I wanted to pass along one brief passage from Holman Jenkins’s most recent Wall Street Journal column:
Seldom has there been a clearer test of how the media sets the agenda for politicians. The press repeats this misleading statistic [ed.: “confirmed cases”] a thousand times a day to no real purpose, leaving us only less certain where we stand in the herd-immunity race. Underplaying the disease’s true prevalence, we have (without realizing it) conditioned people to be less careful even as we preach at them to be more careful. We cause them to underestimate their exposure risk and overestimate their death risk.
Rather than emphasizing closing businesses and masks we should be emphasizing social distancing. Rather than reporting case positivity rates we should long ago have been doing epidemiological testing.
Perhaps you missed it, but the US alone is doing over 2 million covid tests per day.
Remember what they told us: Masks and lockdowns will not reduce the number of cases or deaths by so much as one. All they do is reduce the rate at which new cases show up, thereby reducing the load on the medical facilities and their staffs. Quote, Flatten the curve, End Quote.
If a new strain shows up (and it might have), we are in a new pandemic, back to square one.
Not quite. If a new virus shows up, we’re in a new pandemic. If a new strain shows up, we might or might not be in a new pandemic. There’s no way of telling a priori.
I’m not sure.
I understand close contact small droplet spread is a confirmed risk.
But it’s difficult to understand the spread between 165 employees at a Costco in any in any other way than aerosol through HVAC circulation.
If that’s the case, social distancing won’t cut it.
Testing is still useful since it is an early indicator and since they track the percentage of tests positive it does function as epidemiological testing.
“Remember what they told us: Masks and lockdowns will not reduce the number of cases or deaths by so much as one. ”
They were wrong, thank heavens. The death rate now is about half of what it was in March, allowing for similar patients. So Dave recently wrote something about New York and New Jersey, but that ignored the fact that we weren’t as good at treating Covid then. If people died at the same rate now as in the spring we would be closing in on peaks of 10,000 deaths per day. So by delaying we have saved many thousands of lives.
“we should be emphasizing social distancing.”
The evidence that masks help is overwhelming. This should not be either/or.
Steve
BTW, I trust you are of all the reports noting that the incidence of almost all other respiratory viral illnesses has had large drops.
Steve
It’s practically useless for determining prevalence or changes in prevalence.
I agree. I also think, echoing GS, that some of these COVID-19 relief/stimulus bills should include funding for adding anti-bacterial/anti-viral functionality to building HVAC systems. That would do more for the economy than providing “stimulus” payments to people making $150,000/year.
Since I’m skeptical about the claims of a more transmissible strain, I think Jenkins’s complaints about the media might some day be directed back at him. This may simply be a founder effect from outbreaks in the London area after a long period with very low community spread, promoted by super spreaders/events and seasonal changes. There have not been any studies yet AFAIK to discount that.
The virus keeps mutating, bad things can happen, might be happening right now. Pushing the vaccinations through to get to herd immunity is important because infections by all variants continue.
Plus it reduces the likelihood of a strain which is resistant to the vaccines emerging.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/stanford-peer-reviewed-study-did-not-find-evidence-lockdowns-were-effective-stopping-covid
Whatever the effect of stay-at-home orders and business closures on the spread of the disease, the form that they took in the U. S., which in many states didn’t apply to 50% or more of the people, was absurd on its face.
An interesting experiment is being conducted in Chicago. Will Mayor Lightfoot be willing to weather the teachers’ version of the “blue flu” without paying them? I doubt it.
Looked at the Stanford study when it came out. It will be one that I add to my list to demonstrate to med students how to look for and recognize bad studies. They didnt compare effects within each country but rather used Sweden and S Korea for their baselines. Plus, with a disease affecting millions of people and dozens of countries the chose to study only 10 countries, and let’s not forget that “study”means that they just pulled some numbers out of public health records. There might have been 15-20 hours work put into this. Finally, if they want to include Sweden as baseline then why dont they at least put in Norway and Finland, Sweden’s neighbors and the countries that would be most similar to Sweden? This was not nearly as awful as all of the studies that “proved” hydroxychloroquine works, but it is not very useful (assuming you are interested in really finding out the effects.)
Steve
I presumed that the intent was to identify the extremes of policy and using Sweden and South Korea for that purpose is as good a way as any. No?
Personally, I’m skeptical of comparisons between countries. There are just too many variables. Just to pick one our population is 12% or so sub-Saharan African ancestry and maybe as much as 16% aboriginal American ancestry (Native American + Mexican, Central, and South American). No European or Asian country has anything like that. To draw any conclusions for the U. S. by comparing us to European or Asian coutnries you need to assume that susceptibility is equally likely among all populations. That is such a strong assumption it is deserving of significant evidence. So much so that assuming the opposite is probably more likely.
Looks like a preprint dropped Friday with pretty good evidence that the variant increases the attack rate 30% (as opposed to previous studies that estimated 50% or 70%). It has a much better methodology — it compares this variant’s spread with non-variant spread in the same times and places. It also suggests that asymptomatic infections may be contributing substantially to spread. If the virus becomes less virulent, then people won’t know to stay home and isolate, infecting more people by not doing so.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.13.21249721v1.full-text