Tag: Wuhan flu

Wuhan panic causes Space Force to delay launch

9:32 am

The Space Force yesterday announced that it is delaying the April launch by SpaceX of a GPS satellite until June, though they say in their announcement that they also still intend to get all three GPS launches off this year, as originally planned.

It seems they decided that since the in-orbit constellation is operating well, with lots of redundancy, they could afford to wait two months to launch this new upgraded GPS satellite.

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Lost freedoms and media lies

2:13 pm

The panic over the Wuhan virus is clearly doing irreparable harm to our freedoms. And worse, the loss of those freedoms is being celebrated and supported by the press, the very people who should be acting to protect them, for their own sake if not ours.

Consider for example this article, which documents how four of the ten rights in the Bill of Rights have been tossed out the window during the government imposed lockdowns over the Wuhan flu. It also notes that a more basic right, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, has been cancelled as well.

While this right is not listed in the Bill of Rights and instead appears in the Declaration of Independence, it covers all of our rights in a general sense and should be considered under attack. I have heard from friends who have been stopped at the border of their state and turned back by police; people with out-of-state plates turned away from grocery stores over the border that have supplies they need and can’t get in their own state; and people whose livelihoods are being destroyed by government edicts with no end date in sight. [emphasis mine]

As the author also notes, “anyone who has studied human history knows the ‘temporary’ loss of human rights is rarely temporary.”

The worst part of this article however is the incompleteness of the list of civil rights abuses. Consider these for example:
» Read more

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COVID-19 model predictions continue to be too high

1:59 pm

Two stories off the wire today illustrate again the overheated and over-stated predictions of the computer models being used by federal and government officials are simply wrong.

The first prediction resulted in a panic that caused hospitals nationwide to cease all “non-essential” medical procedures out of fear they would overwhelmed with serious Wuhan virus sufferers. Instead, hospitals sit empty with little activity and some have had to cut staff and hours because the loss of the income from those “non-essential” procedures is bankrupting them. And in New York, the worst hit state, the model was four times too high:

The model projected that New York would need 65,400 hospital beds by April 4, but only 15,905 were actually used, according to former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson.

The second story reports that the IHME model that the White House and state governors have been relying on to justify shutting down the entire U.S. economy, bankrupting millions of small businesses, and putting millions of people out of work, has reduced its prediction for deaths from COVID-19 from about 93,000 to about 82,000, a number is still certainly too high based on the actual deaths so far. Earlier they were claiming hundreds of thousands could die.

Meanwhile, policy nationwide has been based on the assumption, clearly stated by Dr. Deborah Birx, head of the White House coronavirus task force, that “No state, no metro area, will be spared.”

The numbers however make this statement seem absurd. This state-by-state analysis today shows that the bulk of the problem is focused in the New York metropolitan area:

Thus, we can ascertain by these numbers that 53% of all U.S. Coronavirus deaths are coming from the two states of New York and New Jersey.

…If you throw out the numbers for the top five and bottom five states, removing the extreme highs and lows – the other 40 U.S. states (including Puerto Rico) will have suffered an average of 70 deaths from Coronavirus.

In other words, we have allowed our politicians to bankrupt us over an illness that has killed so few people in most of the country (most of which were aged and likely very sick already) that the numbers could almost have been considered rounding errors.

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More evidence that U.S. health system is not being overwhelmed by COVID-19

10:18 pm

In an article today in the National Review focused on a lot of good coronavirus news the past week, a number stories jumped out at me, mostly focused on the surplus hospital beds available in the states of Florida, New Jersey, Washington, Maryland, Vermont, Ohio, Utah, and in southern Arizona, and in the cities of Dallas, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Orange County.

In other words, my conclusion earlier this week that the U.S. hospital system was not going to be overwhelmed by COVID-19 is proving to be true. Even in New York, which appears to have the biggest problem, they have arranged with twenty hotels to convert rooms for hospital care.

Much of this surplus is unfortunately caused by the forced lockdowns that have forbidden hospitals to do any elective surgeries (with “elective” sometimes defined so broadly that they have caused some hospitals to cut staff and hours) as well as the too-high predictions that have probably caused them to plan for more beds than they will need.

Nonetheless, these surpluses are good news.

