Posted by Lots of discouraging signs about whether this SiP will end at the end of this month, or if it will continue.
VP Pence said in an interview that we MAY be getting on the other side of this by Memorial Day. So that’s another fucking month after this one concludes—and after 15 days of being shut down or close to it.
On the other hand, we have the antibody tests and some other things that may prove to be game changers in a few weeks.
No matter what, we have to keep sheltering in place this month. All 50 states have to do that. We need the bug level as low as possible at the end of this month, so that Trump has something to hang his hat on when he pushes for either emergence from SiP or a firm date when we can do that.
The worst thing is to say, “Oh, we need another month and we’ll see what happens.”
One thing we can do without are these people in hotspots who are wealthy enough to either own vacation homes or the funds to rent something long-term while also paying the mortgage. Many of them are fleeing the hotspots to these bug-out locations.
In my view, these people are asshats because they either (a) think they are actually reducing their risk, health-wise, by moving or (b) do not believe the health risk is real, and are resisting what they view as state tyranny.
Regarding the (a) group: Here’s a brief list of some of the health risks you take by traveling long-distance to a bunker in the sticks:
- If you are driving, you are taking the normal risks of driving long distance and getting into an accident. You will then be a drain on medical resources in an area you are not familiar with and which is dealing with its own resource constraints in a time of emergency.
- If you stop to get gas, or get food, or use the restroom, you risk contracting the disease or transmitting it at those places (if you have it and don’t know it at the time).
- You cannot possibly take all the supplies you need to hole up on your new site. So then you have to go to the local IGA and True Value and compete with the locals for the stuff they need.
- If you get Covid, and get really sick, you will go to the local hospital and take up, say, 1 out of the 2 ventilators they have. Another permanent resident may be rendered shit outta luck. It’s the same overload on the medical system that you fleed, but on a smaller scale.
- If you are flying, you are not maintaining 6’ of distance on the plane and you are making physical contact with other passengers with your person and your luggage when you board and when you de-board.
- From a plenary point of view, you are not as careful as you need to be on mitigation, because you have decided to do this stupid thing in the first place.
For the (b) group: You can save your grievances for a month and then we can all discuss what the hell happened, and how to avoid it in the future. We will all be here next month if we don’t panic. Just SiP and let’s get this thing over with.
Now, a little bit about the latest IHME data.
That graph is the projections of daily and cumulative average mortality for Alabama, as projected by IHME on 3/25, and then each day from 3/29 through 4/1.
Through 3/30, the peak death was about 50 and the cumulative death was about 1,500. But on 3/31 those spiked to about 330 and 7,300, respectively. On 4/1, they backed off to 300 and 5,516.
This happened because 13 people were reported dead on 3/31 instead of 5. (Before that day, the death toll was 10, so it rose on 3/31 to 23 instead of 15. The next iteration of the model shifted the 4/1 prediction up to 12, from 5, and all the future dates went up drastically.
On 4/1, 12 people were recorded (total 35) which was accurate, and the model adjusted only slightly. They are predicting 18 today, for a cumulative total of 53. But on Worldometers they had 28 yesterday and 32 today. Although the time at which the data is tallied is different between Worldometers and IHME is different, it stands to reason that the Alabama predictions are going to violently swing again.
Some of the other states with big swings are shown above.
A belief among a lot of people is that the big outbreaks you see in urban hotspots are going to also appear in rural areas eventually. This is a theme in this paper. (I should state here that I really like Tomas Pueyo’s data analysis skills, and I agree with “hammer and dance” as a strategy; but I don’t agree with his political solutions, and in the end he is suffering from the same problems with incomplete data that we al are.)
I am curious if there is a certain elitist bias going on here. Tomas and others are familiar with extensive travel, including international travel, and they often have the resources to do it frequently. Maybe they think that everyone else can pick up and move without too much trouble, and so they think that the flyover/rural/Trump areas are inevitably going to be intruded upon by urban refugees.
I think some of them will, but I have more faith that most rural communities have been doing mitigation for a few weeks now. They were early—like Pueyo recommends the US should have done. But he thinks there will be hordes of people fleeing into their communities sooner or later, and that the people who die will be disproportionately Trump voters (due to their age); therefore, Republican leaders should support lockdown to protect those voters for Election Day purposes.
My political view is that Trump voters in rural areas see the vectors of Coronavirus are disproportionately elitist, wealthy Democrats, with some never-Trump Republicans in the mix.The urban blue areas are getting hammered (not in the Pueyo sense of the term—although the governors have indeed Pueyo-hammered them for days now).
If a small town in Florida or New England gets an outbreak after someone from New Wuhan York interlopers come in, they may very well crawl over broken glass to re-elect Trump in November. He is generally getting good approval for his de-centralized approach to this challenge. (I consider him to be doing well with this, although I wish he wouldn’t talk out of his ass about proper mask usage. Also, he needs to work on fixing the fundamental problems that got us into this mess in the first place. Of course, that’s a discussion for another time.)
Final before I end this post: I watched Father Cuomo today and the data indicate that MAYBE the apex is near for New York’s situation, although the statisticians he listens to say that’s an optimistic view. Here’s some recent NYC data (thanks Richard for the link, stay safe). If NYC is plateauing, it’s a bit of hope for us going into next week.
Father Cuomo had little brother Fredo Chris on a video call in his presser, after going over the serious stuff. They shot the shit for 10 minutes before Fox News pulled away. I don’t know how CNN covered it; I assumed they aired the whole thing. Here’s a link if you want to see it—let me know how it ends because I’m not gonna bother to look. But I hope Chris gets well.
Weight Betting Odds 