CORONAVIRUS: The Start of the Recovery?

The problem with writing about the coronavirus pandemic is that there have been a lot of things happening, and things are changing relatively quickly at this point.  It's hard to keep up.

Government officials are moving to reopen our economy. They claim that we’ve “passed the peak” of this COVID19 pandemic. So now we can start to get back to work and play.

Here’s the problem: We may be trending downward in new cases, but that doesn’t mean people have stopped getting infected altogether. In my county, we are still seeing ten to fifteen new cases every day. Thankfully, the mortality rate has stayed pretty stable at only eleven deaths.

By my calculation, only about 7.8% of the residents in Escambia County have contracted COVID19. That’s awfully low. I’m betting that it will increase. Studies now suggest that 39% of New Yorkers either are or have been infected at some point. But that number doesn't apply smoothly to the whole country.  Some areas are much lower than that. Nationwide, it looks like around 13% of all Americans have been infected. The mortality rate for COVID19 itself (independent of total population) looks to be around 0.15%

Some experts theorize that as many as 50% of Americans (or more) could ultimately contract COVID19. That’s 165,000,000 people getting infected! If that happens, then perhaps 250,000 of them could die. 250,000! We’re only at 60,900 deaths right now!

My point is that we’re hardly out of the woods with this disease. If the lockdowns, social-distancing and “Safer At Home” policies had any effect at all on the number of infections, then as society begins to get back to "normal," that number will go up, perhaps drastically.

Did we “flatten the curve?" Perhaps. Experts disagree as to whether any of the draconian isolation policies that were put into effect did any good at all. But even if they did help in any way, the curve still never would have gotten as high as was initially predicted. In other words, New York Governor Cuomo never would have needed those “30,000” ventilators he was screaming for. The computer models were simply wrong.

As the deaths from COVID19 continue to climb (at whatever rate they do), the True Believers in self-isolation and social-distancing will loudly screech, ”We told you so!” What they do not acknowledge and accept is that those deaths would have likely happened anyway – sooner or later, even if the American public had stayed in quarantine until the end of the year.

CORONAVIRUS: The Return Engagement in the Fall

Let's talk numbers.  And don't worry - I do the math so you don't have to!  

When it comes to the coronavirus, there are two death rates we have to consider. The first is, obviously, the number of deaths among people who become infected with the disease.  The message we keep getting from the media and government/health officials is that if you get the disease you can die.  Well...yeah...you could...but how big of a chance is that?  

The second is the number of deaths as a percentage of the total population (e.g. country, state, county or city). These two numbers are related in a very real way.

But here’s the problem: A very large number of people who contract COVID-19 will never know it because they either have no symptoms whatsoever ("asymptomatic"), or the symptoms were so mild that they assumed it was “just the flu” and didn’t go to the doctor. And without testing everybody in the country for COVID-19 antibodies, we’ll never know just how widespread the disease is. And testing everyone is just not going to happen.

Oh sure, you can test a sample of the population and extrapolate from there, and that’s fine. But the number you come up with may not be representative of every demographic group in every city or state. And that number cannot predict how many people will ultimately come down with the disease. As it turns out, according to three studies that have been performed, the percentage of people who’ve already contracted the coronavirus but were asymptomatic varies widely – like from 25X more to 80X more!  As they say, your mileage may vary...

Take California. Governor Newsom may want to claim that the fairly extreme measures he imposed for his 39,500,000 residents concerning self-isolation and social-distancing have produced numbers far below those of other states.  But have they?   Let's look at that.  To be exact, California has 39,254 confirmed cases of COVID-19, and they’ve had 1,562 deaths.

Two separate studies done in California determined that the "39,254" number might need to be multiplied 35 to 85 times to be accurate. Let’s split the difference and multiply by 50. That would give California an actual infection rate of 1,962,000 people…round it off to 2 million. Okay, the number of deaths doesn’t change. So if we divide the number of deaths by the number of actual COVID-19 cases, we get .00078, or a disease mortality rate of .078% (let's round that off to .08%) - less than one-tenth of one percent. California state’s per capita mortality rate (1,562 / 39.5 million) equals .0039%...say .004%

Now let’s look at Florida. My state has 21,500,000 people. We have 30,522 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 1,046 deaths. Using the same math and multiplier as before, Florida comes up with 1,526,000 actual COVID-19 cases. This gives us a disease mortality rate of .07%, which is…what the…slightly lower than California’s?? Our state’s total per capita death rate works out to be .005% - slightly higher than California’s. I don’t know why that is – statistical anomaly?

