Category: COVID through 2022

All my various postings tracking the COVID-19 pandemic through the end of 2022.

Post #659: Reopening in Georgia and elsewhere, post 1.

 

Source:  Amazon.com.  Source of the quote: Adam Savage, Mythbusters.

Georgia re-opened many types of businesses yesterday, including a lot of personal-care services, gyms, spas, and restaurants.  They’re opening another range of businesses on Monday.  Another handful of states is in the process of easing restrictions at the same time.

The picture at the top of this post is NOT some wish that these re-openings fail.  To the contrary, we should all pray for their success.

Instead, it’s just Adam Savage’s pithy summary of how the world really works.  It’s not the outright pessimism of Murphy’s Law.  Not the sloppy optimism of Professor Pangloss and his various heirs.

It’s a statement of fact.  If you want to have a robust plan for responding to this pandemic — one that won’t crumble at the first adverse event — then you ignore this at your peril.  Continue reading Post #659: Reopening in Georgia and elsewhere, post 1.

Post #658: Yes! Somebody finally figured out that you can skip Phase I vaccine trials.

Artist’s conception of RNA.  Source, Clipart-Library.com

Here’s some good news:  Somebody in authority has finally figured out that they can just skip Phase I clinical trials of proposed vaccines.  That was reported today as a “controversial idea” that might “save several months” of time for vaccine development.

Given what I’ve seen so far, it’s a sure bet that the medical establishment will harrumph at length over this, because this does not match the established protocol for vaccine development.  But the case for doing this — both medical and economic — is overwhelming.  Even the tiniest bit of arithmetic shows how hugely favorable such a strategy is likely to be in this case.  (This case being that thousands die daily from the disease, while economies worldwide slide into depression for want of a vaccine.)

Fewer lives lost, fewer dollars lost.  By a huge margin.  By skipping Phase I.

It’s a no-brainer.  And if a person without any medical training could put two-and-two together on that, there’s a least some hope that our hide-bound public health establishment can, eventually, maybe, shake themselves out of business-as-usual long enough to do the same.

Bottom line:  Here’s what I said 20 days ago.  And I still stand by it.

“What sets me off on this topic is the report that the Federal government was starting Phase I trials of a vaccine.  To which I said, why in the hell are they doing that?  Allow me to explain. …”

Apparently somebody else came to the same conclusion.  Praise be.  Now if they can just convince the arithmetic-challenged members of the public health establishment, we can get that vaccine months sooner.

You can see the background — what is Phase I, and what’s the simple arithmetic in favor of skipping it — in Post #601, 4/4/2020.

Post #G01: Opening the economy prematurely as a variant of the hog-slaughter cycle.

 

With apologies to Hornsby, the long-suffering pig of Marshall Road.

In the prior post, I suggested that survivors of coronavirus should be treated as the seed potatoes of our economic recovery.  In this post I use a different agricultural analogy entirely.  I’m going to explain a classic economic model that I think will apply to those who haven’t been infected with coronavirus yet.  At least in a few States.  That is the model of the hog-slaughter cycle.

The hog-slaughter cycle.

Source:  Understanding Hog Production and Price Cycles, Authors: Gene A. Futrell, Iowa State University; Allan G. Mueller, University of Illinois; Glenn Grimes, University of Missouri

As an economist, your early training focuses in the easiest case to understand, that of perfect markets, with perfect information, and rational actors.  In other words, a) no one buyer or seller has any power over the prices to be paid, b) everything about the market is publicly known and, c) everybody behaves in a rational (i.e., profit-maximizing) fashion.

In such a market, there’s almost no way to justify any predictable changes in prices.  If the price change were predictable, people would act to offset it.

And so, there’s no place for any type of regular, cyclical behavior in prices, other than what could be justified by (say) additional storage costs of commodities for off-season use.  Something that is continuously produced and consumed should show no regular, repeating changes in prices over time.

