Check Your Instruments

h/t WRSA

 

Pull out your calculators, kids.

For the last three days, the J-H ArcGIS website has showed "Number Tested" in the upper right. Spiffy. So what?
Well, e.g., in the last 24 hours, another 150K people got tested.
Only 25,000 additional cases were confirmed.
In the last 48 hours, those numbers are 300K, and 50,000 (rough napkin math).

People can play games with numbers, based on open (or unstated) assumptions.
But as we approach a test sample of not quite 1% of America, there are some statistically valid conclusions.

First off, only about 1 person in 6 tested, has Kung Flu.
Most were tested because they showed symptoms, not  including hypochondria. So it does not follow that 1 in 6 of all Americans have this. (Pay attention to that if math kicked your ass in school.)
Second, if we tested 327M more Americans, we probably wouldn't find enough additional cases to worry about, nor enough to drastically alter the results. More testing isn't going to wildly skew the results, at this point, given the size of the sample. I'm spitballing this never got to or gets to more than 1M people, nationwide, based on the data.

If, at this point, with 42 states at least on moderate lockdowns, we have nearly 24,000 deaths, and we should taper down to a final death tally of around 50K or less dead.
If we don't try to get out of this stupidly, before we're ready.
(And full disclosure, I'm hoping NYFS getting better doesn't just mean we're in for 49 more separate peaks in every other state, before we get out of this.)
(50,000 dead? That's the front half of the graph which we already have, plus the yet-to-be-added back half of the graph, at the current apparent peak. Notice at no point do my hands leave my body, and there are no rabbits up my sleeves.)
Which amounts to a bad flu year, except we'll hit that marker in 8-12 weeks, not months.
Whoops.

That's with probably less that 1M Americans infected.
With 84% of America locked down as it is, and 329M other Americans not infected.

So, if you want another 50K dead per million Americans infected, lift the lockdowns unilaterally, ASAP. We can do the last 2 months another 329 times, if you liked it so much the first time.

That's a CFR around 5%, so you'll only kill off up to 16.45M more Americans, if you manage to infect all of us. Pfft. Stalin killed 20M, and Mao 80M. Thus 16M or so more would be nothing - if emulating brutally repressive communist dictatorships as your benchmark for how to treat your fellow citizens is what you had in mind. Gov. Knucklehead, for any of 50 values of that, telling you to keep your happy @$$ at home and stay indoors for a few weeks pales to insignificance there, for the dim bulbs on the Christmas tree.

That's worst case, and a CFR of 5% is well within historical norms for viruses in the coronavirus family tree, and requires no great leap of logic.

You want best case, reality be damned? Okay.

Pollyanna Roseyglasses would assume that everyone's already exposed, and only 1/3rd of 1% of America having contracted it, and they'd paint the actual CFR as being 0.00015%, or 1/100th as serious as the annual flu. Which is utter bullshit, because we don't need extra freezers for the bodies in the first month of flu season every year, nor swamp the hospitals in NYFC as if there was a Tet Offensive being fought in Flatbush with machineguns and napalm. NTTAWWT. But that's the rosiest assumption set, based on happygas and a dearth of any actual evidence.

But there are still the "This not happening!" crowd out there, after 2000 dead/day days in this outbreak, and they would not only go there, they've never left there.

They're also sociopathic idiots.
(If shellfire landed inside your perimeter there, it's fixable: pull your head out of your ass, and unf**k yourself.)

So the question remains when and how to get us out of this mess, and ideally, without knocking off a few million more of your friends and neighbors.

1) It isn't by yelling "Ollie-Ollie-oxenfree!!!" and returning to the status quo ante.
I don't care where you imagine the economy is, it isn't anyplace that would justify knocking off several millions of your fellow citizens, just because you were slow to stock up on Charmin Extra Soft, nor even because your pizza parlor or dog washing business is about to take a major financial sh*t. Sorry, but it just isn't going to happen. Shit happens. FIDO: (F*** It, Drive On.) And yes, this is one place where government should cushion the blow for those most put out, to help get them back in the game.

2) It might be (and damned well should be) by testing everyone, to see who had it and is over it, and who hasn't got it, and letting them all back on the loose, as fast as we can test them. One rapid test machine could clear 3000 people/day, remember. It should begin with everyone doing "essential" work, since they're already the ones still on the loose, even now, in most stay-at-home/lockdown states. Clear them all first, everywhere.