Here’s where all these numbers come together. If we calculate the rate of infection of the entire state’s population, we come up with basically 5% for California and 7% for Florida. Pretty low so far, right? (By the way, New York State is showing about 14% of their residents have had COVID-19 so far – but that number is obviously skewed by New York City.)  Remember, we cannot accurately predict how many people in the country will ultimately contract COVID-19.

Government and health officials keep insisting that we can keep that number low. But can they? And more importantly, should they? When the coronavirus resurfaces in the Fall with the start of the regular ol’ flu season, what happens then?

In other words, what will happen in five or six months when we still don’t have a vaccine for COVID-19 and the disease comes back and we haven't developed any sort of "herd immunity?" If less than 10% of the U.S. population has developed antibodies and immunity to the coronavirus, won’t it pose the same threat to us then as it does now? And will we have to go through this isolation and social-distancing bullshit all over again?

CORONAVIRUS: Testing, testing...

So, yet another study (this one done by the University of Southern California) determined that in the Los Angeles, CA area, the number of people who have been infected with COVID-19 is 40 times greater than the number of people who have been tested and confirmed-positive. FORTY TIMES! This is a little lower than the first study I referenced before. 

What does this mean? Well, it really confirms that the coronavirus is much more widespread than previously thought, which means it's also much more contagious. But it also tells us that COVID-19 is not nearly as deadly as people thought.

We cannot be on a permanent national shutdown. Vaccine or no vaccine, we have to get the economy working again or the collateral damage will be incalculable. The murder rate WILL be going up. (And soon, too. At least, here in my house my wife "jokes" that if I stay home any longer she's going to kill me, hah-hah, what a comedienne she is!) 

But reopening the economy means infected and non-infected people are going to be intermingling with each other like the smelly hippie kids at Coachella in any given year. And the virus is GOING to spread like pot-smoke at said music festival.

And there's not much we can do about it - unless we come up with a way of simultaneously testing every living person in the U.S. and immediately quarantining The Infected Ones. Which simply isn't gonna happen. (Oh, and hope that no Undetected Infected Ones come in on any overseas flights.)

You could waltz out of the testing center, virus-free and clear ("Yippee! I'm going out to Sammy's to get drunk and then drive home and give the good news to the wife!"). But you bump into an Infected One in the parking lot - an old friend you haven't seen in years. You talk, reliving old times. It's noisy. You're under the busy approach path of the Pensacola "International" Airport which is like being at the end of the runway of that airport in St. Marten, and the two of you are standing close to hear each other over the roar of non-stop widebody arrivals (he's a Seinfeldian "low-talker"). He sneezes spontaneously and doesn't have a chance to cover it. Ooops! Sorry.  And you're like, "God bless you! Wait a minute...you...you...YOU BASTARD!!" and now you've become assimilated like the Borg did to that famous French Englishman, Starfleet Captain Jean-Luc Picard - boom! - just like that. 

There are people who are loudly claiming that we should have been doing antibody testing from the beginning.  Perhaps they know somehow that the U.S. had this capability; I'm not so sure.  Such testing, they say, would "by extrapolation" give us a better idea of how many people are infected.  Good information, I guess...but fairly useless at this point.  I suppose it could be helpful for the next time 'round with this virus.  

"Experts" tell us that an asymptomatic person could be contagious for up to two weeks.  But they really don't know.  Antibody testing could tell us something about what percentage of the population already has (or has had) the virus.  But it cannot tell us or predict how many Americans will ultimately become infected.  

Right now, here in the U.S., 44,805 people have died from the coronavirus.  The CDC says that we have 823,500 confirmed cases.  Let's multiply the number of confirmed cases by 40.  That would make it 33,000,000 infected people.  Dividing the number of deaths by the number of infected people gives us a disease death rate of .0013 or .13%.  

