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

[Landslide Lyndon]

https://twitter.com/TedrickG/status/1277624816569184256

[Landslide Lyndon]

https://twitter.com/BrendanNyhan/status/1277699608777568259

[Badger]

They have a chip on their shoulder because they're "a grown-ass man/woman" and "someone is trying to tell me what to do." 

"It's a free country!  I have rights!!!"

I've made clear my opposition to mask mandates imposed by government, but have also emphasized my support for mask mandates imposed by businesses. As I've explained before, most of the employees at my job were not wearing masks before they were mandated to do so by the Governor's order back in April. One of my co-workers has constantly complained about it, says that he is "fine", and that he doesn't need to wear a mask. He goes maskless whenever he is not on the clock, and has it down much of the time even when he is on the clock. I saw another employee who had a scarf around his neck, but was maskless and interacting with customers. Many of these people are mental Neanderthals.

The whole macho complex surrounding these people is baffling. Attention seeking at its absolute worst.

I don't see it that way at all. I think it's that these people are literally stupid enough to think that they know better than the government and medical professionals, and they're also too simple-minded to question and challenge their own ideas and consider modifying them.

And it's not just people who are considered "uneducated".  I've seen blue-collar-looking guys in dusty construction-company t-shirts and blue jeans who are properly wearing masks and appearing to take this seriously. 

These are all things I've recently heard uttered by friends, most of whom are pursuing professional degrees:

* "Oh it's okay.  My boyfriend hasn't been anywhere in the past couple of weeks."

* "If I get it, I get it.  I'll be fine.

* "I'm actually hoping to get it just to have that immunity.

* "We've been hugging and standing closer than six feet for a while now.  I think we're okay.

And checking my Instagram this morning, there were at least ten stories (time-limited pics/videos for the uninitiated) posted by med students, dentistry students, pharmacy students, nursing students -- "educated" individuals who should know better -- eating at outdoor establishments and taking group pics where they're piled on top of each other, leaning against each other, hugging, etc. with captions like "MISSED THESE PEOPLE" and "FINALLY!!!"

I'm really not trying to be high-and-mighty or preachy.  After all, it was my own stupidity and lack of safety that led to me contracting COVID-19.  There's practically no issue with eating outdoors and enjoying the summer weather so long as businesses observe proper social distancing standards. 

But people need to do their parts, too.

Its certainly understandable. Just remember, there are a lot of "health experts" that abandoned any claim to legitimacy by flipflopping on the appropriateness of protests during the pandemic. One week they were yelling about terrorists killing granny in Michigan for protesting the lockdown the next week a large gaggle of idiot "health experts" said "racism is JUST as deadly as Coronavirus" and you were literally "violent" if you didn't pour into the streets for mass gatherings. I never had much faith in what "health experts" said before this all started but the incredulity of some others in this thread that more and more normies are ignoring the "experts" after months of garbage wolf-crying seems dense. Trust must be earned and the "health experts" have really schat the bed the past few months. I was legally prohibited from attending 3 different funerals and months of church. My grandfather is dying of cancer and the hospital still wont let us visit. My dad has chronic medical problems and the doctors are still hesitant to schedule his appointments. I have tons of friends unemployed. And this past month the experts all but demanded everyone break the rules that caused all of this and go out and destroy public art. If they now try to reimpose lockdowns after their month of politically-motivated advice, you really think most of us are going to give a damn what some moron in a white coat says?

Ah yes, more anti-scientist rhetoric.
Yes, many healthcare workers did support the protests, but many also acknowledged full well that cases would increase because of the protests. Their logic was that this problem is so harmful to black Americans, that it is worth the extra spread. I actually disagreed, but thats it’s own story.
Regardless, not all doctors:healthcare experts did support the protests, and a large number of those who didn’t were too scared (because of likely mob “justice”) to speak up.

The people in white coats know more about the virus than you do, and while the protests were part of the problem, the rapid reopenings, Americans being idiots and having more relative mobility than literally any other current World hotspot (see Apple mobility trends) and the lack of mask mandates also contributed.

I don't believe that anywhere near the majority of doctors or public health officials had anything to say about the Floyd protests, really.

The problem is the media class, who amplified the COVID fearmongering before doing a complete 180 to downplay virus concerns as protests started.  Now that public attention regarding the protests has started to wane, they're back to shrieking about masks keeping schools closed.  Everything they do is to paint Trump and Republicans in the worst light possible.   

In fairness, I was pleasantly surprised to see how almost ubiquitous mask-wearing was among protesters. There were even at least reasonable albeit inconsistent attempts at Social distancing. Not much less successful than I saw at say the grocery store the past few weeks.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

I was interested in modeling how much of a lag there is between case numbers and death numbers in the US, so I plugged all of the case and death data into Stata and ran a regression, along with a linear time trend and fixed effects for days of the week.  The DV here is daily deaths, and there are five IVs related to cases: the seven-day case average on that day, and on the days 7, 14, 21, and 28 days earlier.  I've pasted the results below for days ranging from April 1 to June 28.

