And I’ll be glad when everyone, meaning all the participants, call the entire debate what it is, which is one about public policy. It’s just not helping things, not at all, when people try to drown out any opinion that differs from their own by calling it ‘anti-science’.
I hope in the New Year… we, here in the USA, get laws or at least strict guidelines across all 50 States and territories that enforce a few common sense ideas. Like wearing a mask, 12 feet apart* (the 6’ has been shown to be not effective enough), and Stay The Eff Home unless … at work, buying food/supplies or going to the nearest hospital for whatever reason.
Maybe sometime in 2021 those rules can be discarded and just be suggestions. They might have been by now but too many people just couldn’t/wouldn’t abide by them.
All this talk about the pain of closing down ruining businesses, but no discussion about the other option - paying businesses to be closed, paying workers to stay home, paying to keep people employed at their jobs with their benefits and keeping the companies from going under and people can pay their bills, and doing so for 6 to 8 weeks. Then being able to open everything back up with the economy ready to roll and people have their livelihoods and homes and insurance and everything intact.
Remember, it’s the Republicans that wanted less unemployment benefits because people were incentivized not to work - at the time we were actively trying to get people not to work!
We could have tackled this head on with a hard fiscal hit for the country that would be much less painful for all the people and businesses. We wouldn’t have farmers throwing out food they can’t sell while people waiting in food distribution lines at food banks. We wouldn’t have people afraid they’re going to be evicted. We wouldn’t have people who have their life savings and all their energy tied up in a small business like a restaurant watching it wither and die. We had other options.
But for some reason we chose the most economically destructive and deadly approach to covid response. Well, maybe doing nothing at all would have been more deadly. After nearly a year of bungled response, it’s hard to say.
Wait, we have portable morgue trucks to keep bodies from piling up in the streets, and mortuaries running overtime, and yet somehow this is taken as a sign that there’s no worry, because there aren’t enough dead bodies?
And you argue people are smart enough to broadly assess risk, yet take as evidence that people are not complying with health recommendations?
First off, that’s an invalid assumption. I don’t think anyone believes perfect compliance with anything less than a full shut down would prevent all cases. Rather, the goal is to reduce exposure to reduce the spread and limit cases.
Second, nobody is saying that 10 pm is a magic time that prevents covid before and lets it run rampant after. That’s a strawman characterization of curfews, their intent, and their mechanism. So if that reasoning is incomplete or shallow, it’s not the reasoning being used by proponents of curfews.
No, you were right the first time. People are dying in hospitals from covid. We send the sick there, and the ones who can’t recover die there. That we can get many to recover doesn’t negate that hospitals are a horrible place to go if you look at deaths. How many people die in hospitals every day, from any cause? What percentage of deaths are in hospitals? I bet that number is freaky, if you don’t stop to consider why.
You are looking at the Non-ICU bed count table. That week, the total number is 12,565 non-ICU beds in use, 13% for covid cases. December 13-19 there are 10,225 non-ICU beds in use, with 36% filled with covid cases. That’s an increase from 1,599 covid cases to 3,633 covid cases - in non-ICU beds.
But you are ignoring the table right below for ICU beds. The week of June 28 - July 4, there were 2,021 ICU beds in use, 29% covid, or 585 cases. Dec 13-19 has 2,660 ICU beds in use, 37% covid, or 996 cases.
Okay, so what are you missing? Well,
(1) Covid cases are up as a percentage of hospital use and as a number of cases in both ICU and non-ICU.
(2) The number of staffed beds available did not go down. The top table lists number of non-ICU beds at “~17,000”. The fact that the total in use is down is a reaction to the expectation that the number of covid cases is going up rapidly, so hospitals have cut elective and other procedures to save room for the spike of covid cases. Apparently they have more room than needed at this moment.
(3) The ICU bed usage is up, from about 81% use (29% of that covid) to about 106% full (37% of that covid).
That’s right, there are more ICU beds full now than the total number of licensed beds normally available. How? Well, didn’t they set up emergency hospitals to deal with the covid surge? Didn’t that increase capacity over normal?
Uh, hospitals reacted to the expectation of a surge in covid cases. They reduced other hospital usage to make room. So now the surge hasn’t hit as bad - that means they have room for other things like bad flu cases, people in car accidents, cancer treatments, etc. Or more covid that is likely coming.
