We got this bug, maybe as bad as the flu, possibly worse. We have a small-but-growing fatality rate with enthusiastic, extreme, exponential extrapolations of serious death counts.
From a mathematically educated viewpoint and some historical perspective, what's the right thing to have done and what's the right thing to do?
There are consequences of doing things. One of my liberal friends “unfriended” me on Facebook because I couldn't care more about Corona deaths than the losses from flu or the loss of life from the things we're doing.
2 RISKS
Let's look at the various risks
brought upon us by Corona virus.
2.1 CORONA RISKS
The total losses from Corona virus,
also known as (aka) COVID-19,
are still short of annual flu casualties.
From mathematical scrutiny
the most severe countries are starting the saturation phase.
There are a few scary places including
New York City with almost-as-scary numbers in Philadelphia.
New York has, according to my web browser,
reached flu numbers and is not “curling” downward yet.
A friend sent me an
article
about Jews being especially susceptible to Corona virus.
New York City and Philadelphia have a high proportion of Jews.
The virus seems to spread by touching each other,
touching surfaces within a few hours or a few days,
depending on the surface material,
and breathing air in close proximity.
It seems to response well to washing hands
and disinfecting wipes (Lysol and Clorox brands come to mind).
(I haven't seen it in any of the warning media,
but I imagine brushing teeth more often
would wash virus-laden particles out of the mouth
before they have time to infect the host,
or that could be totally bullshit.
Still, there are good reasons to brush our teeth anyway.)
It presents with a bad cough and high fever,
often without a runny nose.
So I conclude self-quarantine isn't much more dangerous
with other non-quarantined people living their lives.
Food and packages can be delivered and handled
while wearing disinfected gloves.
While the models are still based on
eager, energetic, enthusiastic extrapolation
of factors of over one hundred,
the disease shows indications of near-flu casualties worldwide.
The original scare numbers were about ten times that,
figure 300 thousand deaths stateside and seven million worldwide,
0.1%, one in a thousand.
Actual deaths so far are one in 150 thousand worldwide
and one in 75 thousand in the United States.
Flu claims about one in nine thousand per year.
COVID-19 is not the Ebola-like horror of “Outbreak”
or the rapid-spreading, high-mortality disease in “Contagion.”
Whatever horrors COVID-19 may hold,
the bad predictions haven't happened yet
and the scientific community predicting horrors
hasn't done well with other environmental
predictions
It might be worse than swine flu or SARS or bird flu,
it might even be worse than the ordinary annual flu virus,
but that hasn't happened yet.
It's not the zombie-apocalypse terror of “28 Days Later.”
It's not contaminating the outdoors like “Bird Box,”
so we can go outside without being at serious risk.
This isn't “Capricorn One” in that Corona virus might be real
(even if I don't know anybody who has it
or directly knows anybody who has it).
There is no age group whose mortality is morbidly affected
by even the bad projection of this disease.
For most of us, washing hands and keeping “social distance”
is plenty safe.
For those at highest risk,
staying home, washing hands, using antiseptic wipes,
and using gloves to touch delivered packages
should be safe
even if other people aren't concerned.
A friend wrote me this was a good lesson
about exponential growth.
I think it's a great lesson about exponential growth models.
I took a box of checkers and did the exponential-growth thing,
one on the first square, two on the second square,
four on the third square, eight on the fourth square,
and I finished up the whole checkerboard.
That put nine on the fifth square and the box was empty.
So much for 18446744073709551615 checkers when
the box only had twenty-four to begin with.
It's the same with predicting 200 thousand deaths from 4000.
Sure it could happen, anything could happen,
the sun might not rise tomorrow,
but a factor of fifty increase isn't the way to bet.
2.2 ECONOMIC RISKS
Closing restaurants to sit-down traffic
and prohibiting gatherings of more than fifty people
have cost a few tens of millions of people their livelihoods.
Waiters, retail servers, actors, dancers, ushers, clerks,
et cetera are finding themselves without work.
These people are generally young people living
paycheque to paycheque,
so 2020 April 1 is going to be interesting
as quite a few of them are not going to make
their next rent payments on their living quarters.
Whatever health coverage they had,
whatever resources they had to pay for health care,
are now gone.
Shopkeepers and restaurants are going out of business
and their rent payments also won't be forthcoming.
Many of their landlords have mortgages and bills to pay.
These risks aren't projections of large population impact
from current small numbers.
These people are already suffering from our COVID-19 precautions
and too many of them are going to die
as a some result or other of their now-impoverished status.
The loss is real.
It isn't just that one group has replaced another.
Sure, there's a surge of retail sales
from toilet-paper hoarders who seem confused
about the difference between Cholera and Corona.