Now, how many people in the U.S. will contract COVID-19?  Again, that is something that the antibody testing cannot really tell us.  The government must be thinking that only a small number of us will become infected, because they're estimating maybe 60,000 deaths.  To get that number, it would mean 15% of us get infected.  (330,000,000 X 15% = 49,500,000.  That number multiplied by .13% = 64,350.)

But some people believe that between 35% and 70% of the total population may become infected.  So let's split the difference and say 50% of all Americans become infected eventually.  Fifty percent of 330,000,000 is 165,000,000 people.  If 165 million people get coronavirus, and .13% of them die, that number will be 214,500 deaths over the course of the next year or so.

If the government is right, somewhere around 60,000 people in the U.S. will die of COVID-19.  But it could be as many as 214,500!  That's quite a margin of error.

We better hope for a vaccine soon.  Real soon. 

CORONAVIRUS: How Contagious?

I write a lot about this coronavirus, and how deadly it is - or isn't. The media and the government seem to want us to panic and live our lives in fear and paranoia. It is likely the government did not fully understand the virus…how deadly it was and how quickly it would spread. The media (and the people in that industry)…well, they’re despicable scumbags that must highlight the worst in everything.  So we've been fed some misleading information.

In talking with my friends, who are all adults of average intelligence, wisdom and common sense (in other words, smarter than me), we see the published numbers of “confirmed-positive” cases, and we know that the total number of people infected with the virus must be somewhat higher. The question is: How much higher? We each had our theories. Admittedly, neither I nor any of my friends are doctors or statisticians, so we’re making guesses here – but guesses based on what we’re being told by so-called official sources.

There is no doubt that the coronavirus is very contagious.  We have been told all along that up to “80%” of coronavirus victims never even know they have the disease because they have no symptoms. That always seemed like a guess to me.  But okay, 80% of what total?

Looking at it one way, here in Escambia County, Florida we now have 290 “confirmed-positive” cases. Let’s say 300 to make the math easier. If we had 1,500 actual cases (symptomatic and asymptomatic), then the 20% with symptoms would be 300 people. Okay, fine, that works.  1,500 total cases.

But a new study has come out indicating that the number of infected-but-asymptomatic people with coronavirus may be as high as FIFTY TIMES the number of those with symptoms who test positive. This is an astonishing number that strains credulity. To wit: How can that many people be infected with a virus and not even know it?

By that calculation (50X), with 300 confirmed-positive cases in my county, that would mean that 15,000 residents are actually infected. At first, I thought, “No way.” But the more I think about it…maybe it’s true. If that’s the case, 15,000 out of 315,000 is .047 of the population. Put another way, that’s 4.7% - which is quite high. Could that number be accurate?

The numbers are, after all, not static; they continue to change on a daily basis. We continue to see incremental growth in the number of confirmed cases, and it must be said that the county now has six deaths attributable to COVID-19. If we divide 6 by 15,000 people, we get .04%.

We know that the deaths lag behind the number of infections by a couple of weeks, perhaps by as much as a month. Nevertheless, the percentage of deaths to infected people seems to be quite low. Even if we double the number of deaths, 12 divided by 15,000 is only 0.08% - less than a tenth of one percent. Let's keep that "0.08%" number in mind.

So now the questions become: 1) Is it possible that right now, nearly 5% of the residents of our county have the virus? And, 2) How many people will ultimately end up becoming infected?

The answer to Question #1 is, “It seems possible.” As for Question #2, estimates and predictions are all over the map. Some “experts” postulate that as many as 40% of the U.S. population may eventually become infected. We currently have 330,000,000 people in this country, and 40% of them would be 132,000,000. And if .08% die from the the disease, that’s 105,600 people. No wonder the government wanted to “flatten the curve”!

Let’s hope that the number of people infected with COVID-19 is less than 40%.  During the Swine Flu pandemic back in 2009, the CDC estimated that 62,000,000 people got infected.  That was about 20% of the population of the U.S. back then.

We should hope and pray that only 20% of the American people get infected this time.  If that’s the case, 20% of 330,000,000 is 66,000,000 people.  Then .08% of 66,000,000 equals 53,000 people. Considering that we’ve already had over 37,000 people die from coronavirus in the U.S., 53,000 deaths seems likely.

