US COVID Update (05-05-2020)

This is the update for yesterday. Unfortunately, these reports have been become more and more unreliable and frankly difficult to make meaningful inference. This boils down to two main points.

1. We thought that data from China was cooked, now i'm getting the same kind of feeling for the US. It's hard to trust is all I can say.
2. The crux of the issue is now a matter of political debate between the powers that be who wish to control the citizen behaviours, and those who do not wish to control.

There are too many assertions of certainty, in a very obviously uncertain climate, and thus statements made in this regard, are to be taken with a grain of salt.

A trend i'm seeing is a lot of people saying that the "science" tells us to keep the country on lockdown, and easing it puts the vulnerable -particularly old people- back at risk.

Well, that itself is not an argument for or against anything and keeping the country closed won't keep old people from dying. I'm pretty sure that old people want to and are capable of making their own judgements and decisions.

Tuesday is typically the day that revised data gets merged with on-going data and thus it is also that day that we tend to have outliers. Again, this is one of the reasons why doing these reports based off the data available is becoming less useful. Just yesterday, an extra 1700 deaths were added to the tally from nursing home deaths. Gov Cuomo was some-how able to miss these until now. As it stands, the definition of COVID-related deaths continue to be wishy washy and that leaves me skeptical because it's not like old people didn't die in nursing homes before the virus was around.

In terms of the new deaths over the previous day, it's up by about 1200 but on the moving average it's down by a couple hundred. I have a suspicion that the figures for the new deaths are being inflated for some ulterior reasoning yet to reveal itself. The large numbers of deaths (over 100) are as usual from NY, NJ, MA, PA (Phily next to NYC) and IL. Other states are some distance from the 100 mark but CA is looking at about 80+. Weekend data is particularly unreliable as they often don't report it or do so with a selective few.

With the ramping up of testing, I was expecting a larger increase in new cases due to finding more mild cases or asymptomatic cases. However, it appears that is not the case. Isolated environments make for good controlled environments, and with respect to those (prisons, cruise ships etc.) the number of mild or asymptomatic cases were far greater in number than the severe life threatening cases. I still don't know why this is.

And now the obvious part. The tale of "two" Americas. The NYC area, in particular Detroit Metro and Chicago Metro, continue to decouple themselves from the rest of the country. Looking at their stats vs the everything else, the number of cases per million and deaths per million are about three times as high. If you trust the Worldometer data, then excluding the NYC area would yield a lower rate than Canada.

Where is clear, is that we cannot treat the US wholely, or entirely the same as the few epicentres like NYC or DC, just because the news and media chooses to focus on those areas.
However, the politicians continue to paint that narrative. You only need to do a comparison yourself between NY and FL to see which one is working out best. That all doesn't stop idiots from saying stupid things like how FL had it's highest death toll the day after the FL beaches opened. That would imply that people went to the beach as soon as it opened, some how caught the virus, and then died pretty much the next day. How absurd.

The good news is that the 7 day MA for new deaths continue to trend downward. With the slower MA, it is less sensitive to intra-week swings and therefore tells the bigger picture of where this thing is headed. That said, it's not a rapid downward trend and I wonder if this could be due to changes in the way deaths and deaths related to COVID are defined. In terms of the numbers though, we're looking at about 300 less deaths per week at this rate.

An important note : there are a few states which count confirmed deaths, suspected deaths, and 'other' deaths (which is loosely meant to include COVID related deaths but with no evidence). Not all states do this, which makes understanding the data some what harder. On this front, the data collection process has been terrible and the public data is becoming more and more meaningless by the day. The quality of this data ranges from -ok- to "why on earth do you think this is useful." It continues to frustrate me and I imagine all the people analysis that data. Where possible, I look at the state sites for data for the top 15-20 states with the most cases and even just out of those, there is a huge variation in their usefulness to me. To the average Joe, I don't see how most of them would be useful at all.

On the hand, outside of the NYC area, the data paints a convincing picture of the virus being less transmissible, and less dead as previously thought. There are now reports coming in that some people who thought they had Flu, tested negative, had their swabs retested for COVID, turn out to be positive as far back as December. That means, the emergence of the virus was up to a whole month earlier than previously believed. The question therefore is, why didn't it spread further and faster before March 4th?

At least, people are now finally coming to the realization that just walking past an infected individual is highly unlikely to get you infected. Remember, the equation to predict the likelihood of the virus to be transmitted from one person to another is: Likelihood = contact(how close the two are) + time (how long they were in contact) + viral load shed (roughly how bad an infection a person has) + viral load acquired (how much of the viral load shed the uninfected acquires) + error. So, reasonable distancing (still zero published papers on the 6ft rule) and shorter times in contact with the milder cases effectively means fewer cases spread as well as being milder.

This possibly explains why places such as meat packing plants or prisons showing 95% of the cases to be asymptomatic or mild. We should be scrutinising the data and asking why a lot harder there.

There remains a lot of unreliable data out there and despite this, policy is being driven by only a part of it. I am an "Opener." I think we should open the economy and trust people to be adults, protect the vulnerable. I can't really see any wrong with that, can you? The other choice is to be a "Closer" and with that, you kill off more and more of what economy that isn't dead, and treat people people children, pretending that no one will die, ever.

Pick your poison.