COVID-19 Megathread 5: The Trumps catch COVID-19

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

I skimmed the Wisconsin article. It's very (very) short. This wouldn't make it into a peer review journal (mostly due to its length) but I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand.

The bulk of their actual statistical work is modeling R_0. Neither of the methods they used found certain evidence of a spike; one model does show a mean trend that increases within a week of the election but there's enough uncertainty in the estimate that it's difficult to separate it from statistical noise (rather, the spike is there, but the magnitude of the spike is highly uncertain). Even if this spike was certain, it would be difficult to attribute this to voting without some idea of who was getting infected.

The rest of the report is reporting on and contextualizing results of tests that the state's department of health services administered. I would want to know more about these tests - how many people are included, where they live, etc. That's pretty key to understanding their results and it's left out. They make a great point that many of the people who tested positive may have been infected elsewhere, but again, it's difficult to tell without more knowledge about who was tested.

The most convincing part of the argument is the decrease in hospitalizations across the month of April. There's a separability/identifiability issue there but it suggests to me that there was no disproportionate negative public health effect. I wish we had more information about who these poll workers were and who was actually voting in person, but that data is probably hard to attain. They note that they didn't model the "downstream" effects (secondary, tertiary infections) but note that with R_0 approx. 1 (which has been estimated elsewhere, not just in this study), the number of secondary infections is likely small.

The comparison to driving the car 50 miles strikes me as a little silly. That number was estimated with a mortality rate of a person under the age of 60. Were all, or even most, of the people who voted in person or working at polls under the age of 60? It's possible, but there's nothing in here that warrants using that assumption.

Figure 1A could use a line indicating the moving average. To the (subjective) eye, it looks like there is a bump around April 13th, but that could be due to the abnormally low day several days before. Testing absolutely did not increase over the course of April; testing has been consistent since late March as Figure 1C shows.

The credentials of the authors do not matter. Stanford researchers put out the Santa Clara study which was shredded by several of their peers at other institutions.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Sad news.

One of the first Colorado people to receive a plasma treatment from a recovered person has died. 47 year old male, leaving a wife and two kids. Got the treatment early last month. As far as I'm aware the other patients who received a plasma treatment are doing okay (heard there was a 68 year old man who is either mostly or fully recovered after a receiving plasma).

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Looking at the CDC demographic breakdown of covid deaths makes me think the difference in death rate by gender has actually been significantly undercovered.

It would appear that men are at least twice as likely to die from the virus as women, once we adjust for age.

Men account for about 56% of covid deaths overall.  But the only reason that the gender breakdown is that close is that the death rate is so high among those 80 years or older, and there are far more women who are 80+ than men.

Among people under 65, men account for 70% of US covid deaths.

It's been covered in some places, but you are right, it's not covered nearly as much as racial disparities.

The most compelling reason for this is that there's strong evidence that women typically have more active and effective immune systems than men. But there's also the possibility of men waiting longer to seek treatment and men having higher comorbidities (immune-related or otherwise).  I don't know if there's any reason to suspect there are differences in behavior which cause men to get infected mor often.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1258782599918637057

What an egregious take.

Re-opening is primarily to benefit the 1%?? Have you seen the stock market lately? its up on the year. Its pushing new highs again. The 1% are doing just fine and most have plenty of savings to get them through this. The people who need to go back to work are the ones living paycheck to paycheck. People working jobs in the service industry or hospitality industry who have been furloughed, especially since we have no UBI bill passed.

My God....

This.

I live in a state that is heavily dependent on the hospitality industry.  When you get away from the corporate investors in Disney, Hotels, Resorts, etc, you get to the incomes of the smaller hotels, motels, and independent restaurants, and the workers in all of these places, including servers, drivers, entertainers, etc.  And by "entertainers", I'm talking about a wide number of folks who are NOT famous and NOT celebrities.  Think of how many "entertainers" work at Walt Disney World.  (Employees at Disney are "cast members".  Those who work with the public are "onstage", while those who are support staff are "backstage".)  These are NOT the 1%.  These are working people who need this to live. 

