My Op-Ed ran in today’s Moscow-Pullman Daily News. Enjoy!
As I mentioned in my last two Op-Eds (here and here): rather than isolating the infected, quarantining the exposed and the vulnerable, and social distancing everyone else, America treats everyone as infected.
Swedish professor Johan Giesecke is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading epidemiologists, and as such he is at the forefront of Sweden’s common-sense approach to the on-going pandemic. Sweden’s unwillingness to sacrifice their entire economy and infrastructure, while still treating the virus as a grave issue, is a solid reminder that this reasonable approach is the way societies have dealt with crises for millennia. It is the US, not Sweden, that is taking the novel approach.
The mathematical models America relies on is highly speculative. The initial prediction that 2.2 million Americans would die if not locked down was based upon an unpublished, non-peer-reviewed Imperial College London (ICL) paper from March 16th. Oxford immediately replied that the ICL numbers were wildly overstating the danger, that the outbreak started at least a month before the first reported death, and half of us already had the virus.
How did Oxford reach that conclusion? Three weeks earlier, Japan publicized the results of the coronavirus infection onboard the cruise ship Diamond Princess, including why their shipboard quarantine methods were ineffective. 308 passengers had confirmed symptoms and 318 were asymptomatic. There were more asymptomatic cases than symptomatic ones, even with an overwhelming elderly population (the median age of the passengers was 69). A total of 14 passengers died, just 0.3% of the people onboard. Yet a month later, ICL used a death rate over ten times higher.
Oxford’s model was confirmed by the coronavirus outbreak onboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt. Of the 4,800 sailors onboard, one 40 year-old has died (0.02% of the crew), and the majority are asymptomatic. Given the younger, healthier population, fewer deaths are expected than on a cruise ship, but the results further demonstrated the ICL model is significantly wrong.
Last week, Stanford and USC separately found that coronavirus infections are significantly higher than reported: by 50-85 times in Silicon Valley and by 28-55 times in Los Angeles County.
Finally, there were coronavirus deaths in the US three weeks earlier than originally thought. These individuals had “no significant travel history,” meaning the coronavirus was already widely circulating months earlier.
We know that there are many different factors that affect the spread of the virus, especially population density. However, governors are ordering the same treatment across entire states, as if Pullman were Seattle, Moscow were Boise, and everyone was New York City and Italy.
The “expert” ICL data model our politicians rely upon predicted locked-down hospitalizations and deaths over ten times higher than reality. The Covid ActNow model predicts that Whitman County’s epidemic won’t peak until 28 May and Latah County’s until 1 June and that the Palouse needs to remain locked down until the end of July. Then the second wave will have us back in lockdown in October
We have had 4 confirmed COVID-19 cases in Latah County with no hospitalizations, 16 confirmed cases in Whitman County with no hospitalizations. Meanwhile, we are laying off hospital workers due to lack of patients.
These same “expert” data models predicted Swedish hospitals would already be overrun because they are not locked down. That is nowhere even close to happening. The locked down countries of Ireland, Netherlands, UK, France, Italy, and Belgium all have higher death rates than Sweden.
Professor Giesecke predicts that the infection and death outcomes will be the same for demographically similar countries. The difference is that other countries are destroying innumerable lives by throwing 25% of their workforce into unemployment while Sweden continues with life as normal.
Eric Engerbertson correctly notes that “Moscow Mayor Lambert says he goes by the opinions of medical scientists, not guesswork, forgetting that those medical scientists based their advice on guesswork that proved to be completely wrong.”
The Palouse should be reopened immediately, and not on a piecemeal basis. The reason for the current economic shutdown was to “flatten the curve” of hospitalizations. That’s it. Somehow “flattening the curve” has morphed into the desire to halt the number of infections or deaths. How long are we willing to watch our citizens suffer at the hands of arbitrary shutdowns? It’s time to acknowledge that the cure has far eclipsed the disease.