real numbers

In 2018 there were 85,135 deaths in Georgia from all causes.  The 2019 population of Georgia is about 10,750,000.  The national death rate is 868 per 100,000 population.

Based on those figures, a rough calculation would indicate that between 85,000 and 90,000 people will die in Georgia in 2020.  If we use the lower figure, that's about 233 deaths per day.  Currently we are averaging about 6 deaths per day reported to have died from the Wuhan virus.

Why are we shutting down the entire state for something that is minuscule in comparison to the all cause mortality rate?

Prediction

Georgia's mayors got a presentation last week with dire predictions if they didn't take steps to lock down populations.  Those predictions ranged from a low of about 1,000 deaths to a high of 27,000 deaths from the Wuhan virus.

Believing all these numbers are so much horseshit, I am going out on a limb today and making my own prediction.  By Easter, April 22, 2020, my predicted death toll for Georgia as measured and published by the DPH website is 300 deaths plus or minus 50.

Now we wait to see whether I am excoriated or praised.

risk assessment part 3

More from my private writings concerning my views of the Wuhan virus we are living through.

March 26, 2020 - [in response to https://medium.com/@jpsmithalt/hold-the-line-17231c48ff17]   I agree with what he's saying about how social distancing works. I question whether we're seeing increases in infections or lethality.

March 26, 2020 - Greensboro is now on lockdown. 😫 And I'm real curious how Ingles can have no more than 10 people in the store.  Their STAFF is more than that. Even if they exempt employee count, you'll have a few shoppers inside and a hell of a lot of angry people outside.  Someone will get shot.

March 27, 2020 - Death data in Georgia is maybe up slightly, but the graph is still more or less a straight line, not an accelerating curve.

It's gonna be harder and harder to restart things the longer this goes on.  If we drift into mid-April still on lockdown and deaths start to taper off, are they going to say, "Oops, guess we overreacted?  Y'all go back to work?" That will hardly engender confidence.  Their best bet is to beat their chests and say, "It worked!  We're safe now.  Go back to work."  In other words, government is going to have to claim whatever they did worked, whether it did or not.  The data is so fuzzy nobody will be able to gainsay them.

March 27, 2020 - If we were New York, some of these things might make sense.  I'm not sure they do make sense for Greene County at the moment.  Of course, with people fleeing New York City like rats, no telling how much they're spreading this shit.  Florida better look out.

I'm somewhat concerned that someone will freak out and shoot somebody else for breaking in line or something.  Most folks are at least sane enough not to do that, but it only takes one idiot and God knows there's more than one idiot in Greene County. 

March 27, 2020 - [responding to https://finance.yahoo.com/news/public-health-expert-coronavirus-is-going-to-hit-every-city-in-america-132731827.html]

After looking at it, my take is that this is useless fear mongering with an underlying political agenda.  They're just presenting scary statistics in a vacuum without any context.  Worse, they're using the cases number, which as smarter people have been saying for three weeks, is GOING TO GO UP AS WE START TESTING MORE! 

Gee whiz, can't we get that across?  Case numbers mean next to nothing.  Deaths and hospitalizations are more indicative of what's happening.  I agree that New York City is going to be hit hard.  I don't necessarily agree that the virus will enfold us all.  They provide no context for anything they present.

I object to this video, though, mainly because they present no response, nothing anyone can do, just a bunch of doom and gloom with the clear intention to scare us all.  No discussion about whether social distancing will work or not (it clearly works).  This is completely one sided with no discussion of reasonable response that would change what happens.

The situation is very fluid.  It can change and is changing rapidly.  They're presenting it as though it's foreordained.  It very much is not.

If this is journalism, it's completely irresponsible and should be debunked with real math, not scary charts.

March 28, 2020 - 1.4 percent is quite high, but likely way overstated based on such limited testing.  It's certainly a far cry from the 3.4 percent estimate making the rounds last week.

March 28, 2020 - Dr. Birx...You've seen her at the news conferences standing by the President.  While she doesn't say so explicitly, her point is that the media is not doing us any favors. [responding to Dr. Birx: Coronavirus Data Doesn't Match The Doomsday Media Predictions]

March 29, 2020 - I said the other day we need to see all cause mortality numbers for this time last year and compare to this year.  Is there a statistical difference?  I doubt it, at least not in Georgia, not based on what I've seen.  Deaths ARE beginning to trend upward in my spreadsheet, but the numbers are still so small that the draconian shelter in place orders are out of proportion to what's really happening.

risk assessment part 2

More from the trenches, what I've written over the past couple of weeks.  See part 1 for posts before this date.