Meanwhile, the daily death toll rose significantly today in the U.S., reaching almost 1,500, after several days where it appeared to have stabilized around 1,000. This rise is not unexpected, and further rises will also not be a surprise. The moment of truth however will be when it begins to drop, which should probably happen in less than two weeks. When that happens, we will then finally be able to get a realistic estimate of the total mortality from COVID-19.

I will add that based on the numbers of actual deaths so far in the U.S., it still appears to me that the prediction of between 100,000 to 240,000 U.S. deaths by Trump’s experts is going to be much too high, and very very wrong.

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Predictions four to eleven times higher than actual COVID-19 hospitalizations

9:34 pm

Garbage in, garbage out: The computer models being used by hospitals and government authorities to justify the shutdown of the entire American economy have routinely been way too high, four to eleven times higher than the actual numbers.

The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which owns HealthData.org and has been cited by the Trump administration, is getting called out for promulgating COVID-19 projections that turn out to be far too high. The institute’s projections are treated as the gold standard by several American hospital systems and state governments, according to its website, which warns that the demand for “ventilators, general hospital beds, and ICU beds” are “expected to exceed capacity.”

Yet it overestimated by four times how many hospitalizations would happen in New York State on one day this week, already accounting for the “lockdown” in the state, according to former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson

For example, the Institute predicted that on April 1 New York would have 50,000 hospitalizations. It only has 12,000. Similarly,

The Federalist co-founder Sean Davis noted similar overestimation on a national level, saying the UW model is using New York and New Jersey data – the epicenter of the epidemic – “and applying it to the rest of the U.S.”

This “garbage” model estimated 121,000 hospitalizations Wednesday, about four times higher than the actual number, he said, delving into more wild divergences between projections and results state-by-state. Tennessee and Texas projections were particularly off, at 11 and nine times higher than actually resulted, while Virginia’s was the closest at only two times higher. [emphasis mine]

For any model to be that badly off in only a week indicates it is total garbage, entirely divorced from reality and more a political document expressing the desires of those who wrote it.

But we’re all gonna die! We’ve got to do something! We’ve got to assume bad things so we can justify our actions!

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Shutdowns forcing hospitals to cut staff during Wuhan panic

1:31 pm

This makes perfect government sense: The shutdowns that our governments have imposed on people and businesses nationwide due to the Wuhan panic has forced hospitals to cut staff and shorten hours.

The article describes the growing collapse of medical services caused by the state-imposed lockdowns in Ohio, Massachusetts, Kentucky, Connecticut, South Carolina, Tennessee, New Jersey, Oregon, Virginia, and Arizona. That’s only ten states, but it is very likely the remaining states are experiencing the same problems, as described in the article:

The Connecticut Children’s Medical Center is furloughing 400 across its health system as a result of surgeries being delayed, which has caused patient volumes to plummet, resulting in millions of dollars of lost revenue, according to the Hartford Courant.

The number of elective cases at Prisma Health in South Carolina has fallen by over 75% in two weeks. CEO Mark O’Halla issued a letter to employees informing them of furloughs, adding that they will be able to file for unemployment and apply for open positions at the hospital.

Two-hundred healthcare workers in Tennessee are being furloughed as a result of “dramatically reduced” hospital visits, which means a loss of revenue, according to the Tennessean.

We need to bankrupt ourselves in order to save us! Thank you government and centralized rule!

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First estimate of the cost of the Wuhan panic shutdown

12:48 pm

The estimated lose to the U.S. economy due to the shutdown over the Wuhan panic is now estimated at $32 trillion, more than the entire annual gross national product for the country.

That number is of course preliminary, but for a first guess I think it is probably low, especially because it does not include the following:

  • Lost opportunity cost for businesses
  • Lost opportunity cost for individuals who had to delay dreams, plans, etc.
  • The loss of freedom (priceless)
  • The cost of not educating millions of students and falling further behind in academic standards

It also assumes we get back to work relatively soon. Should the shut down extend through May, I think the Great Depression will appear like a lark in comparison.

Note that the overall social cost of this panic and shutdown cannot be measured, as it is also establishing new social distancing customs that are probably overwrought and counter-productive for a healthy society.

