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Open Thread, 03/02/2020

I’ve been obsessing about COVID-19. It’s shocking to me how many people seem unaware of the massive variation in risk of mortality based on age. There seems to be some heterogeneity when it comes to depleted shelves in grocery stores. For example, while people freaked out about local shortages at Costco and Trader Joes, we went to our local discount market where many Latinos shop, and it was like an ordinary day.

It seems like COVID-19 is exposing some serious “state capacity” problems. Is this the first indication that the water is finally receding and our society will be exposed?

This goes a little too far in my opinion, but still useful, COVID-19 California Information and Recommendations — A letter to my friends.

Adaptive potential and evolution in new environmental conditions.

After Factory Disaster, Bangladesh Made Big Safety Strides. Are the Bad Days Coming Back?

The Coronavirus Has Put the World’s Economy in Survival Mode. In The Great Warming Brian Fagan argued that complex agricultural societies were less “anti-fragile” than the hunter-gatherer societies which preceded them. They were less able to withstand exogenous shocks, and so you periodically saw social collapse.

The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History presents a counter-narrative: as societies have become more complex, there has been more redundancy and regional collapses are less extreme and shorter. Ray Huang observed the same in China: A Macrohistory. The interregnums between dynasties kept getting shorter and milder.

Are we more robust or are we more fragile? Why not both?

Italy, Europe’s Coronavirus Lab. “People have stopped shaking hands, let alone greeting each other with a kiss.” I think greetings of strangers involving physical contact are kind of gross.

Elizabeth Warren Has Won Black Activists. She’s Losing the Black Vote. “…she scored highest among the 2020 candidates on the Center for Urban and Racial Equity’s “Racial Justice Scorecard,”…and announced the support of a collection of activists and organizers called Black Womxn For in November.” I have a hard time not believing that reporters who are writing these pieces aren’t subtly trolling their readers. Elizabeth Warren’s team seems to have strong ideas about what nonwhite voters should be like, but they are less familiar with what they really are like. One thing to remember is that since the overwhelming majority of black voters are Democrats, black Democrats are much more ideologically diverse and know many more people of different ideologies than white Democrats.

Anyone Breaking Singapore’s Virus Rules Won’t Get Second Chance.

You Do Not Need a Three-Month Supply of Spam. Kevin Drum is less alarmist than most.

Inference of sexual selection from pairwise contests.

Religious Groups in China Step Into the Coronavirus Crisis vs. Seoul mayor sues South Korea religious group for ‘murder’ and ‘injury’ over spike in coronavirus cases. The two faces of religious cohesion and collective action.

The New England Colonies: A History Decided by Culture, or by Ecology? This post is a response to something I wrote. I finally got a copy of Ecological Imperialism.

Phenotypic Noise and the Cost of Complexity.

The white acting mother of a white presenting daughter.

38 thoughts on “Open Thread, 03/02/2020

  1. I am familiar with Latino workers who espouse that “Que sera, sera” mindset. (What will be, will be)

    Spam would not be my first choice. Undenatured whey powder, or, if you can get it, good egg white protein, not some kind of chemical smelling junk.

    There is some thought of heavy metal contamination, but it seems to be mainly an issue with plant based powders

    Among the macro nutrients, protein is the hardest to get. For the others, just get some pasta, oatmeal, rice for carbs; oil, butter, and lard for fats.

    Though we must consider proper storage of fats (vegetables oils oxidize easily), as well as the types of fat, as it is essential nutrient. Indeed, more essential than carbs.

    Finally, we will think about some vegetables: perhaps canned, though there is the hormonally active BPA lining to most cans. Or powdered, but then there is the aforementioned heavy metal contamination. Nutritional content will in general be less for both compared to fresh.

    Add some vitamins and supplements (*calcium also tends to have heavy metals if harvested from the sea). And you’re good to go! Besides toilet paper and ammo of course

  2. Personally, I’m not concerned about myself regarding covid-19. My mother however, my mother – who is 69, but in fairly good health overall – is convinced she’s going to die even when I show her that the chance of mortality with someone of her background is only between 5% and 10%. I have been trying to game out what the hell we’re going to to to try and keep her from being infected though. Should I deliver her groceries for weeks at a time and ask her to not leave her condo? Should I keep the kids from seeing her, children being the little disease factories they are? Practically speaking that might be particularly difficult if schools are closed for weeks at a time, since she typically acts as a caregiver for our children on days off where we have to work. Plus we have an international vacation scheduled for early April (no where the virus is now) which i’m wondering if we should cancel.

