COVID-29 # 24 (Required Parts are Highlighted)

Was this class that I said on Monday that all it's going to take is for a basketball player to test positive?

Iran is going to attempt a Wuhan-style quarantine for the entire country, starting tomorrow. Keep in mind that Italy's quarantine is more limited, and we're not sure yet if it will work. No one knows if Iran, a larger, more populous, but also more rural country than Italy, and poorer than both Italy and China, can pull this off.

Meanwhile, in China:

Folks in the west, it's scary to see the epidemic coming & your politicians aren't prepared, but pls refrain from concluding that govts like China are doing a better job because they are authoritarian. 1/5

— Maya Wang 王松莲 (@wang_maya) March 13, 2020

The news is good from China, except there's a lot of people on the ground saying it's not so. Potentially offensive. You've been warned; having said that, do not interpret my reposting this as support for U.S. responses either.

As per usual, Megan McArdle is smarter than everyone. I have saved her piece entitled "When a danger is growing exponentially, everything looks fine until it doesn’t" to the G drive (for some reason Proquest finds it under her name, but produces a document listing the wrong author. Here is an article covering most of the post by the Italian doctor she mentions. If you do not understand the lily pad analogy, if you have a pond that you care about, lily pads are trouble because eventually they cover the surface and kill all the plants under the surface, so you have to pull them before they get out of control.

There's a lot of valid criticism going on about the estimate of 100K infections in Ohio. They mostly amount to it probably being an unrealistic extrapolation to a point rather than an interval estimate. For yourself, think about how long it took China to get to that many with 100 times the people as Ohio.

About 6 weeks ago I posted an image of Shanghai Disneyland closed. Now they all are in the U.S. and Europe.

Here's one of those graphs showing cases by country on a log scale.

Note that the U.S. is on this one, and we are right in the middle of the group heading for Italy numbers (I am not sure Iran and South Korea aren't special cases, but Italy seems an awful lot like us). DO NOTE THAT I HAVE POSTED CHARTS LIKE THESE HERE, AND BEFORE, BUT I REALIZED THIS MORNING WHY THEY ARE WRONG. I WILL EXPLAIN LATER IN A LONGER POST.

Still stalled:

The United States is currently testing the smallest percentage of its population of any developed nation pic.twitter.com/WpAJhyxL0y

— Nick Kapur (@nick_kapur) March 12, 2020

As of Thursday, we're up to 11K "specimens" tested in the whole U.S. That's the terminology they use to describe the fact that a lot of patients are tested more than once. People tested is smaller.

BTW: Utah is now reporting negatives, just under 4 of 136 tests were positive. Not surprising if the only people they are testing are those who are displaying signs of respiratory distress (which has a ton of different causes).

Sophie Trudeau, wife of Canada's prime minister, tested positive. Jair Bolsonara, the President of Brazil, has tested positive too (this is also being denied).

It's been a while since we've talked about warning levels. The State Department has issued a Level 3 (of 4) warning for the entire planet (note this does not supercede the large handful of Level 4 warnings for specific countries). The CDC has issued a Level 3 (of 3) warning for 29 countries in western Europe. It's easier to discuss who's not on the list: west of the old Soviet Union, these are the places that are still OK — Andorra, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Ireland, Kosovo, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Romania. It's not a list of regular tourist spots. They have also added a Level 2 for the whole rest of the world. The pattern of Trump's flight plan is consistent with these.

I've been warning about the odd lack of news out of Iran. Today came reports of satellite images showing mass trench graves. Nearby was a large pile of lime; you bury bodies with lime when you don't have the time or resources to bury them far enough down. Iran also released info that healthcare workers had touched base with 3.5 million people who may have had contact with the infected. The scale of that number is consistent with the numbers of infected discussed in the post for the last class.

The U.S. is experiencing a low scale bank run from corporations. Many are drawing on their lines of credit to increase the amount of cash on their balance sheets. Read between the lines: banks are the safest place for your money unless the bank isn't solvent: non-banks are demonstrating that they are worried about banks.

Of course, you've all heard the news of the last 18 hours or so. Utah partially shutting down. Two Utah Jazz players and Tom Hanks with positive test results. NBA, MLS, and NHL suspended, and March Madness cancelled. MLB pushed back. Champions League tournament postponed until next year. La Liga suspended.

Trump banned air travel from parts of continental Europe. Please refer to the bottom of the post from last class about the suspicion that the strain circulating in Europe is nastier.

March Madness games will be closed to the public. The Ivy League cancelled its tournament yesterday ... but no one noticed ;-)

Italy is closing all stores (including restaurants) except supermarkets and pharmacies.

As of Tuesday, the entire state of Utah had the capacity to do 50-60 tests per day. This will increase on Thursday when a private lab in Salt Lake gets its approval to start. Utah does not release official figures on negative results, but estimates about 100 tests have been done here, with 2 positives. This is consistent with evidence from Seattle, where they've done a lot more tests: they give them to people in respiratory distress, and for most of them SARS-CoV-2 is not the cause. However, this is because there's lots of causes for respiratory distress (emphysema, COPD, pneumonia, bronchitis, congestive heart failure, tuberculosis, advanced age, and so on).

Remember what I said about the healthcare system breaking down in the Lombardy region of Italy?

As always, check out that beautiful log scale helping to emphasize the similarities. If you open up the tweet storm I pulled this out of, it shows a graph with unlogged data. My opinion is that it makes it a little more difficult to see that the other countries are on the same path.

Laurie Garrett, a fairly influential health journalist (who I've linked to a lot this semester) has a piece in Foreign Policy (not a minor outlet, but unfortunately behind a paywall) advocating for shutting down the election campaign. She will be speaking on The Last Word on (shudder) MSNBC at 8 pm tonight.

A woman at the Mirage tested positive.

Seattle has closed all public schools for 2 weeks.

Denmark has closed all schools and universities indefinitely.

Meanwhile, the largest public event still on schedule in the world began today — a series of horse races in the UK, spread over a week, expected to draw 250K people. The UK only has a third of the positives that the US does, but about 1/5 of the population.

Policy success stories on this are South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan (huh ... the same 4 places we used to call the "Asian Tigers" a generation ago). They have each approached their outbreaks in slightly different manners, and this article summarizes.


I will keep updating this until class time on Friday.