COVID-19: Metrics in a Time of Plague

Posted on | April 6, 2020 | 1 Comment

Perhaps you didn’t notice, but since Sunday, Fox News has dropped their habit of framing the screen with graphics showing the worldwide and nationwide totals of coronavirus cases and deaths. Perhaps some executive at the network came to the same realization I’d had for several days, namely that this Death Watch theme was . . . not helpful.

In mid-March, when Americans were first coming to grips with this pandemic — schools were closing, daily briefings, etc. — network executives got the idea that we needed these numbers constantly on our screens, to scare people and make them take “social distancing” seriously. Having accomplished that mission, however, they must have decided that their Death Watch motif was driving home-bound audiences crazy. We’re all trying our best to maintain a sense of optimism, and having these numbers omnipresent on TV news was not conducive to that effort. And, I argue, these weren’t even the most important numbers:

Turn on your TV, and cable news will show you a chyron with the cumulative total of known COVID-19 cases in the United States. That number increases daily, by a simple process of addition, but that’s not the number which matters most in terms of coping with the pandemic. What matters, from the perspective of avoiding a crisis that overwhelms our health-care system, is not how many people are infected with the coronavirus, but rather the number of patients hospitalized. As tests for the Chinese virus have become more widely available, a majority of people who test positive — more than 80 percent in some states — are never hospitalized. Earlier projections of a system-crashing crisis have so far been proven false, but the media refuse to acknowledge the failure of the doomsday prophets and their computer-generated pandemic models.
It feels unfair to point this out, at a time when health-care workers in the hardest-hit areas of the country like New York, Detroit, and New Orleans are struggling to keep up with a surging number of COVID-19 cases, and the daily death toll continues increasing. More than 1,300 Americans died from the virus Saturday, concluding a week in which U.S. deaths totaled 6,232. . . .

Read the rest of my column at The American Spectator.

Category: American Spectator

Coronavirus ‘Myths’ and Real Numbers

Posted on | April 4, 2020 | 1 Comment

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.

Category: Health Care

Fish Stories

Posted on | April 3, 2020 | Comments Off on Fish Stories

— by Wombat-socho

“Mermaid’s Dinner” by Sue Halstenberg

For some reason we don’t have a Food category among our tags, which is odd because I distinctly recall doing at least one post on burgers in my decade of blogging here at The Other McCain. In any case, this being Lent, it’s time to provide a brief review of the various fishburgers that the fast food chains of America roll out this time of year, the better to serve us Catholics who are supposed to be abstaining from meat on Fridays.

McDonald’s
Let us begin with the basic fishburger, the Filet-O-Fish served at the Golden Arches. This is truly your generic fishburger, made from Dagon knows what kind of fish & fish byproducts, topped with a slice of American Style Pasteurized Processed Cheese-like Substance, and smothered with entirely too much tartar sauce. There is also a Double Filet-O-Fish for those unsatisfied with the basic version. Cheap, filling, and that’s about all you can say for it. 70/100

Jack In The Box
Another generic fishburger. Outpoints McD’s because of larger fries and soda.
72/100

Checker’s/Rally’s
Rated slightly higher than McD’s because of the peppery fries, otherwise pretty much the same thing.
73/100.

Arby’s
Actually resembles a fish filet; it actually looks like you’re getting half an Alaskan pollock in your sammich. Yuge – hangs over the side of the bun. Beats the generic fishburger because it has no cheese or other adulteration and actually has a fishlike taste. Bonus points for curly fries.
85/100

Wendy’s
Allegedly made from hand-cut cod, looks and taste a cut above Arby’s because of better breading (panko) and because cod is better than pollack, which is Eskimo for “generic whitefish”. Unfortunately, the superior taste is ruined by pickles.
87/100

Burger King
I was surprised that BK’s Big Fish surpassed Wendy’s; while it’s made of panko-breaded pollack, which you would think would place it halfway between Wendy’s & Arby’s, in fact it is the superior sandwich because it’s served on a toasted bun, without pickles. Cheese is optional.
90/100

Culver’s
Unfortunately, we don’t have a Culver’s in Las Vegas; one has to drive up to St. George to enjoy their walleye sandwich, which is outstanding. Would be perfect if only Culver’s served Coke product.
99/100

Honorable mention: Del Taco
Del Taco doesn’t serve fishburgers, but they do offer fish tacos and shrimp tacos, both of which are yummy.

Dishonorable mention: Chick-Fil-A
For some reason, the home of God’s Only Begotten Chicken Sammich does not serve fish of any kind in Las Vegas. Truly regrettable.

Amazon Warehouse Deals

Category: Catholics

In The Mailbox: 04.03.20

Posted on | April 3, 2020 | 1 Comment

– compiled by Wombat-socho

For your Friday enjoyment, Calgary Sunshine Girl Katie.