I've been deep in thought on a lot of things this week.  One conclusion I've come to is that the Nanny State that many Democrats advocate is going to be anything but "liberal".  I think it's fair to say that we're seeing that right now.  There's no regard for the individual Constitutional liberties and rights of others on the part of these Governors who seem to enjoy issuing restrictive lockdown orders, even if the science doesn't clearly justify it.  (And science is showing that the fastest number of new deaths from COVID-19 in NY are from folks staying at home.)

I'm thinking about a lot of things.  One thing I'm thinking about is the that today's Democratic Governors are something other than liberal.

Are you opposed to either of these plans?

Hawley's worker rehire plan

Jayapal's paycheck guarantee plan

Choosing between in-person work and a lockdown where people are unemployed is absolutely a false choice. Both parties have people suggesting plans to keep people on payrolls and cover other costs (e.g., paying rent/property maintenance costs, keeping employee health care) while not requiring them to go back to work. Do either of these plans sound appealing to you?

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1258782599918637057

What an egregious take.

Re-opening is primarily to benefit the 1%?? Have you seen the stock market lately? its up on the year. Its pushing new highs again. The 1% are doing just fine and most have plenty of savings to get them through this. The people who need to go back to work are the ones living paycheck to paycheck. People working jobs in the service industry or hospitality industry who have been furloughed, especially since we have no UBI bill passed.

My God....

This.

I live in a state that is heavily dependent on the hospitality industry.  When you get away from the corporate investors in Disney, Hotels, Resorts, etc, you get to the incomes of the smaller hotels, motels, and independent restaurants, and the workers in all of these places, including servers, drivers, entertainers, etc.  And by "entertainers", I'm talking about a wide number of folks who are NOT famous and NOT celebrities.  Think of how many "entertainers" work at Walt Disney World.  (Employees at Disney are "cast members".  Those who work with the public are "onstage", while those who are support staff are "backstage".)  These are NOT the 1%.  These are working people who need this to live.  

I've been deep in thought on a lot of things this week.  One conclusion I've come to is that the Nanny State that many Democrats advocate is going to be anything but "liberal".  I think it's fair to say that we're seeing that right now.  There's no regard for the individual Constitutional liberties and rights of others on the part of these Governors who seem to enjoy issuing restrictive lockdown orders, even if the science doesn't clearly justify it.  (And science is showing that the fastest number of new deaths from COVID-19 in NY are from folks staying at home.)

I'm thinking about a lot of things.  One thing I'm thinking about is the that today's Democratic Governors are something other than liberal.

Are you opposed to either of these plans?

Hawley's worker rehire plan

Jayapal's paycheck guarantee plan

Choosing between in-person work and a lockdown where people are unemployed is absolutely a false choice. Both parties have people suggesting plans to keep people on payrolls and cover other costs (e.g., paying rent/property maintenance costs, keeping employee health care) while not requiring them to go back to work. Do either of these plans sound appealing to you?

It’s not a false choice.  You’re either on the payroll creating profit for your employer or you’re unemployed.  Everything else is only a temporary, unsustainable-in-the-long-term stopgap measure.

Yes, if only the federal government had simultaneous programs in place which gave money to employers to maintain operations and pay workers and shored up other gaps in people's paychecks with some sort of... check, perhaps which provided some amount of stimulus money.

I don't understand why people trot out this point about temporary programs. Of course they are designed to be temporary stopgaps, as is nearly the entirety of the response to the virus. Nobody is arguing otherwise. Likewise, nobody is arguing that we continue to mass-assemble masks for perpetuity. What do you think you are proving?

