Category: Health Care

IMHE Lowers COVID-19 U.S. Death Projection Again, Now Down to 60,000

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While MSNBC hosts were busy spreading conspiracy theories, the doomsday forecasters were revising their numbers again:

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) model cited by the White House Coronavirus Task Force lowered its projections for coronavirus deaths in the U.S. by 25 percent from 81,766 to 60,415 early Wednesday morning.
The IHME model has come under withering criticism for vastly overstating projections of regular and ICU hospital beds needed, but its death projections to date have closely tracked with actual data.
Wednesday’s dramatic reverse in the model’s projection of U.S. deaths was made without a press release from IHME explaining the reasons for the reduction. It marks the second reduction in the model’s U.S. deaths projections since April 1, when it forecast 93,765 U.S. fatalities.
On April 5, the death projections were lowered to 81,766. . . .
The April 8 iteration of the IHME model has reduced the projections of coronavirus deaths in New York State to 13,307, down from the April 6 projection of more than 15,000.
It persists, however, in claiming there will be a shortage of regular hospital beds in New York State on the peak day of Wednesday April 8, despite Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s statement at Tuesday’s press conference the state has “more than enough beds available.”

So, in one week, the forecast has been reduced more than 30% and the IHME’s scary predictions of a crisis caused by a shortage of hospital beds has been proven false. Now, we have Chris Hayes suggesting to his Twitter audience of 2 million followers that somehow the IHME — an institute funded by Bill Gates, who handpicked a Harvard professor (Chris Murray) to lead it — was in cahoots with the Trump administration. Alex Jones is banned from Twitter for promoting “conspiracy theories,” but paranoia is OK when MSNBC hosts do it.

Also, it is important to note that “social distancing” cannot explain the failures of the IHME model projections, as Sean Davis points out:

“The IHME models assumed ‘full social distancing,’ including school closures, business shutdowns, and stay-at-home lockdowns from the beginning. It requires abject stupidity or outright dishonesty to claim ‘social distancing’ caused the model revisions.”

Nobody likes to admit they were wrong, but when you are as wrong as badly as Chris Hayes was wrong — and as I’ve pointed out, he was speaking in terms of “millions of lives” just three weeks ago — it’s sociopathic to double-down and blame others for your own errors.

UPDATE: Great minds think alike and, while I was writing this post, Ace of Spades was about a half-hour ahead of me:

One month ago, Chris Hayes accused Trump of “personally pressuring” health officials to “manipulate the numbers downwards.” . . .
Now he says Trump has manipulated the numbers upward.
So which is it, Chris? It can’t be both.
The media and the social media monopolists conspire to control the public discourse by deplatforming and censoring anyone who utters a “conspiracy theory,” the true definition of which is any speculation that the leftwing corporate media disapproves of.

Beware of angry ewoks.




 

COVID-19: The Fight Against Fear

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Mike Rowe: “We’re told to fall in line, trust the experts, and wait patiently for the all clear. Okay, fine. But for how long? What are the criteria for turning the country back on?” Many conservatives have become gun-shy about the COVID-19 outbreak. They don’t want to seem dismissive of the threat, or to undermine the message about the importance of “social distancing,” and I get that, completely. We must consider the influence of our words, but at the same time, I am beginning to hear, in the “social distancing” amen chorus, a creepy tone that reminds me of the rah-rah cheerleading for the Iraq War. Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania:

A York County woman this week was the first person in Pennsylvania to be cited for violating Gov. Tom Wolf’s stay-at-home order, according to state police.
The 19-year-old woman was given a nontraffic citation for allegedly “going for a drive,” according to the citation obtained by Pennlive.
State police spokesman Ryan Tarkowski said Friday the woman initially was pulled over because of a vehicle code violation. Warnings have been issued by troopers in Troop A, which includes Westmoreland County, and Troop E in the Erie area, he said.
Troopers can use their discretion to decide if a citation is warranted, but they have been encouraged to use contacts with the public as a way to promote voluntary compliance, Tarkowski said.

She was alone in her car, but if this “going for a drive” business gets out of hand, people might start “going for a walk,” and next thing you know, they might peaceably assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances, or something. The state police can’t allow that.

Remember my Monday column at The American Spectator about how the IHME (“Murray model”) projections were absurdly wrong? That got a lot of attention, including a link from Real Clear Politics, a substantial quote-out by Instapundit, and tweets by Megyn Kelly and Rush Limbaugh’s legendary producer James Golden a/k/a “Bo Snerdley.”

 

Of course, I was not alone in noticing the failure of the IHME projections (see Derek Hunter’s Sunday column at Townhall, for example), and it would be wrong to think I had any exceptional influence, but watching Tucker Carlson’s opening monologue Tuesday . . .

 

Fox News host Tucker Carlson pointed out that, even with the coronavirus infection and death toll “receding,” it’s still “taboo” in many circles to discuss getting things back to normal in the United States.
Beginning a lengthy monologue on Tuesday night’s edition of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” the Fox News host discussed how once-dire COVID-19 projections “have been scaled back dramatically” in the wake of far lower numbers than any of the models anticipated, even taking social distancing measures into account.
“Whatever’s happening, this epidemic appears to be doing less damage than anticipated and it is receding more quickly.” . . .
“Now it’s time to look ahead,” Carlson said. “If the virus is doing less systemic damage to our system than expected, then presumably we can begin to consider how to improve the lives of the countless Americans who’ve been grievously hurt by this, by our response to this. How do we get 17 million of our most vulnerable citizens back to work? That’s the task.”

