This week I had two related columns for subscribers to the Athletic – my 2010 redraft and my list of the 2010 first-rounders who didn’t pan out. A few people got particularly unpleasant over the redraft, which is quite unusual, mostly because they didn’t read the intro. I held another Klawchat on Thursday.
On The Keith Law Show this week, I had Cubs’ superutilityman Ian Happ as a guest to talk about coffee, especially his collaboration with Connect Roasters to sell a specific blend of Guatemalan beans, with $3 from every bag going to COVID-19 relief charities. You can buy the coffee at coffeeforcovid.com, and you can subscribe to my podcast on iTunes or Spotify.
My second book, The Inside Game, made the New York Times‘ list of six recommended summer reads in the sports category, which is incredibly flattering. You can buy The Inside Game or Smart Baseball on bookshop.org or at any local stores if they’re opening back up near you.
I’ve been better about sending out my newsletter lately – feel free to sign up here to get weekly-ish musings and links to everything I write.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: Ed Yong continues his outstanding coverage of the pandemic for The Atlantic with a sobering look at the “patchwork” pandemic, including the lack of a peak and rolling outbreaks still going on across the country. Note how many instances he documents of the federal government abdicating its responsibilities to state and local authorities, and his statement that Arizona reopened “while cases were still rising” – bad news for MLB teams with training sites there.
- Former NHL player Akim Aliu’s essay “Hockey is Not For Everyone” is a damning look at racism in North American hockey.
- Serious Eats explains the science behind sourdough starters.
- Drowned out by some dubious news about a commercial COVID-19 vaccine venture was the news from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center about two studies showing another vaccine protected primates against the same virus.
- Quarantine fatigue is real, but policymakers can learn from HIV-prevention efforts who realized abstinence-only efforts don’t work and instead focused on risk reduction strategies.
- The shutdown has forced many LGBT kids to return home to families that have rejected them or parts of their identities.
- Nearly half of the accounts on Twitter tweeting about the pandemic are bots, according to new research from Professor Kathleen Carley and others at Carnegie Mellon.
- VICE looks at the disturbing AF world of COVID-19 “truther” groups on Facebook, which promulgate bullshit conspiracy theories and engender anti-lockdown protests.
- BuzzFeed runs through some of the quacks and fake experts pushing pseudoscience and conspiracy theories about the pandemic, including Judy Mikovits, the disgraced researcher behind the bogus documentary “Plandemic.”
- Some COVID-19 patients show severely depleted levels of T cells, which may be a clue to potential treatments.
- As if we didn’t have enough to worry about from the pandemic, it has interrupted inoculation efforts around the world to the point that measles and polio outbreaks are becoming more likely.
- Iowa’s efforts at testing for COVID-19 and sharing that data with local officials appear to be a disaster.
- Dr. Dannagal Young, a Professor at the University of Delaware, describes how her late husband’s brain tumor led her to chase numerous conspiracy theories in a quest to regain control of their lives.
- White people’s “unreasonable fear,” which is itself unjustified, is killing black Americans, writes conservative journalist David French for TIME.
- I knew this was likely coming, but I’m still so disappointed that Gen Con 2020 has been cancelled.
That Akim Aliu piece broke my heart to read. I shared it with my wife and she could barely make it through. Our 16 y/o son plays baseball in Southern California and he’s been the only African-American on his team, on the field or in a tournament more times than I can count. He has some social media accounts and I can see some of the awful things his teammates and peers post under the guise of “jokes”, so I can only imagine what’s said to his face. I’m not naive enough to think Aliu’s essay will change anything, but it’s important that stories like his are out there.
The Ed Yong piece is a good one but still falls victim to the “shifting goalposts” issue. A mesa rather than a Matterhorn is exactly what we were hoping for with social distancing and other efforts to flatten the curve. That is not a bug of our efforts, but a feature. We were never, ever, ever going to stop the spread. The overall goal was to distribute the spread so that our healthcare system could meet the needs of those hit by it. We have — and likely will continue to — avoid overwhelming our health care system, with many hospitals in the worst hit areas returning to normal operations (I know because I live in a badly hit area not far from a hospital that turned over most operations to Covid treatment and get email updates from them on their slow return to other care).
