COVID-19 # 51 (Required Parts Highlighted)

We made the national news, or at least Washington (near St. George) did. And not in a good way (although I was ticked that the made zero mention of the fact that Utahns have a headstart on being prepared for this sort of thing). Anyway, I was down there on Thursday evening actually. I did see quite a few businesses closed, but it was busier than I expected. Also, those big digital signs they post warnings on over the interstates were turned off; to me that seems like an obvious place to note that travel is discouraged, or say how the number of COVID-19 fatalities compares to the highway fatalities they're always advertisign. BTW: cases and hospitalizations in the southwest Utah region were up again today.

Caixin, a publication that does work openly in China, but which is also openly critical of the government, reported today that the government in Beijing was not informed of human-to-human transmission until January 19th (2 days before the decision to quarantine Wuhan was made).

I have seen several versions of this information in the legacy media, and every single one of them has been wrong (they show just one graph, so it's basically just noting that pollution tracks urban areas on a random day). So I went to the source. You need to compare the two images. This is before:

This is after:

What's being shown here is nitrogen dioxide concentrations. These are primarily generated by diesel vehicles and coal burning power plants (not usually located in cities). It is somewhat weather dependent as well (this explains the absence of Columbus, Rochester, and Syracuse in the before picture, and huge fadeout of Boston in the after one). We got chloropleths of this from China about a month ago. Anyway, viewed properly, pollution is way down, especially in NYC. FWIW: I've noticed basic thinking ability seems to go down anytime pollution measures are involved.

Excellent piece in The Wall Street Journal entitled "Why Doesn't the Flu Tank the Economy Like COVID-19?"

Instead of gentle waves of cases cascading across the country over a span of six months, like the flu, a tidal wave of Covid-19 cases has swept over a handful of cities in half the time. The concentration of quickly amassing serious infections overwhelmed the affected areas ...

We had a flu pandemic about 10 years ago, and here's the comparison:

In 22 fewer days, Covid-19 infected 11 times as many people and killed 60 times as many. 

That pandemic was far worse than a typical flu season. Even so, while a lot more people get the flu, amongst those that do, you're 8 times more likely to be hospitalized if you get SARS-CoV-2, and your stay will be almost 4 times as long. It is mathematically valid to multiply those and imply that hospital usage will be 30 times higher during COVID-19.

It took me over a day to find a day-by-day total for Utah (yeah Bing, boo Google). Go to the top item on this link, and then click Trending Stats, and mouseover the graph. Anyway, yesterday, my top chart was about doubling rates after a location hits 10 deaths. Utah doesn't qualify for fleshing out that graph just yet, but the daily death total just doubled in 7 days (from 8 to 17), which make us comparable to Washington (state). FWIW, I also did an exhaustive examination of our doubling times for all new deaths (e.g, when we hit 2 how long did it take to get to 4, and so on), and the day were 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, and 7. Together, those suggest that our experience in this state is not much better than what other states have experienced; but we clearly started later, so we'll peak later.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson was discharged today after 8 days and 7 nights in the hospital. He will not be returning to work or even his primary residence right away. As is probably normal with things involving leaders, it turns out that the truth was worse than we were led to believe. Apparently they had been notified he might need hospitalization 3 days prior to ultimate check-in, and his condition  in the hospital deteriorated more deeply and rapidly than people were led to believe.

There are confirmed reports this morning of hospital overload hitting Moscow.