I’m pretty sure that my connectivity problems are connected to the fact that so many people are at home and online. Periodically I get thrown off, and then unpredictably my service comes on again. Anyway, most of the time I’m online, and I hope that continues.
So for the duration, if every now and then it seems as though my posting pace is a bit off, you’ll know why. At least, that’s my excuse.
As if things weren’t disturbing enough, now we get this news:
Boris Johnson has been moved to intensive care after his coronavirus symptoms worsened, Downing Street have confirmed.
The Prime Minister was admitted to St Thomas’ hospital in Westminster on Sunday after his coronavirus symptoms persisted for 10 days.
After tests and observation, his doctors advised that he be admitted to intensive care around 7pm.
A statement from Number 10 said: “Over the course of this afternoon, the condition of the Prime Minister has worsened and, on the advice of his medical team, he has been moved to the Intensive Care Unit at the hospital.
According to the article, once a person with COVID goes to intensive care, that person’s survival chances are 50/50.
Johnson’s case is upsetting on so many levels, and not just the political ones. One would imagine he has had the best of care (whatever that standard is in the UK). He was in the hospital when his condition worsened. He’s only 55 and has no known previous health problems except overweight. According to the article, he’s 5’9″ and at one point years ago weighed about 234 pounds, but has lost considerable weight in recent years although he remains “slightly overweight.” But slight overweight shouldn’t be a bid risk factor, and he’s also “an avid runner and cycler.”
I fervently hope he recovers.
[Hat tip: commenter “Snow on Pine”]
Oh, the magnanimity of the Chinese government:
After COVID-19 made its way to Italy, decimating the country’s significant elderly population, China told the world it would donate Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to help Italy stop its spread. Reports later indicated that China had actually sold, not donated, the PPE to Italy.
Well, we already knew that – right?
Here’s the new twist:
A senior Trump administration official tells The Spectator that it is much worse than that: China forced Italy to buy back the PPE supply that it gave to China during the initial coronavirus outbreak.
‘Before the virus hit Europe, Italy sent tons of PPE to China to help China protect its own population,’ the administration official explained. ‘China then has sent Italian PPE back to Italy — some of it, not even all of it … and charged them for it.’
Now, these reports from unnamed “senior officials” are always a bit iffy. But I wouldn’t be surprised if this was true.
We do know this:
Much of the supplies and testing kits China has sold to other countries have turned out to be defective. Spain had to return 50,000 quick-testing kits to China after discovering that they were faulty. In some cases, instead of apologizing or fixing the issue, China has blamed its defective equipment on others. China condescendingly told the Netherlands to ‘double-check the instructions’ on its masks, for example, after the Netherlands complained that half of the masks they were sent did not meet safety standards.
And of course, there’s also this:
The official said China’s disinformation campaign delayed the US response by at least a month, as the coronavirus initially seemed to be a regional issue rather than a global one. As China downplayed the outbreak within its borders, nearly half a million people traveled to the US potentially carrying the virus.
It is infuriating, although unsurprising, that China is now trying to make itself out to be Lady Bountiful on top of everything else. And it is doubly and triply infuriating that so many people in the US media and Democratic Party seem to be buying what they’re selling. I don’t just mean that in the metaphorical sense, either. It became clear last fall that the NBA was financially beholden to China and afraid to stand up to that country. But that was just the tip of a huge iceberg. Even the leftist Guardian reported a little over a year ago on the phenomenon:
For decades, Beijing’s approach to shaping its image has been defensive, reactive and largely aimed at a domestic audience. The most visible manifestation of these efforts was the literal disappearance of content inside China: foreign magazines with pages ripped out, or the BBC news flickering to black when it aired stories on sensitive issues such as Tibet, Taiwan or the Tiananmen killings of 1989. Beijing’s crude tools were domestic censorship, official complaints to news organisations’ headquarters and expelling correspondents from China.