You can oppose government aid on ideological grounds; that has its merits. But be honest about it; don't concern troll about people's household income, because there are obvious temporary workarounds to keep these people employed and receiving money. To do otherwise is absolutely a false choice in the sense that there are literally several proposed alternatives.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Today just had by far the most tests of any day so far. Yet still, Worldometers may show only about 17,000 new cases today, if that. Percentage of positive cases tumbled to about 4.5% today.

It was still a good day, but the testing number was increased because New Jersey dumped a bunch of backlogged negative tests.

If you knock 100,000 off the number of tests, it's still by far the best day since March.

Ehhh... I'd be very cautious comparing positive test results across a span of two months. Pretty good odds that the March test results were a self-selected sample that's more likely to test positive (e.g., because they were exhibiting symptoms), i.e., not a random sample. Tests now are more likely to resemble a random sample.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Haven't really researched it tbh, but is there any actual proof that the virus is significantly reduced in warm weather? I mean, the thing is spreading just fine in Brazil, Ecuador and Peru for instance.

Yes, just look at South Africa and Australia, and to an extent India. Also, look at how well several southern states are doing (Florida, Texas, Georgia, Alabama) compared to their governor's loose strategies.

This is pedantic but there's a separability issue here. I don't think it's warm weather per se but instead it's just much harder to have the virus transmitted (and persisting on free surfaces) outside than inside, and places with nicer weather mean people spend more time outside.

I'm predicting that once it becomes too hot for people to spend extended time outside (thinking of places like Texas and Arizona) people will move inside where viral transmission will be more likely.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

I'm very encouraged to start seeing a semblance of normality resume in the Jackson suburbs.  Crowded streets/shops, restaurants seem relatively busy (still at 50% though), and less people choosing to wear face masks.

Meanwhile, King Emperor Chokwe A. Lumumba has decided that restaurants/gyms in the City of Jackson can go ahead and reopen tomorrow, but he's implementing a new citywide curfew as well as a mask mandate to go into effect over the weekend.  If he believes this to be the right course of action, where were these mandates 2-4 weeks ago?  In a press conference announcing the end of the city's SAHO, he said he was only allowing reopening so the city wouldn't become an "island".  So the mayor is opening the city while simultaneously chastising the Republican suburbs for doing the same; a nakedly cowardly move to have his political cake and eat it too.  His motivations appear misplaced.

Moreover, I've been increasingly discouraged by the continuing/escalation of rhetoric (mostly on local social media, but also parroted in the media) that any relaxation of social distancing or a personal decision by individuals to not wear PPE is "going to kill grandma" or whatever.  That was never the point of social distancing.  The point was never to stop new cases, but to prevent the healthcare system from being overwhelmed (which now seems like an extinct possibility).  Under both curves, grandma still probably gets COVID-19 and may die.  The hospital system is as ready as its ever going to be, so for that reason it's time to end the lockdown.

The point of the lockdowns was to prevent the medical care system from being overwhelmed. The point of social distancing is the prevent infections and save lives.

So fine, end the forced lockdowns, but please stay home anyway as much as possible, wear masks, and maintain 6 feet. 😳

Yeah I'm a little confused by this as well.

People still die or accumulate life-altering injuries (like lung scarring) whether the hospital system is overwhelmed or not. It's great that the hospital system didn't get overwhelmed and is pretty unlikely to be swamped in the future, but that's not really an excuse to go back to "normal". Preserving a functioning hospital system was not an end unto itself; it was a goal in the service of minimizing risk of death. Another way to reduce death risk is to reduce infection risk.

I'm much more in favor of masks than I am lockdowns at this point, but advocating for abandoning masks seems like crazy talk to me. We've seen what happens when there's rampant infection; not only does it cause a huge public health risk but it fundamentally undermines the public's confidence in other people in daily interactions, the functioning of basic public services (e.g., busses in Denver have been way below capacity for two months), and the basic safety of public and many private spaces. This isn't speculation... this is something we've seen happen over the last two months. You just don't want a situation with a March-like case spike where you have no idea who does and doesn't have the virus.

edit: worth mentioning as well there are other things you want to minimize in addition to deaths... people getting infected often lowers their productivity (especially if you have a severe case) and, although we obviously can't know the longer-term implications, we have evidence of longer-term health impacts in recovered people. "Killing grandma" while a good caricature isn't the only objective.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Yippy skippy. The Centers for Disease Control recommend wearing them.