    I do have to say it’s interesting to me to see the weird two-track way the press is reporting covid-19 and the presidential election now, as if the two variables will not influence one another. So far the Trump Administration has really bungled the response. I understand they are trying to not panic the markets, but their overall strategy seems to be “underplay, underplay, underplay, and hope it works out for the best.” In contrast, the British government is now preparing people for the worst-case scenarios, which could include 80% of the population infected and 500,000 dead. With these kind of optics, even a moderate outbreak domestically (say 20,000 dead) could be reported as a Katrina-style debacle, not as the near-miss it is. Furthermore, given Trump and the three Democrats with the highest chance of winning the nomination are all men in their 70s – and all of them go to rallies with hundreds to thousands of people – there’s a non-trivial chance that one or more will be dead by November.

    Regarding your last link – your article on Brown Pundits – I was curious about the author of the linked piece, and did a google image search. There are multiple pictures up of her online. I am not sure why she was so surprised her daughter passes for white, when she basically passes for white herself. She has brown hair, white skin, etc. Her facial features do look a bit South Asian, but I’ve known tons of Italians who are swarthier than she is. Of course if she has a child with a white American the child will probably come out looking white.

  3. Concerning Corona virus it seems to be highly likely that the infection rates will drop in warm, sunny and moist weather. Probably even the disease runs will be influenced in a positive way.

    However, how big that influence through the weather really will be is one big uncertainty and its hard to get reliable information about this factor.

    Anyone having read something which seems legitimate about that question?
    If it spreads big and fast in California, that would be bad news in this context.

  4. “Italy, Europe’s Coronavirus Lab. “People have stopped shaking hands, let alone greeting each other with a kiss.” I think greetings of strangers involving physical contact are kind of gross.”

    We were in India in November. I wondered if there was some element of biological evolution behind the namaste greeting, or whether it is a manifestation of religious purity rules.

    I either event, it is a good practice for an era of globalized spreading of novel infectious diseases and decreasing effectiveness of antibiotics.

    I just had trouble trying to figure out how to respond when my hands were full — as with heavy luggage.

  5. It seems like COVID-19 is exposing some serious “state capacity” problems. Is this the first indication that the water is finally receding and our society will be exposed?

    Individual states apparently play a very large role in responding to outbreaks, larger than I had thought. Individual state competence at responding to COVID-19 might compensate somewhat for serious failures at the federal level, at least to enough of a degree that those responsible for the bad federal response can try and claim it went better than it did.

    Bangladesh and textile factory safety really shows the promise and limitations of relying heavily on outside pressure to enforce safety standards, versus the state itself developing strong rules and enforcement of them. If there’s no domestic capacity or power to enforce safety and labor standards, then they tend not to last – and it’s no surprise that the politically powerful textile manufacturers in Bangladesh are trying to push for a more malleable domestic enforcement regime.

  6. Reading about Singapore, part of its relative success might be due to its weather conditions.
    Its suspicious that all major outbreaks so far seem to have happened under cloudy, dry and rather colder “flu weather” (Northern China, Korea, Iran and North Italy).

  7. “Italy, Europe’s Coronavirus Lab. “People have stopped shaking hands, let alone greeting each other with a kiss.” I think greetings of strangers involving physical contact are kind of gross.”

    You know what’s gross? Iranian Shias licking their shrines. Even if they weren’t in the midst of a pandemic, it would still be pretty gross.

    I’ve been obsessing about COVID-19. It’s shocking to how many people seem unaware of the massive variation in risk of mortality based on age.

    I wonder if Japan closing its schools for the month of March was excessive. On the other hand, you don’t want the grandkids infecting grandma and grandpa, especially in a country with so many people over the age of eighty.

