Brace yourselves: the US is Setting Up a Ghastly “Natural Experiment”
Brace yourselves: the US is setting up a ghastly “natural experiment” – by New Deal democrat
When I began my “Coronavirus Dashboard,” I was hopeful that it would document the slow progress towards turning a bad situation around, and the ultimate tamping down of the pandemic. Surely increasingly intense and overwhelming public pressure would force a critical mass of government officials to do what was necessary?
Now I am not so sure. The number of cases continue to climb at a double-digit exponential rate, if a less aggressive one than earlier in March. But even more infuriating is that the President of the United States is all but advocating for letting the virus run free come Easter Sunday. This has had a marked effect. The march to universal Statewide lockdowns has almost screeched to a halt. Most importantly, GOP governors in the Confederacy and in the High Plains, plus Arizona, have completely put the brakes on any statewide “stay in place” orders.
And even in those States which have taken relatively aggressive efforts at containment, the level of testing, let alone isolation and quarantine of identified cases, is running far below what is necessary. In fact it looks like it is falling further and further behind.
In short, I suspect that my dashboard is instead going to document the catastrophe of a deadly pandemic allowed to get completely out of control.
Earlier this month I documented, almost daily, how the pandemic was spreading at an average 34.6% daily. Last Monday, I projected that rate forward another 15 days, meaning that by April 5 there would be 2,500,000 cases. Here’s what the actual growth looks like so far compared with that projection:
Date. Projection Actual
Mar 22: 36,001 35,224
Mar 23: 48,458. 46,450
Mar 24: 65,224. 55,225
Mar 25: 87,792. 69,197
Mar 26: 118,168. 86,012
Mar 27: 159,054. 104,837
Mar 28: 214,087. 124,686
The actual rate of increase is approximately 24% for each of the last 7 days. On a “less worse” note, the rate is only 22% over the last 5 days. Even more alarming, here are the dates in which the number of cases expanded by 10:
Mar 2 100
Mar 10 1,000
Mar 19 10,000
Mar 28 100,000
Every 8 or 9 days, the number of infections have risen 10-fold. Let’s project that forward:
Apr 6 1 million
Apr 15 10 million
Apr 22 100 million
At this rate, by the end of April, every man, woman, and child in the US would be infected. That won’t happen, if for no other reason than the virus will spread less efficiently once it mainly “spreads” to people who have already recovered and so will have developed antibody immunity to it.
And here is a graph from Kevin Drum, showing that at the rate deaths have been growing in March, by April 26 there will have been *1 million* US deaths from coronavirus:
To be blunt: so far “social distancing” has only slowed down the exponential rate of increase. While the effects of State and region-wide lockdowns aren’t yet apparent, the fact that testing isn’t keeping up means that we are far, far away from South Korea style monitoring. Another two or three weeks of this kind of exponential growth and the pandemic will simply be pervasive and out of control. Against that the only hope is that the advent of warmer weather in April might naturally damp down the spread, but don’t hold your breath for that.
Against that background, let me get to the second part of my essay: a ghastly “natural experiment” is being set up in three regions of the US.
Here is The NY Times’s most recent map, from Friday March 27, of States that are under total lockdowns plus States where there are only some municipal or regional lockdowns:
Since that time, Alaska, Kansas, and Rhode Island have also gone to statewide lockdown. Both Pennsylvania and Utah are under close to statewide lockdowns.
The US has 3 regions of coronavirus response:
1. Every State in the Mountain and Pacific West, plus Alaska and Hawaii, is under statewide or nearly statewide lockdown, with the exception of Wyoming and Arizona.
2. Every State in the old Union, except for Iowa, Maine, and Maryland, plus North Carolina, is under statewide lockdowns (and really wtf is up with Governor Northam of Virginia, who is a physician?!?)
3. No State in the old Confederacy run by a GOP governor, with the exception of the Democratic governor of Louisiana, or in the Great Plains west of the Mississippi, except for Kansas, is under a lockdown.
The “natural experiment” that is going to take place over the next few weeks is the rate of spread in the first two regions vs. the third region.
Most likely, over the next two weeks the rate of increase in – and possibly the actual number of – infections in the locked down regions will decrease, while number of infections in the region not locked down will likely continue to grow at an exponential rate, albeit perhaps at a slower one.
Brace yourselves. What has happened in March with regard to the effects of this pandemic is akin to only the first inning of a baseball game. This is almost certainly going to get a lot worse.
Posted by New Deal Democrat
I share your worries. I hope that the horrors that are emerging in overwhelmed hospitals will persuade all states to try to limit spread of the virus. Trump’s more realistic stance should help as well. But there are no guarantees.
It is critical for the press to emphasize the shortage of tests and the poor performance of the Trump administration to pressure the administration into more aggressive action:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-pence-coronavirus-tests
It is not a natural experiment, most of the low population states are going to try to weather it out due to disruptions. Fact is, the Republicans don’t care about these people don’t care what happens to them and never have. Big population centers like what happened in 1957 always take the big hits. If they die, they die……….unless you are them. They are no different than how Russians thought about the ‘territories’ during the Soviet Union. Tribalist they are not and never have been(unlike the Russians). They are parasites. This is the problem with 2nd wave progressivism in general. It whines about tribalism but doesn’t know what it really is. This delusion makes the movement seem as idiotic as the contards(aka Identity politics is post-modernism………lol nope) and it shows.
The fact is, there should have been federal mandated testing in February, closed borders, acceleration of medical production equipment and then watch to see what happens. That is the tribal response to a foreign threat. The elite didn’t care and whined.
Now you see that you previous model is too primitive as the base of exponent changed from initial 1.32 to 1.24 and probably will continues to fade around 0.3-0.1 a week.
If this does not happen I would strongly recommend you to print this post thread it and eat with borscht and post the video (typical punishment of alarmists in Eastern Europe and xUSSR for fake predictions 😉
I think with 32% daily growth as a base this date should Apr 4. But in any case that will be a real test of this model. Will it be Apr 4 or May 4?
likbez:
You got my attention. Chart said ~2500 dead by March 30th. We hit 2965. and 161,000 cases. We still have not tested enough to know how big the population of those infected is which NDD says is an issue because we are not testing enough. likbez, I would shut up and walk away. That chart is Kevin Drums, go beat on him. If only 800,000 die in 30 days is that better than a million ? I think not.
> 0.3-0.1 a week.
Should be 0.03-0.1 a week
Now is a difficult time to begin a career in modeling. A lot more people resonate with tragedy when they are personally touched by it rather than just seeing it reported in news. Even in the best of situations we are faced with a grave tragedy now. In time almost everyone will change their tune at least for a little while.
Ron:
Nobody talks about this when it is happening. It is always afterwards, like the Great Depression. The seriousness of it never comes to life in the present. It took ~10 years to kill 58,000 of us. I still remember the names of the close ones.
This virus’s lethality comes from its affect on the lungs. There was the story of a man where both lungs were totally involved but 4 tests came back negative until finally a fifth test reported positive. Italy’s statistics always seem to show about 15% or less growth in cases and about 10% or less for deaths. That does not seem realistic when compared to statistics from other countries. Now we are reading about the terrible inaccuracy of tests kits from China. The Chinese are not monsters, why are those test kits inaccurate?
A posted article is questioning whether the nasal and throat swabs may be missing the 2019-nCoV virus because it may not always be present in those locations.
See: https://greatgameindia.com/coronavirus-testing-protocol-fraud/
That seems like a plausible argument to me since this virus seems to act mostly on the lungs. Other symptoms are reported to be light. If the sample collection system is flawed, then the accuracy of the test would appear to be at least somewhat erratic.
If this is the case then a better diagnostic test is needed.
–
Young adults and aerobically fit seniors usually have much more reserve lung function than is generally needed throughout the day. Sedentary seniors have the least reserve lung function. And underlying health issues could also affect the flow of fully oxygenated blood actually circulating thru the body.
So perhaps the worst problem is that patients are not concerned enough about their more labored breathing until much of their lung volume is already impacted. That would explain some patients being admitted and their death occurring that day or the next.
Catching patients earlier should be the goal and a test of sputum from the lung should be the gold standard.
If that could be accomplished then we would not need millions of more ventilators. Ventilators cause other problems, so eliminating their use would be beneficial.
Do yourself a favor, jog down a long hall and check your respiratory rate. Then recheck it once a day.
True — virus pneumonia. The USA now can around 20K hospital admissions, because most cases of pneumonia need to be hospitalized.
That’s so far it the most important statistic instead of all those junk data about “tested positive”. The latter is pure fearmongering.
And the dynamic of hospital admissions is of critical importance for obvious reasons. CDC does not provide those data. And that tells a lot about CDC.
For isolation of patients they are OK: better be safe then sorry.
X-ray and CT scans are pretty accurate (over 90% accuracy); polymerase tests are made way too sensitive to avoid false negatives, so they pickup a lot of false positives (probably around 30%). That’s by design.
Yes, that’s an important observation. But so far you can’t control the development of virus pneumonia. So they are the last resort to save the patient. Around half of them die anyway. Some percentage of those patients who were saved will die a couple or weeks or a month later due to the damage done by ventilation.
I think we can hope some of the continuing growth of the past 10 or so days is a combination of increasing testing, plus testing lags. I know someone tested a week ago Sunday who was told last Saturday their result has been delayed. So lets hope the curve is bent a little more than the data set available.
I don’t hear an explanation why people project a peak around 0.3% of the population. I would think a much larger population, say 10+%, would be needed to start seeing the exponential function constrained. I’m just a math geek and maybe the epidemiologists know something that are not explaining, lets hope so. But the model projected 80K media deaths hand waves off what happens after the first peak. Is there sound data that the virus goes away in May with the season ? I can’t find any data indicating varying R0 across seasons. Do people get scared enough to say inside when the number hits 3 tenths of a percent? I think Trump thinks he is taking the over-under spread on 100K and guess I have a hard time rooting against that, until it busts.