After the CDC rejected the WHO's tests and used its own botched tests instead, I don't place very much faith in the CDC.

I just love how instead of making sure we had enough tests, everyone just resorted to authoritarian measures instead.

Most of the people ordering lockdowns had very, very minimal ability to increase testing capacity.

I'm still much more confident in the CDC than I am in the opinions of anybody on this forum.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Yippy skippy. The Centers for Disease Control recommend wearing them.

After the CDC rejected the WHO's tests and used its own botched tests instead, I don't place very much faith in the CDC.

I just love how instead of making sure we had enough tests, everyone just resorted to authoritarian measures instead.

The WHO is a puppet of the Chinese government.

Citation needed.

WHO has been very... deferential to China but that's not an excuse for keyboard warriors to dismiss their public health advice wholesale.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

5/17 (Today): <Sunday>

• Cases: 1,526,842 (+21,809 | Δ Change: ↑2.40% | Σ Increase: ↑1.44%)
• Deaths: 90,973 (+1,462 | Δ Change: ↑41.67% | Σ Increase: ↑1.45%)

What's up with these numbers, Sunday is usually the lowest day for deaths.

Deaths are always lagging, so they could be just catching up still. The case increase is not too much, basically flat.

Yeah but typically coroners' offices are closed on Sundays. This was true during the peaking in April.

Is there a state that did a dump today? I didn't see state-by-state numbers before they wiped the numbers so I didn't get to check for anything out of the ordinary.

Also I see Worldometer only reporting ~860 new deaths on the 17th.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Reminder, as always, that directly comparing testing rates in March and May is not straightforward because tests aren't administered at random, and the sampling distribution for who gets tested likely changes as the test availability changes.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

In Colorado, suicides in Mar-Apr 2020 is down from 2019, while calls to suicide hotlines are up.

Source (Denver Post)

Suicides in Colorado dropped 40% during first 2 months of coronavirus pandemic — but calls to crisis line spiked

[...]

Suicides have steadily increased in recent years, rising from 1,175 deaths in 2017 to 1,287 deaths in 2019, according to death certificate data from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

But so far, suicides are down this year, most notably in March and April, when there were 139 such deaths, compared to the 233 deaths during the same months in 2019, according to the data.

As such, there is no sign yet that suicides are contributing to the 20% increase in overall deaths Colorado is experiencing either directly or indirectly because of the coronavirus pandemic.

[...]

While suicide rates are down, experts, caution that individuals are still experiencing mental health issues, such as depression and anxiety.

Colorado Crisis Services fielded 39,770 calls and text messages from people seeking help in March and April, up from the 26,928 calls and text messages during the same months last year.

[...]

There's also some prediction in here about this rate increasing in the next months but I don't think there's very much reason to think that will happen until October and into the winter, if at all.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Facts.

“For the first time, the CDC has attempted to offer a real estimate of the overall death rate for COVID-19, and under its most likely scenario, the number is 0.26%. Officials estimate a 0.4% fatality rate among those who are symptomatic and project a 35% rate of asymptomatic cases among those infected, which drops the overall infection fatality rate (IFR) to just 0.26% — almost exactly where Stanford researchers pegged it a month ago.”

“We destroyed our entire country and suspended democracy all for a lie, and these people perpetrated the unscientific degree of panic. Will they ever admit the grave consequences of their error?”

https://www.conservativereview.com/news/horowitz-cdc-confirms-remarkably-low-coronavirus-death-rate-media/

I thought at least 80% of cases were asymptomatic.  Why would they estimate such a larger % of symptomatic cases, while also estimating a much lower IFR than previous studies have concluded.  FWIW, that IFR estimate seems implausibly low based on the serology studies in NY and Spain.

