Fact #1 Today, most experts believe that widespread mask wearing and widespread testing are the best ways to control Covid-19.
Fact #2: February and March were the months when the epidemic in America got out of control, when public policy was most decisive.
Fact #3: During February and March, public health officials actively discouraged testing.
Fact #4: During February and March, public health officials actively discouraged mask wearing.
Alaska was down to only 38 cases in mid-May, before exploding upward:
New Zealand was down to 65 cases, and kept falling:
Consider the following two stories from yesterday’s news. Think about the media sources where these individuals may have gotten their ideas:
For a while, the US was doing better than Europe. Now we have more total deaths despite a far smaller population, a younger population, less dense cities, less public transit, being initially hit less hard, and far more spending on health care. And the gap is getting bigger—a month from now we’ll be doing much worse than Europe.
HT: Matt Yglesias
READER COMMENTS
steve.c
Jul 14 2020 at 3:23pm
AK was down to 38 known cases in mid-May. The actual case count then was unknowably higher, and the test rate has risen significantly since then; 32549 tests administered on 5/14. 149473 today.
Incidentally, even today, its ICU bed occupancy rate is less than 50% of capacity (82 of 169). A death occurs roughly once a week (17 today).
Scott Sumner
Jul 15 2020 at 2:07pm
The problem with that argument is that new cases show the same trend, confirming that things really are getting much worse.
Noah Young
Jul 14 2020 at 4:05pm
The COVID party stories are almost certainly made up (though it’s impossible to disprove a negative. https://www.wired.com/story/the-latest-covid-party-story-gets-a-twist/
The story of the 30 year-old sounds like a bad Lifetime movie plot. Surprised you got sucked in on that one. You are correct to blame the media, but the blame here is just making up stories that fit a certain narrative rather than checking the facts.
The Texas story should set off all of your skeptical alarm bells. Young people not taking taking COVID seriously? (check) Red states getting hit? (check) Instant and permanent consequences for not taking COVID seriously? (check). And to top it all off, there is some death-bed schadenfreude for NYT readers to bask in.
Mark Brophy
Jul 14 2020 at 8:05pm
The Covid party story was very silly. Did the victim think the virus was a hoax or did he think he was young and invincible? The story claims both but it must be one or the other, mutually exclusive.
Thomas Sewell
Jul 15 2020 at 1:02am
Others have noted the same internal contradiction in the Covid party story. It’s looking more and more like an urban legend, or else a just-so story sourced from one Doctor who wants to encourage people to take things seriously. The NYTs has already added a few disclaimer-like paragraphs to their original reporting. For example:
I suppose that if it turns out to be seriously exaggerated and remains unsupported then that just illustrates other individuals should also reconsider their own “media sources where these individuals may have gotten their ideas”.
IVV
Jul 15 2020 at 4:52pm
I don’t know, I can find folks on my Facebook who’ll say things like “Covid is a hoax, and it’s not a threat anyway, there’s only a 1% fatality rate, we’re all going to get it, might as well get it over with.”
It is an illogical statement. But it signals that they’re a good right-wing member who says all the right things about covid. Basically: you must show that you’re not cowed by covid. It doesn’t matter why you’re not scared, but don’t you dare advocate shutdowns or wear masks or do anything different from what you presently do, because if you do, you deserve crucifixion like the rest of the left.
Ray
Jul 14 2020 at 11:52pm
Mask wearing adherence in the US is approaching 90%.
There are case spikes now in Pacific Rim countries, including Japan where mask wearing is part of the culture.
We’re also testing more than anyone else.
Please stop the fear mongering.
Alan Goldhammer
Jul 15 2020 at 8:28am
I did not know reporting the truth falls into the category of fear mongering.
MikeDC
Jul 15 2020 at 11:26am
Reporting fictions about Covid parties is certainly fear-mongering and not reporting the truth
Mark Z
Jul 15 2020 at 4:25pm
90% of what? 90% of people wear masks sometimes? Or whenever outside of the home? Or at least whenever they’re indoors outside of the home? The point is it seems like an ambiguous statistic even taken at face value.
JFA
Jul 16 2020 at 12:06am
“Mask wearing adherence in the US is approaching 90%.”
Hahahahahahaha… only on Halloween bruh.
E. Harding
Jul 15 2020 at 2:57am
China v. India is a remarkable display of how institutions matter a lot more than first mover disadvantage in explaining the spread of a pandemic.
Thomas Hutcheson
Jul 15 2020 at 7:54am
I think the that if you check sources, you will find that what was discouraged was wearing the kind of masks that medical person use for their protection. I do not recall an “active” discouragement of simple masks to reduce the risks of the wearer transmitting the infection to others. The question is, why they did not not (and still do not) forcefully recommend simple masks and explain what they were for.
Ditto, not “testing.” Taking as given the limited capacity for testing, a limitation that CDC was partly responsible for, “experts” recommended only diagnostic tests. That was probably wrong even limited capacity and some of the should have gone to random screening. It is a good question why this was discouraged. But this is not the same as discouraging “testing.” Hasn’t TTI been the recommendation since before Covid 19 even emerged?
Scott Sumner
Jul 15 2020 at 2:12pm
No, it’s much worse than you think. People with unused testing capacity were told not to use it, because the CDC preferred to utilize its own test—which proved to be faulty.
People were discouraged from wearing any sort of mask, and the mask shortage was created by government policies.
TMC
Jul 15 2020 at 9:56am
Alaska’s 7 day moving average of deaths is currently 0. Active cases is a problematic way of measuring. We’ve seen lately that 54% of reported cases just lately were from 2 months ago, and in Florida that testing centers were not reporting negative results, just the positive, making the percentages useless. We need better data is the only conclusion I see here.