March 17, 2020 - The news media cannot simply report the steps being taken to combat the virus, because that's boring.  They'll go for the blood and the human angst. 

March 19, 2020 - It appears to me that media and government have more or less lost control, at least of the story.  If martial law is imposed, then things get ugly.  If voluntary cooperation and social distancing works to slow things down, I think we'll stand a chance to cancel the emergency declarations and our political leaders won't feel the need to try and exert more control over us than they have so far.  Kemp has surprised me by (so far) trying to use persuasion rather than coercion.  Some of the northeastern seaboard states are leaning the other way, and some cities, like Athens, have gone overboard, banning all gatherings of more than 10 people and mandating that bars and restaurants close altogether.

March 19, 2020 - To me, the only number that's worth tracking is deaths.  All the other numbers depend on how much testing we're doing, which is too variable and not random.  My contention is that it's a lot more widespread already than we know because quite a few are probably asymptomatic and will never know...IMO, the worse and longer term damage is all economic.  That may be a little harsh or uncaring and I'll no doubt feel differently if someone I know gets sick, but the overall damage that hits all of us is economic.

March 19, 2020 - Track that deaths number and when it starts going down, that may mean we're past the peak. A more useful number would be obtained by randomly testing a huge swath of the population and getting the number of positive hits.  That could then be used to figure out a containment strategy... CDC should have begun testing back in January.  That's their mission, their ONLY job, and they have not done a good job, IMO.

March 19, 2020 - Unless they're going to do random sampling, the cases number is useless bullshit.

March 21, 2020 - Here's an article that muses about what I was saying last week regarding loss of freedoms.   Paranoid as I am, the geotracking stuff didn't occur to me. (referring to: Liberty Vittert: How much of our liberty and privacy must we sacrifice in war on coronavirus?)

March 22, 2020 - So the question is what to do.

Well, here's my thoughts in no particular order:

- Continue to push back at irrational government intrusions on our liberties.  This is hard to do, given that governments don't care what I think.  For now, a reasoned and sane "is this really necessary" questioning is probably a good response.  Not that I'm an "influencer" in any way, but I do post what I'm doing on Instagram, for what little bit of good it'll do.

- Buy stuff, if possible, from those businesses who need our help to survive.  To that end, we're patronizing the Oconee Brewery, who cancelled all their events but are still open for what business they can drum up.  I don't need the beer, but I got some anyway and will weekly until this is over.  Gift certificates from, say, Marie's hairdresser whose appointment had to be cancelled - stuff like that.

- Don't do dumb things that will make people sick.  Make sure my parents aren't going to do something dumb to get infected.  If the most likely transmission is face to face, or really, by touching infected surfaces, their best bet is to stay home.  They're 81 years old, after all.  The less contact they have with the fewest people, the better.  So we're washing our hands and using hand sanitizer.  That costs little and probably does a lot.

- Don't overwhelm the health care infrastructure.  This is the primary benefit of social distancing that I see.  Marie and I were talking about whether it would be better to let this run hot and fast and get over sooner, or slow and steady.  Hot and fast would probably be better for the economy, but would overwhelm the number of ICU beds available and result in more deaths, some of which could be prevented.  It's too late for that anyway, I think, so it's going to be slow and steady.

- Continue to track the only metric that matters, deaths.  For the three days I've been tracking it in a spreadsheet, Georgia is adding about 4 deaths per day.  That's what will tell the story.

- To the extent possible, invest in the stock market while things are down.  It's like buying on sale.  Long term, I'm bullish.

The economic impact is the worst part of this and probably the most unnecessary, caused more by sensationalist reporting and ham handed government than anything else.  Trump is correct when he criticized Peter whatshisname the other day.  The media IS being too alarmist and not positive.  Trump's point, which the media missed, is that he is hopeful (or says he is in public) and they're instead reporting things for the express purpose of scaring the public and that doing so is a disservice. 

The media would rather cut every story into a good guys versus bad guys slant.  If Trump is positive and optimistic, they'll present him as a bumbling fool denying reality.  If Trump is negative about our chances, they'll criticize him for not doing more to fix things.  He cannot win.

Instead, they should be reporting facts AND CONTEXT.