You should watch the whole thing, if you didn’t see it last night.

Perhaps some of you were worried by my lack of blogging Tuesday, and my apologies if anyone feared I’d been laid low by the ChiCom flu, but among other things, I was busy crunching through some interesting statistics about the coronavirus death rate in different countries:

Spain ………………………….. 311 per million
Italy …………………………… 283 per million
Belgium ……………………… 193 per million
France ……………………….. 158 per million
Netherlands ………………… 131 per million
United States ………………… 39 per million

The point should be obvious enough not to require comment. Anyone can look at those statistics and draw their own conclusions, but some in the media don’t want Americans to have an accurate perspective:

Two weeks ago, Dr. Deborah Birx warned against doomsday predictions that millions of Americans might die from coronavirus. At a White House press briefing on March 25, the coordinator of President Trump’s task force condemned media speculation based on claims that as much as half the country’s population might become infected with COVID-19. “I think the numbers that have been put out there are actually very frightening to people,” said Birx, adding that reported rates of infection in China, where the virus originated, were “nowhere close to the numbers that you see people putting out there. I think it has frightened the American people.”
Birx did not name MSNBC personality Chris Hayes, although he was one of the worst scaremongers in the media mob. On his March 23 program, Hayes warned that “millions of lives are on the line” if the economic lockdown response to the virus was not extended indefinitely: “There is no option to just let everyone go back out and go back to normal if a pandemic rages across the country and infects 50 percent of the population and kills a percentage point at the low end of those infected and also melts down all the hospitals.” . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.




 

Coronavirus ‘Myths’ and Real Numbers

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The stated purpose of stay-at-home orders and “social distancing” guidelines was to “flatten the curve” of the coronavirus pandemic, to prevent a sudden surge of hospital cases that would exceed the available resources. Slowing the spread of the disease, however, does not mean that widespread infection can be permanently avoided, nor does it mean that anyone is “safe” from COVID-19. For example, the state of Minnesota has reported only 789 coronavirus cases in a population of 5.6 million, which is 14 cases per 100,000 residents. Compare that to New York’s 530 cases per 100,000 residents, and you see that Minnesota is relatively “safe.” But over the next few weeks, even with policies to “flatten the curve,” the number of Minnesota cases will increase, so it would be wrong to think that you, as an individual, are “safe” from coronavirus, merely because you live in a region with a relatively low infection rate. This is relevant to discussions of how and when America will be able to go “back to normal.” (Our family is currently “attending” church via videoconferencing software.)

There has been a lot of noise in the media about Republican governors in some states being reluctant to impose statewide stay-at-home orders, and people in rural America failing to follow “social distancing” guidelines. Supposedly, this is a result of their believing “myths” that they are somehow safe from coronavirus, but because I’m not a mindreader, I can’t presume to know what people believe. Certainly there have been outbreaks in rural communities, as in the case of Dougherty County, Georgia, were two large funerals Feb. 29 and March 7 acted as “super-spreading” events, infecting dozens of people, 90% of whom were black.

African-Americans are being disproportionately affected by the pandemic elsewhere. In Michigan, for example, black people “account for 35% of confirmed cases in the state and 40% of deaths from COVID-19,” although black people are only 12% of the state’s population. The disease is also disproportionately concentrated in Detroit (Wayne County) and suburban Macomb County and Oakland County, which combined have 80% of all known coronavirus cases in Michigan. The statewide infection rate in Michigan is 128 cases per 100,000 residents, but the rate is higher in the Detroit metron area, and much lower elsewhere in the state.

It must be understood that risk is a matter of statistical probability. Your infection risk is lower in rural Minnesota than it is in Detroit or in New York City, but being “low risk” is not the same thing as being “safe.” In a pandemic, nobody is at zero risk. But even the most drastic governmental restrictions will not lower the risk to zero. Italy has been under a nationwide lockdown order since March 11. Friday, they reported 4,585 new COVID-19 cases — and that’s good news, because the daily number of new cases has declined 30% since March 21, when Italy reported 6,557 new cases. So, after three weeks of lockdown, Italy has already “flattened the curve” (i.e., the number of new cases has already peaked), but they’re still reporting thousands of new cases daily and people continue to die. That’s simply the reality, and nothing we can do in the United States will prevent our outbreak from following the same trajectory. Once we have passed the crisis point — once the outbreaks in New York, in Detroit and other “danger zones” have passed their peak, straining available medical resources — it’s not as if we will then return to a condition of “safety.”

The pandemic will run its course, and a certain number of people will die, because the death toll for May is pretty much already baked into the pie, so to speak. Once you have imposed the most drastic lockdown measures, there is really nothing more you can do, in terms of “flattening the curve,” but at some point the pandemic will peak — reaching the “apex,” as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo says repeatedly in his daily briefings — and then you should be prepared to begin a return to normal. Italy has already passed its “apex,” but their hospital system is still overwhelmed and they are still recording more than 700 COVID-19 deaths daily.