Scott Sumner
Jul 15 2020 at 2:13pm
But deaths are going up in many states right now, in some cases quite sharply. The “second wave” is real, albeit smaller than the first wave in terms of fatalities.
In any case, it’s enough to be a setback for the economic recovery.
Adam
Jul 17 2020 at 5:12am
Deaths are a trailing indicator with about a 2 week delay. When you overlay case and death charts it’s clearly visible that the recent spike in cases is just starting to roll into deaths. Remember, it’s only been in the last two weeks that records for new cases started being broken, and records for deaths are just now starting to fall. The really scary surge in cases over the last two weeks is about to become an even scarier surge in deaths.
Cliff
Jul 17 2020 at 9:13am
“54% of reported cases just lately were from 2 months ago”
You are talking here about CDC numbers, but those are not the numbers most of us are paying attention to, which are the contemporaneous state reported numbers as utilized for example at worldometer
Mayank
Jul 15 2020 at 12:10pm
Scott, do you have any info/opinions on what’s happening in Sweden? Despite no mask wearing, continued indoor dining (at least judging from recent photos on instagram), their case AND death daily counts are plummeting (looks like an inverse exponential).
One theory circulating is they achieved herd immunity on the math: 10x true seroprevalence (from CDC tests in US) * 2x true immunity (from Tcell things not measured by antibody tests that I don’t fully understand) * 0.75% reported case penetration * 2x for relatively low tests per capita rate = 30% true immunity (likely much higher in densest areas where spread would be much faster resulting in maybe >70% immunity in Stockholm). Together with voluntary distancing due to summer vacations, puts them r0 < 1.
The nice thing about this hypothesis is that it’s easily falsifiable. If true immunity rates are 20x reported case load (dropping last 2x factor since test rate higher in US), then Florida should have just gotten to the 1.4% necessary to trigger similar immunity in dense cities and from now on, cases per day should follow an inverse exponential.
This would also explain why NYC has not seen a resurgence despite very similar reopening as SF and LA – they achieved dense immunity in May and thus the subsequent decline in reported cases was driven by herd immunity rather than more strict closures or mask compliance, reversing either of those factors now doesn’t reverse immunity.
This would also explain excess deaths returning to normal throughout US. At least, one can hope!
Alan Goldhammer
Jul 15 2020 at 8:11pm
I don’t think this is correct. I have seen no papers talking about an immune population as high as you note.
A lot of people are looking at alternative models to determine what the true herd immunity rate is. I covered this in my newsletter today. James Hamblin has an excellent summary of this in The Atlantic. He provides links to some of the work in this field. There have been a number of modelers who have been looking at the pandemic using chaos theory principles and examining it as a heterogenous event. Herd immunity for SARS-CoV-2 infections might range from 20 to 60% though I have not seen many papers arguing for the lower number. For my own calculations I have been using the higher number. Having a lower number for herd immunity does not imply that geographical regions should just suck it up and let the virus do its think. This approach would lead to infections far above the ‘true’ herd immunity number as chances increase that everyone becomes infected. Alas, the herd immunity concepts are not easily boiled down into sound bites. I think it is good to have experts from diverse fields coming up with new models for the spread of infectious diseases. We will learn something from this effort.
Mark Z
Jul 15 2020 at 10:53pm
The problem with this is that the 70% herd immunity number assumes an R0 of roughly 3 in a naive population, which is what it has been roughly measured as. However, to the extent that much of the population already had de facto immunity, that means the true R0 value is actually higher. So if, say, 30-40% of the population was immune already, then given the rate at which the virus spread, the actual R0 must be much higher than 3 as was originally thought, and the fraction that needs to be immune to achieve herd immunity is thus much higher than 70%.
Scott Sumner
Jul 15 2020 at 2:15pm
Everyone, I’m not buying the “fake news” argument. Not every story is correct, but I’ve personally met people who refuse to wear masks and pooh pooh the Covid-19 problem. Interestingly, they all watch one particular news network.
raja_r
Jul 15 2020 at 6:09pm
The question is not whether there are others who believe Covid is a hoax.
The story about this 30 year old is false. Even the NY TIMES is walking it backby making several (unacknowledged) edits to the original story.
Maybe it is not just one particular television channel who has lax standards.
KevinDC
Jul 16 2020 at 11:35am
Scott –
If someone was to say “It doesn’t matter if the specific news stories I linked to are fake because the phenomenon they’re describing is still real,” how would that cause you to revise your assessment of their reliability in general?
I think you did what we all sometimes do – you saw some data points that seemed to dramatically illustrate a view you held (a view I share, by the way), and you immediately accepted them despite those stories having more holes than Swiss cheese. As intellectual sins go, that’s pretty minor – we’re all inclined to be more accepting of data or anecdotes that seems to fit what we already believe. But whenever any of us fall into that trap I think it’s important to at least acknowledge the mistake, not brush it aside as irrelevant. Primarily, because it’s just good intellectual hygiene. But also, doing otherwise will make your argument totally ineffective against anyone you’re trying to convince. You’ll just give them a a free pass to say “Why should I believe any of the data Sumner is referencing? He’ll accept anything he’s told as long as it lines up with what he already believes – look at those obviously fake news stories he swallowed whole and tried to use to illustrate his case! So why should I think any of the other stuff he’s posting is reliable?”
Or so it seems to me.
Ndemi
Jul 15 2020 at 4:12pm
Governments tensed,got scared and overwhelmed,as a result they didn’t take the best control measures and that’s why the pandemic escalated.
Mm
Jul 16 2020 at 9:05am
Herd immunity vs masks isn’t a binary choice- they can work together-ie a mask wearing population achieves herd immunity at lower levels of recovered infections- herd immunity works by lowering R0 so it is additive w/masks & social distancing
Comments are closed.