3) It should also include keeping the most vulnerable in lockdown until last, because screw-ups, flare-ups, and false negatives will affect them the most harshly. But doing that is not a substitute for doing #2, thoroughly and comprehensively, no matter how long that takes. Unless your last name is Heydrich or Himmler.

4) It's absolutely going to mean quarantining the actual infected until they're no longer contagious, and then another month beyond that, no matter what, just because. Short-stroking that will merely slow-roll the worst case scenario, above, and make this a monthly exercise for months or years.

5) In the meantime, by all means, research the possibility of CQ/HCQ and AZ for peer-reviewed and validated efficacy. And anything else medically reasonable. Right now, it's anecdotal, and the plural of anecdotal is never "data". If it gets to palliative, we're onto something great, and we can consider short-cuts to #2, instead of being tied to the bull until it gets tired of bucking us.

6) And yes, sure, keep working on a vaccine. But that could take from 1 to ∞ years, and we can't keep America on "pause" that long. If you get one, and it works, happy happy joy joy! But it's way over the horizon, and a sideshow of the main effort, until you get one that works.

And that means everyone else should STFU and wait your turn.
For TPTB, it means get those gorram rapid tests and PCR antibody tests cranked out, ASAFP, in the tens of millions.

And for all the Jackie Jackboots inclined to let the temporary powers of a public health national emergency go to their heads, it should also mean federal prosecutions, and head-of-the-line privileges for all federal cases filed seeking injunctive relief. And just to put skin in the game, any state or local authorities who lose such cases should be mandatorily placed at the back of the clearance line, including their spouses and families, including specifically those "just following orders".
Going all jackbooted thug and petty tyrant should be a lot less fun if it means you're staying home last, until everyone else in your county is tested and cleared to return to work, and such tyrannical stupidity should leave a mark.

China, deservedly, is in for a rough decade or two in response to their culpability in this outbreak, even accepting it was accidental and negligent, rather than deliberate and malicious.

We've also seen the American character, and had pounded home that the most trivial issues are about what pronouns we use, which bathrooms you can visit, who's butthurt about either one, or the utter triviality and inconsequence of sports participants and vacuous celebrities. IDGAF what they're doing now, especially if they aren't backing it up with a substantial amount of their bank accounts, because 75% of their preening now is just to find the spotlight and try to return to a societal and cultural relevance which they've deservedly seen tank since February. What matters in this country are farmers, truck drivers, store clerks, and emergency responders, because they've stepped up, and they matter. So do the working people taking it in the pants right now, staying home like it or not, and hoping they'll have jobs to go back to come the day, while their bank accounts dwindle. But Suzy McYappypants, Brad Hairdo, and Twinkletoes Johnson are at best a pleasant diversion, but only in good times. We need to remember those lessons for a long, long time.

Fail to do and learn that, and this is just the opening disaster in a long-running Sh*t Riot of them.

Do that, and we'll all get through this with a minimum of muss and fuss, and come out the other side ready to roar back to where we were beforehand, and after making people real believers in the necessity of building and buying American, building the gorram Wall, getting a handle on who we let into this republic, and who may stay and work.

Then the 50K (or less, please God) people eventually killed by this damned Kung Flu won't have died for nothing. And next time (and there will be one) we won't be found with our pants around our ankles again.












{And for those can't let go of their futile quest to minimize this calamity, jerk those numbers around to your heart's content. Let's say 2M people have been infected, halving the CFR to 2.5% So that means it can still kill another 8M people. Halve it again, and make it 4M. Or 2M. Bear well in mind we're only at 26K now, and likely, with any luck at all, to stop at under or around 50K. Thus any way you play with this (that doesn't involve either frothing sociopathy, or smoking crack and dropping acid), the pig you're trying to put lipstick on, if you aren't for testing people out of the unknown-risk population, and back into circulation, is just a clever way of saying "I think we should kill a lot more people this year, because reasons". What kind of person do I think the people who make that argument are? Well, as an apocryphal wag noted in respect to a similar discussion, "We've already settled that question. What we're haggling over now is the price."}