Media keep reporting the cumulative number of coronavirus cases, and the cumulative total of deaths, but these numbers are not the most relevant statistics in terms of the “apex” crisis that Cuomo and others are so concerned about. What matters most are (a) the trend in the number of new cases reported daily, and (b) the number of patients requiring hospitalization. As I’ve mentioned before, 87% of known coronavirus patients in Florida have never been hospitalized, and less than 2% of patients have died. This is important, in terms of dealing with the crisis from a public-health perspective. If someone gets the virus, experiences only mild symptoms and recovers without ever being treated in a hospital, that person is counted statistically as a coronavirus case, but has not placed any extra burden on the hospital system.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb produced this chart of Florida’s COVID-19 outbreak:

 

(Click image to view full-size.) What you see is a rather astonishing increase in the number of known cases of coronavirus — more than quadrupling in a single week — but a much lower “curve” in the number of hospitalizations and deaths from the pandemic. Why is this? It’s because Florida has been testing thousands of people daily. Just in the past three days, April 1-3, Florida has tested 34,724 people for COVID-19. More testing means more cases are being identified, but the number of hospitalizations is rising much more slowly. As of Friday, Florida had 1,386 patients hospitalized with coronavirus, which is only 12.5% of the total number of known cases in the state; the total number of COVID-19 deaths in Florida was 191 as of Friday, which is 1.7% of the total cases.

So far, at least, the coronavirus pandemic has not impacted Florida at anything like the impact in New York or Michigan, and 58% of Florida’s cases are in three counties (Dade, Broward and Palm Beach, with 28.5% of the state’s population) on the southeastern coast. The pandemic has had much less impact in places like Polk County (Lakeland), where there are only 138 cases in a population of 668,671, and Volusia County (Daytona), where there are only 129 cases in a population of 527,634. Given this differential in the risk level, why should folks in Lakeland and Daytona be under the same lockdown regime as people in “danger zones” like Miami and West Palm Beach? Look at Friday’s numbers:

Italy total cases 115,242
Deaths 14,681 (12.8%)

U.S. total cases 266,279
Deaths 6,803 (2.6%)

Washington state total cases 6,597
Deaths 272 (4.1%)

Michigan total cases 10,791
Deaths 417 (3.9%)

Louisiana total cases 10,297
Deaths 370 (3.6%)

New York total cases 102,863
Deaths 2,935 -(2.9%)

Florida total cases 9,585
Deaths 163 (1.7%)

Texas total cases 5,255
Deaths 86 (1.6%)

There is an enormous variation in the death rates, with Italy’s rate being about five times higher than the U.S. rate, and the death rate in Washington State, Michigan and Louisiana being more than twice the rate in Florida and Texas. Will these rates change? Maybe, but the fact is that the same virus is having different impacts in different areas, and the “experts” on TV are doing a bad job of explaining this differential, insofar as they are not completely ignoring it. While I don’t claim to be an “expert,” my hunch is that it probably has something to do with viral load at first exposure to the virus. If you attend a two-hour event with dozens of other people, some of whom are infected — or if you’re on a two-hour commercial airline flight, or riding New York City’s subways on a daily basis — then your initial exposure is likely to be a high viral load. On the other hand, a brief encounter with an infected convenience-store clerk will expose you to a lower viral load, and if you do become infected, your case will probably be milder. That’s not an “expert” opinion, just a common-sense interpretation of what some experts are saying, and one which would seem to fit the available data.

Population density matters in terms of spreading any contagious disease, and the use of public transportation also matters. Every day, millions travel by subway in New York City, which has the greatest population density anywhere in America. Furthermore, New York is a major center of international travel, and we know for a fact that this disease entered our country from overseas. More than 700,000 Chinese-Americans live in the New York metropolitan area, and how many of them traveled to China in January? By February, of course, the disease had begun spreading in Europe, so how many people in New York traveled to Northern Italy — the epicenter of the European COVID-19 outbreak — in February? This is not demonizing Chinese or Italian people, it’s about understanding risk factors that would explain why the per-capita coronavirus rate in New York is so much higher than everywhere else.

Americans are being bombarded by misleading media messages about this outbreak, messages that fail to explain (if they even acknowledge) the variations of risk between different areas. We are told it is irresponsible to view this pandemic in anything other than worst-case scenario perspective, and that we are beholden to “myths” if we suggest that people in Florida, Texas and other (relatively) low-risk areas should not be subjected to strict lockdown orders. We are told that low-risk areas of the country are simply at an earlier point in the pandemic “curve” and that, unless drastic stay-at-home measures are implemented nationwide, these areas would be just weeks away from reaching a coronavirus infection rate comparable to the current rate in New York City.

The “experts” on TV don’t actually know what will happen in the future anymore than any other intelligent person with access to the same data can know what trend the pandemic will take in the future.