  8. I remember when we first learned about “Que sera”, we were taught that it was a song about promise and potential. What will I be when I grow up? The possibilities! Oh sweet Anglo can-do and optimism

  9. “Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)” is a song written by the team of Jay Livingston and Ray Evans that was first published in 1956. Doris Day introduced it in the Alfred Hitchcock film The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), singing it as a cue to their onscreen kidnapped son. …

    Day’s recording of the song for Columbia Records made it to number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and number one in the UK Singles Chart. It came to be known as Day’s signature song. The song in The Man Who Knew Too Much received the 1956 Academy Award for Best Original Song. …

    The song popularized the title expression “que sera, sera” as an English-language phrase indicating “cheerful fatalism”, though its use in English dates back to at least the 16th century. Contrary to popular perception, the phrase is not Spanish in origin, and is ungrammatical in that language.

    from wikipedia

  10. Of what use are our carefully shepherded legalistic disenfranchisings, if in turn our demographic becomes terminally disenfranchised by this crass hoax bio-thing? UNFAIR!

  11. The hospitalization rates alone (I’ve seen 15-20%) could be financially devastating, not to mention the impact it would have on renewal rates even if you enjoy a group rate.

  12. https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-china-joint-mission-on-covid-19-final-report.pdf

    Read the World Health Organisation’s China mission report, even if you are totally mistrustful of the data from China. You can learn a lot from it. It’s not that hard, only 40 pages total.

    Karl – This coronavirus is unusual for a virus, in that the ‘attack rate’ on children is very low (you need to trust the Chinese data enough to accept that, but it is being replicated in other countries which have large outbreaks). Not only do they not die from it (0-9 years 0 fatalities, 10-19 years very low fatalities), only a very small % get infected. No one knows why, yet. But unlike with influenza, kids are not a significant vector for transmission in this case.

    80% of the population will not be infected; and if there is a second wave next winter, there could well be a vaccine available by at least the middle of next winter. All epidemics peak; I don’t know enough to know why, but they do. Even the Black Death in medieval Europe did not infect 80%, and that hung around for a very long time and kept coming back. The 1918/1919 influenza, of which there were three waves, infected only an estimated total of 27% of the global population. Even in Wuhan, on the Chinese data, only 1% of the population have been infected – so, x10 or x20 that to allow for under-counting, lying, cheating, stealing, sniveling, propagandising, covering up and all of the other vile things that the evil Chinese obviously do and you still only get 10 – 20%.

    Going on the epidemic curves from various countries, the Japanese seem to be succeeding in containing it.

    The South Koreans have a big problem, despite doing lots of right things (like drive through testing, which is a stroke of sheer brilliance on their part), but they have the problem of the very large religious cult (245,000 members) centred in Daegu which has a lot of infections, and infected people hiding from the authorities.

    It is out of control in Italy, even though they have shut down the worst infected towns, and clearly out of control in Iran.

    Obs – No one has any properly conducted test data for this yet, which is surprising to me; it is something you would logically really want to know, and seemingly not hard to set up tests for. For SARS in 2003, tests found that the coronavirus could stay alive on a stainless steel surface for several weeks at 0 degrees Celsius, and five days at 40C. It seemed to like very low and very high humidity, but died in moderately high humidity.

    Anecdotal observational data for this coronavirus suggest that it is remaining alive on fomites for days, rather than weeks. If it behaves similarly to other viruses and coronaviruses, then higher temperatures and humidity should help, and direct UV light should kill it. But no one actually knows that yet.

    Good thing to know: The WHO do not believe that it is spreading aerially (so no long distance transmission via aerosols), only directly delivered by droplets (maximum range about 6 feet) or picking it up on the hands from fomites and then transferring those to the mucous membranes of the nose, mouth and eyes by touching the face. So diligent hand hygiene is important. They think fecal-oral is only a slim outside chance as a route of transmission.

    So: good hand hygiene, and social distancing.

  13. “It’s shocking to me how many people seem unaware of the massive variation in risk of mortality based on age.”

    Haven’t noticed that at all, more general sentiment seems to be “It’s not that bad, it only kills the elderly and the already sick anyway”. Which imo reveals quite a lot about Western societies…

  14. Running some more numbers (sorry I am having so much to say, but I have been watching this thing very closely for more than 2 months now, and have picked up a fair bit which I think is important to communicate):

    The difference between whether you have very effective containment and control in a community (where you can keep the rate of infection to a small fraction of 1%) and where you have no effort at controlling it at all (where the upper bound is likely to be 20%) is absolutely huge.

