as soon as the fear is reduced. People are eager to go back to business as usual, or as close to usual as we can get.

[NOTE: I’m leaving out the political for the purposes of this post, although I believe that a recovery also depends, at the national level, on who is elected in November.]

Are the reports of Kim Jong Un’s illness greatly exaggerated?

The New Neo Posted on by

Hard to say:

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was not seriously ill, two South Korean government sources said on Tuesday (Apr 21), following reports he had undergone a cardiovascular procedure and was now in “grave danger”.

Kim was receiving treatment after undergoing the procedure, a South Korean media report said late on Monday, amid speculation over Kim’s health following his absence from a key anniversary event this month.

The reports about Kim’s health are not true, two South Korean government sources said. The presidential Blue House said there are no unusual signs coming from the North.

Getting reliable news from North Korea isn’t easy. So time will tell, I suppose.

What on earth did de Blasio think would happen…

The New Neo Posted on by

…after a mass prisoner release?

It is “unconscionable” that Rikers Island inmates who were released due to coronavirus concerns are committing new crimes, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Monday.

“I think it’s unconscionable just on a human level that folks were shown mercy and this is what some of them have done,” the mayor said during his morning briefing Monday, which came on the heels of a Post report outlining the issue.

De Blasio said the number of re-offenders remains relatively small and that the city was “buckling down” on monitoring and supervising released prisoners.

But it’s early yet; it’s only been a few weeks.

According to that Post report, a little over 3% have re-offended. Since 1500 were let go, that would mean 45 crimes so far. Since only 300 of the released prisoners had originally been convicted for violent crimes, can we assume that perhaps up to 15% of that group (45 over 300) has already managed to transgress? Hard to say.

I wonder whether leftists in charge of cities and states truly believe their own rhetoric that prisoners are mostly the victims of racism and an evil system rather than just being exploiters (violent or non-violent) of the vulnerable among us. Did de Blasio really think that criminals shown “mercy” would suddenly desist from criminal activity in gratitude? I suppose some do – and some of the released prisoners were old, which also tends to favor a diminution of criminal activity. But obviously there’s going to be a significant number who will taking up their old familiar way of life and – committing crimes.

It has often been remarked during this COVID crisis that leftist governments have been imprisoning non-criminals in their homes (and sometimes arresting them for violations), and at the same time letting criminals out of prison. Indeed.

[NOTE: Also please see this on how the fear aroused by the pandemic has given the left the opportunity to exercise the power they so crave.]