What we failed to do was protect the most vulnerable populations, with NYC and other areas likely exacerbating the problem through shortsighted/ignorant policy decisions as they related to nursing homes and similar facilities.
Our overall response — especially at the federal level — has had many problems. But we have also avoided many of the worst case scenarios and the spread of the disease plateauing is a good thing, not a bad thing. We should welcome the good news while continuing to prepare for and respond to the bad news and the ongoing threat that Covid presents.
It remains to be seen if a patchwork response is better or worse than a universal one. The article is spot on that the virus is hitting different areas in different ways and at different times. That suggests a patchwork response may be best, allowing it to be tailored to the specific needs of an area. We are seeing data come in on the real toll of shutdown; I read today that LA has had more suicides than Covid deaths. That doesn’t mean the shut down was wrong, but does demonstrate it is not without cost. If we can minimize the cost of shutdown and maximize the impact by being smart and strategic, that would be the ideal scenario. That would require leadership and communication from all levels of the government which we obviously have not gotten to this point and I’m doubtful we will get.
Kazzy, I live in Southern California, but I haven’t been able to find any reliable data on suicide rates in LA or LA county this year. (It’s hard enough to get reliable data on COVID deaths at the city level.) Whatever Internet chatter there is on this issue seems pretty anecdotal. I suspect you read something in which a Northern California physician said he thought suicide rates were spiking in his area. I have heard nothing about this in SoCal except of course the general argument that a lot of people are depressed and anxious.
I would, however, caution you and others to be careful about attributing suicide (or even depression or anxiety) to the stay-at-home orders themselves. Many of us are fighting depression and anxiety not because our states have asked us to stay at home, but because there is a highly contagious and quite lethal virus out there that scares us, coupled with a pretty dysfunctional federal government that has not done nearly enough to keep us as safe as it might have. (Yes, they probably could have done worse, but I think we had the right as Americans to expect more. Our state government, in contrast, has done just about as well as I could have hoped.)
Put simply, and admittedly as a retired guy who hasn’t had to worry about loss of employment during this period, the shutdown (to the extent it has even existed) has taken almost no toll on my and my family at all. But the virus and our federal government’s response to it sure as hell has.
You’re right that I was mistaken attributing it to LA. It does seem to indeed be the NoCal report you mentioned. I did not and would not attribute all suicides to quarantine. But if we are seeing a spike in suicides, we need to consider the causes and be mindful that our cure is not worse than the disease.
Ideally, we’d see a scalpel used rather than a machete, making smart, informed decisions about restrictions that actually address risks from Covid while minimizing the cost of such measures. That is all I have ever advocated here. I took issue with the linked article because it seems to get a major premise wrong, even if it gets a lot of other stuff right: a mesa is not worse than a Matterhorn, to use the writer’s own analogy. That was the goal, at least once our leadership botched the initial stages of response.
a mesa is not worse than a Matterhorn
It is – it’s much worse, and you can see it playing out this weekend across the country.
Wow, Kazzy. How can anyone have any confidence in anything you say?
Not only did you grossly botch the information you provided, you casually interpreted it in a manner that is sloppy at best and intellectually dishonest at worst.
Even if LA has had more suicides than COVID-19 deaths (a “fact” you’ve since retracted), what does that tell us? The answer is: It tells us zero. LA is going to have a certain number of suicides each month, COVID-19 or not, by virtue of being a very large and populous city.
Now if there was clear data that LA had a considerably higher number of suicides over the last six weeks than during the same period last year AND the increase was considerably greater than the number of COVID-19 deaths, then MAYBE that might be the ballpark for making the argument you’re trying to make.
I don’t know what your deal is these days, but it seems you’ve got a conclusion you prefer, and that you’re bending whatever information you get in order to suit that conclusion, all in the name of being “critical” or “open-minded” or whatever.
Keith,
It’s sad you’ve seemed to so obviously lose your way here.