It’s hard to find markets that come closer to that ideal that the markets for agricultural commodities.  For the typical commodity, there are numerous small producers.  There are functioning national and international markets that both price those in current terms, and offer “futures” so that companies can lay off risks of future price movements.  And there are typically enough buyers that no one buyer can materially manipulate prices.

Enter the hog-slaughter cycle, pictured above.  It is well-documented that the prices of hogs do, in fact, vary in a quasi-regular fashion over time.  As does hog production.

For a while, this drove neoclassical economists nuts, so it was a well-studied phenomenon.  So much so that it formed the basis for much of my graduate course in time-series analysis.  That was taught by one of the guys who first documented, beyond a doubt, that the wiggles that look like regular cycles above are, in fact, regular cycles.

In the end, the presence of this cycle was attributed to three things.  First, pigs are prolific.  The production of hogs can be changed fairly rapidly.  Sows have litters of piglets, so one pregnant sow can produce a dozen hogs-to-be.  (As opposed to cattle, say, born one-at-a-time).  Second, there’s a lag between cause and effect.  A farmer’s decision to breed more sows results in more finished hogs some time later.  (I vaguely recall that it’s something like 18 months, but I’m a little rusty on pig biology).  Finally, the economic actors are somewhat short-sighted.  They look at today’s price for hogs, to determine whether or not to breed more or fewer sows.   And they aren’t really able to base their current decision on some sophisticated guess as to the price of hogs a year-and-a-half from now.

And so, here’s how the hog cycle works.  It starts out with things looking pretty good.  Hog prices are up, and it looks like producing hogs is a profitable thing to do.  So, independently, farmers across the country put more sows into production.  Then, things start to go sour, profit-wise, but you can’t yet see it, because there such a lag between the start and the final outcome (breeding the sow and selling the resulting finished hogs.)  But, ultimately, the bad news comes out.  A surplus of hogs hits the market, depressing the price of hogs and reducing farmer profits.

At which point, the whole cycle goes into reverse:  Fewer sows bred, fewer hogs to market, rising hog prices.  And we’re back to the start of the cycle again.  Resulting in the graphs you see above, of hog production and hog prices.

Bottom line:  Short-shortsightedness, plus a time lag, generates the hog-slaughter cycle.

Early removal of coronavirus restrictions as a classic hog-slaughter  cycle.

It’s now apparent that Georgia, at least, is going to start removing restrictions on its population, starting more-or-less now.  This, despite many experts saying that it’s far too soon.  Given the Governor’s rhetoric, it’s fairly clear that this is driven by ideology, not science.

What’s less clear is that this move is driven purely by economics.  This isn’t a case of belief in individual liberty trumping scientific judgment.  It’s a pure dollars-and-cents issue.  Many businesses need a population of coronavirus-immune consumers and workers, or they’ll go under.  That includes pretty much all of the personal-services sector, plus travel, tourism, sit-down restaurants, bars,and many types of non-essential goods retail.

Those businesses plausibly can’t wait the 12 months until a vaccine is available.  Apparently, they can’t even wait until the number of cases in a state has stabilized.  They want that now.

As noted in my seed potato post (#G00), we are slowly producing that coronavirus-immune population naturally, as more individuals are infected and recover from the disease.  It is apparently common for younger individuals to have mild or no symptoms.  A recent screening in LA County showed that about four percent of the population now has antibodies to coronavirus.

But this is a slow process.  That’s the whole point — to slow the rate of new infections so that you don’t overwhelm the hospital system.

Removing the restrictions then has a two-fold benefit to the affected businesses.  It provides some customers immediately, and it will increase the speed at which we produce the coronavirus-immune population.  The downside of that, of course, is that this occurs because the rate of new infections will (almost surely) increase as these restrictions are lifted.

The Georgia government may think that it is doing this prudently.  I am sure that they have in mind some sort of linear, step-at-a-time approach.  Lift the restrictions a bit, business resumes a bit, the infection rate goes up a bit, the number of deaths goes up a bit.  Then when that works out OK, lift it a bit more.  And so on.  Always with an eye toward not letting this get out of control and overwhelming their hospital system.