But over the past decade or so, China has rolled out a more sophisticated and assertive strategy, which is increasingly aimed at international audiences. China is trying to reshape the global information environment with massive infusions of money – funding paid-for advertorials, sponsored journalistic coverage and heavily massaged positive messages from boosters. While within China the press is increasingly tightly controlled, abroad Beijing has sought to exploit the vulnerabilities of the free press to its advantage.
In its simplest form, this involves paying for Chinese propaganda supplements to appear in dozens of respected international publications such as the Washington Post. The strategy can also take more insidious forms, such as planting content from the state-run radio station, China Radio International (CRI), on to the airwaves of ostensibly independent broadcasters across the world, from Australia to Turkey.
Meanwhile, in the US, lobbyists paid by Chinese-backed institutions are cultivating vocal supporters known as “third-party spokespeople” to deliver Beijing’s message, and working to sway popular perceptions of Chinese rule in Tibet. China is also wooing journalists from around the world with all-expenses-paid tours and, perhaps most ambitiously of all, free graduate degrees in communication, training scores of foreign reporters each year to “tell China’s story well”.
Please read the whole thing.
[NOTE: And don’t forget Joe Biden and China.]
Vermont and New Hampshire are somewhat similar states. But last night I noticed that, so far, they’ve had different experiences with CVID-19. That may even out or otherwise change over time. But right now these are the figures:
Vermont: 543 diagnosed cases and 23 deaths
New Hampshire: 669 diagnosed cases and 9 deaths
One other thing to remember is that New Hampshire has twice the population of Vermont, about 1,359,000 for New Hampshire to about 623,000 for Vermont. That makes the difference between their rates of COVID deaths even more stark, per capita. What’s more, New Hampshire has another factor that would seem to point to more deaths and more cases rather than fewer: larger cities, and more of them.
So, why the difference in rates of disease? It’s not that they’ve differed much in policy surrounding it; in fact, both states instituted much the same interventions at around the same time, and although I’m not 100% sure they were at the same stage of state outbreak back then, I suspect they were and it was early.
So I don’t have an answer. It’s not age; both states have quite similar percentages of people over 65: 18.1% for NH and 19.4% for Vermont. Vermont seems to have a lot of struggles with its health care system in rural areas:
…the health care systems in rural areas of Vermont have had financial trouble in recent years. Six of Vermont’s 14 hospitals lost revenue in fiscal year 2019, as financial pressures have caused rural hospitals across the country to close.
But New Hampshire’s rural hospitals aren’t in such great shape either.
Not only that, but New Hampshire has a lot of people in the southern tier who commute (or used to commute) to Massachusetts (particularly Boston) for work every day, and that may be the source of many of its cases. That’s not the situation in Vermont, which is directly over a much smaller and less populous part of western Massachusetts. So once again, you’d expect Vermont to have fewer cases and deaths per capita rather than more, compared to New Hampshire.
The only clue I’ve gotten as to why Vermont has more far deaths per capita than New Hampshire is that it has had outbreaks in 8 nursing homes and senior facilities (see also this). That’s a very vulnerable population, and although I can’t tell how many of Vermont’s deaths have occurred in such settings, it may be substantial.
That’s what happened in Washington state as well – an early outbreak in a nursing home that carried a lot of people off. New Hampshire isn’t talking too much about its own facilities and COVID, but my guess is they haven’t had anything like the magnitude of the problem that Vermont’s facilities have had.
This may point to the influence of chance: where a cluster happens to begin and the toll it can take depending on demographics and previous health of the victims. This can happen on a small level such as a county or state, or a larger one such as a nation.
This is a change of pace from you-know-what.
I’m not saying it’s a pleasant change of pace. But it’s certainly a weird one:
If you want to know more about how they do it, see this.
Modeling can analyze data about complex systems and make predictions. But the predictive value of modeling is hampered by the fact that models are only as good as the assumptions and statistics behind them.