What do you think flattening the curve means? Slow the spread, lower the spike, distribute the caseload over a longer time frame so we can manage it. That is the primary purpose. For whatever reason, you’ve abandoned what I most appreciated about you, which was a reasoned approach rooted in facts, reflection, and open-mindedness. That seems to be gone now. I don’t know why but your response here evidences that: a simple refutation with nary an argument being made. Just “You’re wrong because I say so.”
Sad this site has gone this way. But its yours so do what you will. I’ll look elsewhere.
Joe, I made a mistake which I accounted for when corrected. I did not misrepresent anything and you can only arrive at that conclusion by strawmanning my position, which you clearly do not understand. Later.
It’s sad that you’re resorting to personal attacks against me, Kazzy. I’m not sure why that’s your approach.
The type of “flattening” you describe isn’t what has happened in the United States, where the number of active cases continues to grow even as states re-open. Those arguing to flatten the curve wanted stricter measures earlier in the pandemic so that the level of the plateau was lower than it actually is. We’re still seeing a rolling average of about 20-22,000 new cases a day nationally, and the total number of active cases has yet to plateau or decline. That is a failure of policy on two levels – waiting too long to lock down, and reopening too soon. The curve is flatter than it would have been without self-isolation and forced shutdowns, but it is not flat.
You also mis-state the goals of flattening the curve. Yes, avoiding crushing our hospitals was one goal. So far, that has worked in most areas, although there are still surges coming in midwestern and southern areas. Another is avoiding needless deaths, and we haven’t done that at all. We’re 9th among all countries (excluding extremely tiny ones with < 100K people) in deaths per 1MM residents, behind eight countries in Europe where the pandemic started several weeks before ours did (their active case loads are declining, and we had far more warning than they did). You can’t argue we succeeded in flattening the curve when our death rate is this high and still rising unless you are arguing that minimizing deaths from the virus was not a policy goal.
“I read today that LA has had more suicides than Covid deaths. That doesn’t mean the shut down was wrong, but does demonstrate it is not without cost.”
Yes, I *clearly* misrepresented your position.
In general, I think there’s a public misconception about what “flattening the curve” means. Yes, the 1st goal was to make sure that our health care system was not overwhelmed. However, decreasing R0 also means that fewer people will get the disease. With zero distancing (R0 > 2.5), we’re looking at a herd immunity threshold of 60% or higher. If we can keep R0 below 1.5, that threshold is now < 33%. So flattening the curve saves lives on beyond simply ensuring adequate health care resources. A potential benefit is that it buys time for more people to benefit from antiviral treatments and/or a vaccine. Which is why many epidemiologists thought that Sweden's strategy was a dangerous experiment. Incidentally, their health outcomes have been worse than their immediate neighbors (though admittedly not as bad as I had feared), while there's little to suggest that their economic outcome will be much better.
Bourdain worked at a NYC restaurant years ago and their sourdough starter was named The Bitch. The baker was Adam, Last Name Unknown, and even if he wasn’t there, would call in begging Anthony to ‘Feed the Bitch’. Kitchen Confidential was an awesome book. I miss AB.
https://issuesinsights.com/2020/05/23/still-more-evidence-that-lockdowns-were-a-massive-waste/
Are you willing to consider the data and the science here? Or is anything that disagrees with your position inherently anti-science?
This isn’t “science,” Kazzy. The piece quotes two financial analysts, cherrypicks a WHO quote, quotes someone from the Koch-backed (climate change-denying) American Enterprise Institute, and attacks “Democrats and the press” without backing it up. It refers to a single scientific paper, one that has not been peer-reviewed, and you can see in the comments below it that readers don’t think its data supports its conclusion. (I don’t know how the author could say that the lockdown didn’t slow the pandemic in Italy, which went from a peak of 6000 new cases per day shortly after the lockdown went nationwide to about 600 a day now.)
Here’s some actual data showing that lockdowns in Europe were effective at slowing COVID-19 transmission.
So, yes, indeed, there is a single way of scientific thinking and it aligns with your priors. Goodbye.
@Kazzy
“So, yes, indeed, there is a single way of scientific thinking and it aligns with your priors. Goodbye.”