    So, let’s assume that in communities in the USA everyone just ignores it and there is no control effort at all (which I cannot believe will be the case) and you get 20% of a population infected. Of those, 80% will suffer only mild ‘flu like symptoms (and those who remain asymptomatic throughout the course of the infection will actually be very small), they need no special medical care at all, and they can just self-isolate at home, and recover in the space of couple of weeks.

    But 20% will get severe symptoms (like onset of difficulty breathing, which kicks in about 5 days after they first get symptoms), and of those, 5% will progress to becoming critically ill. And all of those 15% + 5% will need some special medical care – for the 15%, supplemental oxygen to keep them alive long enough for their immune systems to fight off the infection (and who can all survive if they get it), and 5% will need mechanical ventilation or similar (of whom maybe 1% will die anyway).

    So, 20% of 20% is 4% of the population who could get severely ill and need special medical care. If all of those 4% present to hospitals over a short period of time, the hospitals will be overwhelmed – they will run out of oxygen, and have insufficient equipment, or even just bed spaces, to accommodate them all. In that case, conceivably all 4% could die.

    But if you can exercise enough control so you flatten out the epidemic curve, and severe patients present to hospitals at a slow enough rate for them to be able to cope with, then all but about 1% of infected will survive, although some of the more severely affected may be left with permanent heart or lung damage.

    Those that die will mostly be the very elderly (the over 80s particularly, but even then more than 75% will survive, and of the over 70s about 92% will survive, which are pretty good odds) and those with co-morbidities of a set that is now very well known from the Chinese experience: coronary artery disease, diabetes, hypertension, and chronic respiratory diseases like asthma and COPD.

    This belief that seems to be going around, that a lot of people seem to be convinced of, that there are a lot of ‘cryptic’ asymptomatic cases among the community that remain detected but are infecting people, is not right. I have been watching a few cities where I have either very high confidence or reasonably high confidence in the numbers, and that is clearly not happening. Where there is good contact tracing, there is no evidence at all that is happening.

    I have no particular medical knowledge, I’m just a simple engineer, but I can do the math, and those are things I have learned and have confidence in. And this is not just an academic exercise for me; my family and I are pretty much in the middle of it, and have been for a couple of months. It’s not something to ignore – it’s more infectious than seasonal influenza, and has a higher fatality rate (but with the blessing that it doesn’t kill kids). But it’s not the zombie apocalypse either.

    Effective control and containment are very important – you can get a big economic hit from that, but you can recover quickly afterwards. No control at all, and you could get 20% infected and 4% dead; secondary effects like widespread shortages of food and other essential supplies kick in, your community will be on its knees and your economy might never recover. You can do the math yourself – the difference is huge. The Chinese didn’t shut down half of China for no reason.

  15. Thanks John, you confirm my impression. The death rate in Wuhan is not primarily due to the initial spread being more aggressive, but they just run out of proper care capacities.
    Without intensive care up to 5 percent seem to be lethal.

    I think a lot depends on the individual immune response. There are 80 year old males with comorbidities doing well and healthy young women dying. Since nobody knows his immune response, nobody but kids seem to be safe. The odds are different statistically, thats all.

  16. Sorry, there’s one other bit of good news that I meant to mention but forgot: like SARS and MERS, this coronavirus so far has been very stable; it shows no sign so far of mutating into more contagious or virulent strains. Let’s hope it stays that way. People thought initially that a more virulent strain might be happening in Iran, but it’s not – that came from accurate reporting of deaths but under-reporting of total number of infections (not necessarily deliberately), giving a falsely high crude fatality rate.

  17. Btw, do NOT stock up on canned tuna; there is sufficient mercury in tuna to cause poisoning if it becomes the main source of protein for months

  18. John Massey: Thanks for your excellent summary. I’ve forwarded it verbatim to my kith.

    About your situation there in Hong Kong: First I thought to ask, whither now the resistance to Mainland-ization (or what’s the working-vernacular term)?

    Then I thought to ask: Beyond the helpful general rubrics of hand-hygeine and social distancing, what are some salient particularities of your family’s emerged protocols/routines/habits in response to this contagion? Especially of interest given the Manhattan-like (or beyond?) population density in HK.

  19. “Are we more robust or are we more fragile? Why not both?”

    Good point.

    Mayans collapsed but they didn’t go away, you can go hang out with them today. Maybe their civ was more fragile than hunter-gatherers (maybe), but a comparable collapse among hunter-gatherers would be extirpation. Civilizational development might be more fragile (maybe) but gives levels your culture can collapse back to before disappearing entirely.