Models have become ubiquitous in government planning and policy-setting. But that carries built-in dangers connected with the inherent problems with models and the predictions based on them, particularly if the policies recommended are far-sweeping and damaging in themselves.
The more catastrophic the prediction, the more likely a government or a populace is to become afraid, and to justify large-scale interventions that can negatively impact liberty, the economy, and quality of life in general. And all for what? To avert a catastrophe that never would have happened in the first place? A lot of people – even those who are generally science-oriented – have come to distrust the models and consider them deeply flawed or even deceptive, an excuse for government to clamp its hand ever more tightly around us.
If a government doesn’t follow the modelers’ suggestions about AGW, for example, and yet the catastrophe doesn’t appear when predicted, the forecasts are often just pushed into the future. If a government does follow the modeler’s suggestions and nothing catastrophic happens, those who advocated the draconian interventions can claim, “See, if you hadn’t listened to us it would have been absolutely terrible, just as we predicted. Now you must always listen to us, because we are correct.”
And yet there’s only one earth. We cannot do a controlled experiment because there is no second planet to act as a control. And although we can try our best to crunch the numbers, how can we know for certain whether the intervention made things better or not, or was necessary at all?
Pandemics are similar in that modeling and predictions are involved. But with pandemics we have more opportunity for checking our work. We can compare different countries and different interventions during the same pandemic, although that can take not just years but a century or more; for example, they’re still trying to decide whether certain cities in the US had interventions in 1918 that made an ultimate difference in their rate of death. After all, it’s not as though all cities in a certain country, or all countries on earth, are the same in terms of a host of factors that might make them more or less susceptible to a particular illness. Researchers have ways of adjusting for those differences. But the methods to do so are far from perfect. And yet we really need to know.
But that’s mostly ex post facto, and enormously consequential decisions must be made in real time. Choosing a model and deciding whether to intervene and how to intervene is very hard. Following advice that features a worst case scenario, just in case, can lead to enormous interventions that hurt a city or country (or world) and may have been unnecessary.
In the olden days, science didn’t have models and people were at the mercy of epidemics that ravaged their countries and sometimes much of the world. But even then, in their desperation they tried to figure out what to do:
Hippocrates and Galen are colossal figures in the history of medicine [offered guidance for plague], rendered in Latin as ‘Cito, Longe, Tarde,’ which translates as ‘Leave quickly, go far away and come back slowly.’…
When the Black Death spread through Italy in late 1347, some ports began turning away ships suspected of coming from infected areas. During March the following year, authorities in Venice became the first to formalise such protective actions against plague, closing the city’s waters to suspect vessels, and subjecting travellers and legitimate ships to 30 days’ isolation. This period was extended to 40 days some years later – hence the term quarantine. Further regulations established remote cemeteries for plague victims who in turn were collected, transported and buried in accordance with defined rules. But these measures were too little, too late. Plague took hold and Venetians died in their tens of thousands…
Other Italian cities tried similar measures. Further inland, in May 1348 the northern city of Pistoia introduced wide-ranging laws affecting many aspects of daily life. Restrictions on imports and exports, travel, market trading and funerals were all brought in, but again to no effect. At least 70% of the population died. But by contrast, another northern city, Milan, avoided a major outbreak. Whether this was due to control measures taken by city authorities, including sealing up three houses (with the occupants inside) after plague was discovered there, is debatable. The Milanese authorities could certainly be firm. From 1350 they decreed that all future plague victims and those nursing them would be isolated in a designated pesthouse built outside the city walls.
I’m grateful for modern science. But unfortunately, we may not be as good as we think we are – and certainly not as good as we would like to be – at predicting the effect of the major interventions we employ in our attempts to control the forces of nature.
A person gets a cough, a fever, fatigue. Ordinarily, that doesn’t engender much alarm. But this year of COVID is different. Almost anyone with those symptoms believes he or she might have it. Depending on the state or city, and depending on the severity of symptoms, many of them manage to secure a test. And the majority of them test negative for COVID.