What we're seeing is the COVID-19 was and is not the cataclysmic, end-of-the-world disease that many predicted.  Can it be fatal?  For sure.  Is there a vaccine?  Not at the moment.  But I think The Great Shutdown was probably unnecessary, and we should get back on with our lives.

Here is the CNN report on the study:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/17/health/santa-clara-coronavirus-infections-study/index.html

CORONAVIRUS: What Numbers Do We Use?

When it comes to the coronavirus, the media throws all sorts of numbers at us. But all they do is confuse me. They compare the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the U.S. with those of other countries…most of which have far, far fewer people than the U.S. has. They publish the daily COVID-19 death totals, but those numbers – as horrible as they may be - are meaningless without context.

This whole coronavirus thing is pretty upsetting, mainly because we were told that COVID-19 is very contagious and very deadly. Nobody I know wants to die at this moment. And so we all want to get a handle on how serious this disease is. 

The two Big Questions are:
1) Just what is the actual coronavirus death rate; and
2) How many Americans can we expect will get COVID-19?

Unfortunately, neither of those questions is answerable in the absolute right now. And so that makes us want to stay holed-up in our self-isolation until this thing blows over – if it ever does.

As time goes on, we are learning that COVID-19 actually is fairly contagious among family members and people who live or work in the same indoor environment (but not so much among people with casual contact outdoors). If you get it, there’s a pretty good chance your office- or housemates (or cell mates if you're in prison) are going to get it unless you all wear full biohazard suits all the time. However, if you get it, chances are you won’t even know it. But even if you do get sick, it is far less-deadly than we were told.

You can run numbers and do percentages and hypotheticals until your brain hurts. For me, that doesn’t take long. But none of the numbers really mean anything. The only numbers that are valuable to me are the ones published here where I live. First, the infection rate. While it keeps going up, it is doing so in small steps – not exponentially as everyone feared. That’s good news. Secondly, we’ve only had four people die, a number which has not changed in a couple of weeks. That’s very good news!

Indulge me a little math, okay? Today we have 280 confirmed-positive cases here in Escambia County. If we go by general assumptions that 80% of people who have COVID-19 show no symptoms, then we can deduce that a total of around 1,500 people here have the disease right now. But only *4* of them have died! That means the actual death rate is (4 / 1,500) = .0026, or .26%.

Finally, because I can’t resist, let’s assume that 5% of our county population of 315,000 ultimately gets the virus. That would mean 15,750 people. If the fatality rate of .26% holds, we’ll see 41 deaths.

Now, the COVID-19 infection rate may be higher than 5%. Maybe it’ll be 10%. That would give us 31,500 people who get it, and 82 deaths.

Your mileage may vary, as they used to say.

The media focuses on the worst-case scenarios. They cloud the issue with all sorts of other problems and complications. They only interview the health care professionals who are stressed-out and, well, bitchy enough to go on camera and complain. The media wants us to think that it’ll be the end of the world if we so much as open our front doors and peek outside. However, the hard numbers don’t seem to be all that bad. The “experts” have been predicting a big spike in confirmed-positive cases and COVID-19 deaths, but we’re just not seeing either of those things happening.

All the big, scary numbers just aren't adding up.

Getting Back to "Normal"

I'm going to go out on a limb here - and actually it's not much of a limb. I predict that everything will be opened back up by the end of April. We're talking restaurants, bars, barbershops (dear God, PLEASE)...beaches, bowling alleys, strip clubs...uhhh, oh yeah, and churches...will all be reopened. Here's why:

EITHER... 

Scenario #1: The COVID-19 disease is MUCH more contagious than previously thought and has infected far more asymptomatic people than we are seeing in the "confirmed-positive" case numbers. If this is true, then the coronavirus is orders of magnitude less deadly than they warned us about.

OR...

Scenario #2: The number of "infected-but-asymptomatic" people is only slightly higher than the "confirmed-positive" case numbers. If this is true, then COVID-19 is not that contagious at all, and is far less deadly than they warned us about.

