Covid-19, Foresights and Hindsights

Covid-19, Foresights and Hindsights

After a draconian economic response to the Covid-19 pandemic, some parts of the country (and the world) are beginning to relent a little, and social and business activity is restarting. 

As one would expect during and after something as disruptive to human life and activities as this virus and the efforts taken to mitigate it have been, blame and recriminations abound.  Most thinking people all over the world are really pissed off at the Chinese communist party for hiding the scope of the outbreak in late 2019, allowing the virus to escape the Wuhan area of China, and infect the rest of the world.  There have been calls that some of our debt to China pay for some of the economic impact they caused.

Other anger is directed at various governments and leaders for not being seers and oracles early in the pandemic spread, and taking earlier actions to save more lives.  More anger is focused on these same governments and leaders for taking such drastic steps to save lives that it broke the economies of those countries, and also broke the livelihoods and pocketbooks of many millions of people.  Of course, President Trump, a key figure in the U.S. response to the Corona virus crisis, is always wrong in the eyes of the antagonistic media, and is blamed for everything.

It's amazing the alacrity with which humanity responded to the mitigation efforts called for by the medical and scientific communities.  We left our jobs, “socially distanced”, “sheltered in place”, donned masks and gloves, and placed ourselves virtually under house arrest, with hardly a whimper, (at least at first).

But now that we have been herded into our pens by our ovine masters and manipulators, many are having second thoughts.  Did we really need to break the whole economy?  Was this Corona virus really as contagious and deadly as what we were told?  Numbers are being manipulated by ostensibly knowledgeable “experts” who are fueling this contrarian swell by anecdotal commentary and manipulation of the mortality data, now that there is actual data.

The actual, reported, easily accessible, mortality numbers say that as of the end of April, 2020, over 5% of U.S. Covid-19 cases, nearly 7% of world cases, and nearly 8% of New York State cases result in death.  This compares to 0.1 – 0.14 % for recent flu seasons.  Simple math says that Covid-19 is some 50 – 80 times more deadly than conventional flu.  Admittedly, the true number of cases (the denominator) is greater, since we haven’t accurately defined all of the cases by testing, and we may have exaggerated the number of deaths (the nominator), by classifying other deaths as caused by Covid-19.  However. it doesn’t take a math genius to see that it would take a tremendous amount of manipulation to get the death rate for Covid-19 to the same order of magnitude as conventional flu.

A look at the numbers for the 1917-18 Spanish Flu shows that 50 million people died world-wide, an estimated 10% fatality rate.  In the U.S., 675,000 people died, an imputed mortality rate of about 2%.  By all principles of rationality, it would appear that the present Corona virus outbreak is acting more like the massive 1917-18 Spanish Flu pandemic, than a normal flu virus.

So, rather than acknowledging that drastic action needed to be taken, based on the best world-wide expert medical and scientific evidence at the time, and that we needed to respond as we did to save literally millions of lives, second-guessers and manipulators of actual data now that there is some history of mitigation efforts to slow down the spread of the virus, posit critiques of the actions originally taken, and propose alternatives.

Some of these arguments are compelling.  For example, why do we have the same mitigation rules for Montana, as Manhattan?  Why is Costco allowed to stay open while mom and pop shops have to close?  Why are twenty-somethings lumped together with eighty-somethings?  The ER doctors from Bakersfield California also make the point, why are we quarantining healthy people and lowering their natural resistance to infections?

The sad thing is that we have not come together as a nation as a result of the crisis.  Instead of pulling together, our politicians take advantage of the crisis for more “politics as usual”.  The Left position seems to be - “Keep it all shut down until there is an effective vaccine next year (and incidentally after we win the presidential election and the congress in a completely broken economy).  If you don’t you will kill grandma and grandpa”.  The right says “Let the states and localities phase in an opening.”  To the howls of “Trump is not taking responsibility, etc.”  Remember, everything Trumps does or does not do, is wrong.

To sum up, governments all over the world, pretty much severely curtailed their economies and told the populations to stay home.  They did this because the best medical and scientific minds in the world projected that if we didn’t do this, millions would die from an unchecked spread of the virus.  They considered this novel Covad-19 virus to be as unique as the H1N1 virus of the “Spanish flu” in 1917-1918.  Mitigation efforts are resulting, generally, as the epidemiological modelers predicted.  Not spot on, and changing with actual results, but essentially trending like a highly contagious virus, as the experts said.

And we’re opening up.  Trump and his scientific/medical experts, and the respective governors and city fathers, with cautions and precautions about the virus popping up in spots as they go.  Taking a lesson from the 1917-1918 Spanish flu pandemic, there is a danger that there can be another major outbreak of Covid-19 as the next flu season develops later this year.  The one thing positive about this possibility is that we are infinitely better prepared to address and contain it than we were when the Chinese communists originally sent it to us earlier this year.  Also, by then, we may have vaccines to try, at least on an experimental basis.

Ray Gruszecki

April 29, 2020