Could be outstanding in her field.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Florida Man Has Competition
EBL: Flashback Friday – Pelosi In Chinatown, 2/24/20
Twitchy: Laura Ingraham Triggers Occasional Cortex So Badly She Triples Down On Fish Tank Cleaner Story
Louder With Crowder: PETA On Coronavirus – Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop Protesting
According To Hoyt: Screaming In The Forest
Monster Hunter Nation: This Week’s Episode Of The Facebook Hunter, also, Choose Your Freakout! NOW FIGHT!
Vox Popoli: Never Trust The Banks, also, Is There Nothing She Can’t Do?

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: The Blob Sucked Away Your Public Health & Gave You War Instead
American Greatness: Payback Time For Red China, also, Companies Busted Selling Critical Equipment To Overseas Buyers For Cash
American Thinker: Will Trump Betray Us After Corona?
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Signs Of Life Friday
Babalu Blog: Krauthammer Turned Out To Be Right About Obama & Cuba
Baldilocks: My March 2020 Post Digest For Da Tech Guy Blog
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For April 3
Cafe Hayek: Reality Isn’t Optional, #778
CDR Salamander: The Law Of Gross Tonnage Applies
Da Tech Guy: DaTechGuy’s AM Court Livestream – The China Syndrome, Putting God To The Test, & Baseball
Don Surber: Media Lies Cost Lives
First Street Journal: Reichskanzler Andy Beshear Assumes More Dictatorial Powers, & The Sheeple Love Him For It
The Geller Report: George Soros Groups Pushing Democrat Scheme For Mail-In Voting, also, Pelosi Made Millions On Amazon Stock Bought After Coronavirus Hearings Before U.S. Retailers Forced To Close
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, I’m So Old…
Hollywood In Toto: Jon Savage Draws Strength From Fan Recognition, Veterans, also, Shooting Heroin Director – Andrew Breitbart Was Right About The Culture
JustOneMinute: Mask Up!
Legal Insurrection: Word Police Strike Again – Grammarly Complains About “Wuhan Virus” Usage, also, Evidence Suggests Wuhan Death Toll Sixteen Times What Red China Reported
Megan McArdle: Here’s Why It Won’t Work To Just Isolate The Elderly & Vulnerable
The PanAm Post: Maduro & His Ministers Are Running A Narcostate, also, From Noriega To Maduro – Drugs, Money, & Power
Power Line: A Letter To Chuck Schumer, also, Who Is Dying From COVID-19?
Shark Tank: Ted Deutch Pushes Coronavirus Awareness & Grows His Beard
Shot In The Dark: #CancelRent
The Political Hat: That’s Racist! Free Speech, Parents, & Intellectual Diversity, also, Firing Line Friday – The Place Of The Treaty In International Affairs
This Ain’t Hell: Valor Friday, also, Hydroxychloroquine Rated “Most Effective Therapy”
Victory Girls: Sen. McSally Says WHO Director Should Resign
Volokh Conspiracy: Masks For All – Sensible & Helpful
Weasel Zippers: Trump Sends Letter To Sen. Schumer That’s An Instant Classic, also, House Majority Whip Clyburn Sees Coronavirus Crisis To Call For “Restructuring Of Government”
Mark Steyn: Pandemics, Panderers, Poems, & Policemen

Amazon Warehouse Deals

Category: Linkagery

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

Posted on | April 3, 2020 | 3 Comments

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.

It's not as if we weren't warned (CDC, Feb. 29) about the N95 mask supply. https://t.co/QTEokw8ZFz pic.twitter.com/q9tXX6wVq8

— Don't Eat Bats OK? (@PatriarchTree) April 3, 2020

Category: Health Care

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | April 3, 2020 | Comments Off on Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

by Smitty

From time ago far past,
Sprang a galaxy so vast,
Infinity did strain it to contain.
And though man be alone,
Contemplation skill to own,
Still weighed it heavily upon the brain.

Into its depths he peered,
(Predators so deeply feared),
Devices all around, data to glean.
To algorithms fed,
The danger off to head,
And puzzle out what all of this could mean.

Yet with advancing age,
Came a rather frigid rage:
Intellect failed all meaning to bring forth.
And then his eye did score,
Wisdom handed down from yore:
The prophets had the right of life’s full worth.
—
via Darleen

Category: Friday Fiction

MSNBC’s Doomsday Crisis Theme

Posted on | April 2, 2020 | Comments Off on MSNBC’s Doomsday Crisis Theme

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:

It’s a Doomsday Crisis that threatens to kill us all;
and
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.

Category: Health Care, MSNBC

In The Mailbox: 04.02.20

Posted on | April 2, 2020 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 04.02.20

– compiled by Wombat-socho

This post doesn’t have a Page Three, but if it did, today’s Page Three Girl would be Zara from the Winnipeg Sun. also, thanks to everyone who bought stuff through my Amazon links in March!