You didn’t refute a single thing Keith wrote. You have already acknowledged that you misreported or misrepresented information. Why don’t you just actually leave, as you’ve said you would do several times, instead of continuing to try to get people to agree with your unsubstantiated claims?
I don’t agree with everything that is being done, but I don’t think you’re doing a good job of making whatever points you are trying to make. Clearly, we needed to avoid having the entire population infected with this virus, and had we done NOTHING, that would have been the situation – everyone would have ben infected. Closing businesses that require large gatherings in close quarters was almost certainly the right thing to do (Casinos, sporting events, concert halls, etc).
I don’t understand why Krispy Kreme and Dunkin Donuts are open but the local donut shop isn’t, and I do not understand why local businesses such as mattress stores and furniture stores cannot be open – these are large physical areas that rarely have very many people in the store at one time anyway, and with masks and social distancing, I don’t see what he problem is.
And so forth. I believe there are inconsistencies and favoritism occurring.
But what you’re saying doesn’t make much sense, and proper sourcing is important. Someone tried to explain to me why masks are a complete waste of time and money, and to convince me, he linked me to a website called “DocMuscles” or something like that, run by a doctor whose entire website is set up to promote and sell his Keto Diet food packages. There was nothing whatsoever to indicate it was a valid scientific website or article. N95 masks are a good thing. They help slow and prevent infectious diseases. That’s why medical personnel wear them. If everyone had an N95 mask and wore it when around other people, we’d probably be doing a lot better than we are.
Support your position with legitimate sources, and you’ll get a more favorable response from Keith and others here.
Or just leave, as you keep “threatening” to do.
Support your position with legitimate sources, and you’ll get a more favorable response from Keith and others here.
This is the salient point here, I think. Kazzy, the site to which you linked is run by someone who works for the Heritage Foundation, themselves funded by major dark-money, right-wing groups (Koch, DeVos, Olin), and they link under “sites we like” to extremely partisan outlets like the Daily Caller. The article itself doesn’t link to any real scientific studies, and cites one epidemiologist without naming them – so who knows who they are or if they exist.
Those of us saying that the lockdowns worked are using data and other evidence to back up those statements. We only ask that you do the same.
At the risk of whataboutism’ing, we (royally) are all prone to confirmation bias in how we seek out sources. We generally start with a thesis, and then look towards sources that confirm. Scientists should be trying their damndest to disprove their hypotheses, but even really smart scientists are not immune to letting confirmation bias creep into their interpretations (*cough* John Ioannidis).
It’s really obvious when anti-vaxxers and climate change denialists do this because the scientific consensus is so overwhelming in one direction that there’s only pseudoscience and/or fraud on the other side. It’s much harder when the dust hasn’t settled yet, or when there’s scientific nuance.
My general advice (that I should try to follow as well): examine your priors and look in earnest for studies that run contrary to those. Then do the same for the other side of the argument. Examine the merits of the each side of the argument the best you can, and as close to the primary data as you can understand. Examine the people on each side of the argument and whether they have any potential conflicts of interest. This doesn’t necessarily mean they are wrong, but vested interests deserve more scrutiny. Anyway, my two cents on how to somewhat mitigate against one’s own biases.
Salty,
That is what I aim to do. I am not perfect. Believe me, my understanding of this situation has evolved tremendously and remains only lightly secure, because there is so much uncertainty. If you knew my priors, you’d likely see that the positions I’m taking here are not ones you’d predict (I do not identify as conservative, a Republican, a Trump supporter, or anything of the sort). Why is it “baffling” what has happened to me? Is it hard to imagine that someone who is liberal and generally a believer in much of what Keith believes in would come down differently on these matters? Is there no possibility of a reasoned alternative position to the one he offers?
Has anyone considered the possibility that “Kazzy” isn’t an actual person? Machine learning can do some pretty impressive things, including let bots participate in conversations.
He’s a longtime reader. I’m baffled by what’s happened here.
I’ve enjoyed Kazzy’s contributions here in the past. While disagreements have been really heated recently, I wouldn’t be happy if he no longer felt welcome.
I am similarly baffled. All I have seen is critiques of the sources but no actual engagement with what is presented within them. They contain facts, stats, and data.
