The COVID-19 visitation is said to be a 100-year event. So is the economic contraction triggered by the lockdowns imposed by state and local governments, mostly in blue states.
During the first phase of the Great Depression, 1929-1933, the U.S. economy shrank by one-third. A stubborn adherence to wrong-headed policies brought down an economy staffed by of some of the world’s hardest working, most productive people, supplied with plentiful capital and boundless natural resources. The policy mix — punitive tariffs, high taxes, jawboning high and inflexible wages, and a Federal Reserve grimly determined to deflate the currency and allow the banking system to go to ruin – caused an unemployment rate of 25% and a one-third drop in GDP.
It took four years to produce that outcome. Those people were slackers. The high-powered geniuses of 2020 managed to shrink the US economy in one calendar quarter at a rate that, had it been allowed to continue, would have matched in one year the sorrowful record of the first four years of the Great Depression. Fortunately, saner heads began to reassert control, slowly and quietly, as the second quarter of 2020 ended.
The battle between shutting and opening has not yet been decided.
Have the benefits from this exercise in mismanagement exceeded the costs? The dramatic percentage decline in gross domestic product does not measure the depth of the pain that the shutdown has imposed on those least able to deal with it.
Think of the anxiety suffered by a family that was fully employed in February and found itself suddenly out of work, unable to pay rent, and uncertain how to afford food, medical care, or auto repairs. Consider the stress piled onto small business owners who had to shut down their restaurants, construction projects, and shops. How many of them have had to abandon their dreams of independence?
Add to that the stress of parents denied the opportunity to work, who became full-time educators. Consider the toll on patients with chronic conditions – cancer, heart disease, arthritis, to name three – who found hospitals and clinics closed except for emergencies. Even if their clinic was open, the fear of infection from a fatal illness persuaded patients to stay away.
Economic hardship and physical isolation carry in their wake medical and psychological damage that will leave lasting scars. The losses have not been distributed fairly, either. Hourly workers in the service, travel, and hospitality industries have been much harder hit than, say, lawyers, government employees, and investment professionals.
What gain was achieved through the sacrifice extracted from day-to-day working people and small business owners? The information needed to make that assessment is hard to come by. Intentionally so, I fear.
Alex Berenson is a true resource for the conscientious citizen trying to understand this situation. He has published two pamphlet sized chapters to what will become a longer book titled “Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns”.
Berenson worked at one time as a reporter for the New York Times. He examines data dispassionately. And he shows his work. Every statement he makes is accompanied by a link to the official report or scientific study that backs him up.
Yet, when he tried to sell his book on Amazon, they refused to carry it. They would not offer anything on their site that contradicted the received wisdom of those advocates of lockdown, the CDC and the WHO[1]. Berenson got his story in front of Elon Musk, who was able to shame Amazon publicly. The first two parts are available on Amazon because of that intervention. I highly recommend them. Berenson is the chief source, but not the only one, that has shaped my thinking on this subject.
The distortions and half-truths on COVID emanating from official sources are breathtaking. To start, consider the term “case”. I notice that cases “surge” or they “soar” or they “spike”. I can count on one finger the number of times that I have heard a news report say that cases have merely “increased”.
But what is a case? The use of the word has been needlessly provocative. The common meaning of the term covers individuals who display symptoms of disease. The CDC definition counts anyone with a positive lab test as a “confirmed case” without regard to the person’s symptoms. In fact, individuals with COVID symptoms are only “probable cases” until their status is confirmed by a test.
https://wwwn.cdc.gov/nndss/conditions/coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19/case-definition/2020/
The high number of “cases” in the U.S. is not necessarily evidence of an outbreak of disease. It may reflect a high rate of testing, nothing more. Further, the CDC has also told us that many of those who test positive have such low viral loads that they are not in danger of suffering symptoms and are not a risk to spread the disease. Somewhere between one-third and one-half of infected individuals will show no symptoms. That means that the disease is much less fatal than advertised.
We know that many people counted as fatalities died with the virus in their bodies but did not die from the disease. The CDC has acknowledged that hospitals may have a financial incentive to code a death as related to COVID, whether or not the unfortunate patient died of the disease. It will take years of research to unravel the mess, assuming that impartial researchers can be found who are willing to take on the task.
