This is Page Three
The best historic precedent:
The Spanish flu, also known as the 1918 flu pandemic, was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic caused by the H1N1 influenza A virus. Lasting from February 1918 to April 1920, it infected 500 million people – about a third of the world's population at the time – in four successive waves. The death toll is typically estimated to have been somewhere between 17 million and 50 million, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in human history.
Let's parse that paragraph:
- February, 1918 --April, 1920: 26 months
- no vaccine -- didn't even know it was a virus
- a third of the world's population became infected
- death toll: estimated between 17 million and 50 million
- four successive waves
Coronavirus:
- December, 2019 - present
- September 29, 2020:
- 34 million cases
- one million deaths
Coronavirus: statistics. By country. By state.
Genetics. Link here. Also, here.
US re-opening, tracked here.
New York: mortality rate (new link noted June 1, 2020).
Commentary: 2020.
Children (received from a reader, August 12, 2020):
I met Dr. Deane Waldman a number of years ago. He is an
MD, an Albuquerque physician who also earned an MBA. He prefers to be
called Dr. Deane. As we were descending into the insanity of Obamacare,
he'd willingly spoken to several groups at my request.
Anyway, I'm still on his contact list.
Here's an excerpt of an article which was published in The Federalist on August 10, 2020.
I
have his permission to share this clip, and he encourages others to
spread the word. If you quote him, you owe ME a drink - ha!
Regarding the risk of death from
CoViD-19 in children, on August 5, 2020,
President Trump said they were “almost
immune.” Both the White House press corps
and Politfact wrote this was a lie, that there
was no evidence to support such a claim.
But there is.
According to official data, on August 5,
2020, 142,164 Americans had died with
death attributed to CoViD-19. Of these, 45
were less than 15 years of age. This
calculates to a childhood risk of death from
CoViD-19 of 0.03 percent, and conversely, a
safety factor for children of 99.97 percent.
No vaccine ever created for any infectious
illness has a protection level as high as
99.97 percent, comparable to the immunity
that children seem to exhibit to CoViD-19.
Updates
October 1, 2020:
commentary. Compare with Spanish Flu, 1918 - 1920.
July 26, 2020:
update.
July 21, 2020:
the science is settled -- science no longer matters.
July 19, 2020:
this op-ed seems fair and well-balanced.
July 12, 2020:
consider the source,
but some are suggesting New York is well on its way to "herd immunity
with a 21% infection rate and an existing, circulating natural immunity
of 40%, giving New Yorkers a 61% move toward herd immunity.
July 6, 2020:
June 28, 2020:
Sweden's strategy may still win out.
June 23, 2020: black privilege -- I can't make this stuff up --
June 22, 2020: when will we "back to normal"?
- NFL is betting on mid-November, 2020
- London may: not until mid-2021
June 19, 2020: I see the mainstream media is suggesting that Covid-19 is harder on "blacks" than other ethnicities. My hunch: it's all about pre-existing, underlying medical conditions. When Italy and Spain were particularly hard hit early on, there was no evidence it was due to their overwhelming black population.
June 17, 2020:
fake news and huge expectations.
June 16, 2020:
fake news out of Texas.
June 7, 2020: Global headlines not necessarily good. Mainstream media tracking each "million" milestone of cases when, in fact, cases don't matter. Headline: South Korea grappling with uptick in infections; data doesn't support the headline. The "hot spot" I'm watching: Minneapolis and New York.
June 6, 2020:
Norway vs Sweden, six months into the pandemic.
May 31, 2020:
random update; some nice data points.
So, now we have:
- a virus that is not particularly infectious (this was suggested
months ago, by the way), relative to smallpox, chickenpox, measles, and,
the virus that causes the Trump Derangement Syndrome (which, by the
way, that virus has still not been identified);
- a virus that is not particularly deadly (CDC confirms, see link above);
- a virus that pretty much hits those already with significant medical problems, and/or the elderly;
- a virus, that compared to "seasonal flu," for which we have a
vaccine, albeit very ineffective, that spares children and young adults;
May 30, 2020: mark these dates -- June 14 - June 21.
The Minneapolis riots broke out the night of May 28. On May 29, sympathetic riots broke out in NYC, Los Angeles, Dallas, other cities. These folks -- all of whom were wearing masks, of course -- were not practicing social distancing. Let's see if that affects the number of cases. The increase in deaths, if there are any, might not show up until a couple of weeks later. But certainly by the end of June we should have a good idea if the riots made the corona virus pandemic worse in the cities that were affected.
May 29, 2020:
Norway vs Sweden, update.
May 27, 2020:
the CDC is conflating corona virus numbers.
May 25, 2020: something I've not seen addressed in mainstream media. Everyone agrees that testing for Wuhan flu is going to increase "exponentially" over the next few weeks. All things being equal, even if there is no "real" increase in the number of Wuhan flu cases, just the fact that more folks are being tested, the number of cases will increase. Two things: the federal government says lock downs in the US states can continue
if there is a downward trend in the number of new cases being reported. Does the federal government know something the rest of us don't know? Second, if increased testing does
not result in an "exponential" increase in the number of positive results -- what does that tell us about the pandemic? If there is something to this, we should see by following number of new cases by state. What state should we follow? Let's follow
NY,
LA,
MI, for various reasons.
May 23, 2020: NY governor Cuomo under huge pressure. Says he was only following President Trump's guidance to explain New York state's huge Wuhan flu-related case fatality rate.