Well said.
Wow. I mean, fishing for a way to minimize the severity of the disease goes to new levels.
Covid-19 has become the number 3 cause of death in the United States.
Covid-19 has killed about as many people as Suicide, Nephritis, Influenza and pneumonia, Diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease combined - 365,815. (Those numbers are from 2018.)
Covid killed twice what Accidents did.
Covid killed over half of what died by heart disease.
You are correct, people aren’t good with large numbers.
Interesting assertion. Do you have that data, or are you just speculating?
Also, I dispute that the distribution of deaths is the issue. Let’s look at hypothetical numbers. Let’s take a population of 1,000,000 people. Assume for a moment that the distribution is roughly 30% at high risk (e.g. elderly, over 70), 30% at low risk (e.g. young, under 20), and 40% at moderate risk (the ones in between).
Let’s further assume the normal distribution of deaths is 1,000 high risk deaths, 100 moderate risk deaths, and 10 low risk deaths a year. Again, made up numbers purely to show comparison.
Now along comes deathpocalypse, whatever new source of death we want to envision. Let’s say that deathpocalypse attacks in exactly the same distribution of 30%, 40%, 30%. So now we suddenly have 10,000 high risk deaths, 1,000 moderate risk deaths, and 100 low risk deaths. That’s a 10-fold increase in the number of deaths, but the distribution is exactly the same as before.
A person’s statistical chances of dying has gone up markedly, even if their risk is still the same percentage as it was before. The high risk person’s chances have increased from 1,000/1,000,000 (i.e. 0.1%) to 10,000/1,000,000 (i.e. 1%).
YES! 330,000 deaths is MORE SHOCKING than 100,000 deaths far earlier on. 500,000 deaths coming by next summer will be MORE SHOCKING. You know what would be more shocking than that? 1,000,000 deaths by next summer.
Yes, it would be horrendous if we had 500,000 deaths now as opposed to just 330,000. But that does not make those 330,000 deaths less severe.
Um, here.
CDC COVID Data Tracker
If it doesn’t link directly, set “United States”, Views = “deaths”, Metric = “daily trends”. Also select “7-Day moving average”.
Or you can set Metric = “Total and rate”. The slope now is steeper than it was in April.
Very good post.
You know, there has been a lot of conversation about how the virus, for the most part, isn’t killing healthy people, isn’t killing young people. We hear how it’s only affecting people with pre-existing conditions, people that might not have long to live anyway.
But a lot of the businesses that are going under weren’t healthy, either. A lot of them would have gone under shortly, COVID or no COVID. The country is full of businesses that are struggling at the best of times, vulnerable to the vagaries of one bad holiday weekend. If you owned a vibrant healthy successful business with a loyal following, you were probably able to transition to a COVID model and survive - maybe even thrive.
And while a lot of people in confinement might be suffering from increased mental health issues, they probably weren’t the most mentally stable individuals on the block to begin with.
They question that’s been put out there by a lot of people is “Why are we putting our economy at risk in order to save a bunch of people that probably would’ve died soon anyway? But I might turn it around and ask “Why are we risking our health in order to save a bunch of businesses that probably would’ve gone under anyway?” “Why are we risking our physical health for the mental health of people that are already halfway to crazy?”
But these aren’t the right questions, either. The entire debate is based on a false dichotomy, the idea that there’s a binary choice between saving lives and saving the economy.
The virus is a culling event. It’s attacking the vulnerable and taking out those on the margins. People with vulnerable physical health, people with vulnerable finances, struggling businesses, people with pre-existing mental health issues. We needed a response that recognized this dynamic.
Instead, we chose to pit these vulnerable groups against each other, while those of us tucked safely away from the margins took sides and placed our bets and turned it into a political slugfest.
(I came to this realization after seeing a long mournful Facebook post from a friend blaming lockdowns for destroying the “business she dedicated her whole life to building”
But she sold that business in January 2019.
She unloaded it in a questionable last minute deal after another buyer backed out, simply because she couldn’t afford to close it (it was a yoga/fitness studio and she had recently sold lot of expensive annual memberships she lacked the capital to refund).
She had “taken a break” from the business in 2017 and had been traveling for 2 years, using the business as a piggy bank while it was slowly dying from inattention and attrition.