We know that the cumulative total of known cases will continue rising everywhere, simply because each new case adds to the total, and no cases are ever subtracted from that total. What actually matters, however, is whether the number of active cases requiring hospitalization exceeds available capacity at any given time. If more than 85% of cases never require hospitalization, then we can disregard those cases, in terms of a crisis caused by a shortage of hospital beds, ventilators, medical personnel, etc. We are not guilty of propagating “myths” about this disease by insisting that the media (and public officials) pay attention to the numbers that provide real metrics of the problem.




 

N95 Mask Supply: 3M Is Not the Bad Guy (and Neither Is President Trump)

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Yesterday, President Trump invoked his executive power as Commander-in-Chief to put an American corporation under federal orders:

President Trump blasted the company 3M in a tweet Thursday evening, after invoking the Defense Production Act to force the company to produce face masks. N95 face masks are critical for health care workers on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic, and there have been issues with mask shortages.
“We hit 3M hard today after seeing what they were doing with their Masks. “P Act” all the way. Big surprise to many in government as to what they were doing – will have a big price to pay!” Mr. Trump wrote, referring to the Defense Production Act.
Mr. Trump announced during the White House coronavirus task force briefing on Thursday that he had signed an order for 3M to produce face masks.
“Hopefully they’ll be able to do what they are supposed to do,” Mr. Trump said, without offering details.
White House trade adviser Peter Navarro also said during the briefing that there had been “issues” with 3M not providing enough masks to American buyers.
“We’ve had some issues making sure that all of the production that 3M does around the world, enough of it is coming back here to the right places,” Navarro said.
In a statement responding to the president’s announcement, 3M said that “3M and its employees have gone above and beyond to manufacture as many N95 respirators as possible for the U.S. market.” The statement added that there would be “significant humanitarian implications” if the company followed the White House’s order to stop exporting masks made in the U.S. to Canada and Latin American countries.
“In addition, ceasing all export of respirators produced in the United States would likely cause other countries to retaliate and do the same, as some have already done. If that were to occur, the net number of respirators being made available to the United States would actually decrease. That is the opposite of what we and the Administration, on behalf of the American people, both seek,” the statement said.
3M said it was working to combat the “unethical and illegal” price gouging and unauthorized reselling of company products.
Jared Moskowitz, the head of Florida’s Division of Emergency Management, said in an interview on Fox News Thursday evening that he had learned 3M distributors were sending face masks to foreign countries and had refused to send him essential equipment.
“We are chasing ghosts. I just decided to turn up the heat and tell people what is actually happening in the N95 mask space,” Moskowitz told Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson. Moskowitz said 3M “decided to make a globalist decision and not put America first.”

Permit me to clarify the political image game being played here. Do you see the word “distributors” in what Moskowitz said Thursday? Like every other manufacturing company, 3M distributes its output via wholesalers who, in turn, deliver the product to retailers and other vendors and clients. Your local hospital orders their masks through a medical supply company, which obtains them through this wholesale distribution supply chain. All of this is a matter of contracts and purchase orders and if, in January or February, 3M signed a contract to deliver X-million number of N95 masks to a vendor on April 10, the manufacturer’s obligation to fulfill that contract cannot be disregarded simply because, in the meantime, authorities in New York City or Florida developed an unexpected shortage of N95 masks.

Well, what about “price gouging”? If you’re a wholesale distributor of a product that suddenly is in high demand, are you under some kind of moral obligation to pass up the opportunity for extra revenue that such a situation offers you? Nonsense! The market is what the market is, and if you get an offer of $4 per mask for a shipment of 100,000 masks that you normally would sell for $1 per mask, you take that extra $300,000 with the clear conscience of a Christian holding four aces.

Yet the New York Times blames “shady middlemen” for their city’s shortage of equipment, which is simply an excuse for the failure of Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo to plan ahead for this crisis:

The next task was undertaking the vast production and allocation of masks, other protective gear and ventilators. Instead of centralizing this task, President Trump said from the White House lectern, “Governors are supposed to be doing a lot of this work.” He added, “You know, we’re not a shipping clerk.”
But governors can’t invoke the Defense Production Act, which allows the federal government to order businesses to manufacture necessary medical equipment. Nor can they enlist the Federal Emergency Management Agency to manage the giant project of distributing the equipment. The vacuum left by the federal government forced states to compete for scarce equipment like ventilators, driving up their price and benefiting shady middlemen while causing fatal delays.

Those middlemen aren’t “shady,” they just happen to be in the medical supply business at a time when demand for medical supplies is high. And the New York Times led the media chorus with this idea that the “giant project” of distributing these supplies should be centralized under federal authority, making Trump the fall guy for failures of planning on the part of state and local officials. Day after day for the past three weeks, we have watched nationally televised press conferences in which Gov. Cuomo incessantly talked about the alleged shortage of masks, ventilators and other supplies. The media treat Cuomo as a saintly hero when, in fact, his pleas for more supplies reflect his own failure to prepare for this emergency. If he wasn’t signing contracts in February and March to purchase however many N95 masks the city needs now, how is that Trump’s fault? Or how is 3M to blame for not producing six weeks or two months ago whatever number of masks Cuomo says he needs now?

The media isn’t asking those questions, because the media wants to scapegoat Trump for the whole shebang. This blame-game in turn compelled Trump to invoke the Defense Production Act, telling 3M to make more of the masks they were already making as fast as they can. 

