Topical thread
by rjs
Once again, here are the links to this week’s coronavirus news collections, as posted overnight at Econintersect:
09 Aug 2020 – Coronavirus Disease Weekly News 09August 202009 Aug 2020 – Coronavirus Economic Weekly News 09August 2020
New coronavirus cases in the US were down another 10% this week, and the week’s virus death toll was down by about the same percentage, so my projection that deaths would continue rising another two or three weeks was clearly off the mark….if deaths don’t spike back up, the current wave of the virus will mean a US virus death rate of about 2% of those who test positive…that a big improvement from the 8% to 10% of those who tested positive who were dying early on…it’s hard to say how much of that is due to better care, or simply the big increase in the number who are now being tested and being confirmed positive…it could also be demographics; as more young people have been catching the disease in this recent wave, and their cases tend to be less severe..
The “economic’ news here includes a thread of articles on the failed virus relief negotiations in Congress and Trump’s subsequent executive orders to enact parts of the package anyhow, several articles on Friday’s jobs report, and another batch of articles on school’s plans for this fall, which barely scratches the surface because they’re probably discussing what to do in every school district in America…
One thing to note is that the recent 10% drop in deaths is really just a statistical anomaly. On July 27th Texas had recharacterized 675 old deaths as Covid related. When those dropped out of the 7 day average, the deaths looked to drop by about 100. In reality, deaths have been pretty steady.
Per above comment we should keep in mind that reclassify “old” deaths does distort specific cause mortality analyses but shouldn’t change overall mortality. All “cause of death” views should reference overall mortality to get a clearer understanding of what has been happening. It is pretty easy to understand what the impact of nearly random trauma is, but a disease with very strong age and comorbidities correlations is much less intuitive. These can all get sorted out, but it is very careful work to explain it to people not familiar with the data.
BKsea & Eric377, thanks for your observations…
my note above that Dan copied was just a few comments off the top of my head that i quickly typed to accompany an email notification to my mailing list that those news collections had been published, and was not researched or meant to be a definitive statement (phrasing like “down by about the same percentage” and “it’s hard to say” should have been a clue)
just to be clear, i don’t in anyway claim expertise on this pandemic…even that i am putting together these new collections was somewhat accidental; i had long been doing an environmental newsletter, and began including coronavirus news in that when the initial outbreak began in Wuhan…when the coronavirus news began to overwhelm the environmental news, i split that into two newsletters…and when almost the entirety of my economic newsletter became about coronavirus impacts, i did the same with that, resulting in the two weekly newsletters you see linked above..
I’m no expert in virus either but I do have a couple of decades experience in multi-cause “mortality” modeling. Aircraft engines, not people, but this discussion of age-skewed mortality with strong comorbidities is stunningly similar to the way large engine fleets age and eventually need repair. You might have a new failure cause that dominates removals, but doesn’t drive huge incremental engine failure rate. Failure here means a document reason to remove an engine from service and almost never means that an engine stopped operating while in-flight. Those happen, but very, very rarely.