I haven't read the whole conservative review piece but the fact they cite the Ionnidis/Stanford antibody study makes me skeptical. That article has been thoroughly discredited on several fronts and should basically be considered garbage.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Facts.

“For the first time, the CDC has attempted to offer a real estimate of the overall death rate for COVID-19, and under its most likely scenario, the number is 0.26%. Officials estimate a 0.4% fatality rate among those who are symptomatic and project a 35% rate of asymptomatic cases among those infected, which drops the overall infection fatality rate (IFR) to just 0.26% — almost exactly where Stanford researchers pegged it a month ago.”

“We destroyed our entire country and suspended democracy all for a lie, and these people perpetrated the unscientific degree of panic. Will they ever admit the grave consequences of their error?”

https://www.conservativereview.com/news/horowitz-cdc-confirms-remarkably-low-coronavirus-death-rate-media/

I thought at least 80% of cases were asymptomatic.  Why would they estimate such a larger % of symptomatic cases, while also estimating a much lower IFR than previous studies have concluded.  FWIW, that IFR estimate seems implausibly low based on the serology studies in NY and Spain.

I haven't read the whole conservative review piece but the fact they cite the Ionnidis/Stanford antibody study makes me skeptical. That article has been thoroughly discredited on several fronts and should basically be considered garbage.

If you read the linked CDC report, it says their IFR estimates are just based on “data received by CDC prior to 4/29/2020”.  They estimate that 10% of the population (33 million people) have already been infected.  As much as I would like to believe we are that close to herd immunity, it just doesn’t seem possible to me.  The only states or countries that have estimated an infection rate close to that high through serology have a much higher death rate.

Yeah also worth mentioning that even if the CDC reports a most likely symptomatic CFR of 0.4%, they also give an estimate of uncertainty that says that it could be anywhere between 0.2% and 1%.

Their calculation going from symptomatic to total CFR also assumes that exhibiting symptoms doesn't depend on your age at all. Maybe this is true but I would find it surprising.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1264312206914719745?s=20

Run the front page about the 40 million displaced American workers, and the extra hundreds of thousands who will die from deaths of despair, while at the same time casting a successive lost generation to dumbass economic policies. Yeah, I’ll continue to wait.

Anyone who is affluent and/or under the age of 20 cannot possibly understand the severe economic ramifications we now face. The irony is, those under 20 will be the most negatively affected by this in the decade to come.

Dawg I posted an article suggesting this is not happening (at least in CO) literally at the top of this page.

Man you are really grasping at straws here if not flat out lying.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Seeing reports that several states are reporting combined antibody and PCR/viral tests. This is bad for a couple of reasons, but some people are claiming it will artificially lower the reported positive rate. I don't really understand why this would be unless there's some very big difference in who is being tested.

Seems to me like if anything combining these tests would artificially raise the positive rate, because antibody tests are essentially a record of ever having been infected while a viral test is only a record of being infected right now. So combining these tests and preventing them as viral tests would suggest that there are more infections happening right now/the last couple weeks than there really are.

Can anybody help me understand why these would lower the positive rate and not inflate it?

In general I think it's good for transparency to report the tests separately and it will be helpful for assessing the overall accuracy of the tests (e.g. accounting for the fact that antibody tests have a higher false positive rate). I'm afraid though that the testing has been administered and reported in such a way that large-scale and systematic statistical corrections to get any sort of population-wide inference (like many people are trying to do with the Stanford and NYC serology studies) are going to be fruitless no matter what happens.

Pretty bizarre that the US could hit 100.000 deaths exactly tomorrow, Memorial Day.