The website www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries provides a daily update on COVID data by country. It shows that the United States has conducted more than 117,000,000 COVID tests and that we have had 7.9 million “cases”. Incidentally, we can’t use that information to calculate an infection rate because many people received multiple tests. Of the 7.9 million “cases”, almost 220,000 have resulted in death. That doesn’t mean they died of COVID. It means they tested positive for COVID and later died – of something.
More than 5 million are shown as “recovered”. That leaves some 2.6 million people whose “cases” are awaiting an outcome.
What this website does not tell us, and it is one of the most informative I have found, is how many of the 2.6 million “cases awaiting an outcome” are symptomatic. The only hint is in a column labeled “Serious, Critical” which shows 14,780 such cases in the U.S. These are people currently in ICUs “if and when this figure is reported”.
A little legwork leads me to the conclusion that fewer than 75,000 of the 2,600,000 “cases awaiting an outcome” require aggressive intervention. The detailed daily report from Illinois on their hospital bed and ICU bed usage for COVID patients indicates that total ICU usage in that state for COVID is around 400 beds (a little less in fact) and the total of hospitalizations for COVID is around 2200 beds (including ICU). (For context, Illinois has more than 30,000 hospital beds and nearly 4,000 ICU beds. The Illinois system is not being overwhelmed by COVID cases.) Use that same ratio on the nationwide numbers and we find that around 67,000 people are in hospitals for COVID.
https://www.dph.illinois.gov/covid19/hospitalization-utilization
Everyone else included in the 2,600,000 “cases awaiting an outcome”, more than 2,500,000 individuals, is well enough to stay out of a hospital. That does not seem like an uncontrollable outbreak.
The question, again, is whether this is a problem so severe that it requires us to shut down the world’s most potent economy in order to address it. If we stop reacting and start reflecting, a clear answer starts to emerge.
Governments may not be good at preventing the spread of the disease, but they are masters at preventing the spread of information. Even so, we can conclude that after nearly ten months during which the virus has roamed the land, less than 2% of the population, and possibly as little as 1% of the population, have had symptoms and well less than one-fifteenth of that number have died from the disease, or from something else after testing positive.
The great majority of those who have died are over the age of 75, many of them in nursing homes. How many of those people were healthy and vigorous? Sorry to be grim, but how many of the over-75s who died were going to die soon of something else? Old age is a fatal condition.
Was it worth taking a fully functioning economy to the brink of ruin to deal with a threat that has proven to be much less serious, dramatically less serious, than was at first thought?
Who decided that lockdowns were a good idea? Berenson points out that public health agencies around the world, including the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control, published guidance over recent years strongly recommending against locking an economy down in the face of an epidemic. The agencies divide epidemics and pandemics into five categories of severity, category 1 being the least concerning. The recommendation is against locking the economy down except for category 5 events.
In the United States, the novel coronavirus outbreak is likely a category 2 event, but may in the end prove to have been a category 1 event. A category 2 event produces between 90,000 and 450,000 deaths in the U.S. population of 325,000,000 individuals. Right now, 220,000 deaths have been attributed to the disease, but that count may be high because of loose standards for attributing cause of death.
Why did CDC depart from its prior guidance? A certain British researcher named Neil Ferguson (not be confused with the estimable Niall Ferguson), a man with a very spotty forecasting record, predicted that the virus would cause 500,000 deaths in the UK and two million deaths in the United States if no action were taken.
How did he come to that conclusion? Two key statistics are the “Case Fatality Rate” and the “Infection Fatality Rate”. Divide the number of deaths caused by the virus by the number of people with symptoms to get the CFR, and by the number of people infected (with or without symptoms) to get the IFR. (These definitions use “case” in its original sense to cover individuals with symptoms.) It appears that Ferguson’s team relied on a study (among others) that looked at coronavirus deaths in the Wuhan area reported by Chinese sources to get the numerator of their equations. To get the IFR denominator, the study on which they relied tested people returning to the UK from Wuhan. They tested a few hundred people returning to the UK from China from a handful of flights arriving within a few days of each other. From that information, they extrapolated to calculate the denominator, the number of infections.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033357v1
When Ferguson put the two together, he came to the startling conclusion that the virus was going to cause untold suffering, up to 500,000 deaths in the UK and 2,000,000 in the U.S. In the U.S., the University of Washington was equally apocalyptic.