This will be inscrutable if you're not used to State data.  But the upshot is that the lagged effect of cases on deaths is pretty clear: 1-2 weeks (specifically the average of cases from 7-13 days earlier). The "avgminus7" variable has a large and significant effect, predicting an additional death for every 17 additional cases in the average one week earlier.  The average of the current week, along with the 2, 3, and 4, weeks earlier, all have a small and insignificant effect.  On top of this, deaths tend to drop about 15 per day, so an increase in 255 cases per day will actually result in a constant number of deaths, not an increase.

reg deaths days avgcases avgminus7 avgminus14 avgminus21 avgminus28 i.day if days>31

      Source |       SS           df       MS      Number of obs   =        88
-------------+----------------------------------   F(12, 75)       =     76.62
       Model |  32413040.9        12  2701086.74   Prob > F        =    0.0000
    Residual |  2643942.96        75  35252.5728   R-squared       =    0.9246
-------------+----------------------------------   Adj R-squared   =    0.9125
       Total |  35056983.8        87  402953.837   Root MSE        =    187.76

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      deaths |      Coef.   Std. Err.      t    P>|t|     [95% Conf. Interval]
-------------+----------------------------------------------------------------
        days |  -15.10064   1.274004   -11.85   0.000    -17.63858   -12.56269
    avgcases |  -.0038266   .0089625    -0.43   0.671    -.0216808    .0140275
   avgminus7 |    .058964   .0141994     4.15   0.000     .0306774    .0872506
  avgminus14 |   .0049107   .0153738     0.32   0.750    -.0257156    .0355369
  avgminus21 |    .002581   .0134527     0.19   0.848    -.0242181      .02938
  avgminus28 |  -.0053081   .0078224    -0.68   0.499    -.0208912    .0102749
             |
         day |
          2  |   152.0686   76.66254     1.98   0.051    -.6509597    304.7882
          3  |   826.6271   76.69768    10.78   0.000     673.8375    979.4167
          4  |    818.107   75.29342    10.87   0.000     668.1148    968.0992
          5  |   675.9876   75.26829     8.98   0.000     526.0454    825.9297
          6  |   595.3323   75.31052     7.91   0.000     445.3061    745.3586
          7  |   404.5534    75.4019     5.37   0.000     254.3451    554.7617
             |
       _cons |   549.2656    197.128     2.79   0.007     156.5665    941.9647
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The graph below shows the predicted deaths generated from the model against actual deaths (starting from April 1). I think it fits pretty well.  The exception is that because I am constraining a constant effect onto each weekday, the weekday effects are too small when deaths are exceptionally high and a bit too large when deaths are much lower.  

[Gass3268]

Arizona is shutting things down again:

https://twitter.com/zekejmiller/status/1277730132074156032?s=21

[It’s so Joever]

Covid survivors should be given free healthcare, because it is our fault as a country that they got sick in the first place. Maybe that will incentivize the conservatives to wear some damn masks.

[YE]

Arizona is shutting things down again:

https://twitter.com/zekejmiller/status/1277730132074156032?s=21

Probably about 10 days too late.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

But the upshot is that the lagged effect of cases on deaths is pretty clear: 1-2 weeks (specifically the average of cases from 7-13 days earlier).

...

The graph below shows the predicted deaths generated from the model against actual deaths (starting from April 1). I think it fits pretty well.  The exception is that because I am constraining a constant effect onto each weekday, the weekday effects are too small when deaths are exceptionally high and a bit too large when deaths are much lower.  

https://i.imgur.com/LPUY62j.png

Nice to see some effort put into some statistical analysis - well done!

There are, however, some important omitted variables. That would certainly include some that you yourself have emphasized in earlier posts - 1) improvements in medical care that lower the fatality rate and 2) increased testing detecting more cases and 3) reduced median age of the newer cases as opposed to the ones from March/April. All of these would tend to lower the ratio of deaths to confirmed cases in more recent observations as compared to earlier observations.

Because all 3 of those omitted variables would lower the ratio of deaths to confirmed cases in more recent time periods, that would seem to imply that if those were taken into account, the guesstimated lag time you would find would be longer than the one you came up with from this regression that omitted them. So that would mean that your results don't really suggest that the true lag period is 1-2 weeks, they suggest that the lag period is longer than 1-2 weeks by some unknown amount.

It would be hard/impossible to get reliable data to quantify how much the "true" fatality rate has declined as a result of better treatment. It would also probably be hard (though theoretically doable if you had median age data for each day and could make some assumptions about the age distribution of cases) to take into account the impact of the median age on fatality rate. However, you could fairly easily include the positivity rate as a variable indicating how much testing has improved.