How is this an argument I can engage with:
“It is – it’s much worse, and you can see it playing out this weekend across the country.” It is simply an assertion. I engaged with your source and the content within. You did not seem to do the same with mine.
Yes, I committed an error in remembering the details of an article I saw on FaceBook. I’m not perfect. I acknowledged it and corrected myself. Somehow that is cause for criticism? How many folks here are willing to acknowledge an error?
I am surprised that I am seeing a disregard for science and thoughtful analysis here. You can disagree with that. Reasonable people can disagree. I did not dismiss the article Keith shared out of hand but did note some areas with which I disagreed and critiqued those.
The data is hard to rely on because there has been data “shifting” on ALL sides by ALL parties, some of it reasonable (e.g., moving to different definitions that help better capture what is happening), some of it in error (i.e., with things moving fast and so much uncertainty, errors are going to happen), and some of it clearly politicized. That makes the data less reliable but taken on whole, it shows that much of the country is through the worst of this and that beyond our most vulnerable population groups — first and foremost the elderly in extended care facilities with co-morbidities — ongoing lockdowns are doing little to help and are doing much harm to people in other ways.
If you support ongoing lockdowns, what data or science do you have that they are the right course of action to take?
I have attacked no one here but have expressed a criticism of the perspectives I’m seeing offered. I am open to receiving the same. If that is what folks are interested in, let the conversation fly. If not… if it will be outright dismissals of alternative perspectives or ad hominem attacks, then, yea, I will sadly have to remove this site from the few that I read because I do not consider that the approach of a reasoned, fact-oriented community.
Let’s take a look at whether cases are spiking or not. Florida was averaging about 573 new cases a day about two weeks ago, but since then has averaged 704 new cases per day, an increase even above over what they had when they re-opened. Now are these due to an increase in tests or is there an increase in hospitalizations? Deaths are holding steady but it may take time to see an increase in those numbers. Georgia, the other state I looked at two weeks ago, is still around 655 new positive tests per day, so they have simply plateaued. The number of deaths in Georgia have also plateaued.
So what should the numbers look like after a location opens up? Some countries have seen a sustained decrease even after opening up, like New Zealand, South Korea, and Denmark. Is that the goal?
My issue was not that you made an error. That happens, and it’s fine. It’s that the erroneous information was used in service of an utterly wrong-headed (and, in my view, willfully dishonest) argument that more suicides is prima facie evidence of the costs of the COVID-19 lockdowns.
It’s true, you admitted your fact was wrong. But you haven’t backed off your interpretation of that “fact” and, instead, you accused me of misrepresenting your viewpoint.
This–along with your reliance on dubious, non-scientific sources–is why I cannot take your opinions on this subject seriously. You’ve also adopted an increasingly adversarial tone on this site in the last several months that suggests there is some other underlying dynamic going on, even if I have no idea what that dynamic is.
I’m somewhat open to possibility that hard lockdowns do not do much more than soft lockdowns (i.e. heavy social distancing), but even the model for this (Sweden) still switched to distant learning for high schools and universities switch, and disallowed crowds of more than 50 people. They have somewhat worse health outcomes than their neighbors, and somewhat better economic outcomes (but they are still very likely to have a recession worse than 2008/9.). I’m highly skeptical that soft lockdowns would have worked well in hard-hit places like New York and Italy.
I can address some of the data presented in that article suggesting that “lockdowns were a massive waste.” Marko Kolanovic’s study (JP Morgan) showing R0 going down in most states after lockdown makes zero sense to me. One, it’s not clear what he means by re-opening, since there are many states that did not have lockdowns but are on Figure 1 (AR, ND, UT…). Since his thesis is that lockdowns don’t work beyond social distancing (Sweden?), this matters. He also shows R0 below 1 for every single state before and after lockdown (including Texas at an R0 of ~0.88 both before and after lockdown–6 weeks ago Texas was at 0.87–it’s been above 1 for the last 2 weeks). So, it’s not clear where he got the data. Even without that, these types of studies are completely confounded by ascertainment bias–states and countries do not re-open randomly, but instead re-open based on local case trends–and by behavioral lag (people en masse don’t immediately change their behavior post lockdown).