The CDC confirms remarkably low Wuhan flu death rate.
May 22, 2020: Dak Prescott has still not signed. Does he really think there's no chance that there will be no NFL season this year?
May 18, 2020:
weird Scandinavian graphs.
May 16, 2020:
Tokyo and targeted surveillance.
May 8, 2020:
Japan vs NYC. Data as of May 4, 2020.
May 8, 2020:
must-watch video.
Wiki entry.
May 5, 2020: by any measure,
Sweden did much worse than its Scandinavian neighbors, and it wasn't even close.
May 4, 2020: I'm not quite sure how to address the question but
there must be some "political" correlation between those who felt, for example, under ObamaCare, that
medical care must be rationed, and that folks with serious underlying
medical conditions and/or over the age of 75 should not be aggressively
treated vs those who now suggest that not one life should be lost to
Wuhan flu if we can prevent it, no matter how much it costs. Mark Perry
would be the guy to put up a Venn diagram and color in the area of those
with cognitive dissonance.
That
was the whole reason behind the "stay-in-shelter" strategies -- to
flatten the curve so that hospitals would not be overwhelmed. Under
ObamaCare, that would not have been an issue. Hospitals would have had
to form triage teams / "death committees" to decide who got treated and
who didn't.
May 4, 2020: because of the way the CDC focuses on total number of cases (which makes little sense), Rhode Island is an outlier among the New England states. It does not show up among the list which includes MA, CT, NY, PA, and NJ. I was curious. Where does RI stack up when looking at numbers
based on population? I haven't changed any of the numbers in the spreadsheet below, except to add Rhode Island to the bottom of the spreadsheet. On a per capita basis, RI would rank #3, between CT and MA, for new cases in the past 24 hours. It would be incredibly interesting to remove nursing home numbers from all Wuhan flu statistics, but the only ones who know that number are the CDC and a few politicians who are intellectually curious.
May 3, 2020:
Governor Cuomo took the Swedish strategy route before he took Trump's advice to "shut down." I disagree with Dr Frieden's conjecture but I appreciated the op-ed:
Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, former head of the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention and former commissioner of the city’s Health Department, says
that if the state and city had adopted widespread social-distancing
measures a week or two earlier, including closing schools, stores, and
restaurants, the estimated death toll from the outbreak might have been
reduced by 50 to 80 percent. Instead, New York mandated those measures
after localities in states including California and Washington had done
so.
May 3, 2020: tracking number of cases is irrelevant. Tracking deaths is somewhat more relevant. May 2, 2020, is a great milestone to begin such tracking: shelter-in-place orders are expiring in many states, protestors are becoming more vocal, and folks are flocking to the beaches, whether "allowed" or "not allowed." Ranked in order that the CDC ranked them on this date (total cases, which, of course, is irrelevant unless one has a hidden agenda).
Deaths - May 2, 2020
|
New Deaths Over Past 24 Hours
|
Total Deaths
|
% new deaths in this state vs top 11 states
|
% total deaths in this state vs top 11 states
|
NY
|
299
|
24368
|
23%
|
45%
|
NJ
|
204
|
7742
|
16%
|
14%
|
MA
|
130
|
3846
|
10%
|
7%
|
IL
|
102
|
2559
|
8%
|
5%
|
CA
|
77
|
2188
|
6%
|
4%
|
PA
|
125
|
2776
|
10%
|
5%
|
MI
|
154
|
4020
|
12%
|
7%
|
FL
|
50
|
1364
|
4%
|
3%
|
TX
|
25
|
874
|
2%
|
2%
|
CT
|
97
|
2436
|
8%
|
4%
|
LA
|
23
|
1993
|
2%
|
4%
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
1286
|
54166
|
|
|
Ranked in order of number of new deaths (in previous 24 hours) per one million population:
Deaths - May 2, 2020
|
State population in 100K
|
New Deaths Over Past 24 Hours
|
Total Deaths
|
% new deaths in this state vs top 11 states
|
% total deaths in this state vs top 11 states
|
Total Deaths/100K population
|
Total Deaths/100K as Precent Among Top 11 States
|
New Deaths/Million Populaton
|
NJ
|
90
|
204
|
7742
|
16%
|
14%
|
86.02
|
14%
|
2267
|
CT
|
40
|
97
|
2436
|
8%
|
4%
|
60.90
|
4%
|
2425
|
MA
|
70
|
130
|
3846
|
10%
|
7%
|
54.94
|
7%
|
1857
|
MI
|
100
|
154
|
4020
|
12%
|
7%
|
40.20
|
7%
|
1540
|
NY
|
200
|
299
|
24368
|
23%
|
45%
|
121.84
|
45%
|
1495
|
PA
|
130
|
125
|
2776
|
10%
|
5%
|
21.35
|
5%
|
962
|
IL
|
130
|
102
|
2559
|
8%
|
5%
|
19.68
|
5%
|
785
|
LA
|
40
|
23
|
1993
|
2%
|
4%
|
49.83
|
4%
|
575
|
FL
|
220
|
50
|
1364
|
4%
|
3%
|
6.20
|
3%
|
227
|
CA
|
400
|
77
|
2188
|
6%
|
4%
|
5.47
|
4%
|
193
|
TX
|
300
|
25
|
874
|
2%
|
2%
|
2.91
|
2%
|
83
|
May 3, 2020:
