Daily Archives: April 18, 2020
The Peasants Are Revolting . . .
More and more protests are springing up around the country, as people are itching to get back to some semblance of normal life.
If fact, Michiganders are in almost open revolt with 10’s of thousands of cars flooding the capitol and clogging the streets and freeways around the city.
And in a ‘Let them eat cake’ moment, Governor Gretchen Whitmer actually threatened to extend the shutdown even longer in retaliation. But the peasants have gotten so angry that she’s now decided to let the state start reopening May 1st. The torches and pitchforks had an effect I guess.
Even in California things are heating up, with daily protests in the streets.
The city of San Clemente, angry that kids kept breaking into the locked skateboard parks, dumped 37 tons of sand into the bowls to keep skaters out. Of course not to be denied, the locals made lemonade.
And Jacksonville, FL flocked to their beaches yesterday when they were reopened with some restrictions. Looks like plenty of ‘social distancing’ going on.
I mentioned the other day that when Iceland started wide testing they found that about 1/2 of the population had or had had the virus, with no real symptoms.
And the CDC is reviewing ‘stunning’ (their words) test results from a homeless shelter in the Boston area. Due to a small outbreak, they tested 397 people, and found that 146 of them tested positive for the WuFlu, and none of them had any symptoms.
And many researchers think that this is the reason that California has so many less cases and deaths compared to NYC. It is thought that that WuFlu had actually been running through the population since the October-November timeframe with few or no symptoms,
More and more people are starting to question the models being used to guide the mitigation efforts being mandated. But how can you trust the model when the numbers keep changing. And this is nothing new.
Here’s a quote from the leaders of W.H.O.
“The … crisis we face is unparalleled in modern times,” said the World Health Organization’s assistant director, while its director general proclaimed it “likely the greatest peacetime challenge that the United Nations and its agencies have ever faced.”
This was based on a CDC computer model projection predicting as many as 1.4 million deaths from just two countries.
So when did they say this about COVID-19? Trick question:
It was actually about the Ebola virus in Liberia and Sierra Leone five years ago, and the ultimate death toll was under 8,000.
Later, avian flu strain A/H5N1, “even in the best-case scenarios” was to “cause 2 (million) to 7 million deaths” worldwide. A British professor named Neil Ferguson scaled that up to 200 million. It killed 440.
This same Ferguson in 2002 had projected 50 to 55,000 deaths from so-called “Mad Cow Disease.” On its face, what possible good is a spread that large? But the final toll was slightly over 200.
And here’s some highlights from the latest IHME (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation) models.
A week ago, IHME projected South Dakota to have 356 coronavirus deaths. Four days ago, IHME reduced that prediction to 181. Today, it dropped to 94. So IHME is slowly coming closer to reality. South Dakota currently has seven Wuhan flu deaths.
A week ago, their model showed North Dakota with 369 deaths, a ridiculous number. Three days later, the projection dropped by 91%, to 32. Now–just four days after that model revision–IHME has moved North Dakota back up to 149 deaths. None of this bouncing around has much to do with reality; as of yesterday, IHME showed North Dakota with just 9 deaths.
I guess it’s real easy to declare your models accurate when you can keep moving the targets.
Wrapping up, if you think ‘flattening the curve’ on the WuFlu is being done to save lives, you would be wrong. It’s being to prevent the hospitals from being overrun, not to save lives. It merely spreads the same number of cases and deaths, over a longer period of time.
In contrast to a steep rise of coronavirus infections, a more gradual uptick of cases will see the same number of people get infected, but without overburdening the health-care system at any one time.
The idea of flattening the curve is to stagger the number of new cases over a longer period, so that people have better access to care.
Note that when you squish the peak, you just spread the cases, and the deaths, out over a longer period of time.
Now the ironic part of this is that, according to the CDC, our hospitals have not come close to being overwhelmed, even in NYC.
Remember the USNS Comfort that docked in NYC with 1000 beds, and ended up with about 20 patients. Or the 2500 bed military hospital that was built in the Javits Center that’s been sitting hardly used.
According to the CDC, there have been about 100,000 total hospitalizations for the WuFlu, with less than 750,000 cases.
But the CDC estimates that 2017–2018 influenza season was associated with more than 48.8 million illnesses, more than 22.7 million medical visits, 959,000 hospitalizations, and 79,400 deaths during the season.
And the CDC estimates that influenza was associated with more than 35.5 million illnesses, more than 16.5 million medical visits, 490,600 hospitalizations, and 34,200 deaths during the 2018–2019 influenza season
So we had almost 960,000 hospitalizations in 2017-2018, and 490,000 hospitalizations in 2018-2019, but now our hospitals can’t handle approximately 300,000 hospitalizations (based on the un-squished curve in the graph above).
I guess that as they say, the devil’s in the details.
Thought For The Day:
Sometimes even the devil sitting on my shoulder asks “What the HELL are you doing?”
gf