March 22, 2020 - The bottom line for me:  this virus is cause for concern, not panic.  A lot of actions taken so far are out of proportion to the risks.  We should be avoiding contacts and washing our hands.  We should not be taking out entire economy offline and instituting martial law as has been done in Athens and elsewhere, especially statewide in the northeast and California.  That's too much and not necessary.

 

March 23, 2020 - It's also shocking that they project 50 percent of those admitted to ICU to die.  I don't know why it would be that high, other than maybe the fact that only the most serious and severe cases will go into ICU in the first place.  I wonder what percent of total ICU admissions - for any medical reason - die?  I'd think it would be several times higher than hospital admissions in general.

 

March 23, 2020 - Yeah, this is cause for concern, but is it cause for epic shutdowns?  I don't know,  nor does anybody else, but they're defacto now.  Cuomo in his news conference mused about whether we could modify things to allow some workers to return.  There are also some things that really haven't been mentioned yet, like staggered hours and such that might let us limp along better.  The conversation needs to keep happening.

March 23, 2020 - Kemp just got done with a news conference.  He's closed all bars and restaurants until April 6th.  Everything they're doing says they expect a large influx of sick people. I don't know what info they're basing that on.

Fauci HAS said recently this is more contagious than swine flu.  He was around for swine flu, so maybe he's got some data not public.

Some hospitals like Phoebe Putney actually are having lots of cases.  I just don't know how they know what will happen or is likely.

March 24, 2020 - I think perhaps the news media and the administration may be too focused on New York and California where cases are higher.  The actual deaths, however, appear to be remaining low.  I think they're scared of overwhelming the hospital bed space and people dying who otherwise wouldn't.  That is, the virus won't kill them, but the lack of good care will.

[The media] had a chance to step up and at least partially redeem themselves for their failures of the past three years and instead the press just fell off a cliff and got worse (if that's possible).  I do hope to see the death of journalism.  It's been dead for a long time but they won't admit it, like zombies insisting they're human.  Journalism should be shot in the head.

 

March 26, 2020 - I'm not sure that the severity of the presentation is accurate, but that's what every mayor in Georgia has been told, so that's how they're making their decisions.  Too many of them are probably not very math literate and almost nobody has even a passing familiarity with statistics.

The projected deaths are so sketchy that I wonder what data they're using.  From a low of about a thousand to a high of 27 thousand?  If that's an estimate based on data, I'd hate to see a guess.  The graph on cases increasing is useless.  We've been saying for three weeks that number would go up as we began testing more people.

We are 9 days into the deaths...Present rate is highly variable but averaging about 5-6 a day and not (yet) increasing, though with only a few data points it's hard to say anything with certainty.  To reach even one thousand deaths though, we'd have to maintain the current death rate for 190 days, way longer than anybody is saying this will last.  On the other hand, to reach one thousand in two weeks, the death rate will have to be something like 65 per day from now until then.  To reach the worst case of 27 thousand deaths, people will have to start dying at a rate of 27 times that, or else this must go on for months and months and months. 

 

Billings, Montana probably doesn't have a situation.  Nor does Greensboro, Georgia.  Hyper local isolation, not general quarantine, might be more sensible. 

The news media is doing us all a huge disservice with their tendency to frame everything as good guys versus bad guys, rather than analysis of numbers, risk assessment, resource allocation and logistics.  This is a problem in those areas, not a conflict between people, but they don't know how to report anything else.

The cost/benefit analysis of the damage to the economy sounds heartless, but needs to be considered.  Another thing to think about: how many people die daily in Georgia?  That is, what is the all-cause mortality rate?  Has that gone up in a statistically significant amount?  My suspicion is that it has not, but I lack data.  If the mortality rate blips upward, only then can we say that this virus really is having an effect.  If the all cause mortality rate does not change, then heartless as it is to say, the deaths caused by this virus are statistically insignificant and the extreme damage to the economy is not worth it. 

risk assessment part 1

Predicted deaths in Georgia from the Wuhan virus range from 1,000 to 27,000.  So far, the data does not support even the low estimate.  For the record, here are selected excerpts from what I've written in the past week to ten days.

March 8, 2020 - So as we test more in the coming months, we'll find more and it'll LOOK LIKE it's spreading, when all that's really happening is we're recognizing it more.

