Conservatives tend to be skeptical about the doom-and-gloom scenarios that are being presented as absolute certainties unless the country as a whole is essentially shut down for months. Many have called us “deniers” or accused us of valuing money over human life. But I believe that this skepticism is both eminently reasonable and will prove right in the long run.
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Is it just me, asks a politically moderate friend, or is it mostly conservatives who are skeptical about the dangers involved in and the necessary precautions needed to contain the danger of the Wuhan corona virus? Why is that?
As one of the conservative friends he is probably thinking of, I’d like to answer him. I think he is right. Though there are some conservatives who do think that we are faced with an unparalleled medical crisis, and some liberals who are not, it is indeed more likely that conservatives are skeptical about the doom-and-gloom scenarios that are being presented as absolute certainties unless the country as a whole is essentially shut down for months. Many have expressed dismay about this skepticism, calling us “deniers” or simply accusing us of valuing money or our own comfort over human life. But this skepticism comes from a number of different reasons. While I think this skepticism, like any skepticism, can be taken too far absent other intellectual virtues, I think it is both eminently reasonable in the present case and will prove right in the long run.
Doubts about Apocalypses
It may seem odd to say that conservatives harbor skepticism about apocalyptic scenarios. Many of us are busy talking about the end of Western Civilization, or even civilization, quite often. One friend told me a couple years ago that her persistent fears about the collapse of civilization had eased once she had realized that it had collapsed already.
But we are also skeptical about claims that some particular future event will be the thing that ends it all. I grew up with the threat of nuclear war, acid rain, tainted Tylenol, the threat of cholesterol, and a whole host of strangely-garbed horsemen of the apocalypse. Over the years the number of scenarios being hawked by end-of-the-worlders has only grown larger. Just a list of the various doomsday situations over the last twenty years or so would fill a nice essay in itself. Y2K, anthrax, cell phone radiation, swine flu, bird flu, SARS, hormone replacements, transfats, and even net neutrality have been the proposed agents by which millions will soon die. Indeed, every potential snowfall is announced as “Snowmageddon” before it happens. Alongside of these apocalyptic horsepersons (to keep with our genderless times), we have a running theme of the Pale Rider of Atmospheric Carbon and its climate change scythe to fill in when there isn’t something new to threaten us with: the end of snowfalls! The end of the world in twelve years!
We conservatives are actually pretty certain of the fire next time. But the little boxes of matches being proposed are not impressive to us. Coronavirus will take many lives, for sure, but the media and government agencies setting their hair on fire do not inspire confidence in their predictive powers.
Political Motives
This particular apocalypse came wrapped in politics from first to last. It was seen as a continuation of the last three years of reporting by major outlets that was less about the truth than it was about OrangeManBad. We had just gotten off three years of phony claims about “Russian Collusion” and other alleged evils when this virus hit the news. To say that the coverage seemed more about Trump and less about the disease would be an understatement. While many media outlets such as the Washington Post and Vox actually began their coverage by saying the corona virus was not as bad as a flu and that President Trump’s ban on flights from China was “racist,” they soon pivoted to full-blown panic, or at least a pretense of it, when Mr. Trump took a more hopeful stance toward the disease. The pretense was not very convincing because it was too often conveyed with a delight that this might be “Trump’s Katrina” (as a number of journalists said) and thus the end of his presidency. They proceeded to pretend to outrage at the president’s reference to it as the “Chinese virus,” though they had used such epithets themselves. They engaged in every sort of absurd gotcha attempt possible and then used Chinese government talking points against our administration. Recently, media figures, who up until five minutes ago were upset that the President didn’t do enough White House press briefings and answer enough questions (often accusatory speeches) from reporters, are now demanding that those press briefing not be televised. This might have something to do with the President’s rising poll numbers and not any concern with the public’s right to know.
Indeed, the political reaction to the disease has been evident in the corona virus bill still trying to get by the House as I write. Democrats seemed to believe this was really an opportunity to shove in all sorts of progressive and liberal goodies into a bill aimed at relieving businesses and workers of the burdens of shutdowns, putting in all sorts of unrelated goo such as corporate board diversity mandates and wind and solar tax breaks. As South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn supposedly told his colleagues, “This is a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.” As I write, the Senate has passed a version of the bill by a vote of 96-0. But Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is still hesitating and making promises to get around to it later. If Republicans were in charge of the House, there would be an immediate cry about playing politics to the detriment of lives.
