From TPM Reader BW …
My turning point moment was in the first few days of March, when I happened upon this Feb. 29 Twitter thread from Trevor Bedford in which he concluded that the novel coronavirus had been spreading undetected in Washington state for six weeks.
TPM Reader BR’s turning points on the COVID19 Crisis while traveling abroad …
We left the US on 29 January for a 9 week stay in Ireland (through 5 April), to have been followed by 20 days in Portugal and Spain. Trip started off well enough when we realized that the legendary John Prine was on the same flight, and he was gracious enough to give us 20 minutes of his time chatting about all the places in Ireland he thought we should visit while we waited to board.
I have been fascinated by your accounts of your own turning points in the onrush of the COVID19 Crisis. They fascinate me both as a lapsed historian and also because they refresh my memory of an abrupt historical transition that is still less than two months old. Back in early March again and again we were hearing that the key signal of transition and the onset of a crisis footing was the closure of schools. Most people are only casual consumers of news. It is difficult for even important news to break through the routines of daily life. The closure of schools directly impacts almost every aspect of social life. It upends the life of kids. It upends the life of parents of school age kids. It upends all commercial and organizational life because vast numbers of workers have school age kids. Precisely because of these dislocations the decision to close schools unmistakably signals crisis. Again and again readers reported from around the country that it was in response to a school closure that the whole tenor of life in their community changed.
What was your COVID19 Crisis turning point?
For me it was February 25th when Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said on a CDC conference call: “We are asking the American public to work with us to prepare in the expectation that this could be bad.” It is not in my experience that public health officials make open-ended “bad” comments like that.
She went on to say: “Ultimately, we expect we will see community spread in this country. It’s not so much a question of if this will happen anymore, but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illness.”
This wasn’t out of the blue for me. I’d been watching the ‘novel coronavirus’ developments closely since January. I just looked at back at my Amazon purchases and it was on February 2nd that I put in an order for a stock of hand sanitizer and cloth masks. But until Messonnier’s comments I had first assumed and then hoped I was making contingency plans for edge case bad scenarios. That made clear these were likely scenarios.
Equally ominous, the comments seemed aimed not only to alert the public but to alert the public precisely because the administration was refusing to do so, either didn’t know or didn’t want to tell citizens what was happening.
What was your turning point moment?
Don’t miss this piece on a surge in cardiac episodes tied to COVID19 and how cardiologists have been forced to adapt.
International Workers’ Day, or May Day, comes on the heels of one of the worst periods for workers in quite some time. In the last six weeks, more than 30 million Americans filed for unemployment. At the same time, the S&P 500 gained more than 12 percent and recorded its best month since 1987.
How deadly is COVID19? The question has mobilized countless researchers, become a political football around the globe and probably occurred to and triggered fear in the minds of most members of the human species. The question can be posed in various ways. But the closest to what people likely mean by it is what epidemiologists call an ‘IFR’, an infection mortality rate. That is to say, the percentage of people who will die from COVID19 after being infected by it. That’s different from the number of ‘cases’ since some infections never show symptoms and many never get recorded in any medical or governmental dataset.
The epidemic in New York City allows us to make initial calculations which, though imperfect, move us toward a real estimate as opposed to inferences, history and guesswork. For each variable in the formula we have an actual number based in science and quality record keeping, even if each is subject to substantial uncertainty and revision.
After her predecessor rounded out her tenure as White House press secretary without holding a single press briefing, Kayleigh McEnany will hold one of those now-rare Q&A’s with reporters from the White House podium today. Read More
As a non-expert I’ve struggled over the last week or so to make sense of the status of the pandemic in the United States, but overnight a top expert laid things out in as clear a way as I’ve seen in a while. You probably know Jeremy Konyndyk as a disaster preparedness expert who served in the Obama administration and has since become a prominent voice on the U.S. COVID-19 response.
His rundown of why things aren’t getting dramatically worse but also aren’t getting any better helps pull together the various contributing factors to the brutal daily death toll at which we seem to have plateaued. By his own admission, it is not an optimistic assessment.
There is a common aphorism in the world of statistics: ‘All models are wrong but some are useful.’ It captures an important point: Models aren’t predictions as a psychic might make so much as attempts to organize data and think critically about uncertainty. The COVID19 model out of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington has become something of a canonical model for the COVID19 epidemic in the United States, in part because it appears to have been adopted by the White House task force. I wanted to take a moment to look at just how far out of line it has become even with current data.
The models estimates have bounced around a fair amount. It started high, jumped back considerably and has crept back up since. This isn’t a sign of a problem in itself. It is an attempt to model the course of a disease that didn’t exist six months ago. As we proceed it is supplemented with new data.
But consider these numbers. The latest estimate, released on April 29th projected 72,433 cumulative deaths through August 4th – a range from 59,343 to 114,228. But as of this morning the Johns Hopkins University data tracker shows that 63,019 people have already died. And if we look at the data compiled by the COVID Tracking Project 13,252 of those have died (or at least been reported) in the last seven days.