There are also a lot of people who had similar symptoms earlier this winter and are convinced they had COVID back then. Maybe they did. But maybe they didn’t.
Actually, even now, chances are better that it was actually old-fashioned influenza. Flu can kill, too, but it infects tons of people and kills a very small percentage of them. For the vast majority, flu is a bother and a pain and nothing more.
So far this season (2019-2020), flu has infected many people, almost certainly way more than COVID (which so far appears to have a higher case fatality rate, although exactly how much higher has yet to be determined). Take a look at the CDC page for this year’s flu in the US, and see the kind of numbers I’m talking about. It says 39,000,000 – 55,000,000 cases of flu, 18,000,000 – 26,000,000 doctor visits, 400,000 – 730,000 hospitalizations, and 24,000 – 63,000 deaths.
It adds this:
Because influenza surveillance does not capture all cases of flu that occur in the U.S., CDC provides these estimated ranges to better reflect the larger burden of influenza. These estimates are calculated based on CDC’s weekly influenza surveillance data and are preliminary.
Influenza testing across the United States may be higher than normal at this time of year because of the COVID-19 pandemic. These estimates may partly reflect increases in testing in recent weeks and may be adjusted downward once the season is complete and final data for the 2019/20 season are available.
I wonder whether levels of flu have been going down since all this social distancing began, though. It seems logical to conclude that would be so.
The “this” is that I’ve had a lot of internet trouble today. That always makes me break out into a cold sweat. It seems to have been fixed, but you never know. And right now I – like so many others – am even more dependent on the internet than ever.
The “that” happened last night when I was getting ready for bed. I turned around to do something, and as I did so my arm or hand brushed against a toilet paper roll, only about one-quarter used, that was sitting unsecured on a shelf. Bullseye, right into the toilet.
I almost wept. I definitely cursed.
I see that statement quite regularly these days: “We have destroyed the economy!” And I agree that we’ve dealt it a terrible blow. But a fatal one? Isn’t that as prematurely doom-laden as the “COVID will kill us all!” folks?
I’m as concerned as most people. In fact, one of the particularly terrible things about the current crisis is that it’s a wallop in the gut on so many levels and topics that evoke deep fear and/or anger: health of self and/or loved ones and others, economics and finance, government overreach, politics, social cohesion, press bias, and personal isolation.
But on the economic front – the stock market had already undergone a huge drop right at the beginning, before the government had done much of anything. In many places in the country, businesses were already floundering; people were already not going to restaurants, sports had been canceled as well as concerts and many other gatherings. Even now, portions of the economy are still functioning: groceries stores, pharmacies, and trucking, to take a few examples. But a large part of the economy is shut down and gravely threatened, with many small businesses set to fail.
It’s awful, actually. But how much actually is self-inflicted as a result of what the government has done? How many of these businesses would have continued to function and kept their head above water if state and local governments hadn’t forced shutdowns or shelters-in-place or whatever you want to call all the present edicts forcing us to stay home? More would almost certainly survived than is likely now, but how many? And for how long? What if, without any shutdown, things had gotten much worse in terms of people dying? Would restaurants, for example, have just gone on as before?
I doubt it. But I don’t know; that’s why I couch these things in the form of questions.
And at what point is an economy “destroyed”? Can we not recover? Maybe yes, maybe no, maybe not back to the level we achieved before this happened. How long will it take, and how hard will it be along the way, and how much will change as a result?
Predictions on that seem as iffy as predictions on all the rest. In this post, I’m not even including links to economic prognostications (although feel free to discuss it all in the comments) because I don’t think anyone knows. Previous recessions and depressions and downturns had more to do with fundamental problems or forces within the economy, but this one is self-imposed and/or imposed by a health crisis that is not primarily economic. And it appears to be worldwide, particularly in the developed countries that so far seem to be the ones hardest hit.
I actually think that, in this situation, that much-overused word “unprecedented” is warranted.