I don’t understand the math well enough to critique Thomas Moliener’s preprint (as an aside, even though preprints are not peer reviewed, I think that is somewhat overblown. Highly visible preprints get publicly reviewed by several dozens of eyes vs. 2-4 for peer-reviewed papers, and it’s relatively easy to publish in crappy journals. Full disclosure: I put all of my lab’s papers on preprint servers when I submit to journals.)
FWIW, Thomas Moliener did comment on the preprint (direct quotes):
1. The research, which has not yet undergone standard peer review evaluation, does not question the efficiency of social distancing.
2. The research looks specifically at the impact of police-enforced home containment policies in some European countries.
3. The work suggests that social distancing may be just as effective as home containment.
4.The results show that the epidemic was already in decline (that is, the number of cases was growing less and less rapidly for 2 to 3 weeks before the lockdown and kept declining at the same rate afterwards) before the full lockdown, possibly thanks to social distancing measures already in place.
Finally, I should note that there are papers that show the opposite effect for lockdowns (e.g. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/05/14/science.abb9789), and I do think that hard lockdowns are likely necessary in places where COVID-19 is out of control. And unfortunately soft lockdowns and social distancing still come with at least most of the economic pain.
@addoeh, one way to reasonably determine whether the number of cases is due to increased testing vs. increased infections is to look at the percent positive rate per test. Ten percent or higher means significant under-testing, and ideally we want to be under around 5%.
Joe,
My point was that lockdowns carry costs as well as benefits; we need to consider both in evaluating the appropriateness and effectiveness of them.
Is it your position that lockdowns have zero costs?
I’ve now been accused of being willfully dishonest and a bot. For the unique flaw of being hasty and wrong on the internet.
Excuse me if I can’t turn every blog comment into a citation filled essay. I’m a single parent home schooling/raising two young kids almost entirely on my own. This included a 16 day stint of tight quarantine after their mother contracted Covid, likely through her ongoing work as support/admin at a local hospital besieged by Covid. A hospital I delivered meals from local restaurants to during what little spare time I had to support the front line workers AND our local economy. Oh, and I’m remote teaching 36 toddlers and supporting their families as my “day job”. Apologies if I was insufficiently thorough in my comments here. Yes, I must be a bot or a willfully dishonest person.
I’m seeing firsthand the effects of Covid: I live in NJ and work in NYC, two of the hardest hit areas. I’m also seeing the mounting costs of lockdown and the data that shows we can balance protecting ourselves as a community without locking everyone in place interminably. I’ve decried the manipulation and politicization of data on all fronts, though only see one group targeted here. I’ve seen uncertainty rejected in favor of passion, which does not tell me science and reason reigns supreme.
Disagree with me if you want. But I’m not the one who has shown an unwillingness to consider alternate viewpoints; that is you.
Let me ask: is there anything that would convince you lockdowns are harmful? That opening up is the right move? If not, there is no use talking: your mind is made up. Mine isn’t and I’ve shown that. What have you done other than attack?
“ The Ed Yong piece is a good one but still falls victim to the “shifting goalposts” issue.”
Yes… so adversarial. Is it possible you are less open to perspectives other than your own?
I am surprised that I am seeing a disregard for science and thoughtful analysis here.
You’re not. Multiple people, myself included, have provided you with evidence-based arguments in favor of lockdowns and/or continued restrictions on social and economic activity, but you haven’t responded to those. All you’ve provided here is a link to a poorly-sourced article from writers funded by well-known anti-science outfits.
I understand that you believe you’ve seen the negative effects of lockdowns, but you must also understand that that is a form of availability bias – you see those impacts, but not the impacts on hospitals when surges occur, or what the impact might be when lockdowns are lifted or never imposed because you haven’t seen those at all in your area.
There is an argument that strong tracking and tracing may be more effective than lockdowns – but that would require a level of government surveillance and monitoring that exceeds anything we’ve seen before in the U.S., and with which many citizens may be uncomfortable. We also have not had the technology or infrastructure available to enact such plans so far, which made lockdowns the only way to stop outbreaks. There isn’t a viable alternative until we have the tracking/tracing infrastructure ready here that has been available for weeks or months in other countries.