So she unloaded the remnants in January 2019 and the new owner closed it April 1st, 2020, without even making an attempt to transfer to an on-line model.
I’m sure blaming the whole fiasco on COVID has helped my former friend sleep better, but it’s not …you know…true.)
This is not borne out by data.
50% of New York restaurants and bars would not have gone under shortly in a normal year.
- As of today, 17% of restaurants—more than 110,000 establishments—are closed permanently or long-term.
- The vast majority of permanently closed restaurants were well-established businesses, and fixtures in their communities. On average these restaurants had been in business for 16 years, and 16% had been open for at least 30 years.
Yes, you are exactly right. But that’s not the situation we are dealing with. It’s not an ‘apocalyptic’ situation where natural deaths are increased by some integer multiplier. I guess it might be a little while before we have solid data about how many Americans will have died in 2020, but it’s still in the range of ten percent, give or take, above whatever trendline can be extrapolated from prior years. In that case, both distributions are more or less going to hold: deaths of all causes by age group, and age groups by virus deaths.
What I mean, and I know it would be easy to produce, is a graph with dates on the x-axis and deaths to date per day on the y-axis, with the date of the first observed death as day one.
Deaths to date per day? Here’s one for new deaths per day, other axis being days since 10 deaths:
If you meant something else, there’s drop down menus to select.
I meant something a bit different, and I don’t know if there is much to take from it or not. I just downloaded a CSV from your link and made one of my own. Just simply the day of the sequence on the x-axis and the cumulative deaths on that date divided by the day value on the y-axis, with the curve showing how the measure ‘cumulative deaths divided by cumulative days’ has varied over time.
It peaks somewhere around day 75 at 1241 or so deaths per day in the cumulative (meaning 90,000+ deaths to date at that point), and then seems to have a local minimum around day 250 at 950 or so deaths per day in the cumulative to that point, and is now back up over 1100.
Again, I’m not sure what to take away from that, if there’s even anything at all.
Me neither. I have no idea what you were even hoping for it to show.
I think one fair takeaway is that the only reason for panic, as the death total increases while the calendar inexorably moves on, is that the thing isn’t disappearing. In other words, that’s the only sense in which it’s getting worse. That seems to have been the case since the end of May. Not sure that’s the sense you’d get, though, from hearing the talk about it.
Because you’ve now decided this metric shows how bad things are best? Despite no one at all using it before you?
Shows how bad things are best? I’m afraid I don’t follow you.
Being around for a long time is not necessarily an indicator of health. However, neither diabetes nor obesity is an immediately fatal condition, so those with them who die of Covid had their deaths accelerated just like the death of the restaurants. So I think the analogy is an excellent one.
I’d say it’s a pretty good one for a restaurant. You argue that these restaurants that have gone under if COVID hadn’t occurred?
The thing is, a lot of those restaurants will come back. Maybe under a different name. Maybe different owners (but maybe not. Knowing the restaurant business is a huge edge.) But the employees will be rehired. The suppliers will get new orders. Creative destruction is a natural part of a free market, and if demand returns, support will return to meet it. We aren’t going to have a permanent 20% drop in restaurant capacity, unless it’s permanently unsafe to eat out. We may have fewer, larger restaurants and some may have new names, but if the virus is controlled, the industry will rebound.
But the people won’t come back. Killing actual consumers (and producers) is actually reducing productive capacity and market size.
Sure, it will likely fill back in over time (probably a lot more large corporate chains, less small owners, if I had to guess). What I’m saying is that it is silly to say that the majority of restaurants that have gone under were on the verge of failure or about to close anyway. That just isn’t true.
The majority of deaths is people over 70. That’s not analogous to diabetes or a restaurant that can’t handle months of closure.
Only in the same sense that someone who had diabetes is about to go under. I wonder if there is a life expectancy table for restaurants given their age. Age is not a sign of decrepitude, but it might not be a sign of health either. The place can get stale, the owner might be on the verge of retirement etc.
Some one who has made it to age 70 can expect to live 15 more years. At 75 it is 10 more years for men. So the stress of Covid is accelerating the deaths of people who might have expected a lot more years - just like the stress of Covid is accelerating the deaths of restaurants who might have expected to survive a lot longer.
@MandaJo is right - restaurants come back, people don’t, so sacrificing people to keep restaurants open doesn’t seem like a good idea. Especially for those of us near 70.