That way, they can simply trade a few additional deaths for a better economic outcome.  They’ll never say that, of course.  But that’s the bottom line.  It might not even be irrational, if there are few enough additional deaths, and a great enough economic benefit.  (But given that the decision appears based on ideology, it’s a fair bet that nobody there has done even the most basic arithmetic to see if that’s even remotely plausible. )

But I bet that what they get is not that nice, linear progression.  They’re going to get a hog-slaughter cycle.  At least, this certainly has all the elements.  A prolifically reproductive creature.  Long lags between decisions and outcomes, relative to the that creature’s life-cycle.  And short-sighted economic actors.

Lift the restrictions a bit — and two or three weeks later, you may have some idea what that did.  Or you may not.  You may be able to put that particular phase of the genie back in the bottle.  Or maybe not.  And you may have already gone on to phases II, III and so on, before you even have any feedback on what the effect of the initial easing was.

My guess is, given the low fraction of the population that is naturally immune at this point, it’ll cycle.  They’ll lift restrictions, some weeks later the rates will be up, they’ll re-impose restrictions, some weeks after that the rates go down, and so on.

We’ve seen what it takes to bring this epidemic to screeching halt.  It takes what they did in Wuhan — a complete and total shutdown.  Here, we do this-n-that, we suggest, we encourage, we keep the bulk of retail open for business.  (And make excuses for businesses that won’t require masks.)  And now, selectively, some states are removing even those mild approaches, far earlier than public health experts say is warranted, given current conditions in those states.

Just to keep this in perspective, here’s Wuhan (left) versus Virginia (right), as of a couple of weeks ago.  The 12-day markers all denote the point at which the Commonwealth took some restrictive action (or the CDC changed guidance).

Tough for me to fathom what, exactly, they expect to happen in Georgia.  And when, exactly, they’ll know it’s gone sideways.  And how long, exactly, it’ll take to get their rate back down to where it was when they started.

But maybe that just doesn’t matter.  Just think of your citizens as a farmer thinks of hogs.  First and foremost, they are a factor of economic production.  They are a resource that needs to be put to use.  From that perspective, the only minor distinction is that hogs were born to be slaughtered.  In terms of the arithmetic of the results, I’m betting there’s not a lot of difference.

Now doesn’t this make my seed-potato concept seem positively humane, by contrast?   At least in that case, people choose to be infected and you concentrate on the lowest-risk population.  If the driver here really is the economic need to speed up the creation of a coronvirus-immune consumer and worker population, that seems like a much better way to go about it.

If you want to see a simple-minded explanation of why the decision to cause more deaths, in order to reduce economic losses, is probably inefficient, see Post #571.

Christopher Hogan, Ph.D., chogan@directresearch.com

Post #G00: The pandemic garden blog.

On seed potatoes

A month ago, I set myself up to do a real garden this year (Post #580).  Let me dub that my pandemic garden.  And now,  as we pass our probable last-frost dates, it’s put-up-or-shut-up time.  Get off my  duff, get the soil prepared, get the seeds sprouting or in the ground.  Or admit that I’m just a nervous Nellie with no follow-through.

I’ve decided to talk about my experiences, trying to get back into gardening.  Figuring that if I can do this, anybody can.  You name a crop that can plausibly be grown in Northern Virginia, and I’ve failed at it.

But, oddly enough, a couple of the earliest steps reminded me of a couple of things I learned as an economist.  So I thought I might get the ball rolling with a post on seed potatoes, and, next, the hog-slaughter cycle.

Seed potatoes:  Sprout inhibitor and viral plant diseases

One of the first things to go into the ground in the spring are the potatoes.  Mine should have been in the ground a couple of weeks ago, but I’m still awaiting delivery of my seed potatoes.

For those of you who have never grown potatoes, you take a “seed potato” and cut it into little chunks, where each chunk has an eye.  So one good-sized potato serves as seed for several new potato plants.  A reasonable expectation of yield is that each pound of seed potatoes yields about 10 pound of potatoes at harvest.