Cuomo’s problem is not 3M’s fault. Cuomo’s problem is not Trump’s fault. But the media won’t hold Cuomo accountable for his failures.



 

MSNBC’s Doomsday Crisis Theme

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Today, I watched MSNBC (so you don’t have to), and it is difficult to find the words to describe how bad their coverage is. What is obvious — if you could just stand to watch MSNBC for a few hours, you’d see it — is that they are invested in the idea that the coronavirus is the ultimate “Walls Closing In” moment that will doom Trump’s presidency. From this idea flows two basic themes in their coverage of the pandemic:

  1. It’s a Doomsday Crisis that threatens to kill us all;
    and
  2. BLAME TRUMP!

Never mind the blame game just now, the greater problem in MSNBC’s coverage is that they are so heavily invested in hyping up the severity of the pandemic that they ignore all contrary data. And if you are capable of doing basic arithmetic, contrary data is not hard to find.

The first thing to point out is that the three states with the largest number of coronavirus cases — New York (92,506), New Jersey (25,590) and Michigan (10,791) — have a combined total of 128,887 cases, which is 53% of all U.S. cases. As I have previously explained, even within these states, the overwhelming majority of cases are in urban areas — New York City and its suburbs, Detroit and its suburbs. So if you live in the more rural parts of those states, you’re not really at very high risk from the coronavirus outbreak. At the very minute I’m writing this sentence, Rachel Maddow is telling her audience that Florida’s Republican governor is an irresponsible idiot who has put lives at risk because he didn’t issue a statewide lockdown order earlier. As I write this sentence, Maddow has just finished telling her audience that a hospital in North Carolina has declared it will need an extra 3,000 beds for expected overflow coronavirus cases. And nobody on MSNBC will speak a word to the contrary. It’s all Doomsday Scenario 24/7, and this theme requires MSNBC to completely ignore some very important data.

Start with North Carolina. They report fewer than 2,000 coronvirus cases in a population of 10.4 million, 39 cases per 100,000 population. Compare this to New York, which has 476 cases per 100,000 population. Does anyone expect a 12-fold increase in North Carolina’s COVID-19 caseload, and if so, why? Is there some particular reason that this stratospheric increase is expected to hit North Carolina? Nearly 30,000 residents of North Carolina have been tested for the virus so far, and 93% of those tests were negative. The state has fewer than 200 coronavirus patients hospitalized, and only 16 deaths so far. So why the fear of hospitals overflowing with COVID-19 patients? “The Murray model”:

North Carolina will be short hundreds of hospital beds and intensive care units at the state’s peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is still weeks away, according to a model touted by a leading expert on Sunday.
Developed by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, the model estimates that there will be dozens of COVID-19-related deaths daily during the virus’ projected peak.
The model projects 79 COVID-19 deaths in North Carolina on April 22, with about 2,400 people in the state dying from the disease by Aug. 4.
North Carolina could face a shortage of hospital beds from April 17 until April 27, according to the model, which shows the need for beds for COVID-19 patients peaking at 7,774, including 1,173 intensive care unit beds. . . .
In a post describing the study, Christopher Murray, the institute’s director, wrote that the goal was to determine when people across the nation are likely to die from COVID-19 and when hospitals could run out of resources.

These projections are already being proven false.

As of Wednesday, North Carolina was projected to have more than 1,000 hospitalized cases — five times larger than the actual number. So is it really likely that there will be nearly 8,000 patients hospitalized in the state within three weeks? I don’t know. I’m no scientific expert, but if the projection is 400% off-target within a week of its release (the Murray projection was published March 26), call me . . .  somewhat skeptical.

(As I’m writing this sentence, Lawrence O’Donnell is ranting about Trump somehow swindling New York out of its fair share of medical equipment — the word “profiteers” was used — while “rewarding” Republican governors like Evil Ron DeSantis of Florida who, according to O’Donnell, did not take “reasonable precautions.”)

You see the Doomsday Crisis theme and the Blame Trump theme require MSNBC to deprive its audience of any information that contradicts the network’s chosen narrative. The fact that the Murray model — the basis of the Doomsday Crisis theme — is being disproven on a daily basis by the actual data simply has no place in MSNBC’s coverage. Meanwhile, what’s happening in Florida, where Evil Ron Desantis is governor?

Well, they’ve got 9,008 reported cases in a population of 21 million, a total which has risen rapidly because they have tested 52,783 people for coronavirus in a single week (March 26-April 1). There were 6,417 positives (12.2%), meaning that 87.8% tested negative. Of the 9,008 cases in Florida, only 1,167 have been hospitalized — about a 13% hospitalization rate — and 144 have died, a 1.6% death rate. So, 87% of coronavrius cases have not required hospitalization, and 98.4% survived.