On the basis of these projections, many prominent public health professionals lost their nerve and abandoned their previous recommendations. A policy that was the result of careful evaluation by teams of professionals – the very model of progressive governance by experts – was thrown out in an afternoon on the basis of some back-of-the-envelope calculations by an analyst with a poor forecasting record.
Ferguson’s numbers are flexible. His original estimate of 500,000 deaths in the UK would drop to 20,000 if the UK government shut the economy down for a year. Shutdown for him means: (1) quarantining anyone who is symptomatic; (2) keeping everyone else isolated in their homes; (3) shutting down schools; (4) maintaining social distancing for people who venture out of their houses. According to Ferguson, if you do that for a year, all may yet be well.
He warned that if his advice were ignored, hospitals and ICUs would be overwhelmed by a wave of patients. Officials imagined lines of feverish patients, many of them voters, unable to breathe on their own, requiring round the clock intensive care. If the Ferguson numbers were correct – and a chorus soon claimed that he had underestimated the coming disaster –the U.S. medical system was about to be overwhelmed.
The immediate reaction of some U.S. state governments was to use executive emergency powers to shut down economic activity to “flatten the curve”. The idea as originally stated was that while we can’t control the number of people who will get the disease and require treatment in hospitals and ICUs, we can spread out the demand over time to avoid crashing the ability of hospitals to meet the crisis. A brief lockdown, fifteen days or so, would flatten the curve and avoid hospitals being overwhelmed.
The initial short-term lockdown to flatten the curve was extended. Then, somehow, the goal of the lockdowns became something different. Now, we are “fighting” to prevent the spread of the virus, not to slow it down.
But events have shown that we can’t stop the spread of the virus. Nor does the spread of the virus mean that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are abroad in the land. The vast majority of people who have symptoms have a few bad days and then recover. The recovery rate for the most vulnerable – those over 75 – is about 95%. It’s almost 100% for the young. It’s roughly 99% for everyone else.
If you graph the number of deaths from an epidemic against time, you get an asymmetrical bell curve. The left-hand side of the curve, tracing the early deaths, is nearly vertical as the virus scours the population to seek out the aged, the infirm, the ill. After the rate of death peaks, the number of deaths in each period of time starts to fall. Now the people being infected are younger, healthier, better able to deal with the illness. It is still unpleasant but it is less and less fatal. It helps that viruses are known to evolve to become less fatal. If you are a virus trying to survive and replicate, killing your host is a losing strategy.
As Alex Berenson’s two pamphlets demonstrate, none of this is new information. Epidemiologists have studied many disease outbreaks over long periods of time and have worked out a set of responses that can control the worst aspects of an outbreak without doing damage to the economies that provide life and sustenance to populations as they brace themselves against the onslaught of a novel disease.
No government before now has ever tried to lock down its economy in the face of an attack by a novel disease. There was a massive flu epidemic in 1918-1920. There was another less dramatic outbreak in the 1950s. We had swine flu in the 1970s, avian flu in the 1990s, SARS, and H1N1 in more recent decades. These were widespread viral epidemics that did a lot of damage. Yet no one ever suggested shutting down a thriving economy in order to flatten a curve, much less stop the spread of a life form that has worked out over the course of countless millennia how to spread, reproduce, and increase its numbers.
There is plenty of middle ground between taking no action and watching people die and shutting an economy to fight the spread of the disease. Many experienced medical professionals favor letting healthy people go about their business while encouraging the vulnerable to isolate when possible and to practice social distancing.
So why, in the year 2020 did so many western governments and particularly those in English-speaking countries, entrusted as they are with securing the liberty and security of their people, embark on a policy of suppressing freedom of movement and freedom of association to fight a disease?
I’ll share my speculations on that subject in another post. Check back, please. Sorry for any inconvenience.
[1] Just before posting this note, I saw a report that the head of WHO now recommends ending lockdowns. WHO has proven to be susceptible to political pressure. We’ll see if they stand by this recently announced change of heart.
The Passing Scene 