Most people realize that using grocery-store potatoes as seed potatoes often fails. Those are treated with one of a range of chemicals to inhibit sprouting.  Some of those sprout-inhibitors thoroughly destroy the potato’s ability to grow normally by damaging basic processes such as DNA synthesis.  They cannot effectively be washed off.  Depending on the dose that the potato got, the effects can range from complete suppression of sprouting to potatoes that appear to grow well, but produce malformed, knobby tubers.

It’s not clear that potatoes labeled as “organic” potatoes are or are not so treated.  When I read the rules regarding what may and may not be used in organic vegetable production, the only substance that might be used as a sprout inhibitor that appears on the list is ethylene gas.  And that’s mentioned only for use with citrus and pineapple ripening.  So, by “the rules”, you’d have to say no.

But I note that the “organic” Yukon Golds currently on my counter top certainly behave as if they were treated.  They now have tiny sprouts that blacken and die off if they grow beyond a quarter-inch or so.  That suggests that some long-lived treatment has been applied.  At this late date, they’d be sprouting by now if they hadn’t been treated in some fashion.

The consensus of internet opinion is that potatoes from a farmers’ market are unlikely to have been treated with sprout inhibitors.  The ones I got at the Holy Comforter famers’ market two weeks back follow that rule:  They are sprouting vigorously, with no sign of die-back.

So, for the time being, I’m planting farmers’ market potatoes, as I wait to see whether my seed potato supplier will come through.

But there’s a second reason to use certified seed potatoes:  viral plant diseases.  Potatoes are subject to a wide variety of crippling viral diseases, and potatoes sold as seed potatoes have to be certified virus-free, or at least, certified as to minimal viral content.  Not only can these disease kill the current crop, as with many plant disease, the potato virus can remain in the soil for a few years, rendering fields useless for potato production for some period of time after infection.

In Virginia, the Seed Potato Board (yep, that’s a real thing) regulates standards and trade in seed potatoes, for commercial growers in the state.  In other states, it may be literally illegal for the home owner to plant grocery-store potatoes, for fear of spreading viral potato diseases.  But as far as I can tell, it is not illegal for a non-commercial farmer to plant non-certified potatoes in Virginia.  Either way, once certified as virus-free, seed potatoes can be planted anywhere in the Virginia, by commercial and non-commercial farmers alike.

I’m taking a gamble, as I could not get my hands on seed potatoes.  Because I rarely grow potatoes, that seems like a reasonable choice.

A seed potato analogy.

I read the other day that an estimate 4 percent of LA county residents test positive for antibodies to COVID-19.  That’s consistent with a separate estimate of about 2 percent in a different California county, using a different methodology.  And estimates that the majority of younger individuals will be asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic upon infection.

As we re-open the economy, we need to start thinking of those people as the seed potatoes of this pandemic.  All minor doubts aside, a) those people are almost certainly virus-free, and b) they are probably unable to be re-infected.

There are some doubts about the latter, but I think they have been overblown.  Those mostly arise from Korea, where a few tens of individuals (out of a recovered population of 8000+) tested negative for coronavirus subsequently returned to positive status.   They claim that’s evidence of re-infection.  I think that’s far more likely due to a small false-negative rate in their testing regimen.

Korea uses two negative tests, 24 hours apart, to determine whether hospitalized individuals are virus-free.  And so far, out of about 8000 recovered patients, a few tens of those that passed that test have gone on (typically one day later) to have a third test that was positive.

To me, that looks like the two-negative-test regimen has a few false negatives.  That is, out of 8000 tested, a few have shown two negatives, 24 hours apart, while not actually being negative for the virus.  Korea steadfastly maintains that their testing regimen is perfect, and so claim that the subsequent positive test is a result of re-infection.  I think it’s vastly more plausible that their regimen has a roughly 1% false-negative rate.  For almost any other lab test I can think of, a false negative rate that low would be an outstanding achievement.  And so, immediate re-infection cannot be ruled out, but that would make this virus almost unique in that regard, and I think that a small false-negative rate is by far the more likely explanation of those facts.