This is good news, which is exactly why the MSNBC audience won’t hear about it. If you were told that more than 98% of coronavirus patients in Florida survived the disease, and 87% were not even hospitalized, you might stop thinking the Doomsday Crisis was going to kill you. But no, you’re going to die, because ORANGE MAN BAD! Or at least that’s what MSNBC keeps telling their audience, 24/7. (As I write this sentence, Lawrence O’Donnell is interviewing failed presidential candidate Kamala Harris, meaning that he’s mainly just listening while she denounces ORANGE MAN BAD!) So you’re locked down under a stay-at-home order (which was in large part inspired by the Murray model) and you’re probably not watching MSNBC, so you might have realized that the Doomsday Crisis is not really happening, except in a handful of major urban areas, even if I hadn’t told you. You’re somewhere “safe” (most GOP-leaning parts of the county have very low rates of coronavirus infection) and if you watch cable news, you probably watch Fox. So you are better-informed than any MSNBC viewer, and are not deceived by the worst-case scenario mentality prevailing at that network.

Let’s wait and see. Maybe we’ll see huge spikes in COVID-19 cases from Florida and North Carolina, and the Doomsday Crisis will actually happen. So far, however, there’s no reason to expect a viral apocalypse, and within a week, my hunch is that more and more people will be calling attention to the failure of the pandemic to match the scary predictions of the Murray model. Gov. Cuomo will continue to be on TV every day, talking about the need for more ventilators to meet the crisis at the “apex” of the “curve,” but by next Thursday, he’ll be within a week of when the “apex” is actually supposed to hit, and what will the daily numbers look like next Thursday? Today, in his press conference, Gov. Cuomo talked about how some numbers seem to be reaching a “plateau.” The expected upward surge isn’t actually happening, even though New York City has suffered 188 deaths in a 24-hour span. The situation in New York City is bad, and it’s getting worse, but the increase of numbers isn’t accelerating as was feared. But anyway . . .

As I write this sentence, the discredited Brian Williams is complaining that not all states have “stay-at-home” orders. This is a pony the national media — headquartered in New York and D.C. — is going to keep riding, because it’s unfair that other people out there in the rest of America aren’t doing what the media want them to do.

We must be patient. We are two weeks away from the projected “apex” in New York City, and once that arrives, the size of the actual pandemic — not just in New York, but everywhere — will be compared to what had previously been forecast. At that point, not even MSNBC will be able to conceal the difference between the forecast and the reality. Oh, well, maybe they will, but if they do, they’ll discredit themselves.

Stay home. Stay safe. Stay healthy. Wait and see.




 

Crazy People Are Dangerous

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Coronavirus terrorism in a Maryland hospital:

A Hagerstown man has been charged with Threat of Mass Violence in connection to an incident at Meritus Medical Center.
On Tuesday, March 24, 2020, at approximately 4:30 PM, a Deputy, assigned to work at Meritus Medical Center, assisted hospital security with an aggressive male. The male, identified as Michael Palani Smith, 32, was in the Emergency Department. It was learned that Smith had been tested for COVID 19 prior to his arrival at the hospital. When asked to wear a protective bandana, Smith refused and became combative with staff and security. Smith yelled that he didn’t care if he infected others because no one cares about him. During the incident, Smith pulled his bandana down and forcefully coughed several times in the direction of the Deputy and Security Officer.
After being moved to another room, Smith continued to be combative and attempted to harm himself. The medical staff was finally able to gain control of Smith.
During the incident, the deputy was wearing proper personal protective equipment; face mask, gloves, and glasses.
On April 1, 2020, a warrant was served on Smith for one count of Threat of Mass Violence and two counts of Assault 1st degree. Additionally, Smith was charged via criminal summons for two counts of Assault 2nd degree.
Smith is currently being held at the Washington County Detention Center on no bond.

Did the virus cause this, or was he already crazy before he got the virus?




 

Non-Essential Worker Update: #Coronavirus Crisis Boomerang Edition

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Florida is now under a statewide “stay-at-home” order because journalists kept whining about the Republican governor not doing it:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday ordered his 21 million residents across the state to stay home for 30 days because of the coronavirus pandemic, saying the “national pause” dictated by the White House pushed him to limit movements to essential activities like grocery shopping.
The Republican governor had resisted such an order even as Florida’s COVID-19 cases doubled in recent days, reaching about 7,000. He said Broward and Miami-Dade counties accounted for the majority of Florida cases, while other parts of the state saw very low transmission.
He changed his mind after President Trump decided to extend social-distancing guidelines until April 30. While the guidelines didn’t mandate a stay-at-home order, it signaled that things wouldn’t return to normal anytime soon.

DeSantis is a Republican, Florida is a swing state with a lot of elderly residents who are worried about the virus, and so the media in Florida kept interviewing “experts” (eye roll) who urged the importance of a statewide shutdown order. All the while, of course, municipal and county governments (including the Democrat-controlled cities and counties where the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak is worst) always had the power to order local shutdowns, and most of communities did. But the screeching hysteria from the media continued, because how dare Republican-voting people in rural parts of Florida be allowed to go about their normal lives while there was an EMERGENCY HEALTH CRISIS underway.

Let’s talk about the “crisis”: Statewide, the known COVID-19 infection rate in Florida is 32 cases per 100,000 residents, and the death rate so far is below 1 per 100,000 residents. Florida’s risk level is about 90% lower than in New York (430 cases per 100,000 residents).

But, but, but … SEVEN THOUSAND CASES!