  20. Writing from Italy.

    All of the stories around Italy as a major center of infection in Europe are bullshit.
    Italy is being demonized, discriminated (visas and controls at the borders) and even being outright mocked (look at the “Coronavirus pizza” video on a national French station) while the simple fact is that we are just monitoring the situation MUCH BETTER than the other Western countries. To date we have tested *over 30.000 people* while France, Germany, the UK etc just a small fraction of that each while at the same time registering “large unusual late cases of influenza” (especially Germany and France, Germany alone is talking about 80.000 cases!) this year…

    And what about the other developed nation with a large number of cases… South Korea too has tested over 23.000 people, perfectly in line with Italy (their population is around 50.000.000, ours 60.000.000).
    The thought that a nation like Germany, with its massive contacts with China, or a gruviera nation like France, that whenever you pass the boarding areas to their country at the airport all you see are assorted coloreds from all over the world, would get their cases from Italy, and just recently, is totally laughable.

    Read today on various Western European news outlets about the first Ukrainan and first Russian cases, both pinned on a local citizen coming back home from Italy and the message is: infection coming from Italy. My wife is from Ukraine but ethnically Russian (from the separatist areas) and since her brother has long moved to Russia and her parents are moving this summer, she follows both countries’ news (local sources).
    The actual truth of what happened was that the Ukrainian man flew from Italy to Romania where he met with his wife and they went back home in Ukraine by car with many stops along the way and the Russian man came back home in Moscow from a ski holiday in North Italy, felt perfectly fine but was worried about the news so went and got checked 2 times: test results both negative. Then people coming back from Italy started to be quarantined in Russia and they quarantined also this man putting him, among his protests, *in the same room* with 4 other guys coming back from South Korea and Iran and he later tested positive. The director of the warden actually asked him to be quiet about his incompetence but he blew the whistle and it made the local news.

    All you would know in the West is about 2 other clearly Italy-related cases…

  21. “Why People Are Sharing Their Family Secrets With Strangers in Public: People who uncover family secrets with home DNA tests often confide in friends and relatives. Some people also feel compelled to divulge the revelations more widely.” by Amy Dockser Marcus on March 3, 2020.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-people-are-sharing-their-family-secrets-with-strangers-in-public-11583260168

    * * *

    “The impulse to stand up is like testifying in the old-fashioned way. It is almost religious. It is standing and saying, ‘This is who I am,’ ” says Dani Shapiro, author of the memoir “Inheritance,” which chronicles her experiences after a DNA test led her to discover that her parents conceived her via sperm donation.

    Ms. Shapiro’s book tour has turned into a regular gathering place for people who not only want to hear her personal DNA story but also share their own. People have shared stories at every one of the more than 100 events she has held since her book came out last year, she says, including at the Westport library in February.

    * * *

    People have also publicly shared DNA findings at movie showings and in academic gatherings. Sara Lamm, who made a documentary about her discovery that she was conceived through sperm donation, says some people have shared their DNA stories at the screenings because those closest to them may not fully accept how transformative and unsettling a DNA discovery can be.

  22. “The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History presents a counter-narrative: as societies have become more complex, there has been more redundancy and regional collapses are less extreme and shorter.”

    The book was written by William McNeill and his son J.R. I took Western Civilization from Willam in 1966. As I look back on it, his level of insight was amazing and almost everything he predicted has come true. I would go with him.

    Further thought on this issue. Richer societies are far more capable of dealing with problems than poorer one. Compare natural disaster responses between rich an poor countries. There are always orders of magnitude more dead people in the latter than the former.

  23. Just wanted to say that Mr. Massey’s summary is EXCELLENT!

    The only thing I’d add is that, in the United States, there has been a great deal of consolidation in the healthcare field. Many medical facilities, esp. those with trauma and ICU capabilities or even just in-patient treatment capacity, have closed in the last 20 years. Particularly hard hit are rural areas. So we are less able to deal with a pandemic surge today than we were in the past.

    This is the problem with achieving “efficiency.” Efficiency, by definition, eliminates or reduces excess capacity/redundancy and dramatically weakens the ability to deal with an unexpected shock. For a recent example, witness the tornado that flattened an Amazon warehouse in the East Coast. Amazon shipping speed from 1-2 days to 14-to-21 days for several weeks in the affected regions.