When in doubt, just ask yourself why they require two negative tests, 24 hours apart?  Why not just one.  The most likely answer has to be to reduce the false negative rate.  If each test separately had a 10% false negative rate, the two together would have just a 1% false negative rate.  I can only assume they require two tests to bring that combined false-negative rate down to an acceptable level.  And I could easily see them not admitting that publicly as a way to avoid public lack-of-confidence in their widespread testing regime.

We should start thinking of those coronavirus seriopositives as the seed potatoes for restarting the economy.

First, and most directly, they can provide convalescent plasma.  With that technique, someone who has survived coronavirus donates blood, which then provides coronavirus antibodies to the recipient of that blood. That’s an old, old technique for dealing with infectious disease outbreaks.  It’s one of those treatments that worked well in the past, has been used recently for uncurable viral diseases such as Ebola, should work now, and has been shown go work extremely well in a small-scale trial (in China).

And, much like the seed potato, one plasma donor can provide enough blood for several other individuals.  The Chinese example (search this website for details) was based on a 200 ml infusion of plasma.  At that rate, a standard one-pint blood donation provides enough for at least two recipients.  More, if an individual makes several donations.

But the other aspect that is seed-potato-like is that these individuals should be free to go anywhere, and engage in any activity.  They are like the potatoes approved by the Virginia Seed Potato Board.  The should be able to be used anywhere.  Coronavirus restrictions should not apply to them.  In theory, they’ve had it, they’re over it, they’re probably not spreading it, and they probably can’t get it again.

The government ought to issue them clip-on IDs, and as long as they are wearing those and they are visible, no coronavirus restrictions should apply to them.

Among other things, I bet these individuals would be highly valued as public-facing employees in essential businesses.  Given the rate of unemployement, and the (apparently) high percent of the population that could serve as our economy-reopening seed potatoes, I think this idea deserves some attention.

The end-game of this is to have the entire population in that state, but by artificial means (vaccine) rather than by natural immunity (by surviving the disease).  I really don’t see the downside to starting that now.

As an economist, I’ll even go one further.  Suppose you are young and unemployed.  Suppose you realize your odds of dying from coronavirus are quite low.  Supposed you’d be willing to risk that, in order to graduate to post-infection “seed potato” status, so that you could be free of coronavirus restrictions and go back to work.

In that case, if we’re so fired-up to get the economy re-started, why not arrange sites that would allow such low-risk individuals to choose to be exposed to coronavirus and placed in quarantine?  Those that are infected and survive to a virus-free state would be issued their “seed potato” IDs, and then lead the re-opening of the economy.

Many of you will be appalled by that idea.  But please refrain from judging me until you read the next post.

I have to get back to real gardening now.

Christopher Hogan, Ph.D., chogan@directresearch.com

 

Post #657: My last word

The US CDC materially changed it guidance to Americans, regarding this pandemic, on 4/3/2020.  People who know nothing about public health have no clue how unusual and important that is.  On 4/16/2020, I blogged about the difference between Fresh Fields — a company that truly gets the new CDC guidance — and Giant Food, which clearly does not.

The CDC guidance was based, in large part, on the head of the Chinese CDC saying that failure to mandate masks in public was “The great mistake” that both the US and CDC were making.  China, you know, the country that has, at this point, about 10% of the cases that the US has had, with a much larger population.  And without the months of warning that the US had.

I have been told that, today or maybe yesterday, our anointed Mayor-to-be Colbert posted a video specifically defending Giant, based on the bullshit defense that “some employees are allergic to masks”.  Which is a hoot, give that a) masks are made hypoallergenic, on purpose, and b) the store across the street has everyone masked up.  And, frankly, all you have to do is be awake, as you shop in person at Giant, to see that employee allergy is not the problem.

Their defense is, as I described earlier, legal mumbelty-speak.  As it was with Safeway.  It does not hold up to any fact-based scrutiny.  It’s something their lawyers concocted to avoid legal liability.