I’m seeing consideration given to only one scientific perspective. Did you interrogate all the people behind the articles you link to? I questioned before why you question one set of numbers but not another… you did not respond. If you are skeptical of that which disagrees with you but do not similarly scrutinize that which supports you, you are indeed falling victim to confirmation bias.
Did you not read my post? I’ve seen firsthand the effects of a hospital that was pushed to capacity for Covid, that only stemmed the tide by converting multiple units to Covid. I’m also seeing that hospital slowly returning to normal operations. There are costs to lockdown and costs to Covid; I’ve never denied the latter. What I’m seeing here is a complete disregard for the costs of lockdown and very little willingness to engage with evidence that explores it. You accuse me of ignoring something I’ve acknowledged. I’m not the one doing that.
You’ve criticized Florida. Were any Florida hospitals overwhelmed? Their numbers were lower than other areas because they did take some better steps and likely had some demographic and geographic advantages. We have not seen the massive spike that was predicted. Yet you consider the criticism.
You have not criticized New York. Why are you not concerned with the DISASTROUS policy that required nursing homes to admit folks with confirmed diagnoses? Why do you not criticize the gaming of numbers in NY and NJ for political reasons?
When I put all that together, I see a conclusion in search of support rather than a wide-eyed examination of the entire picture. I consider that to be a necessary component of a scientific, rational approach.
If there wasn’t a lock down, what would the economy look like right now as we live with the virus? I don’t think it would be much better. There would still be a lot of people who lost their job, still be a lot of people furloughed or working reduced hours/reduced pay. Most economists I’ve read said you can’t open up the economy until consumers and labor feel safe, with or without lock downs. There just won’t be a lot of demand.
A lot of people are in the high risk group or live with people in the high risk group. The elderly, those with respiratory diseases like asthma, heart disease, diabetes, obese, immunocompromised, etc. There would be a lot of overlap in the groups, but I’m guessing that’s at least 50% of the country. Yes, some of those people will still go out regardless of the risk to themselves, but some that are not in the high risk group won’t go out.
So even if the economy was opened, I don’t think there would be enough demand to open it a lot, especially given the risks of spikes in positive tests and potentially hospitals overflowing. FL has seen a 25% spike in positive tests in the last 10 days. Will that continue into a spike in deaths in a week or so?
From CDC, you can look at pneumonia deaths over the years, which is useful for identifying which states are likely undercounting COVID-19 deaths (based on looking at the state-by-state data, I don’t see any obvious cases where states look like they’re overcounting, but I may have missed something): https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/mortality.html
There are lots of reasons that undercounts can happen that aren’t politically driven or malicious. But, looking at these types of mortality data (and for other categories of death) are critical both for understanding what is happening on the ground right now, and retrospectively, what were the effects of our local and national responses.
NJ initially counted any suspected deaths. Then reversed course and removed 1400 nursing home deaths from the tally because they weren’t confirmed, right around the time they were getting heat for policies that contributed to a spike on nursing home deaths.
NY did not count nursing home residents who contracted Covid but died while treated at a hospital as nursing home deaths, even though everyone else is. Again, in a state where policies greatly exacerbated the spread in nursing homes.
The policies were brutal and led to many, many deaths. And now they’re trying to hide that.
Kazzy What exactly is your point?
Don’t we all agree that we need to do whatever is possible to restart the economy within the constraints of adequate safety and reduction of the spread of COVID?
Where people seem to differ is exactly to what extent we can restart the economy and what constitutes “reasonable measures to adequately keep people safe and healthy and reduce the spread of COVID”.
I don’t really care about the number of deaths being over or under reported – it’s obviously a highly contagious disease, and if don’t keep the Ro below 1, we cannot resume “normal” without a lot of illness and death.
Which means, people need to stop congregating in large numbers, especially without masks. People need to take some responsibility and recognize that just because they have the constitutional right to do something, doesn’t mean they SHOULD do it.
Stores can refuse service to someone not wearing shoes or a shirt, yet people are literally getting shot over stores requiring a mask? WTF?