  24. Thanks Twinkie.

    @American Lake: ‘Resistance’ is as good a term as any. It had died down to a low level right after Christmas, before HK got its first Covid-19 case. I don’t see much relation between the two.

    We are living out in the sticks in HK (it’s a region, not a single monolithic city, although frequently referred to as such in MSM), so not an NYC analog for us. Family routine is largely unaffected. Not much you can learn from us personally in the details, I think. My wife doesn’t scare easily and daughter is a switched on Biologist, so they just mask-up, pocket a little bottle of hand sanitizer and out they go, undeterred. I do the same, but usually can’t be bothered with the mask, which doesn’t actually do much, and masks are in short supply; it’s more of a social pressure thing, makes other people less scared of you because you can’t cough or sneeze droplets at them. Some panic buying here, so I was having to go out hunting in my car for toilet paper, rice and such for a while, but that’s over now; suppliers got the message, ramped up supplies of essentials, supermarket shelves were quickly restocked, people were reassured and it’s over. Current total 0.0013% of the population has been infected, many already recovered and been discharged, and the large number of undetected ‘cryptic’ cases in the community alleged by numerical modelers is mythical, R0 is around 2.6, so the risk of exposure is minimal provided you do the basic sensible stuff.

    HK is a small sample, good public health system, plenty of test kits and testing facilities, very good contact tracing using police manpower. By this stage in 2003 the SARS epidemic here was much worse, with 1,000 infected and 50 dead, incl. 8 doctors and nurses, ultimately total 299 deaths, and we learned a lot from that very painful experience, both in public health terms and as a community, and acted on it, so HK was well prepared in most respects.

    Teasing out the HK data could be somewhat useful I guess. So far, 100 infected (so less than Singapore), 2 deaths (co-morbidities), hospitals not too stretched and coping well, and new infections now dying down to a small trickle, and sources of new infections all now easily identifiable (close contact with infected family members; people evacuated from the Diamond Princess cruise ship; one particular Buddhist temple which is now closed down and people who went there traced or voluntarily self-identified to health authorities). Border with Mainland China is now effectively shut down (14 day mandatory quarantine going both ways) except for cross-border trucks supplying food and other essential supplies; truck drivers get health-checked at the border but are exempted from quarantine. Quarantines/cordons sanitaire do not need to be perfectly watertight to be effective, just good enough.

    BUT: the Covid-19 epidemic in HK, such as it has been, has coincided with peak ‘flu season, so for every confirmed case – more than 100 symptomatic ‘suspected’ cases put into isolation but who have quickly tested negative, 3 tests each on consecutive days, and have been discharged. More than 17,000 people quarantined so far, with very large majority of people being compliant. It is these large numbers of negatives that tend to stretch resources here, but they are necessary, so we are doing rapid construction of more accommodation to house quarantined people, where home quarantines are not workable due to housing limitations. But the situation would have been far worse without plentiful test kits and the ability to test lots of people quickly right from the start, plus ample isolation wards, ICUs, etc. which got built up a lot as a consequence of the SARS epidemic.

    Public gatherings have been greatly curtailed, voluntarily/proactively without people needing to be told. People intuitively practise social distancing – ingrained behaviour from SARS. No one objects and we all just do it. People working from home as much as possible; avoiding using the trains, which are normally very crowded/lots of close contact; strict controls on people arriving by air, and air travel numbers are way down – the HK flag carrier Cathay Pacific Airways has 50% of its aircraft parked, and is taking a big financial hit.

    Looking at the USA, the thing that worries me the most for you folks is the testing situation. That is a very big problem that needs to be fixed very quickly. I’m probably not telling you anything you don’t already know in that regard.

    Plus what Twinkie said, which I didn’t know.

  25. John,

    Can you please elaborate further on this:

    “80% of the population will not be infected…”

    Cochran says, “it’s a new virus, no one is immune.”

    The Atlantic ran a non-panicky article that stated 40-70% of the populace will be infected. Infected, not seriously ill.

    So I’d like to know where you get the 80% figure from.

  26. PS – I think I have it.

    The Diamond Princess is a good example as to how many people in an enclosed space can be infected. 19%.

    Sounds right to me.