If the point of an apocalypse is simply to leverage upcoming elections and get legislation passed that would not see the light of day otherwise—and liberals and progressives are willing to postpone or delay emergency measures because of such concerns—conservatives are not going to take it as seriously.
A Real Problem—of Knowledge
Of course most conservatives I know got over the skepticism of the sensationalism and the politicization of the virus fairly quickly. That is, they do believe that the Wuhan Virus is indeed a real problem and a threat. True, a few still hold to the idea that this is a Deep State action to get rid of President Trump. I don’t think that holds up in the face of world-wide reports, from places friendly to our country and president to those that are not. The question, however, for almost all is not whether it is a problem, but what the extent of the problem is and what are the proper measures used to contain it.
Concerning the first, we do know that this particular virus seems to be deadly to a small portion of the population that contracts it. Much of the talk among friends who are desperately worried comes from an Imperial College London study that predicted that as many as 1.2 million Americans would die from this disease even with serious mitigations strategies, largely because that small portion of the population for whom it is dangerous would take up needed intensive care unit space and ventilators that are not very plentiful in many states. They assumed massive proportions of the population would contract the virus, thus the goal to “flatten the curve” of those getting it so that they would not overwhelm our hospital capacity. Many have looked at the study and concluded we will have 2 million deaths.[1]
One of the talking points of those who took this worst-case scenario was that the growth in the disease would be “exponential” rather than arithmetic. Much was made of people being unable to understand exponential growth. Of course most people do understand exponential growth; it is often the basis of get-rich-quick schemes.
The difficulty is that such exponential growth relies on there always being more people to infect (or bring in to one’s pyramid scheme). But at a certain point, such exponential growth breaks down. First, many people don’t constantly come into contact with new people on a regular basis. They see many of the same people on their usual daily business of work and shopping. Second, some portion of the population has already contracted the virus previously and now are immune to it. Third, because of the early warnings about it, large portions of the population have modified their daily behavior in terms of personal contact, hygiene, and business practices.
Concerning the second point, we really don’t know who has contracted the virus already and come away unscathed because we haven’t tested enough of the population. My in-laws, who live in Snohomish County, Washington, where the first outbreak came in a nursing home, suspect that a January-February illness bearing many of the symptoms associated with the virus was indeed the virus. They don’t know with absolute certainty because their symptoms were rather mild. Many other people in different parts of the country think the same about their illnesses. No doubt not all of them are correct, but we simply do not know this. I know a family in which four of the five members are all being treated as if they have the illness but none have been tested because they are not in the high risk group; a friend who works at a local university tells me he knows at least ten other similar cases. There could be many, many more. If true, the percentage of the population that had it and did not die will be much larger than our current statistics have it (and the population available for infecting has decreased). Thus, even exponential growth might not yield the same death rates if the virus is not as deadly as has been maintained and people have been mitigating its spread in all sorts of ways.
Indeed, there have been a great many skeptics taking on these doomsday scenarios. Dr. John Ioannidas, professor of medicine, epidemiology, and biostatistics and also co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS) at Stanford University, has written a number of pieces warning about drastic measures taken based on bad information.[2] Doctors Eran Bendavid and Jay Bhattacharya, colleagues at Stanford, wrote in the Wall Street Journal about a number of ways in which the modeling used by those making decisions might have mis-estimated the number of those who have already gotten the virus and those who could yet contract it by many orders of magnitude. A study by a team at Oxford University also concludes that a model indicating the UK is at a different place in the pandemic’s curve has a great deal of merit. It is not certain, but then again, neither is the Imperial College modeling.[3]
The problem that those who are angry with our skepticism have to face is that they are relying on experts who don’t have all the data. Experts, however, don’t always agree.