Either way, this was not a modern day Black Plague. And I think that The People (you know, the powers-that-be's) are seeing this as well. Furthermore, I believe they know that if we don't get people out and working and mingling again (and yes, perhaps getting sick), we'll never develop the immunities and antibodies to fight this disease when it comes back in the fall. 

Oh, and it WILL come back in the fall! And if we don't have a vaccine by then, what are we gonna do, go through this nationwide shut-down drill all over again? Hah. Not likely. What was that song by The Who?*

And so I think this will all be "over" soon. I put that word in quotes because it's not like someone will throw a big switch in Washington (or wherever) and we'll magically go back to The Way It Was In Ye Olden Days Before Coronavirus. No, there will be a new normal, and we don't know what that looks like yet. But as long as Sammy's "Gentlemen's" Club here in Pensacola is back open, I'm good. I've got women named after expensive automobiles to support!

Answer: It was "Won't Get Fooled Again" from their 1971 album, "Who's Next." (No, they did not use a question mark, those punctuation-eschewing bastards. Although, come to think of it, they also could have used an exclamation point.)

Coronavirus: Have We Reached The Peak?

Like you (probably), I wondered how this coronavirus could spread throughout the country so thoroughly and so quickly. And never mind the U.S., this thing spread around the globe like the proverbial wildfire!

The Chinese only admitted to the world that they had a problem in December of 2019. Believing anything the Chinese tell us would be horribly naïve. We can safely assume that they were aware of this novel coronavirus "at some time" before December.

My curious, skeptical mind makes me think that this coronavirus was probably in the U.S. waaaaaay before "patient zero" showed up in Washington State. I won't venture to say how long ago, but I'd bet the virus has been here for "a while."  I believe that quite a number of people have gotten COVID-19, mistaken it for the flu, and gotten over it already.

WHY THIS IS IMPORANT

When the government publishes a timeline of COVID-19 penetration into our society, they always show us a bell curve graph. The big question is: where does that timeline begin?

Linked HERE in a very interesting article published by a woman who theorizes that the U.S. may already be as much as sixty days earlier in the spread of the disease...that we're already at the "peak" of said bell curve, contrary to what we're being told by the authorities. And maybe we're even past the peak.  If she's right, then some of this pandemic panic has been meaningless and unnecessary. Intuitively, I've agreed with she's saying, but I haven't been able to put it into words like she can.

Here in my Florida county, we've been practicing mandatory social-distancing for well over two weeks.  My kids think I don't love them anymore.  Instead of tucking them in bed and kissing them goodnight (which I always considered to be coddling), now I merely wave at them on the upstairs landing as I sit in my recliner in the living room, drinking my beer, binge-watching "Tiger King" on Netflix and composing nasty emails to their mom (my ex-) in my head.

If what the authorities say is true - that you cannot get COVID-19 simply by breathing the same air as a person who is infected, then we should not be seeing a big spike in new cases.  If Walmart employees start showing up disproportionately in the local numbers, then I'll worry.

Out of 315,000 residents of Escambia County, 136 have tested positive for coronavirus.  That is .043% - less than half of a tenth of one percent of the population.  In other words, a tiny number.  In terms of confirmed cases, we're seeing an increase of about ten people per day.  Nine people are in the hospital, and only one person has died.  Epidemic, you say?

So yeah, the disease is still being transmitted, just not at the huge, exponential rate that "experts" were predicting.  Sooner or later we're all going to have to get back to work - restaurants and bars and our beach, etc. will have to re-open.  We can't stay on a statewide lockdown forever.  And so the virus will continue to spread until we come up with an effective vaccine.  If we're already at or just past the peak, that would be a very, very good thing.  

Coronavirus: How Deadly?

On Monday, in an effort to inject some sense of normalcy to this insane world...and to give at least a tiny bit of support to the businesses that are still open and haven't folded yet...my friend, Terry and I drove out to Pensacola Beach for lunch. 

We ate at the café NOLA, which serves pretty damn good Cajun food. I had the Nola Burger, which is basically a fully-dressed cheeseburger topped with their crawfish and andouille dip.  Oh Lord, was it messy!  To say it was fantastic would just not be doing it justice.  Seriously, when the airlines start flying again, you must book a flight and come down here and go out to the beach and eat at NOLA.  I'll drive...and I'll even buy!