So, I’m just going to copy in here an unexpurgated email that I sent to Pasha Majdi on 4/13/2020, , in response to a generic inquiry as to whether I had bothered watch the last Town Council meeting. So, this is my response, to Majdi’s simply inquiry “Are you watching this”, meaning, the last Vienna Town Council meeting.

Here’s my response.  No changes.  Apologies in advance for the swear words.  Just with the understanding that I’ve been somewhat ahead of the curve so far, in getting a grip on this pandemic.

“Pasha,

No, sorry. I am sorry to say this, but I don’t think it matters what Vienna does. E.g., from a public health standpoint, I’m guessing that we can’t safely re-open sit-down dining until the majority of the population has been vaccinated, which (best guess) can’t happen any sooner than a year from now. More likely, 18 months.

Present company excepted, Town Council and Town Staff are not smart enough to think through what that means. And all the other things that will be happening, just like that, at the same time.

Last I heard it was “business-as-usual” for the Vienna town budget, and Fairfax County budget, except for a salary freeze. Only when that particular Titanic hits the new iceberg of fiscal reality will they finally, after the fact, realize what deep shit we’re all in.

Maybe that’s the right course. Maybe that changed last night?

But, as of now, I can only see two endings for this. One is that everybody goes bankrupt, and we wipe the slate clean in the messiest, piecemeal way. Two is that everybody takes a major haircut on their financial assets by, say, doubling the price level.

And I have yet to see any analysis that convinces me otherwise.

Two, three weeks ago, for the first time ever, the Fed announced it was going to buy municipal bonds. I’d bet my house, that’s because of the anticipated wave of municipal bankruptcies. The Town has (or thinks it has) $30M in reserves. Maybe it has deep enough pockets that stay-the-course is an OK strategy. But it’s not like, 18 months from now, they flip a switch and it resets to 2018. Best guess, we start picking up the financial wreckage at that point.

Looking on the bright side, this solves the toilet paper shortage. You’ll be able to get some from any ATM.

Well, fuck it, I was going to continue spreading doom-and-gloom, but you get the picture. Even if we had a functioning President, this would be tough. Even if he hadn’t larded key Federal positions with cronies, this would be tough. As it is, we’re left with whatever remains of the top professional bureaucracy Federally, and, God help us, the Virginia Department of Health. Plus the Federal Reserve.

In that context, the TOV government just … doesn’t matter. Keep the water and sewer running. Keep paying the cops. Whatever other bullshit games the rest of Town Council is up to at the moment, I don’t care. I’ve worked with people who use chaos as a tool for advancing their aims. I’ve worked with ones that caused chaos, so that they could use it. At the least, if they’re still living in 2017, it keeps them from causing further trouble.

Separately, we need a mandatory public mask ordinance. Or, rather, we need to have the Town’s fucking lawyer say that’s not within our power.

I’ll review the tape if you want me to. If there’s something in particular you want me to see, point me to it. I’ll be as helpful as I can, given the circumstances.

My projection, as of today, is that we’ll have 40,000 cases statewide in three weeks. That’s a simple-minded projection using the current daily average growth in cases, which seems to be settling in around 10%/day. Hope like hell we can get the growth rate below that, but there is no sign of that so far.

We’ll be living in a different world by the next time Town Council meets. And a different one again, but the time they meet after that. They’re not capable of grasping that.

Thanks,

Chris

Oh, PS:  https://www.mlive.com/news/2020/04/walmart-sams-club-employees-being-required-to-wear-face-masks-to-work.html

Sweet baby Jesus, Wally World can figure this out, but our leadership-to-be is making excuses for our local grocery store?  Good luck, Vienna.  You’re going to need it.

PPS:  Convalescent plasma is now a thing.  You may need to keep that in mind.  Search this website if you need an explanation of it.  https://www.cbsnews.com/news/desperate-families-turn-to-social-media-in-search-of-convalescent-plasma-coronavirus-potential-treatment/  Risky and rare, but the Chinese experience says this 100-year-old technique works.

PPPS:  Take you zinc, and, some hours later, take our ionphores and your flavonoids.  Can’t hurt, might help.