Not only are these factors of knowledge in play, but U.S. businesses are hard at work on all sorts of projects to expand our medical capacity and treat the illness. G.M. and Ford are converting assembly lines to create more ventilators for the U.S. Researchers at the University of Minnesota are hard at work on a project to build ventilators from standard available medical equipment for a cost of about $500 per unit. Many clinical trials for vaccines have already begun both in the U.S. and abroad. If one of them works, we could have it available in a little over a year. Success has been found treating some patients who already have the virus with several different drugs already available for use with other drugs like malaria.
The difficulty with the “it’s exponential, stupid” crowd is that they are assuming not only that deaths will increase many times what they are now, but that they will stay that way. For those saying we will lose 2 million Americans over the next eighteen months, they have to assume that we will average nearly 3700 deaths per day every day during that time. Even 1.2 million would require 2200 deaths per day. I am certainly willing to believe that this virus might end up killing or contributing to the deaths of several times the number killed by our annual flu. But do the predictions seem reasonable given all that’s being done not only to change our behavior but also to solve the problem?
Uncertain Knowledge versus Certain Facts
I don’t think so. Even Neil Ferguson, the lead author of the Imperial College study has recently revised his own calculations about the UK from 500,000 deaths down to 20,000 or fewer.[4] I wonder what he says about the US now? Yet calculations like these that are driving the shut-downs of “non-essential” businesses in many states. The governor of my state, Minnesota, yesterday announced a stay-at-home executive order that will last until April 10. At the time Governor Walz announced this shut-down, there was precisely one death in our state and 287 confirmed cases. (The day after Worldometer tells me we have added a second death.) Yet the calculations justifying keeping so many businesses shuttered are that almost two-and-a-half million more Minnesotans will contract the virus, resulting in sixty thousand in-patients at Minnesota hospitals simply for this virus. A friend who thinks that the governor’s decision was at least reasonable defends it on the basis that with uncertain knowledge, it is best to plan based on the worst-case assumption. I might be tempted to agree with this claim if there weren’t all of the other things mentioned before.
Conservatives who doubt the wisdom of such measures that have economic destruction attached to them are regularly accused of malice and valuing money over life. Yet we do have figures for those who are out of work. The week that ended on March 21 saw a record 3.283 million people filing for unemployment. While some of these jobs will come back when businesses are allowed to reopen, many small businesses will be closed for good. The resulting economic destruction will have many health effects from the postponing of treatments to despair-induced behaviors not limited to substance abuse and suicides. Besides all these factors, the longer the shut-downs continue, the more we might look forward to people violating them—especially if the numbers of deaths are not anywhere near the catastrophic predictions of the wonks. This is a threat to public order.
Conservatives don’t doubt, of course, that shelter-in-place orders might be necessary in certain places. Seventy percent of the deaths thus far have come from six coastal states with large city populations and lots of travel: New York (whose deaths are about a third of the U.S.’s as a whole), Washington, California, New Jersey, Georgia, and Louisiana. The incidents there should give pause to those who want everyone to be densely packed and only have mass transportation and reusable bags for their shopping. But the continued insistence that places where the number of flu or automobile accident deaths continue to dwarf the number of deaths related to the virus must continue to shutter their economies is going to be met with increasing agitation.
I find that many of the people insisting that the risks are too great to keep open “non-essential” businesses or allow people to leave their homes often have salary-based employment and work capable of being done at home. True, the economic consequences of these shut-downs will affect their investments, but they won’t stop their paychecks immediately. Based on these people’s certainties, however, a great many blue-collar workers whose lives are not simply a matter of adjusting their stock portfolios or making sure the wi-fi at home allows them to keep consulting, are going to be struggling to survive. Those who regularly talk about the poor who don’t have enough savings to last more than a week are strangely quiet now.
Conservative skepticism about the wisdom of this approach is not a “conspiracy theory” and not a callousness about life, but a wisdom about making decisions based on risks and uncertainties. We do know that we will have many deaths. We will probably need to keep social distancing for the near future. We will have to change how we operate many businesses. We will, sadly, have to forego not only large-group events among the healthy but possibly asymptomatic but also in-person visits to those who are most at-risk. The elderly and those with health disorders that make them vulnerable will have to deal with more loneliness and isolation. That is one of the sad aspects of this crisis.
