Yesterday Kevin Drum published a set of graphs depicting the number of deaths due to COVID-19 in (from left to right, top to bottom) Italy, France, the UK, Sweden, Germany, Canada, Argentina, Mexico, and the United States. Those graphs seem like as good a place as any to begin my status report. What do they show?
The European countries with the exception of Sweden but including Germany along with Canada exhibit a peak in March or April and have recently seen a sharp upswing. Is that upswing beginning in Sweden and the U. S., too? Truthfully, it’s too early to tell.
Let’s dig a little more deeply into some U. S. states (graphs taken from Worldometer).
I see three different patterns: Texas, California or Florida, and Wisconsin. In Texas the number of new cases has risen but the number of new deaths has not risen proportionally to the number of new cases. In California or Florida the number of cases has risen but the number of deaths has continued to decline. In Wisconsin, unlike in most European countries or in Texas, California, or Florida, the number of new cases and the number of new deaths have both increased considerably. Clearly, there’s a serious problem in Wisconsin.
Here’s another pair of graphs to consider, this time from my home state of Illinois:
Illinois’s number of new cases and new deaths is something between Texas and Wisconsin. The number of new cases and new deaths have increased but not as dramatically as in Wisconsin. As you can see even with the increase in new cases the health care system is not presently being overstressed. Might it in the future? Yes. I think that the governor should be emphasizing more convincingly the importance of steps each person can take to slow the increase in the number of cases but not moving towards another lockdown as he appears to be doing.
One more point I’d like to make about Kevin Drum’s graphs. As I have said before I don’t think the U. S. can be understood by comparing us with much more homogeneous countries like France, Germany, or Sweden. We are better understood as two countries occupying the same territory, one something like Germany and the other a lot more like Mexico. When you do a finer-grained analysis of our statistics that is what emerges clearly. Among whites the number of cases per million population and the number of deaths per million population is very similar to Germany’s, even more so if you discount New York and New Jersey where, not to put too fine a point on it but, well, mistakes were made. It was early in the pandemic. By comparison the number of cases and deaths among blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans is more like those figures in Spain or Brazil. I hasten to emphasize that my conclusion from that is that we need to be devoting considerably more attention to communities with black, Hispanic, or Native American populations. The attention should take the form of both a public awareness campaign and medical assistance.
Massive lockdowns is like performing brain surgery with an ice pick and garden tools. Understanding potential differences in ethnicity, as you advocate, is worthy of investigation. I fear it will be politicized.
But overarching all of this is personal responsibility. People who choose to engage in risky behaviors will, well, become at risk. If they are young, who cares? If they are old, they could become an unfortunate statistic. The wife of a friend has an immunity disorder. Late 50’s. So she chooses to be cautious. Wise. But you don’t shut down an entire economy for the few. It just doesn’t work, and the side effects are unacceptable.
We visit the Omaha reservation once a month. They man the two paved roads leading into the main town. About half of the locals live there, the rest scattered in rural housing across the reservation area.
Seems pointless, you stop and tell them who you are going to see, they wave you on.
They are not in any way a tourist destination and have no business other than the school, clinic, and offices.
I was told one family of four (adults) all died but I personally only know one young man, infected but since recovered.
I myself think they could use a dozen home health nurses, they wouldn’t have to be native but if not it would take time to gain trust.
With a 90% effective vaccine pending safety review; everything changes.
Going from “never developed an effective vaccine for a coronavirus” to “90% effective” is pretty ambitious for a single step. What is the minimum effectiveness actually to change anything?
There’s a whole bunch of assumptions; which only time can prove.
(a) it is 90% effective at all ages
(b) that the signal of effectiveness they are measuring (whether someone is symptomatic) is equivalent to reduction in risk of hospitalization or death
(c) this coronavirus doesn’t mutate like the flu where the effectiveness varies wildly year to year
Then a 90% effectiveness would reduce the risk of dying from coronavirus from `~0.75-1% to about 0.075 to 0.1%. At 0.1%, the risk is equivalent to catching the flu (without flu vaccine).
So we have a treatment that makes the coronavirus as deadly as the flu, and about 3 times as infectious. That should be enough to lift restrictions (we don’t close many things or employ emergency powers for the flu).
Technically, not a single step, all of the major vaccines under development have passed Phase I and Phase II showing a strong immune response. But I think I get Dave’s point, 90% effectiveness is beyond the 50% regulatory hurdle and beyond what those predicting a good vaccine were suggesting.
Under a heterogenous model of spread, herd immunity kicks in at a much lower level because the most infectious and the most susceptible are removed from the population earlier. The vaccine does not need to be 90% effective.
I think PD has it correct, assuming 90% effective means that 90% of people who get the vaccine are truly immune. Should eliminate big outbreaks and make the disease a non-issue. (Setting aside mutations.)
Steve