It would be funny if it weren't funny.
2.3 HEALTH CARE RISKS
Over the past century some politicians,
perhaps in cahoots with the medical industry,
decided not to allow poor people to get for their families
the inexpensive, high-quality medical care
rich people get for their dogs and
cats.
Maybe we can fix that,
but we've had a health-care crisis here in the United States
for decades while we haven't done anything about it,
so I doubt a speedy fix is going to happen soon.
A disease that would be a week of miserable coughing and a fever
for me in my nice, comfortable home with my three cats
will likely be fatal for people who can't afford
doctors and hospitals.
They tell us New York City and Philadelphia
are running out of health-care resources
even with the sub-flu penetration of COVID-19.
What the fuck are they going to do
if a disease comes along, maybe Corona, maybe Cholera,
maybe Denghe, maybe Ebola, maybe something new,
with far-higher penetration and mortality?
(A few days later I've heard that people have visited
these allegedly-overloaded hospitals
in New York City and Philadelphia to find emergency rooms
(ERs) that are mostly empty, no lines, no delays.
Maybe the whole overloaded-medical-systems story
is a political story without fact.
Here in Phoenix there is no medical shortage
that my health-care-professional friends can see
and I really don't know what's happening back east.)
2.4 POLITICAL RISKS
The freedoms at risk from a lockdown sound academic.
We're no longer free to assemble,
we're no longer free to travel,
and they're watching our cell phones
to see where we are.
They say it's an emergency.
But there's always some kind of emergency,
so let's look more closely at the losses
of increasing government power to deal with Corona virus.
About half of Americans want government to get bigger.
They look at the results from Russia in 1925, German in 1935,
Cuba in 1950, China in 1960, Cambodia in 1970,
South Africa in 1990, and Venezuela in 2000
through very different eyes than mine.
Non-revisionist history shows they actually supported
most of those regimes.
(I'll point out that these were “socialist”
in their own description of themselves as well as others.)
So I don't expect sympathy from them when I resist
the expansion of government to deal with COVID-19.
In fact, I suspect COVID-19 was a convenient event
for our Democratic Party to try to topple the Trump presidency.
I recall several liberal public figures
saying they actually hoped the economy would fail,
go back down to Obama levels,
if it would cost Trump the 2020 election.
So what is the cost of this sort of socialist regime?
Is losing the right of assembly so terrible?
I'll point out that in the past century, 1921-2020,
about 100 million people have died at the hands
of their own governments.
If we figure about 5000 million people have died
for any reason at all in that same period,
that means 2% of all deaths have been due to big government.
The cost in life, liberty, and livelihood
from our Corona-virus prevention is huge,
never mind that the threat of the virus
is still in the state of
large projections from early small data.
Before somebody whines about “Lives Over Liberty,”
or something like that,
we have a precedent for that exchange.
We accept having a military force to guard our country
and it's special freedoms at the cost of human lives.
We don't have to be happy about it,
but we accept that tradeoff.
3 GUIDELINES
A new disease is a downer, no doubt about it.
Sick sucks, dying is worse, and we want to avoid that.
I was “unfriended” because I couldn't grasp
that the object was to reduce Corona deaths at all cost,
even lives lost other ways.
There are doubts all over the place.
We have guiding principles in the United States of America
that other countries don't have.
I think we should use them.
Remember the scene in “Outbreak”
where the chief of staff or whatever
are deciding to do Operation Clean Sweep
to wipe out a California coastal town
where an Ebola-like disease is spreading rapidly.
The guy in charge puts a bunch of pictures
of the faces of folks in the town,
pulls out a copy of our Constitution,
and says something like
there's nothing in here about killing 2600 people,
even to stop a disease.
We should stop and think about that.
If Ebola were spreading in my area,
then I would want some kind of force to keep people
from spreading the disease through association or travel.
I would want restaurants and concert halls closed.
The guidelines of our Constitution might take a back seat.
I suppose we could argue it is a war with over
100 million casualties at risk.
Everybody is pitching in to help.
For those stuck at home without access
to the romantic-dating scene,
Pornhub is giving away their product for free.
COVID-19 isn't Ebola.
Grotesque, gratuitous growth projections of large death counts
based on small numbers suggest something five times worse than flu.
As I write this on 2020 March 29 the American-death
numbers are still in the few-thousand range,
several times smaller than ordinary flu.
China is over the hump, so are Italy, Norway, and Spain.
Our east coast is at flu levels of death,
a threat level where we have chosen freedom over force
for a hundred years.
We fought a terribly-difficult war over the right to assemble
and I'm not happy about giving that up because of a prediction.