But it is better that we have to keep some part of the population isolated and keep social distancing until further knowledge is available than that we keep the whole country shut down and isolated and cause untold economic damage that will itself have health repercussions. We have options for allowing businesses to go on with some new regulations about how to keep both workers and customers safe. Tennessee has smartly decided to go that route.[5] We can continue to ban large group meetings for a while. What we cannot do is to continue to make drastic decisions that affect the lives of millions of people on the basis of worst-case scenarios that do not factor in either our lack of knowledge about where in the curve we are or the mitigation being done by changes of habits or the different kinds of living arrangements in different locales or the strides taken by states, the medical establishment, and businesses to mitigate the crisis if the numbers of significantly ill do shoot up.
Conservative skepticism has its limits, but in this pandemic they have not been reached.
This essay first appeared here in March 2020.
The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.
Notes:
[1] For the study, see here: “Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID- 19 mortality and healthcare demand.”
[2] For one, see here: John P.A. Ioannidis, “A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data,” Stat, March 17, 2020.
[3] Eran Bendavid and Jay Beatacharya, “Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?” The Wall Street Journal, March 24, 2020.
[4] Andrew Mark Miller, “Imperial College scientist who predicted 500k coronavirus deaths in UK adjusts to 20k or fewer,” Washington Examiner, March 26, 2020.
[5] “Gov. Bill Lee Signs Executive Order Mandating Alternative Business Models for Restaurants and Gyms, Lifts Alcohol Regulations,” Office of Governor Bill Lee, March 22, 2020.
The featured image is courtesy of Unsplash.
In all my conversations with people on this issue, Ive used the word ‘balance’ over and over. To live is to risk, and at my job, we regularly risk our safety and even lives, but we do what we can to mitigate those risks in many ways. For me, this is just another risk. I’m waiting for the arguments to ban automobiles, because even one death is too much to go about living our lives.
Mr. Deavel, I don’t know how familiar you are with hunting or game management, but there is a principle used among game managers called “compensatory mortality” (CM). From everything I have been reading so far, I believe that CM will play a big factor into why this could turn into a big nothingburger.
CM is that amount of deaths that can be absorbed by a population by a specific cause of death without causing the average mortality to raise. During the winter hunters can take a cetain amount of rabbits and there will be the same number reporting for “duty” come the spring breeding season as there would be if the hunting season was closed. Every rabbit that is taken by a human hunter is one that could have, or would have, been taken by a fox, or owl, or cat, or disease.
CM will probably be a factor when the dust settles because the at risk population is already at risk. You have an 8% chance of dying just by being 80 years old, and an 15% chance by being 87 yrs old. The US buries almost 3 million people per year.
While epidemiologist are concerned with how people die, demographers are concerned with how many people die. To an epidemiologist it is impressive if 1/2 million people die from a single disease. To a demographer it will only be impressive if that single cause of death creates more deaths than has been trending.
People as rabbits? If a hunter doesn’t shoot them, the fox will eat them? If you don’t see the fallicy in that argument, there’s probably nothing I can say that’ll change your mind. You’re getting quite close to claiming that people past a certain age or with certain health conditions have a ‘duty to die.”
Sir, you seem to have misunderstood SJ’s comment. In the event, we see that this virus has shown a tendency to take the old and the sickly. If you are over 80 and contract the illness, ones chances of dying are elevated. If one is over 80 and has a pre existing condition, your chances of dying from the virus increase further still. And so on.
SJ’s point is that those people that are most at risk due to age or pre existing condition are very likely to die within the next year, if not within the period of the current outbreak. His point is that the virus got to them first.
He never compared people to rabbits; and certainly never hinted that these at risk groups had a “duty to die”. But then you knew that, didn’t you?
I would add to your comments that data released from Italy this week shows that almost half of all COVID19 related deaths there involve people with an average age over 80 with at least three other serious medical conditions and that only 8/10 of 1% of the deaths were exclusively the result of the virus..
This confirms Steve’s analogy, substituting disease for predators but also raises serious doubts about the actual number of deaths from COVID19. Even Naill Fergusson (whose absurd projections are heavily responsible for the worldwide over-reaction) has acknowledged that half to two thirds of the deaths would involve people already in an end of life situation. If one has cancer, diabetes, cardio-vascular disease and the virus when they die, just what exactly killed them?