March 8, 2020 -  one more from the same source with real data analyzed by a real human, not some stupid reporter.  (referring to article entitled How Mass Hysteria Is Making Coronavirus Worse Than It Actually Is - Worth)

March 10, 2020 -Finally somebody put together a good bit of writing that encapsulates the facts.  Compare what this article says to what's on the broadcast networks and they start to look like the idiots they are.  This should be mandatory reading:https://www.fisherinvestments.com/en-us/marketminder/coronavirus-seeing-through-the-fog-of-fear

March 13, 2020 - We are taking something that is a problem and turning it into a crisis by being stupidly misled by reporters who don't understand math.  Concern is appropriate.  Panic is not.

March 13, 2020 - The US should copy South Korea's approach.  Instead of draconian stoppage and lockdown that will likely cripple the economy, why not trust people, especially medical professionals, to do their jobs and use common sense?

March 13, 2020 - This episode is going to go down as the worst over reaction and media driven idiocy in recent history.

March 14, 2020 - Much of the closures are probably not legal and the voluntary ones are mostly unnecessary.

March 16, 2020 - (responding to Dr. Oz's predictions) It appears to me he's just pulling numbers out of the air.  And if he believes ANYTHING about the China numbers, he's deluded.  The story says the number of cases "surged" recently.  Of course they're surging, but mainly because we're actually starting to do some testing and finding out it's more wide spread than we ever thought - AND NOBODY NOTICED.

This is still the most over hyped hysteria we'll ever see (until the next one). 

March 16, 2020 - You can't spell pandemic without Dem Panic.  Check out the proposals mentioned in this article for one Illinois city.  I'll quote them here:

The city council proposed to grant extraordinary powers to the mayor, which include:

• Banning the sale of firearms and ammunition;
• Banning the sale of any alcohol;
• Closing of all bars, taverns, liquor stores, etc.;
• Banning the sale or giving away of gasoline or other liquid flammable or combustible products in any container other than a gasoline tank permanently fixed to a motor vehicle;
• Directing the shut-off of power, water, gas, etc.
• Taking possession of private property and obtaining full title to same;
• Prohibiting or restricting entry and exit to and from the city.

How the hell is any of this legal?  Why is it necessary?  It's not, IMO, and they're pushing to see how many sheep we have in the population. 

March 16, 2020 -  his is exactly what I was afraid would happen, using this "crisis" for massive government overreach and control and loss of freedom in the name of public safety...It's almost out of control now...People in office are power hungry control freaks who see this as an opportunity to set some precedents that will become accepted practice in future years.

March 17, 2020 - Social media shaming and gang raping contrary opinions has led to a herd mentality on this event that we will all be shamed by later on.  The truth is that there's no one in charge, and the ones who think they are in control have lost control of events.  I have no idea how it's going to play out now, but I'm hoping for some sort of sheepish return to good sense by May.  I fear it could be longer, though.

March 17, 2020 - Kemp and his team sounded like they're on top of the situation with pragmatic sensible answers. Hopefully we are beginning to pull back on the insane overreaching.

background noise

I'm ready for this Wuhan Bat Flu pandemic to fade a little.  The stock market has dropped the Dow from near 30 thousand to just under 20 thousand, a loss of about one third.  My IRA is shot and unless it recovers, so are my longer term plans for retirement.

The news stories are all of the increasing number of cases, but never of the deaths, which is the real number.  Cases don't mean a thing because the sampling, the testing, is not being done randomly out of the entire population, but selectively only from those who present themselves with symptoms.  Deaths will be low.

Toilet paper shortages?  Really?  Hoarding, social distancing, businesses by the hundreds of thousands closing, layoffs, canceled presidential primaries, worry - all are becoming common.  The news media is beginning to be repetitious, which is a good sign.  Soon the novelty will wear off and we'll notice we need more in our lives than news about the virus.

This is the new normal for a while, so the virus and its news will become background noise for whatever else we're doing in our daily lives.  It's about damned time we wake up from this fever dream and realize most of us should be ashamed of how we've been acting.

Wuhan Bat Flu

Here's an interesting thing to think about.  Would the collective freakout have occurred if the outbreak had a different name with the word "flu" in it?  We'll never know, but I believe part of the problem is that the name sounds like something out of control already, whereas if it were the "Blank Blank Flu" it wouldn't sound so bad.

Thus, for me it's now the Wuhan Bat Flu.

 

At this point, it appears we are in the midst of mass hysteria with everything from schools to the NBA season closed down.  We have elevated a problem into a crisis, causing damage where none should have occurred and trashing our economy in the name of stopping the spread of something we can't control but could mitigate.

 

The focus should be on mitigating the highest risks, not stopping the spread, which is impossible.