Signing off now.

 

Post #656: You are, in fact, most infectious before onset of symptoms

What prompts this post is a report from someone who went to the Merrifield Post Office yesterday.  Crowded, people standing in line, no masks, chit-chatting with one another.  Standing 6′ apart, of course.

Folks, in the case of a deadly pandemic, stupidity is going to be punished.  Even with our low testing rate, the US has more cases per capita now than any other Western nation.  And one of the main reasons for that is that a lot of Americans are just too damned dumb to take this seriously, until there are bodies piling up in the streets.

And if that’s what it takes, you know what?  That’s exactly what we’re going to get.

We already have by far the worst outbreak in the world  And yet, most people continue to treat this like it’s somebody else’s problem.  Which is a good part of the reason that we have the worst outbreak in the world.

With the last few days of case growth, we have managed to break the downward trend in daily growth in Virginia.  We are no long winning this battle, here, in our state.  If you look at the last 28 days, the trend in daily growth in cases was good.  For the last two weeks, it was good, but not as good.  But this week, it stalled at 8 percent per day case growth.

At that rate, Virginia as a whole overtops its health care system in about 2 and a half weeks.  That’s the point at which we’ll have 30,000 cases, which is my estimate of the case load that would consume more than every empty bed and ventilator in the Commonwealth.  And at that point, we start simply leaving people to die at home, because there’s no place to put them in the hospital.

Once again, a trend is a trend until it ceased to be a trend.  Our positive trend in case growth ceased this week.  Maybe that will change.  Maybe it won’t.

Yesterday, in Nature Medicine, there was a study published that tracked patients from infection through onset of symptoms.  They concluded that a) the typical individual is infectious for about three days before onset of symptoms, and b) they are most infections in the period just prior to onset of symptoms.  I don’t think anyone who has been tracking this was surprised, because transmission by asymptomatic individuals is the pretty much the only way you could explain the data.

The person you are talking to may be infectious, but not showing symptoms yet.  YOU may be infectious, but not showing symptoms yet.  The dumbest thing you can do is stand around talking to a bunch of strangers.   For no particular reason.  Just to pass the time of day.  (No, sorry, the dumbest thing is doing that without wearing a mask of some sort.)

People are not taking this anywhere near seriously enough.  It’s a good guess that something like 0.5% of the entire Fairfax County  population is walking around in an infectious state (Post #624, 4/12/2020).  (But that’s almost a week old, so … more like 1% now).  There are tons of people walking around with COVID-19 among the younger population who will never have significant symptoms (Post #632, 4/14/2020).  You can get infected via short-range aerosol transmission, which means just by being in the same office as somebody and talking to them (Post #631).

And, for sure, there have been instances of long-range (airborne) aerosol spread (Post #585).  I’d bet a large sum of money that the shutdown of meat packing plant after meat packing plant is occurring because those places a perfect storm of conditions promoting aerosol (airborne) spread, and that’s what explains the rapid and broad spread of disease there (Post #655).

At this point, my guess is that the CDC’s recommendation of “social distancing” alone is going to go down as the single biggest blunder in public health history.  Followed by their failure to recognize that short-range aerosol transmission (by talking with somebody) is a common route of infection.  Combine that with a population that STILL won’t wear masks in public (let alone at work), and governments that are too damned stupid to require them.  Add in a dysfunctional Federal government that is pressuring States to remove lockdown restrictions.  Sprinkle in a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot shortage of proper masks.

Folks, we have the worst experience in the world so far, and probably less than 1% of the total US population has been infected at this point.

Do the math.  We have 37,000 deaths so far.  Deaths, as I noted in earlier posts, are a lagging indicator, because it takes some weeks to die, on average.  But that’s from infecting just 1% of the population or so.  So, if it gets to 10%?  That’s 370,000.  And if it gets to 70%?  That’s 2.6 million.  In a typical year, we only have 2.8 million from all causes.