COVID19 has been compared frequently to seasonal influenza – is it worse or is it less dangerous has been a frequent debate. However, as we get deeper into the situation (and as I use my otherwise wasted time at home digging into the matter) I find that comparing it to the flu may be a very incomplete comparison. Seasonal flu kills between 22,000 and 55,000 per year in the US per the CDC but as I dug deeper into the estimates and, especially, the cause of death standards (FYI, essentially, there are none) I am coming to the conclusion that we need to look at flu and pneumonia numbers in some combination.
Pneumonia already serves as the coup de grace for many people whose underlying conditions are virtually identical to the array of diseases cited in the Italian study, It causes around 300 deaths per 100,000 in the 70+ category which comes out to about 100,000 to 120,000 annually in the US (without the wide ranges. If the, as yet, highly uncertain new projection of 100,000 to 200,000 deaths essentially overlaps with the flu and pneumonia deaths (and, apparently any number of other diseases) there is a reasonable chance that the impact of COVID19 will be statistically insignificant If the death rate at the end of a year is unchanged or changed within the margin of error, then all this has been pointless.
Lastly, I would note that, while people do not like to discuss this topic, right now we have a $2 trillion bailout and unknown multiples of that in other economic fallout from the crisis. Pretending that Ferguson’s prediction was even remotely plausible (there is no such thing as an unmitigated epidemic in 21st Century developed countries) we have committed $1 million per hypothetical life lost just in government funds alone. Again, multiples of that in other economic hardships.
Michael Perry, as a medical writer I’m surprised you would think Mr. Janowiak was at all comparing people to animals. He is clearly not. He is explaining the principle of CM, and explains it quite well actually.
Thanks for your thoughts.
A comparison with what we are more familiar with, influenzas, with what we are less familiar with COVID with might be helpful for making policy decisions.
What we are trying to balance is economic and social destruction with severe morbidity and mortality. Examples of economic and social destruction leading to misery and death are near at hand, Venezuela.
Idea: The broad use of surgical masks in public and work environments like in Asia may lesson the need to always be 6 feet from someone and help get people back to work.
1) Neil Ferguson’s estimate of 20,000 UK deaths assumes a “shutdown” of the economy, as we are doing. It is equivalent to about 100,000 US deaths. This is not trivial. 2) Do you believe that China, S. Korea and many other countries disrupted their societies and economies just to harm President Trump? 3) There have been numerous plagues and pandemics in the past. But they occur infrequently at intervals of hundreds of years, sort of like tsunamis. So we forget them and can’t believe they will happen in our lifetime. But sometimes they do.
This was a good article. Thank you for perspective from the other side. As someone from a different perspective, I don’t care about the Imperial College study so much as the numbers as they come in. I think your governor was trying to stop the exponential curve before it took off.
I too wonder if this virus had already hit America long before we started dealing with it. It seems inevitable. I’m not one for sensationalism but I do try to be realistic. I think 1 million deaths is extreme but 20/30 thousand not so much. I think an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure so if social distancing or sheltering for a couple weeks while the virus count sits really low cuts its legs off before it gets going I think that’s the best approach.
I agree with the political lean this whole thing has had and I don’t like it. I’ve been trying to weed out my own biases and focus on the facts. It is hard at times but I’m glad to see work like what you’ve written here. I hope it all works out for the best and that those of you more skeptical than myself have a better read on this whole thing because if you’re right then it’s a better end for us all.
What we need to do is avoid breaking the healthcare system for this round of coronavirus. There will certainly be additional rounds if our species does not develop herd immunity through contracting the virus or vaccines. If the healthcare system does break, then the economy will break. So, let’s do everything we can to save as many lives as possible, save our rickety healthcare system and the economy.
David: You need to do the math and look at the existing data: both are unforgiving. The growth of a pandemic is exponential and you can see (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/) that the growth rate of cases is, in fact, exponential (look at the graph in logarithmic coordinates, it is nearly a straight line). It has gone from 100 on March 2nd, to 142,000 on March 29th), roughly a factor of thousand in a month. At the same rate, we will have over 100,000,000 by the end of April. At 0.1% mortality, that is the 100,000 deaths Dr. Fauci mentioned yesterday. That is twice the number of American soldiers lost in Vietnam (in a much shorter time span) and clearly a major national calamity. If it requires extraordinary measures to reduce this number substantially, we should pursue these measures.