So if you feel like adding it in, I wonder, what happens to the regression if you include the positivity rate? I haven't thought about it carefully, but it also seems at first glance like that would actually be linear in its effects on the lag (alternatively to the positivity rate, you could include tests as a variable, which seems like it ought to have the same effect as including the positivity rate, due to the formula for positivity rate being calculated from tests and cases - and if you were to include both, you should get multicollinearity).

So does including the positivity rate (or alternatively tests) as a variable raise or lower the lag that you would estimate (I would expect it would raise the lag time)?

If you had data to take into account changes in median age and changes in quality of care/availability of new treatments, those should have effects in the same direction.



Also Re an earlier post:

If you are just saying the 7-day average rose from yesterday, this is tautological (it will always rise when the week-over-week daily number rises).

True, I wasn't thinking in those terms, but now that I think about it that is obviously correct.

[Penn_Quaker_Girl]

Arizona is shutting things down again:

https://twitter.com/zekejmiller/status/1277730132074156032?s=21

Probably about 10 days too late.

Water parks are bad enough without the pandemic.  Giardia, cryptosporodium, N. fowlerii-- all the friendly water-born parasites!

[YE]

https://twitter.com/govsisolak/status/1277727263673335808?s=21

[GeorgiaModerate]

https://twitter.com/ericgeller/status/1277693321037611013

[Progressive Pessimist]

https://twitter.com/ericgeller/status/1277693321037611013

As if I needed another reason to be increasingly embarrassed for both of these countries.

[Dr. Arch]

The updated numbers for COVID-19 in the U.S. are in for 6/29 per: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

I'm keeping track of these updates daily and updating at the end of the day, whenever all states finish reporting for that day.

Δ Change: Day-by-day Growth or Decline or COVID-19 Spread/Deaths.

• IE: Are we flattening the curve enough?

Σ Increase: A day's contribution to overall percentage growth of COVID-19 cases/deaths.

• IE: What's the overall change in the total?

<Last Numbers for 3/26-3/28 in this Post>
<Last Numbers for 3/29-4/4 in this Post>
<Last Numbers for 4/5-4/11 in this Post>
<Last Numbers for 4/12-4/18 in this Post>
<Last Numbers for 4/19-4/25 in this post>
<Last Numbers for 4/26-5/2 in this post>
<Last Numbers for 5/3-5/9 in this post>
<Last Numbers for 5/10-5/16 in this post>
<Last Numbers for 5/17-5/23 in this post>
<Last Numbers for 5/24-5/30 in this post>
<Last Numbers for 5/31-6/6 in this post>
<Last Numbers for 6/7-6/13 in this post>

6/14: <Sunday>

• Cases: 2,162,144 (+19,920 | Δ Change: ↓21.27% | Σ Increase: ↑0.93%)
• Deaths: 117,853 (+326 | Δ Change: ↓53.56% | Σ Increase: ↑0.28%)

6/15:

• Cases: 2,182,950 (+20,806 | Δ Change: ↑4.45% | Σ Increase: ↑0.96%)
• Deaths: 118,283 (+430 | Δ Change: ↑31.90% | Σ Increase: ↑0.36%)

6/16:

• Cases: 2,208,400 (+25,450 | Δ Change: ↑22.32% | Σ Increase: ↑1.17%)
• Deaths: 119,132 (+849 | Δ Change: ↑97.44% | Σ Increase: ↑0.72%)

6/17:

• Cases: 2,234,471 (+26,071 | Δ Change: ↑2.44% | Σ Increase: ↑1.18%)
• Deaths: 119,941 (+809 | Δ Change: ↓4.71% | Σ Increase: ↑0.68%)

6/18:

• Cases: 2,263,651 (+29,180 | Δ Change: ↑11.93% | Σ Increase: ↑1.31%)
• Deaths: 120,688 (+747 | Δ Change: ↓7.66% | Σ Increase: ↑0.62%)

6/19:

• Cases: 2,297,190 (+33,539 | Δ Change: ↑14.94% | Σ Increase: ↑1.48%)
• Deaths: 121,407 (+719 | Δ Change: ↓3.75% | Σ Increase: ↑0.60%)

6/20:

• Cases: 2,330,578 (+33,388 | Δ Change: ↓0.45% | Σ Increase: ↑1.45%)
• Deaths: 121,980 (+573 | Δ Change: ↓20.31% | Σ Increase: ↑0.47%)

6/21: <Sunday>

• Cases: 2,356,657 (+26,079 | Δ Change: ↓21.89% | Σ Increase: ↑1.12%)
• Deaths: 122,247 (+267 | Δ Change: ↓53.40% | Σ Increase: ↑0.22%)

6/22:

• Cases: 2,388,153 (+31,496 | Δ Change: ↑20.77% | Σ Increase: ↑1.34%)
• Deaths: 122,610 (+363 | Δ Change: ↑35.96% | Σ Increase: ↑0.30%)