…and came across one of those neighborhood freebie papers from about a month ago. You know, the ones that list concerts and meetings, and have ads for restaurants.
Ordinary stuff. Unremarkable.
Except today it seemed like an ancient relic from a lost civilization. Concerts? Meetings? Restaurants where you sit down with people around you, and have a leisurely meal?
I believe all of this will come back. I just don’t know when. And even though it’s only been a few weeks that we’ve been in this isolated state, time’s a funny and elastic thing. It seems longer.
I feel that way even though I know that this is nothing compared to what people have gone through in the past. Hey, tell it to those who endured the Siege of Leningrad, for starters. To them, our current situation would feel like paradise. Internet, cell phones, supermarkets nearly full – what’s the problem?
And yet there is a problem. Part of it is the unknown nature of the wait. Part of it is dealing with cooped up children (I don’t have that problem, but many do). A big part of it is isolation and loneliness, as well as economic stress. Still another part is the fact that it’s self-imposed, and perhaps unnecessary but perhaps necessary and effective – we just don’t know.
And still another part of it is political. I’ve noticed that many of the people I talk to on the phone have increased (or in some cases begun) their casual sniping at Trump; the assumption is that of course he’s stupid and incompetent and perhaps even malevolent. Those of us on the right continue to worry that this will set the stage for more government control in the future, and/or for a loss in 2020. Reading the paper or listening to cable news only fans the flames, so that’s pretty much out (at least for me).
And yet the virtual world is at our fingertips. We can watch concerts and performances online. Movies and TV shows, lectures, documentaries. Take a course. Read the classics. Reread the classics. Watch funny videos about dogs and cats.
It’s not the same as being outside among crowds of people, or traveling. But it’s still a blessing to have.
This got a lot of views, and rightly so:
And here’s a touching moment from an interview with the family:
[NOTE: The music is a song from “Les Misérables”.]
That is, first-person accounts from someone described as having COVID. This one is from a young woman in Brooklyn who writes that her entire family came down with it.
But as I read it, one thing in particular leaped out at me (ignoring the obligatory Trump-dissing). Here’s the passage in question:
I called a pediatrician whose main advice was that one of us, my husband or me, should get tested, “so you know what you’re dealing with.” But what were we dealing with? And how, on March 22, to get tested? Call 311, she said, maybe there was a drive-through still taking walk-ins. I called 311, got routed to someone someplace whose connection was too fuzzy to make out who he was and what he could do. He took my info and then I never heard from him again. I emailed my primary care doctor and was prompted to install an app to take a test. I installed the app, took the test, and then an admin person replied that I probably had the virus, but new guidelines prohibited outpatient testing. Even if we had directions from a pediatrician? My wording grew stronger. A different admin person replied with an electronic shrug.
I read that several times trying to decipher what the author was saying. There is no app that can diagnose COVID – and if there is, please tell us, pronto. All an app can do is ask a list of questions about symptoms, and give a guess as to whether they conform to possible COVID. And that appears to be the foundation on which this entire essay rests: a family has either COVID or the flu, and is miserable and scared.
Even now, in New York, most people who are tested are not found to be positive for COVID. They must be having symptoms of it or they would not be tested. But they don’t have it. Does this woman? I have no idea, but she’s making a lot of assumptions here, as are her editors. And I looked through quite a few of the comments (certainly not all) but didn’t find anyone remarking on the fact that her case was never diagnosed.
Later in the essay she writes (emphasis mine): “There is no doctor to see, no tests to confirm what we already know.”
This is not the first article I’ve read that’s supposed to be by someone with COVID and yet the person never got a diagnosis. Now, I have no doubt it’s both frightening and frustrating to have symptoms that seem to conform to those of the disease and yet to have no access to a test. I have sympathy with that. But with the rate of negative results, and the fact that the symptoms also are consistent with flu, I find it disturbing that people accept a self-diagnosis at face value.
Disturbing, but probably not surprising.