There are two major problems with your assumptions.. One, the number of CASES is not growing at that rate – it is the number of CONFIRMED cases. Of course there was a spike once testing became widely available. BTW, look at the US (or any individual country) day by day new case numbers and you will see that even with rapidly increasing testing capacity, the rate of growth has slowed dramatically over the past week or so. Italy’s daily new cases have trended down for ten days and they have not exactly been good at handling this. The US took just 3 days to grow from 5000 cases in a day to 10,000 (March 20-23) but has not doubled in the six days since (actually declining yesterday but that may just be a twitch).
Second, we are only testing the symptomatic and the high risk populations. Even among those populations we are only getting about a 15-16% rate of infection. That rate will plummet as we test younger, healthier populations later, However, lets pretend that rate would hold true for the general population – that is about 50 million infected and 50,000 dead. That is extremely comparable to a rough – but not maximum -flu season.
Finally, factor in the probability of overlapping causes of death (see my post above) and you will see that there are lot of problems with attributing as many deaths as we have to COVID 19.
You didn’t read the article very carefully. When you used the term “existing data” you gave yourself away. The point is that the existing data is incredibly faulty because, among other reasons, it does not take into account those who have been infected and have not been tested. I suggest you read the article by Prof. Ioannidis and get back to us.
David: Somebody has already pointed out that Imperial College model has not changed and the figures have not changed either. What has changed is the UK government went from doing nothing to lockdown as the numbers started rising.
At the moment we do not know how many people have already been infected; it is all very well saying that I had what I thought was a cold in January but on reflection it was Covid-19. At this time NOBODY knows exactly how this will pan out. However, we do have some clues from China, Italy and Spain in particular where doing nothing has led to health services being overwhelmed and mortality rising to 5-10 times what it could be with best care.
In the long run everybody will either get the virus or be protected with a vaccination; in the absence of a vaccine maybe people should be less sceptical and trust experts especially when they make it clear that their best guess changes from day to day as more data become available. Please also bear in mind that, with the exception of Sweden which has only been mildly affected so far, pretty well every government in Europe, including now Russia, are taking drastic measures.
You are correct that this event has been politicised but by the right wing. The media always sensationalise everything, they want people to read their product to maximise revenue. We all know this and allow for their hyperbole when judging how serious an event really is. Recently there has been a disturbing trend in the US of conservatives not only denying issues but besmirching anyone who espouses them. Extreme right wing sites such as Breitbart throw wild allegations out at perceived enemies who may be left wing opponents, climate change advocates and now even Dr Fauci. This man is a world class immunologist with an unimpeachable reputation; he is quietly trying to his job as best he can; he may or may not be correct but he is doing his best in an impossible situation. In contrast a certain mango shaded individual speaks whatever he feels on the day, changes his mind frequently and then denies he said things which are on video. The President was given an opportunity to show real leadership but has quite frankly blown it.
Finally, could I thank you for providing a space to debate this subject without people using inflammatory language and name calling. I am happy to reply to any point you disagree with.
Despite Naill Ferguson’s efforts at CYA, it is not really accurate to say that his original report has not been walked back. His post-admission tactic of saying it was always right and certain measures have changed the equation does not hold up. It might be most accurate to say that he has acknowledged that his original premise of an “unmitigated” epidemic was never accurate and therefore his projections were always hyperbolic and irrelevant. As Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, Sunetra Gupta said (in classic English understatement), “I am surprised that there has been such unqualified acceptance of the Imperial model.”
There are multiple flaws with the Imperial model:
1) As noted above, there is no such thing as an unmitigated epidemic in a 21st Century developed country. There were always going to be travel bans, quarantines for the sick, and firewalls for those highly susceptible. The question is about the value of draconian measures imposed on the general population rather than targeted responses to protect the high risk populations from high probability sources of the virus.
2) It assumes that the vulnerability of infection for the older population—from 70 upward—gives some clue as to the rate of spread over the general population, when it does not. As with every new virus, the most vulnerable people are hit first, subsequent transmission will be slower because the remaining pool of individuals is already more resistant to infection.