6/23:

• Cases: 2,424,168 (+36,015 | Δ Change: ↑14.35% | Σ Increase: ↑1.51%)
• Deaths: 123,473 (+863 | Δ Change: ↑137.74% | Σ Increase: ↑0.70%)
• Death toll inflated by older counts recently dumped by DE

6/24:

• Cases: 2,462,554 (+38,386 | Δ Change: ↑6.18% | Σ Increase: ↑1.58%)
• Deaths: 124,281 (+808 | Δ Change: ↓6.37% | Σ Increase: ↑0.65%)

6/25:

• Cases: 2,504,588 (+42,034 | Δ Change: ↑9.50% | Σ Increase: ↑1.71%)
• Deaths: 126,780 (+2,499 | Δ Change: ↑209.28% | Σ Increase: ↑2.01%)
• Death toll inflated by older counts recently dumped by NJ

6/26:

• Cases: 2,552,940 (+48,352 | Δ Change: ↑15.03% | Σ Increase: ↑1.93%)
• Deaths: 127,640 (+860 | Δ Change: ↓65.59% | Σ Increase: ↑0.68%)
• Death Δ Change affected by older counts recently dumped by NJ on 6/25

6/27:

• Cases: 2,596,537 (+43,597 | Δ Change: ↓9.83% | Σ Increase: ↑1.71%)
• Deaths: 128,152 (+512 | Δ Change: ↓40.47% | Σ Increase: ↑0.40%)

6/28 (Yesterday): <Sunday>

• Cases: 2,637,077 (+40,540 | Δ Change: ↓7.01% | Σ Increase: ↑1.56%)
• Deaths: 128,437 (+285 | Δ Change: ↓44.34% | Σ Increase: ↑0.22%)

6/29 (Today):

• Cases: 2,681,802 (+44,725 | Δ Change: ↑10.32% | Σ Increase: ↑1.70%)
• Deaths: 128,779 (+342 | Δ Change: ↑20.00% | Σ Increase: ↑0.27%)

[Stand With Israel. Crush Hamas]

Those week-to-week Sunday and Monday numbers are definitely giving some reason for optimism, if we can keep the hotspots at the moment from snowballing.

[Bandit3 the Worker]

For what it's worth, I've noticed that any time the number of known cases in a state or county gets to about 1% of the state or county's total population, the new cases start cratering.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

For what it's worth, I've noticed that any time the number of known cases in a state or county gets to about 1% of the state or county's total population, the new cases start cratering.

I believe Arizona passed this threshold yesterday, so you’ve got a good test of your theory to look forward to this week.

[Bandit3 the Worker]

For what it's worth, I've noticed that any time the number of known cases in a state or county gets to about 1% of the state or county's total population, the new cases start cratering.

I believe Arizona passed this threshold yesterday, so you’ve got a good test of your theory to look forward to this week.

I think Los Angeles County is about to pass it too. Maybe Miami-Dade too.

[Calthrina950]

Arizona is shutting things down again:

https://twitter.com/zekejmiller/status/1277730132074156032?s=21

This is certainly a damning indictment of Ducey's response to the virus. It should also be clear at this point that the weather makes no difference with coronavirus. Whether if it is hot or not, it will spread, and mitigation measures must remain consistent. Arizona has had temperatures over 100 degrees for weeks now, and yet look at the situation they are now in.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/1277794191259635713

[Calthrina950]

https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/1277794191259635713

Given the current trajectory with the virus, do you think school districts will be able to resume operations in August/September? Or is it possible that online learning will be the norm again?

[Dr. Arch]

https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/1277794191259635713

Given the current trajectory with the virus, do you think school districts will be able to resume operations in August/September? Or is it possible that online learning will be the norm again?

Well, I can't speak for school districts, but, at least for the fall semester, UW-Madison has opted to go almost entirely online, with very limited and rare in-person instruction/services.

[T'Chenka]

These states that are shutting down again had better have learned their lesson about "saving the economy" and minimizing the "authoritarianism". The more times they open and shut, the worse off the economy will be. Close early and stay closed until the right time without rushing it.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

These states that are shutting down again had better have learned their lesson about "saving the economy" and minimizing the "authoritarianism". The more times they open and shut, the worse off the economy will be. Close early and stay closed until the right time without rushing it.

How do you know when the time is right?

[jimrtex]

Let's assume that this trend continues for another day. There will be 9 tests with 5000% positivity the next day.

Are you familiar with the expression GIGO? Garbage In, Garbage Out.

That's your model you're throwing garbage into. There's no reason to think the trend will continue or that it would continue at a linear rate of increase.

There is no trend.

[GeorgiaModerate]

BBC: New swine flu strain with pandemic potential found in China.

I really hate this year.