risk assessment part 4

More posts I've made regarding the Wuhan virus:

April 6, 2020 - While it's probably not feasible for a lot of reasons (cost, lack of qualified medical personnel) here's a response that I think I might favor. It could be summed up as, infect as many young and healthy volunteers as we can, while isolating the most vulnerable, and then let herd immunity do the rest. The volunteers would be rewarded (paid) for getting infected under the assumption that each recovered person increases herd immunity in the community and is thus saving lives by risking their own. I like the fact that some people are at least thinking about these things as an antidote to the usual media scrum.

April 7, 2020 - I'm attaching a spreadsheet with some of the Georgia stats on deaths.  It's updated as of noon today (4/7).  The total deaths are over 300 right now and will be updated again tonite at 7pm.  The rate of dying is accelerating now, after dropping a bit this past weekend.  My original prediction of 300 by 4/12 will be low, obviously...The age range is disproportionately older people, some quite old.  On the other hand, I would imagine that under "normal" circumstances, that particular chart would look much the same, i.e. skewed right.

April 7, 2020 - Unfortunately the numbers of people dying look to be accelerating.  As an aside, Greene County now has 23 confirmed cases and 1 death.  Union County has only 4 cases and nobody dead.  They're continuing to die in Dougherty County, leading the state with 56 dead.  Next closest is Fulton with 39.  I'm reluctantly beginning to believe we haven't reached the peak yet.

April 9, 2020 - That IHME page is one I've been tracking, and yes, it's changed pretty significantly for Georgia, which is the only part of it I pay attention to.  In their defense, they're continuing to update their predictions as conditions change, rather than slavishly adhere to their original numbers.

What I saw was that they were actually LOWER than the actual numbers of deaths early in April, not a whole lot, but about 3-5 percent under what the real deaths were day to day.  Longer term they were projecting something like total 3. 5K deaths in Georgia by June, with a shortage of hospital beds and so forth.  The general shape of their data, though, and the ramping up, was tracking pretty well unfortunately.

After Kemp came out with the statewide shelter in place proclamation, their projections changed.  Rather than a shortage of hospital beds, there's now enough that no shortage is projected at all.  The number of ICU beds is still showing a shortage, but a smaller one than before.  And the total projected deaths is now down.  I think the peak date may have moved a day or so and the peak is now smaller, based on the newer data and changing conditions. 

So it appears that the model is being refined as more and more data comes in, which makes sense. They're also changing it based on factors like whether a shelter in place order is in effect or not.  I suppose they take into account the number of hospital beds available, too. Their projected deaths per day is now slightly higher than actual numbers, I think.  But of several models that have been thrown at us, the IHME one seems to be the closest to reality for Georgia.  The percent hospitalized seems important as to whether we get a runaway pandemic or not, and Georgia has remarkably stayed under 35 percent the whole time.

April 9, 2020 - ...let me flip a switch and point you to a couple of news stories out of New York that support two things we've talked about:

This first one says that new data indicates the virus has been extant in the city a lot longer than first thought, and that it came from Europe.  That matches perfectly with the theory that after the Milan fashion show, all the jet setters left Milan and headed all over Europe and to America where they landed mostly in New York.  The east coast mostly got the virus from European travelers, not Chinese since we had already cut off China (Yay, Trump).  I'd be interested in seeing the same type of research done on the virus on the west coast.  Dollars to donuts it came from China, maybe as early as November.

 

April 9, 2020 - That's a good argument for shelter in place, at least if you're part of the high risk population. Unfortunately, there was a huge exodus from New York (and Atlanta) some weeks back, which spread the virus around.  We need social distancing measures, but we also need to get the country back to work full time.  I don't know how to juggle those two things, but I still like the variolation method of purposely infecting the young and strong to build up herd immunity.  I'd just hate to try that and have it make things worse.

I've been toying with the theoretical idea of purposely infecting myself.  Would I do it if it were offered?  I dunno.  I'd hate asking younger, stronger people to do something I'm not willing to do.  On the other hand, am I a good candidate to survive it if I get it?  I don't know that answer either.  There are just too many unknowns still to make hard choices.

 

April 10, 2020 - The point of my post was that the problem is not the model (which is actually pretty good by now); the problem is the reaction to the model. 

I guess what I'm saying is that I'd like decision-making to be based less on predictions of the future and more on analysis of the past.  By this point, we are collecting enough data on how this virus behaves in the wild to analyze what is really happening, not what is projected to happen down the road.  I'd rather decisions be based on what we know and have seen the virus do. 

For one limited example, we've now seen over and over that if this gets loose in a nursing home it's horrible and people die who probably shouldn't.  What's the proper response to that?  Me staying home?  Bars closing?  Probably not.  Isolate the nursing homes with super stringent hygiene and very limited in and out visitation?  Probably so. 

Somewhere between total societal lockdown and let-her-rip there's a middle ground that acknowledges we all have some social responsibility not to hurt the vulnerable among us by insisting on our own free reign, while at the same time the government backs off on trampling my Constitutional rights in the name of safety.