  27. 100% agreed with John. I’ve drawn an identical conclusion from the same numbers, including the asymptomatic issue being exaggerated. There are under 100k ventilators in America. I started calling and cajoling all my elderly relatives, friends, and neighbors two weeks ago when I realized this. I am telling them the hospitals will be overwhelmed and the death rate for your age group will be appalling when this happens. Vulnerable people **MUST** prepare to isolate themselves at home without visitors until the first wave burns through. Preferably they should stock up on food so they have no reason to go out at all, as I’ve got my parents to do (Dad’s 75 with pneumonia). I am pleading for relatives to get people out of nursing homes. Cases doubled every 2.4 days on average in China before drastic control measures were taken. That kind of growth means there will be a week where it just seems to explode and the cat will be out of the bag in the US. The team that uncovered the six week old cluster in Washington says they are where Wuhan was on Jan. 4.

    I am struggling to get most to understand this risk because the news is working against me. The “Time to Get Medieval” editorial in NYT the other day talked about the pervasive attitude in public health of not wanting to alarm the public. We don’t need soothing “most people will be fine” messages. We need calls to action. Hurricane forecasters are a good role model here. They scare you as much as they think they can get away with to where you’ll listen next time if it’s a dud. I’ve been through a few and the public doesn’t panic. They start planning and preparing furiously when the call goes out.

    Max Starkloff, hero of St. Louis in the 1918 pandemic, stuck his neck out early and saved a lot of lives. Where are the people like him today?

  28. gothamette – Right. I took the Diamond Princess as a worse case scenario, and that has topped out at 19% infected of all passengers + crew held on board, crowded together in confined space for a prolonged period, with no effective disease control; in fact the ‘disease control officer’ on board was infected herself, and seeing patients while not wearing any PPE, so she undoubtedly infected people.

    In addition to pneumonic plague in medieval Europe and the 1918/1919 H1N1 influenza pandemic, I also looked at the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic, no acquired immunity, estimated to have infected 11 to 21% of global population.

    So 20% for the first pass of Covid-19 seems like a reasonable guess as an upper bound, in the case of no attempt at disease control at all.

    80% is ridiculous.

  29. I have a feeling (just a feeling) that this might be the Hurricane Irene to the Superstorm Sandy.

    I remember it well. We were all waiting for and warned about The Big One. Irene: August 21-28, 2011.

    Very bad hurricane, but in the end, that’s all she was. People even criticized Bloomberg for shutting down the subways. Assholes. If Irene had blown in a different direction the subways would have been inundated and thousands of people would have died. We have nearly 800 pumps working 24/7 to prevent normal flooding. They would have been overwhelmed.

    So we relaxed. There were even some who said it was (bad pun) overblown. It really wasn’t. It was a very destructive hurricane.

    Wikipedia:

    Hurricane Irene was a large and destructive tropical cyclone which affected much of the Caribbean….
    Total fatalities: 49
    Highest wind speed: 121 mph
    Lowest pressure: 942 mb
    Damage: $14.2 billion (2011 USD)
    Date: August 21, 2011 – August 28, 2011
    Category: Category 3 Hurricane

    Then came Sandy. I don’t have to tell you about that one.

    I’m concerned that we’ll learn all the right things from this virus, and forget them.

    And it could easily happen. Same lethality rate, but it attacks young adults, or kids.

  30. Speaking of plagues: I suppose that what with CRISPR, molecular printing, and all suchlikes, there really is by now nothing but ethical self-restraint that might prevent a capable lab from cooking up a virus that specifically targets one human subgroup, or perhaps that targets ::all:: human subgroups, except but that it spares the inventor’s own preferred genotypic subgroup? As in, to use a (hopefully absurd) example, let’s say some wiggy Icelanders decided that they’d like to depopulate the globe except for Icelanders…

    Yeah, it’s been the stuff of sci-fi forevs. But how close are we now to such unfortunate capability? As a mere mortal at my keyboard, I say unfortunate because (such capability) x (a fair number of years) = certainty.

    Is this not a genuine now-very-real probability? Is it not time to say, “Yikes! It’s now, today, really possible!” to this particular yet-another technological unleashing?

  31. Razib,
    UofWasington seems to be eequencing a high number of samples to confirm cases. If I understand, this seems to be separate from CDC approved testing. Can you explain anything about the situation? Are the CDC tests geneti tests? Or what is the range of testing types used to confirm cases?

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