Charlie:
I will answer for NDd for now. I do not know why they pick 3 tenth of 1%. It appears to be low in light of what has happened in other places globally when the place did not take immediate action, the lag time between taking action, and the lack of concurrence of what treatment to use. As I read Health Affairs, I did not find much agreement as to where to start other than to WAIT for clinical trials to be completed before doing anything. It certainly does not bode well for the patient.
There is no sound data I am aware of this goes away when the heat arrives (your intent?). I have read the humidity in the area make fomites too heavy to remain airborne. (fomite: any inanimate object that, when contaminated with or exposed to infectious agents (such as pathogenic bacteria, viruses or fungi), can transfer disease to a new host. For humans, skin cells, hair, clothing, and bedding are common hospital fomites.).Is there a chance for a second wave? I would agree there is a chance for one e same or one which mutated and is resistant to current treatments. I am not sure why this would not be any differ than a flu virus which requires a new drug each year and a dart w to determine what it might be. I assume you mean R naught, which is intended to be an indicator of the contagiousness or transmissibility of infectious and parasitic agents. Corona appears to be aggressive generally speaking. The Princess cruise ship R naught was estimated to be 2.28. To NDd’s point on progression growth in Corona cases, the probable number of new cases for the next ten days would gradually increase, and the estimated cumulative cases would reach 1514 (1384-1656) at the tenth day in the future. However, if R0 value was reduced by 25% and 50%, the estimated total number of cumulative cases would be reduced to 1081 (981-1177) and 758 (697-817), respectively. This was early stages in a closed unit (ship).
Since our testing of the population is severely lacking, I am not sure how accurate the R naught would be.
There is no discussion of community “resilience”. Also the testing is notoriously inaccurate both lacking specificity and sensitivity if the PCR methodology is used. So all of these graphs are basically gibberish. How come no discussion about nutritional methods for conferring resilience? You do know, that the vast majority of people who wind up in intensive care with critical illness have one or more indices that are extremely low including vitamin A, vitamin D, selenium, and zinc. How come no discussion of that? So we are just passive posts waiting for a hazmat suit from Santa Claus? You can do better than that.
Christopher:
Welcome to Angry Bear. First time commenters and comments always go to moderation to weed out, spam, spammers, and advertising.
run75441,
That the art of exaggenation. You should try to apply for a job in neoliberal MSM.
Take away the people with no symptoms, with mild symptoms, and with life-threatening underlying illnesses, how many cases do we have?
Probably around 20K. That’s ‘it. That’s virus pneumonia cases not deaths. Where did you get 800K death in 30 days? Are you trying to imitate Joe Biden ?
“No State in the old Confederacy run by a GOP governor, with the exception of Louisiana”
That sentence seems to imply that Louisiana governor John Bel Edwards is a member of the GOP. He isn’t.
liam:
Welcome to Angry Bear. First time co and commenters always go to moderation to weed out spam, spammers, and advertising. To your point, I will fix this for NDd Thank you for pointing it out.
Run,
Until 9/11 we were all just a bunch of baby killers, no matter that the draft selected many former antiwar protestors whose only other choices were federal prison or moving to Canada. With some effort one could CO to become a medic in RSVN.
Covid-19 is more a continuation of our story than some sudden shocking surprise. The 9/11 attacks were likewise consistent with the reality that we knew and, to the well informed among us, expected. There is no risk too great for the general population so long as the deserving few can enrich themselves at our expense.
The trajectory for 9/11 ran from the Treaty of Versailles preserving colonial property rights in the ME and SE Asia, through the wash and repeat at the end of WWII plus the fallacy of 1949 remapping Palestine (why not Miami instead), 1954 reinstatement of the Shah of Iran, big oil, and US arming Saddam Hussein against Iran (like Noriega, our guy until he wasn’t). The Caliphate’s cover story was about infidel boots on sacred ground, whereas this was a continuation of an ancient internal struggle for power among the nations of Islam. Big oil raised the stakes justifying a higher death toll to complete the balance.
The Viet Nam War began with the Treaty of Versailles as well, by preserving France’s proprietorship of Viet Nam. The US entry was more a matter of preserving a poker bluff with the Commies than worrying about dominos. That is why our mission did not require that we win. Just putting up the ante again and again was sufficient to demonstrate that the US was still in the game.
The trajectory of Covid-19 began with Nixon opening markets to China running through Reagan then Clinton raising the ante on globalization while turning a blind eye to the risk posed by traditional animal husbandry and wet markets practices. If our own TVA region had been more densely populated then we might have had our own virus breeding lab. Recreational value of those gorgeous TVA lakes may have priced the land out of reach for hillbillies living in one room shacks with their chickens and pigs by now. As bad as modern industrial agricultural practices are, we often forget why they were developed in our frantic attempts to refute those practices rather than update them.
Stupidity is its own reward, karmically speaking.