Right, in a state of 21 million people where, every day for the past week, thousands of people have been tested for COVID-19 — March 24-30, more than 45,000 Florida residents were tested for the coronavirus, and more than 80% of those tests were negative. Thanks to the panic-mongering media, every fear-stricken hypochondriac with a case of the sniffles is demanding a COVID-19 test, wasting precious time and resources. The escalating number of cases was a predictable result of the advent of widespread testing, but fewer than 900 of those testing positive for coronavirus (about 12% of the total) have been hospitalized.

And, yes, exactly as Ron DeSantis kept saying, most of Florida has scarcely been affected by coronavirus: Of the 6,741 cases in Florida as of Tuesday, 3,893 cases (58% of the statewide total) were in three counties on the state’s southeast coast: Dade, Broward and Palm Beach. If you’re in Polk County — Lakeland, Winter Haven, etc. — you’ve got 73 cases in a population of more than 600,000. There has been exactly one coronavirus death in Polk County, a 60-year-old man who died March 21. The greatest risk for Polk County residents is that the next county over, Hillsborough (Tampa/St. Petersburg) has had more than 300 cases with four deaths so far. But Hillsborough County approved a “state-at-home” order March 26, so as long as people in that urban center had obeyed the local order, they wouldn’t have been traveling to Lakeland to put residents of Polk County at risk. If there was any political pressure from Polk County for DeSantis to issue a statewide order, I imagine, it was only because those damn city folks in Tampa wouldn’t stay home.

Well, that’s all over now. Statewide lockdown, because of the media, and maybe it will save some lives, but the media will blame DeSantis for the whole thing, because demonizing Republicans is their job. The good news is, the pandemic is causing layoffs at media companies, because it turns out their jobs are not essential. Here’s some more good news:

Trump Was Right: Coronavirus Death Rate
Much Lower Than Previous Estimates, Study Says

The media mocked Trump for saying he had a “hunch” the mortality rate was lower than the 3.4% widely cited three weeks ago, and now it turns out the rate is less than 1%. (Hat-tip: Instapundit.)

Here’s a March 6 headline from CNBC:

People are stealing masks and other
medical equipment from hospitals,
New York Gov. Cuomo says

Here’s a March 30 headline from ABC:

Cuomo and New York hospitals
reject Trump’s claim masks
‘going out the back door’

Do these “journalists” know anything about actually reporting facts? Three weeks after Cuomo said medical equipment was being stolen from New York hospitals, suddenly he pretends to have amnesia when Trump makes the same point, and “journalists” can’t be bothered to check?

Let me offer a prediction: Some time in the next month or so, the FBI will arrest people in New York and New Jersey who have made hundreds of thousands of dollars by stealing medical equipment and re-selling it. Some of these people might have Italian names, IYKWIMAITYD.

Speaking of Italian-named people in New York:

 

Why didn’t the city at least stock up on masks and hand sanitizer, which are cheap—or were cheap, before global demand created a shortage? It isn’t as though Mayor de Blasio is unconcerned about emergencies—he talks obsessively about climate change and its “existential” threat to the city. He has initiated major lawsuits against energy companies, attempted to prohibit glass buildings, banned plastic bags, and plans to extend the shoreline of Manhattan into the East River in order to protect New York City against the possibility of rising ocean levels over the next century.
Yet at the same time, de Blasio—and New York’s governors—closed hospitals and care centers, turning their sites over to well-connected developers, without replacing capacity or building in redundancy. He signed six bulging budgets that increased spending by tens of billions of dollars, and he lavished money on anything that advanced his political agenda or benefitted his allies. But he clearly didn’t allocate enough money to buy the necessary staples of emergency preparedness. Now that disaster has arrived at the city’s door, the mayor is blaming everyone but himself.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) Today, for the second day this week, I’m watching MSNBC (so you don’t have to) and what amazes me is how much news they simply ignore. Like, the bungling of Mayor de Blasio? Didn’t happen, as far as MSNBC is concerned. They entirety of their coverage — hour after hour, 24/7 — is about blaming Donald Trump for coronavirus. And because their coverage is completely devoted to this political blame-game, MSNBC’s viewers are missing out on coronavirus news that’s far more important than politics. For example:

Carroll County, Maryland, is largely rural and, like the rest of rural America, had little reason to fear the coronavirus pandemic — until last week. Eighteen residents of a nursing home in Mount Airy were hospitalized, 77 of the facility’s 95 residents tested positive for COVID-19, and five have already died. This single-site outbreak dramatically increased Carroll County’s total number of coronavirus cases from 15 to 92 and was a key factor in Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan issuing a statewide stay-at-home order Monday.
It’s about 7,000 miles from rural Maryland to Wuhan, China, where this worldwide pandemic began late last year, but more importantly, Mount Airy is just 40 miles away from two major urban centers: Baltimore to the east and Washington, D.C., to the south. This proximity almost certainly played a role in the deadly viral outbreak at the Carroll County nursing home. The spread of COVID-19 across the United States has been very uneven, heavily concentrated in urban areas, leaving most Americans outside the danger zones, at least so far. Protecting the “safe” parts of the country from the contagion may require strict measures that many conservatives would normally oppose, and disparities in the impact of this pandemic are likely to exacerbate America’s partisan divide. . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.




