Which Is Worse, The Virus Or The Response To It? (2)

At this writing (Thursday evening), Worldometers is reporting that the U.S. death toll from the Covid-19 virus has reached 1293. That number has been climbing rapidly in percentage terms (266 new deaths today is 20.6% of all U.S. deaths to date), but still is a small fraction of the 20,000 to 60,000 annual deaths from the regular seasonal flu. Every death is a tragedy, but then, we’re all going to die. Nobody regards the regular seasonal flu as any kind of major crisis, let alone a reason to shut down the economy or have the federal government go on a special $2 trillion spending blowout.

So will the death toll from this virus ultimately reach or substantially exceed the toll from the regular annual seasonal flu? If the answer is yes, then it would be reasonable to treat this situation as something special that could call for extraordinary measures to combat it. If no, it’s just more of the same that we deal with every year.

But how to tell? As many have noted, we are lacking some basic data to make a determination. The same Worldometers site that reports 1293 deaths shows 85,280 U.S. “cases” — but that’s the number of people who have tested positive, not the number exposed to or infected with the virus. What is the total number of people who have been infected, including all those who have shown few or no symptoms, and who have taken no test? If that number is barely above the 85,280 “cases,” then we have a very serious 1.5% death rate on our hands. But if the number infected is 10 million, then the death rate is well under the 0.1% of the regular annual flu.

I’m not criticizing anyone for not yet having all the data we would like, such data being not at all easy to acquire on short notice. But in the absence of the data, two approaches have emerged to support decision-making. One is to create a computer model of projected infections, sicknesses, and deaths. The other is to focus carefully on any situations we can find where hard data exist, albeit in small numbers, but that might be representative of what we can expect on a larger scale.

Exemplifying approach 1, we have a guy named Neil Ferguson and a team of thousands at Imperial College in the UK, who came out with a very technical and authoritative-sounding paper on March 16. These guys lay out endless detailed assumptions (e.g.,”[I]nfectiousness is assumed to occur from 12 hours prior to the onset of symptoms for those that are symptomatic and from 4.6 days after infection in those that are asymptomatic with an infectiousness profile over time that results in a 6.5-day mean generation time. Based on fits to the early growth-rate of the epidemic in Wuhan, we make a baseline assumption that R0=2.4 but examine values between 2.0 and 2.6. We assume that symptomatic individuals are 50% more infectious than asymptomatic individuals, . . . “ etc., etc., etc.) which they then plug into a super sophisticated computer model and voila! The answer is:

Ferguson’s model projected 2.2 million dead people in the United States and 500,000 in the U.K. from COVID-19 if no action were taken to slow the virus and blunt its curve.

Yikes! Needless to say, this projection got cited by everybody, from the New York Times on down, and can be seen as a big part of the justification for the lockdowns taking place all around us. But then today, Ferguson made a revision to his projection. The new projection for the UK is no longer 500,000 deaths, but rather 20,000, and "possibly much lower.” That’s rather a large change. From the Washington Examiner today:

Scientist and Imperial College author Neil Ferguson said Wednesday the coronavirus death toll is unlikely to exceed 20,000 and could be much lower if lockdown measures continue, according to New Scientist. 

But can the lockdowns really be given credit for this huge of a change? From the Washington Examiner again:

Ferguson credited the U.K.’s lockdown for stopping the spread of the virus, but as Berenson [of the New York Times] points out, the country “only began its lockdown 2 days ago, and the theory is that lockdowns take 2 weeks or more to work.”

As far as I can find, Ferguson has not come out with a new number for the U.S. If the reduction is proportionate to the reduction in his UK projection, it would now be around 90,000 (or “could be much lower”) for the U.S.

Then there is approach number 2, trying to find some representative hard data from which to make some realistic projections. The best I have been able to find on that score comes from the Diamond Princess cruise ship. That’s the one where several people tested positive for the virus, so the passengers were all kept in quarantine on the ship for several weeks before they were allowed to disembark. Extensive data were collected from these passengers. Here is an analysis of those data by a guy named Willis Eschenbach on March 16; and here is further analysis from a guy named Nic Lewis on March 25.

There were more than 3700 people on the ship (including crew), all of them clearly exposed to the virus. Every single person was tested. Results (from Lewis):

Some 706 (19.0%) ultimately had positive test results, of whom (based on the NIID data for 619 of them) 51% were asymptomatic. The infection rate varied between 10.0% for ages under 30 years to 24.5% for ages 60+ years.

Number of deaths was 8. They don’t seem to know the age for one of the deaths, but of the seven they know, all were over 70 and 4 were over 80. The ages of the people on the ship skewed far older than the general population (details at the links).

I’m not saying that this isn’t something serious. But the fact is that most people exposed did not get the disease, and the deaths are confined entirely or almost entirely to the very old.

I’m going to go out on a limb and make my own projection of deaths from this thing in the U.S. through the current flu season (to the summer): 10,000 to 20,000. Will the lockdown have helped to keep the numbers low? Probably to some degree, but we’ll never know by how much.

Meanwhile, the Treasury is now out getting ready to borrow $2 trillion in a desperate attempt to cover the downside risk of all of the drastic government-induced economic shutdown. One way of looking at that is it’s that much sooner that Social Security and Medicare will go broke. Thankfully, I won’t be around for that; but my kids will.