Those opposite me in the political arena
wave the banner of “science” just as they did for
eugenics and global warming.
I'm scared of this disease,
but I'm more scared of the diseases we already know,
I'm more scared of putting 10% of our country out of work,
I'm more scared of big government that will linger
long after COVID-19 is gone.
We still have the Patriot Act almost nineteen years
after 2001 September 11 when the World Trade Center came down.
It's a kind of terrible ecology,
political tyranny never goes away.
4 MY ADVICE
Here's what I think we should have done,
what we should do now,
and what we should do for the future.
Think of it as the Al Stewart record “Past, Present, and Future.”
4.1 PAST
Right about the time President Trump started talking
about Corona virus, “the Chinese virus”
(just like “the Spanish flu”),
I think our Federal government should have begun a campaign
of caution,
kind of like Bert the Turtle told us not to watch the mushroom cloud
but, “Duck and Cover.”
Wash your hands, don't shake hands, stay home,
and especially don't take the kids to visit their grandparents.
Restaurants should have been energetically encouraged
to double their table spacing, a factor of four reduction
in capacity to reduce contagion.
Maybe a bright blue medical caduceus sticker on the door
would promise extra spacing and extra cleanliness inside,
something like “We Protect, We Don't Infect,” that sort of thing.
Older people would be encouraged to stay home.
A campaign against hoarding was a good idea,
maybe making even more fun of people buying toilet paper
because they couldn't tell Corona from Cholera.
Maybe the government could go beyond that
and make available laptop computers with somethink like Skype
pre-installed so folks could talk to each other
digital-face-to-digital-face.
Until death rates climbed to substantially more than flu,
that's where I believe government should have stopped.
People staying at home still need stuff.
Rather than shrink our work force,
maybe we could augment it with more home delivery of stuff,
especially groceries, to those at maximum risk.
If a seventy-five year old with a history of heart trouble
and some wheezing asthma can stay home with a laptop
to watch shows and movies on Netflix and
to Skype with the grandkids
and efficient home delivery of food and stuff,
then he can be about as safe as he would be under lockdown.
Concerts could still be held.
Concert venues could offer full refunds for no-show at-risk patrons.
I wrote two dance companies that they shouldn't give any refunds,
the disease wasn't their fault,
but they should put on the performances
(perhaps in empty halls)
and send high-definition video to all their subscribers.
I know two orchestras doing that for their subscribers.
Still, if the pandemic panic hadn't reached such heights,
maybe those of us willing to take the risk could still go.
4.2 PRESENT
Where are we now?
We have countries and areas under lockdown
and the most-severe region of COVID-19 has reached flu mortality
without a downturn.
I think government should back away gently,
keep encouraging people to stay careful,
and keep encouraging the elderly at risk to stay home.
Companies should be able to feel good about a
work-at-home workforce.
A legal precedent should be formed that a concert provider
isn't legally at risk if folks get sick.
Maybe they can keep social-distance seating.
Before you jump all over me about what might happen,
nowhere has seen worse than flu
and the Corona threat is no greater than swine flu was.
We need to get people back to work so they can pay their bills,
including their medical bills when they get flu or Corona.
4.3 FUTURE
We should be scared shitless that we ran out of medical resources
from such a small death toll.
New York City's 0.01% may be a lot of people,
but the big, bad diseases that may come our way
are going to be a lot worse.
We should get ready.
I don't feel good about government funding readiness.
Just as banks are required to keep reserves as the lend deposit money,
maybe hospitals should have plans for larger sick populations.
We're not going to have enough doctors,
so we need to find ways for non-doctors to do doctor stuff
in a pinch.
My diabetic friends give themselves insulin shots
and I know other people getting shots from non-doctor
family members.
If the death toll goes from 0.01% to one percent,
then maybe people can learn to administer intravenous (IV) drips
of medications at home
or even put a sick co-inhabitant on some kind of simple
breathing machine while more-official medical help
is not available.
I also feel we need clear numerical guides
for government action.
Trump is bad because he closed the border,
then because he didn't close the border enough.
Some threshold like 0.1% deaths (flu level) should close the borders
and some higher threshold like 1.0% should call out
the National Guard to keep people from going out.
Make it official and not political.
It sound cold to talk about deaths like that,
but it's a tradeoff between death by disease
and death by economic deprivation,
or even death by big-government tyranny.
We can be afraid rationally, without panic.
Let's try that for a change.
This was our wakeup call.
5 THE SPEECH I THINK DONALD TRUMP SHOULD GIVE
More stuff is available
here.
16:51:04 Mountain Standard Time
(MST).
29965 visits to this web page.