Somewhere in that progression, when the bodies start piling up, and they start digging and using mass graves, some Americans will probably figure out that they need to take this seriously.  To the point of, I don’t know, maybe at least wearing a mask in public.

This is a Darwin test for the USA.  And we appear to be flunking.

I’m not sure I’m going to post anything more about this.  I’m tired of being Cassandra.  I’m tired of emailing my elected representatives and getting nothing.  I’m tired of the magical thinking of people who believe that, somehow, this problem is going to solve itself.

I’m going to start putting my energy into getting good and hunkered down.  Maybe making a few high-quality aerosol-filtering masks for the couple of friends who asked for them.  And hoping like hell I’m still alive by the time they develop a vaccine.

We have an average daily case growth rate, this past week, that will put us over the capacity of the Virginia hospital system in just over two weeks.  And we have a President who is egging on those who call for removing the only tools we have in place, right now, to try merely to keep the rate down to that level.  Ain’t nothing I can do about it now except keep my head down and try to protect me and mine.

I’ll see you on the other side.  I hope.

Post #655: You want to reopen the economy? Get every US citizen a good mask and mandate their use.

Governors will have to consider face masks in reopening, surgeon general says

That’s from today’s Washington Post.

“Have to consider”?  When the head of the Chinese CDC said that failing to require masks in public was “The big mistake” that the US and Europe were making?  What planet are these people living on?

I guess the Surgeon General gets credit for at least mentioning it.  But this needs to go a lot further than “consider”.

Here’s an extras for experts.  See if you can put this story together with another one in the Post today, about how many meat plants are closing due to coronavirus. 

So, ask yourself, why meat?  Why not vegetable processors, fruit processors, toilet paper manufacturers, and so on.  What’s the common thread?

I mean, if one meat plant has a huge number of cases, OK, maybe they made a mistake.  But plant after plant?  What’s the common thread?

These are noisy places filled with aerosols-sized droplets arising from frequent use of water sprays to keep equipment clean and running.  And cheap masks don’t stop aerosol-sized droplets.  That’s why our healthcare workers need N95 respirators.

Meat plants are going down because they are a perfect storm for short-range aerosol transmission of COVID-19. 

When will the US government finally figure out (or publicly state) that the generic issue with meat-packing plants is short-range aerosol spread of COVID-19?  Aerosols are droplets under 5 microns.  Cheap masks don’t stop them.  And you produce large quantities when you talk, particularly if you talk loudly.  And viruses that get into the air can use existing aerosols, including air pollutants and other small particles, as carriers that help spread the virus around.

Want to get up to speed, read this article, by Lisa Brosseau, ScD, at the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/03/commentary-covid-19-transmission-messages-should-hinge-science

Just look at the pictures at the end.  You’ll get it.

Which gets me back to the title.  If the US wants to hurry the re-opening of the economy, absolutely the best thing they could do is make sure that every citizen has a decent mask.  And require that they wear it any time they share some space with others, outside the home.  That means in public areas, or as with meat packing plants, work spaces.

Post #654: Chinese death toll was understated

As reported by the Post.

Yeah, that was obvious from the data.  (Post #551, 3/15/2020).  So the news isn’t that it was grossly understated.  The news is that they have, for some reason, admitted to having more deaths.

My guess is, it’s still understated.  Likely they are bringing the rate up in stages, so as not to freak people out.

Here’s the data that say the death rate was 4%.  This is from the WHO report on China.  These are the data the used to claim a 4% death rate.  Not even remotely credible.  Read my prior post if you want to know more.

 

Post #653: Shopping trip 4/16/2020

If you still hold a grudge against Fresh Market, due to the Norm’s incident, may want to think about getting over that.  I haven’t been to Whole Foods yet, but as of yesterday, I’ve struck both Safeway and Giant off the list of places I will shop.  I’m a Fresh Market fan now.

Fresh Market is doing this right.  If in-person grocery shopping makes you uneasy (and it should), I suggest you give them a try.  Yesterday they were fully stocked, and they were clearly taking the CDC guidance on mask use seriously. Continue reading Post #653: Shopping trip 4/16/2020