It's possible but a lot of coroners take the weekend off and Memorial Day is a federal holiday, so many will probably also take Monday off. But it will definitely happen on or by Tuesday.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Fortunately, I live in a place where people have brains and have largely given up on social distancing out of fear for a virus that is basically the flu in terms of death rate.

lmao this is false jesus christ

No offense but it honestly infuriates me that people can be this innumerate.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

You don't need to isolate all contacts. You test contacts, and isolate the positive contacts.

There are feasibility issues in tracking down and testing all contacts, but it's an excellent starting point for building a system which tracks the spread of the virus. Perfection is the goal but settling for suboptimality is still much much better than relying on people volunteering themselves for testing at drive-thrus.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Snake's post is weird and bad for other reasons but he is right in one sense: people should really be asking themselves why states that opened up early (like GA) haven't seen NY-like explosions in cases like many people were predicting, and what we can learn from that.

Like, at this point I'm fairly confident that stuff like Lake of the Ozarks isn't going to cause case explosions the same way that the Florida beaches being open hasn't lead to explosions. It's bad because it's slowing the decline in cases but it's not worth being hysterically upset over.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

https://twitter.com/brithume/status/1265045009323241472

That's actually badass.

Biden should take the debate stage dressed as a plague doctor and see what happens in the polls. Thanks to negative polarization, it's not like it'll hurt.

If he does that he'll be unironically dragged by this man and his supporters.


(youtube, current affairs, daily beast)

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

No it's called people who want to save lives vs people who care more about going to a football game then protecting people around them!

When did I say anything about football games? I could care less about the football games.

We have to have ideas that are realistic and workable.

I would also add that people aren't protesting against or criticizing the lockdown orders because they "care about football games" or "want to get a haircut." Many people's livelihoods are on the line if the economy is not reopened in due order, and this is to say nothing of the demonstrated psychological impacts which this is having for many. Essential surgeries have been delayed; the education of millions of children has been negatively affected; and unemployment rates have climbed to unprecedented levels. Bringing about the end of lockdown orders will alleviate the stresses that many are dealing with right now.

Except ending lockdowns isn't like flipping a switch on economic activity. The lockdowns aren't, nor were they ever, the primary thing slowing down spending; it was the virus itself.

The maddening thing about the discourse on this topic is we have ample evidence that economic activity was falling in early March, weeks before any shutdowns were issued. People, especially older people, immuno-compromised people, or anyone living with a person with those conditions, are going to change their behavior when confronted with a generational threat like the virus.

In the most generous interpretation I can think of, people attribute all of the economic loss to the shutdowns (or to the Chinese, Trump, governors, etc.) because bad events are easier to be upset about when they are human caused. But, sometimes bad things just happen. We're in the middle of what is an unprecedented bad thing. There could have been very different responses which would have changed at the margins, but most of the damage we saw in March and April were inevitable because of the nature of the threat itself.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

The stories have been mostly separate, but I'm worried all these protests/riots could fuel some big spikes in cases or even outbreaks.

Going to be very interesting to see "blacks only have higher rates of infection because they were out rioting" discourse in two weeks.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

The public health response is what happens when PhD holders in this country are totally captured by and face sanction for failing to adhere to ideological wokeness.

edit: as an example of this, a post showed up in my twitter feed this evening (I will not link it) where a PhD student tried to dogpile one of her colleagues for focusing on planning for a post-COVID department rather than "addressing systematic racism". This is the language of people who stand much more to lose by misaligning their priorities in public than by advocating for the wrong thing.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

The public health response is what happens when PhD holders in this country are totally captured by and face sanction for failing to adhere to ideological wokeness.

edit: as an example of this, a post showed up in my twitter feed this evening (I will not link it) where a PhD student tried to dogpile one of her colleagues for focusing on planning for a post-COVID department rather than "addressing systematic racism". This is the language of people who stand much more to lose by misaligning their priorities in public than by advocating for the wrong thing.

What kind of PhD student was this (degree)?

I don't remember but she was at UC Davis, so one of the biology fields is pretty likely.