3) It underestimates the rate of natural adaptive responses, which should slow down the replication rate. In other words, it assumes that current transmission rates will continue unabated when, historically, new infections lose their ability to jump from host to host.
4) Their model ignores the impact of warmer weather. Studies (and common sense) support the positive impact of the coming spring and summer in the Northern Hemisphere: “High temperature and high relative humidity significantly reduce the transmission of COVID-19.” An increase of just one degree Celsius and 1% relative humidity increase substantially lower the virus’s transmission, according to the data analyzed by the researchers.”
5) The report states that ” this conclusion has only been reached in the last few days, with the refinement of estimates of likely ICU demand due to COVID-19 based on experience in Italy…” Italy has the second oldest population in the world (only Japan is higher) and has extremely high smoking rates and low air quality. Using Italy is going to skew any projection higher than the US/UK will experience.
6) There is an apparent disconnect in the Imperial report’s claim that many of the deaths will be the result of overwhelming the number of critical care beds and the actual availability of such beds. The two high estimates (510,000 for the UK and 2.2 million US) are proportionate to their basic populations without factoring in that the US has 5 times the available CC beds per capita. In short, if, as Fergusson now admits, the UK system would not be overwhelmed, then the US will have a substantial surplus. Alternately, if his original projects were valid and the UK would have experienced more deaths from the lack of resources, this should have reduced the estimate of US deaths.
This should never have been taken seriously and keeping businesses closed and people unemployed just to assuage the vanity of a body of public officials and media sycophants is not acceptable. Which, by the way, is how the left has politicized this crisis, contrary to your opinion.
You are willfully ignoring what the model is for it is not a prediction of the future, it is a prediction based on assumptions which are varied and create scenarios of the likely impact. The model is not claimed to be perfect but is refined as new data came.
In effect the ‘Doomsday Scenario’ is the same as the Do Nothing option in a classic option appraisal. If the UK Government had not taken action then given what is being seen at the moment it looks pretty accurate. Remember there is about a 2-week delay between an intervention and its full effect so the numbers are hopefully going to plateau and start falling fairly soon. As it is some parts of the country are short of ventilators and protective gear so again the prediction of health services being overwhelmed looks fairly accurate but whether the death rate would be 2 or 3 or 5 times the rate using optimum care is an academic point which nobody wanted to test.
We have no idea what the final death toll will be and at the moment most countries are underestimating the effect because of diagnostic issues such as the complexity of post mortems on corpses which are infected. Looking at current numbers in the UK with 684 deaths on April 3rd; that daily number is likely not to peak for probably another 14 days so the lockdown scenario of 20,000 may even be optimistic.
I really do not understand why conservatives are so reluctant to accept the word of experts who have never claimed to omniscient but are world leaders in their field. I do wonder just how many people have ot die in the USA before people admit that this is the most serious threat to the public health since 1918.
Point of order Leslie…we actually do not know if people will naturally acquire immunity after recovering from Covid-19, or if they do how long it will last. It depends on how the body responds and how well the immune system remembers the virus. Weak viral infections often only result in immunity for weeks or months, allowing re-infection by the same virus again later. If so many people are in fact experiencing very mild presentations of the disease, there is concern that they may re-acquire it again in the near future. The implications of this are unsettling. More data is needed.
The best would have been to catch this thing early, do what the WHO recommended, test & contact trace and then lockdown the initial clusters of COV19. This would have been painful, but I wager it would not have cost 2.2 trillion dollars.
By February it was already too late for that in the US.
The next best would have been coordinated confinement at least in all the major population centers and a serious brake on air and road interstate travel (essentially limiting it to commercial-goods traffic only).
The US has patchy confinement and planes are still flying. It’s daft and if you assume that Americans are as human as Italians, the disease trajectory will be worse because less measures have been taken. Italy is now seeing what may be the beginning of a consistent decrease in daily new cases. Assuming the future trajectory will be like that of China, because of the death lag, something like 30-40K Italians will be killed by C19. There are 8x more americans than Italians (but they are on average not so tightly packed) so logic dictates that somewhat less than 8 times the number of deaths as Italy can be expected. This is where Fauci gets his numbers from and it’s pretty solid reasoning.