Anyway, the beach was a ghost town. Shops and restaurants are open, but they're dying.  There was absolutely no reason that Terry and I could not have eaten at any of the outdoor tables at NOLA. Swab 'em down with a sanitary wipe, and enjoy your food, boys! Nobody could ever convince me that it would be a huge risk. But nooooooo, the tables had signs saying that you could not eat there.  So what did we do?  Well, we didn't eat there, but we waited at said outside tables while our food was prepared.  And who stood leaning on these very same tables before us?  Who knows.  If they have COVID-19, we now probably have COVID-19.  Them's the chances you takes.

So Terry and eventually grabbed our grub-to-go and repaired to the boardwalk where we found some benches that looked out on the bay where we could eat our food and drink our ice tea (sweet tea, of course because, the south!).  We felt a little guilty, like we were being major threats to public safety.  "We're scofflaws," we laughed.  The government has us scared to be within six feet of one another, whether you've got a hacking cough and are sneezing or not.  Be afraid...be very afraid!

Let's look at some hard numbers.  As of today, Wednesday April 1st, the Pensacola and surrounding area (Escambia County, Florida) had 94 confirmed cases of COVID-19.  For perspective, that's 94 out of 315,000 people.  If we divide 94 by 315,000, we get .00029 (or .029%).  That's a really tiny number.

For clarity, 1/10th (10% or .1) of our local population would be 31,500 people.  1/100th (1% or .01) would be 3,150.  1/1000th (.001) would be 315 people.  As I said, with only 94 people ill, we're talking very small numbers....right now.

And so far, nobody here in Escambia County has died.  That said, according to some sources, if you're going to die from COVID-19, it generally happens within 14 to 19 days of infection.  So the death-rate for the disease will lag behind the infection rate, but it shouldn't lag too far behind - a couple of weeks or so.  

Fortunately, the mortality rate for COVID-19 is remarkably low - at least here in the U.S.  But absolute rates are impossible to derive because we don't really know how many people have the disease, because you only get tested of you exhibit symptoms.  So estimates are all over the place as to how many people in the country will become infected with COVID-19 and not know it.  And without testing everyone in the country, we cannot know the total number of people infected.  As my friend Matt astutely says, "We don't know what we don't know.  And it's true. 

Just because Escambia County, Florida has 94 people who've tested positive for the virus doesn't mean they'll all need to go into the hospital.  You might take the number of people who have tested positive for COVID-19, and multiply that by five times to estimate how many people are asymptomatic and never get tested.  In our case here in Pensacola, that would mean around 450 people are infected - that's .14% of the people, still a very small number. 

But let's be pessimistic!  For argument's sake, let's say that one-quarter (25%) of all the 315,000 people in my county eventually contract coronavirus.  If that happens, then we'll be looking at 78,750 cases (315,000 X .25).  As I said, what we do not know is how many of them will show no symptoms at all.  

If the statistics hold, 80% of those people do get infected and do get tested will recover on their own.  So if we have 94 confirmed cases here in my county, 75 of them will not need hospitalization.  That leaves perhaps 19 people who will!  Not very big numbers.

You can drive yourself crazy when you start to crunch numbers.  Statistics are funny things; they don't come with guarantees.  When it comes to the percentage of people infected, or the percentage of people needing hospitalization, or the percentage who might fall critically ill, or any percentages at all for that matter, the actual numbers will vary depending on the demographics and population density of the particular area.

My friend Matt adds: "How many people die *with* coronavirus versus those who die *of* the coronavirus?"  In other words, how many people would have died anyway this week?  Right now, every person who dies with coronavirus is shown in the statistics as dying of the disease.  And maybe that's not quite accurate.

I get it that the risk of death from COVID-19 is small.  But I also get that we don't want our hospitals (and ICU's) overrun with COVID-19 patients.  Thus, all this "flattening the curve" they keep talking about.  Without a vaccine, we really are playing with fire.  I'm one of those, "I never get sick!" guys - because I don't.  But guess what...when they do come out with a vaccine, I'll be one of the first in line to get stuck.