 

Worse Before It Gets Better: Statistical Risk and the Wuhan Coronavirus

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For three consecutive days, Italy has reported declining numbers of new coronavirus cases, so that Monday’s number (4,050 new cases) was the lowest they have reported since March 17. At the same time, however, Italy reported 812 deaths from the virus Monday. This was the 10th consecutive day with more than 600 coronavirus deaths and Italy’s cumulative death toll is now 11,591. This is happening in a nation of about 60 million people; U.S. population is 327 million; an Italian-scale coronavirus outbreak in the United State would mean more than 60,000 deaths. So far, only 3,175 Americans have died of the virus. The U.S. death toll is certainly going to continue increasing, but it’s got a long way to go before it could reach anything like the impact in Italy.

What is not getting enough attention in the media is how uneven the impact of the Wuhan virus outbreak is spread in the United States. For example, 42% of deaths from the disease (1,342 out of 3,175) are in New York state, and the vast majority of those are concentrated in New York City and its suburbs. Of the 66,497 cases reported in New York state as of Monday afternoon, the city has 37,453 (56%) and four suburban counties — Westchester (9,326), Suffolk (5,791), Nassau (7,344), Rockland (2,511) — comprise another 38% of statewide cases, so the city and its suburbs account for 94% of all cases in New York State.

More than a third (62,425, or 38%) of all coronavirus cases in the United States are in the New York metropolitan region, without even including the cases in the New Jersey or Connecticut suburbs.

This disparity of impact can be demonstrated by other statistics. Consider the state-by-state coronavirus death tolls. As of this morning, seven states had reported at least 100 deaths from the virus:

New York …………………. 1,342
Washington State ……….. 210
New Jersey ……………….. 198
Louisiana ………………….. 185
Michigan …………………… 184
Georgia …………………….. 102

That is 2,221 deaths, 70% of all U.S. coronavirus deaths. These states have a combined population of 60.6 million, which is less than one-fifth (18.8%) of the total U.S. population of 327.2 million. So 80% of Americans live in states that have suffered less than 20% of COVID-19 deaths, and this explains a lot about political responses to the disease. For example, if you live in Michigan (6,498 cases, 184 deaths in a population of about 10 million), your risk from coronavirus is about six times greater than if you live in Texas (3,184 cases, 47 deaths in a population of about 29.5 million). Yet not everyone in Michigan is equally exposed to the COVID-18 risk, which is highly concentrated near Detroit. Nearly half of the state’s cases are in Detroit (1,801) and surrounding Wayne County (1,394). Add in the suburbs of Oakland County (1,365) and Macomb County (728), and there are 5,288 coronavirus cases in the metro Detroit region, accounting for 81% of Michigan’s total.

If you’re not in one of the “red zones” of this pandemic, the alarmist rhetoric in the media probably strikes you as an irrational panic. The American who lives in eastern Kentucky, northern Texas or upstate New York is not seeing overcrowded local hospitals or reading obituaries of local residents killed by the Wuhan virus. As a matter of statistical probability, your personal risk from the virus is low, and yet every time you turn on TV news, it’s another CORONAVIRUS CRISIS UPDATE, with politicians and medical experts warning that we are approaching a catastrophe, requiring immediate and drastic action.

Part of this disparity, of course, is that the national news media are headquartered in New York, where the coronavirus outbreak is worst. Yet the uneven impact of the disease produces disparities everywhere. Consider the case of Maryland, with a population of about 6.1 million, which currently reports 1,660 cases, or about 27 cases per 100,000 residents. This is far below the level in Michigan (about 65 cases per 100,000 residents), and not even a tenth of New York’s rate (342 cases per 100,000 residents), yet Gov. Larry Hogan issued a statewide lockdown order Monday. Why this drastic action?

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan said on Monday that he is taking the coronavirus response seriously as cases in the Washington, D.C. metro area rapidly increase.
“Over the past week, cases have more than quadrupled in the Washington metro area [Washington, D.C. Maryland, and Virginia],” he noted, comparing the trajectory of cases to New York City a few weeks ago.
New York City has now become the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, with city hospitals overrun with patients. Citing 66 cases at a Carroll County nursing home, Hogan said that it is a serious issue as cases have doubled in the past two days in the area.

This hits close to home, as my podcasting partner John Hoge lives in Carroll County, which had very few cases of coronavirus before this sudden outbreak at a nursing home there. While we don’t know exactly how this nursing home became infected, the proximity to Baltimore (about 30 miles) and D.C. (about 40 miles) is suggestive of the source.

Look at the county-by-count case numbers in Maryland, and you see that two D.C. suburban counties (Montgomery and Prince George’s) and Baltimore (city and county) have a combined 1,143 cases, which is 69% of the statewide total. In rural Maryland — the Eastern Shore, and from Frederick County westward — there are very few cases. Yet resident of the rural counties are not exempt from the statewide shutdown, and this once again highlights the disparate impact of the pandemic. As much as we might complain about this, the upside is that locking down the “red zones” means that the low-risk areas are more likely to remain low-risk. The upward spikes in coronvirus cases in urban America will continue, while rural America will largely be spared the worst of the pandemic.