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.