My dear friend Dave says he believes his skepticism will be “proven right in the long run.” That may be. But it’s a hollow claim, in that it leaves no test for its truth. At what point would the statement be disproven? 100,000 dead? 250,000 dead?
While it’s true that the people of whom Dave practices his skepticism are making their judgments based on limited data and models, at least they are using data and models; Dave offers no alternative. What we cannot do, to retool his own last sentence, is make drastic decisions that endanger the lives of at least hundreds of thousands of people on the basis of “skepticism” about where in the curve we are or the necessity of the mitigation being attempted. If in doubt, our society should err on the side of protecting human life.
The biggest problem with debate today is the manner in which contrary opinion is shouted down by the masses of “salaries workers” and lefty opinionistas, as is the case with the coronavirus. I agree absolutely with the opinions of the author but, such is the mass hysteria surrounding the shutdown orthodoxy, it’s simply not worth even trying to present an alternate opinion, informed or not. Like the author I have lived through all sorts of alarming and supposedly apocalyptic events. My background in business and academia have also taught me to question and analyse all data, pragmatically. It makes no difference, I’m being dragged over the cliff with the lemmings.
A most thoughtful and enlightening essay. It deserves a broad audience.
Neil Ferguson did not revise his estimates down from 500,000 to 20,000. He gave two estimates, one if the UK let the disease run rampant and another if strict social distancing was performed. The article makes him out to be incompetent but he is highly regarded by the UK government and has been right so far. American media has distorted and blown up what he said.
It’s interesting to read this skeptical article and supporting comments reposted on the very day that a 41-year-old congressman-elect in apparent perfect health contributed to the 340,000 (and counting) American victims of COVID-19. What’s Mr. Deavel’s current position on the pandemic and the government response?
The American Right’s tendency to distrust experts that’s taken root over the past few decades might be imaginative, but not in a good way. I’m skeptical too, but mainly about whether the GOP can recover from its conversion into a Trumpist personality cult that replaced conservative principles with conspiracy theories and lust for political power.
This came around again. I am convinced that Donald Trump lost the election because he did not address concerns the middle of the electorate had over the corona virus. He did a great job in managing the problem but showed a lack of sensitivity toward enough of the population who feared it. Addressing people’s fears is the primary vote-getters objective. People vote on fear more so than love. When Trump scoffed at it in the first debate and his family showed up to the debate maskless, the public came to the conclusion their fears were being ignored. And to top it off, Trump right after that first debate got the virus himself. I think Trump lost the election right there.
This is one of the best essays of the year? Almost everything asserted in this article has been disproved by the disastrous death toll of Covid-19. God only knows how many more would have died without the very restrictions the author criticizes. No one likes the lockdowns and bans, but it has become undeniable that they saved lives. Now that the vaccines are rolling out hopefully things will get back to normal sometime next summer, but articles like this badly missed the mark and should certainly not be republished now except as cautionary tales.
I hope that one day the irresponsible “experts” ordering lockdowns, masks, distancing, and distributing skewed information, will be incarcerated. They caused and do cause enormous harm, both economically and in health. As per science, the damage caused by lockdowns so far is 50 to 91 fold of its potential benefits. As of June 2020, 10 million surgeries were postponed (of which 3 million were cancer-related) due to lockdowns. Medical treatments and examinations were also postponed. The population is misinformed. Still, many believe that Covid is lethal. To them: in the 0-70 age cohort, 5 in 10,000 Covid-infected die. In the 0-40 cohort, 3 in 200,000 infected die. Of all Covid-related deaths in the world, at the maximum, 6 in 100 are caused by Covid alone. To translate this: in the 0-70 age cohort, 50 in 100,000 infected die with Covid, but only 3 in 100,000 infected die of Covid alone. This is 19,000 in the US in 10 months. Around 3 million die in the 10 months in the US.
There are clearly very different views on the “facts” surrounding coronavirus as well as the prudent response. We all have different opinions of what information to look at, how to interpret that information, and what to do in response. That being the case, why don’t we let individuals and businesses decide for themselves how to respond as opposed to having broad government action?