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States begin push to end voting at polls

8:50 pm

The rigging of elections begins: As part of the Wuhan panic, state legislators (as well as Joe Biden, the present Democratic Party front runner for president), are now pushing to change election laws to allow more voting by mail, and to even eliminate in-person voting at the polls.

States are weighing measures to change voting rules in November’s presidential election as they struggle with social-distancing orders during the worldwide coronavirus outbreak, according to a report Tuesday. “More people who vote early or vote by mail, means fewer people standing in line on election day,” California Secretary of State Alex Padilla told the Axios news website.

But the effort to keep voters from going to the polls in person Nov. 3 faces legislative and financial roadblocks. The price for states to change their methods of voting could pass $2 billion, Axios said.

Of course, they are completely sincere about their desire to protect us from this evil virus. None of them would ever take advantage of an election conducted entirely by mail to rig the results. Never! How could anyone think such a thing?!

I mean, really, these are the same kinds of people who wrote the FISA court legislation, and then administered it perfectly! They are also the same kind of governmental people who run the IRS and never use it to go after people they don’t like, for political reasons. Never!

I await the coming our perfect government-run utopia. All will be well. Just accept it.

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The lack of context during the Wuhan virus panic

12:51 pm

Link here.

This editorial tries to remind people that when you look at the whole picture, the coronavirus epidemic simply does not yet justify the fear it has caused, or the over-the-top authoritarian measures politicians have imposed. For example:

On its own, 3,000 fatalities [from COVID-19 as of yesterday] might seem like a tremendously large number. But that’s before you learn that an average of 7,700 people die in the U.S. every single day. Which means that over the past week, when the coronavirus took 2,000 lives, nearly 54,000 people died from other causes. [emphasis in original]

They then list the many other preventable causes of death that each year kill far more people than the coronavirus, and yet pass entirely unnoticed, with no panic, fear, or government-imposed edicts. The mortality numbers for other infectious diseases I find especially revealing:

  • 35,000: antibiotic-resistant bacteria
  • 40,922: blood poisoning resulting from bacteria
  • 55,672: flu and pneumonia

Once again, these are numbers for deaths that occur routinely, each year. I don’t remember the government declaring martial law over these. Do you?

COVID-19 could still be as bad as our panic-stricken leaders say, with predictions of between 100,000 to 200,000 deaths this year. I remain very skeptical. Such numbers would be from two to four times higher than the worse flu epidemic. The data from too many sources suggest this prediction is absurdly high.

And even if it is correct, I suspect these deaths will not be additional mortality, on top of all other causes. Instead, I predict that overall the mortality will be about the same, if not less, because of the imposition of martial law. Unable to go out, there will be fewer traffic accidents and flu infections, for example, causes that routinely kill a lot of people.

Thus, the overall death numbers will not be significantly different than we normally see, a result that will hardly justify the panic that has gripped everyone.

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Flu deaths appear to be plummeting as COVID-19 arrives

1:05 pm

Sarah Hoyt has published a very revealing analysis of the CDC numbers of the on-going 2019-2020 flu season.

The graphs, which are astonishing, show two trends, one somewhat expected, the other completely a surprise. You should definitely go to the link to see.

First, this flu season there is a giant uptick in people seeing their doctor because of flu symptoms. Though the big rise in doctor visits began in December, when COVID-19 first began to make the news, the trend did began well before its appearance, making the uptick somewhat puzzling.

The second trend makes that uptick even more baffling. It appears that in the last four weeks the number of deaths because of flu and pneumonia has plummeted, dropping to far below any numbers for the past five years. As Hoyt notes at the link,

BTW the author and I had several “people who know better than us” look at the charts, and it remains a mystery. No, we don’t know what’s going on. We know it makes no sense.

I suspect the drop in deaths is connected to the high level of concern by the general population, causing them to get treatment earlier so that many who would have died in past seasons don’t. I also suspect that this data also confirms the relatively minor impact so far of COVID-19 overall. As the author notes,

As to conclusions, there isn’t enough data for any concrete conclusion. Looking at this logically, IF there have been COVID-19 cases in the US since December, it doesn’t appear to have been deadly enough to have been very noticeable.

This data is very preliminary, has great uncertainties. Nonetheless, it suggests once again that the panic over the Wuhan flu is way out of line.

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