The Numbers Just Don't Add Up

California issued a revised and more restrictive stay-at-home order that closed restaurants and reduced capacity at many other businesses and activities over most of the state, effective November 21. According to medical.net,

. In the case of coronavirus, the incubation period is estimated to be 5 – 6 days; however, the exact recommended range is 1 - 14 days.

November 21 was more than three weeks ago, and we might expect many incubations since that time to emerge as full-blown cases -- but with the new restrictions, wouldn't we expect to see some effect in the number of new cases since that time?

On December 2, when it had been ten days since the order, I went to that day's data from the LA County Health Department to see what the actual effects of the newest restrictions might be (Click on the image for a larger copy). The data leads to several questions. First, although we might expect to have seen the newest restrictions begin to show a clear reduction in cases at that time, this wasn't showing up on the chart. The cases continued, and still continue, to spike.

Second, the "case death rate", the stepped black line lower down on the chart, notwithstanding the drastic increase in "cases" over the course of the year, had stayed steady at 2% since the summer. I went to the CDC site to get national numbers. As of that day, there were 13,626,022 "cases", with 269,763 deaths, which corresponds to a national case rate of 2%.

Los Angeles County had a total number of cases at 414,000, with total deaths at 7740, for a slightly lower case death rate of 1.9%.

Third, the cumulative deaths, the dark line at the very bottom of the LA County graph, simply haven't spiked. However, the news media keeps referring to a COVID "surge" in recent weeks, with an increase in "hospitalizations", but it doesn't appear that there's been a corresponding increase in the death rate.

But it might be objected that 2% of a continuing increase in cases is still bad -- but recent data seems to be inconsistent. The December 2 rate, according to data from the LA County Health Department was 5,987 new cases and 40 new deaths. This gave a case death rate of only .6 of 1%. Curious, I went to the November 27 numbers from the same source and found that on that day, there were 4544 new cases and 24 new deaths, giving a case death rate of .5 of 1%, again much lower than previous national and county case death rates. (Both December 2 and November 24 were midweek days, avoiding potential underreporting due to weekend delays.)

This morning I went to check the LA County daily stats again. Although weekend statistics may show a delay, yesterday, December 13, had 12,731 new "cases" reported in LA County, with 29 new deaths. I brought up my trusty calculator and found that this amounts to a case mortality rate of 0.2%, roughly equivalent to the seasonal flu. This is one tenth of the currently reported national case mortality rate of about 1.9%. I went to the Friday, December 11 stats and got 13,815 new cases with 50 new deaths, for a case mortality rate of 0.3%, not a big difference. So then I went to the November 4 statistics to see what things looked like midweek before the Thanksgiving lockdown. There were 1843 new cases and 22 new deaths, for a case mortality rate of 1%. This is still half the national rate, when LA County is said to be a major trouble spot.

On November 24, only three days after the new restrictions took effect, LA County experienced 3,692 new cases and 51 deaths, for a case mortality rate of 1.4% still well under the rate for the year of about 2% in both the county and the US.

So LA County has had a jumble of state and local restrictions that are about the most severe anywhere in the US -- outdoor dining is prohibited, for instance, when it's allowed in New York City -- while its statistics have consistently been below national levels, and one critical measure, the case mortality rate, has in fact been falling significantly. The stepped black liine on the chart above should in fact be stepping significantly down.

But another explanation for the lower case mortality rate since early November, and since Thanksgiving as well, could simply be the increased testing. But here's a question. If, as the CDC bigwig Aron Hall, whom I quoted the other day, says, the nationial case rate could be as much as a third of the population, then these people have been infected for quite some time -- and their infections have been mild or asymptomatic. So the perception of a declining death rate may be just a statistical artifact and an indication that the disease has never been that serious as a percentage of the population. Like, say, the seasonal flu.

Even so, if it's hard to avoid thinking that large numbers of "cases" resulting from increased testing are in fact resulting in a lower case mortality rate, shouldn't the political class and the moral enforcers be patting us on the head for doing a good job? And maybe, just maybe, easing some of those restrictions for Christmas?

Don't count on it.

Let's Get Real About The Election

Whatever the eventual outcome of Trump's legal efforts -- and they don't look good at all -- the biggest issue for most of 2020 was the most egregiouis human rights violation in recent times, the worldwide COVID lockdown, a phenomenon that's continuing to do incalculable economic, emotional, and psychological damage but has been feckless to control the disease.

There's simply been no proportionate payoff to the human sacrifices that people have rendered in most countries -- the disease is if anything more prevalent now than it was in March, though it's much less fatal -- but my guess is that with the new year, the authorities, seeing no effective remedy, will simply try to reimpose exactly the same lockdowns as last spring, with the same effect.

Trump, and Trumpism, were irrelevant to this problem. If Trump had been re-elected by a landslide, we'd still be facing the Cuomos, the Newsoms, the Whitmers, the Wolfs, the Boris Johnsons, the Doug Fords,with exactly the same strategies. Trump would have been no help. Rallies, as we saw over much of the fall, had no effect. And whateever Biden and the Democrats do, or don't do, in coming months will likely be just as irrelevant.

Trump was a talented political novice, but even his talents were insufficient to stop the COVID moral panic that's taken hold, and still has hold, of the public imagination.

On the other hand, the most positive development in the COVID field in recent weeks was the victory in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn's US Supreme Court case. This has clearly kept states like Virginia, Colorado, New York, and California from declaring worship services "inessential" by decree and closing churches entirely, as they did last spring. But the Catholic Church is independent of Trump and Trumpism, and its efforts will persist.

By the same token, judges at local and federal levels are beginning to deliver opinions that the health authorities are losing the benefit of the doubt they'd been given last spring, since lockdowns and mask mandates in fact haven't had the promised benefit. The effort to defeat the moral panic on a legal level, or via civil disobedience or local nullification, has been and will continue to be independent of Trump and Trumpism.

I'm a little disconcerted, and even a little surprised, at the continuing focus and hysteria about the dead kraken. the increasingly ineffectual legal appeals of the election. The biggest problem we face is the one we've faced all year, that the health authorities have a credibility crisis: the remedies they proposed to "flatten the curve" have nevertheless been ineffective in preventing a full second-wave COVID outbreak, while, as respectable parties are beginning to note, the health authorities know almost nothing more about the diseaae than they did a year ago.

Forget Biden, at least for now. There's much more important work to do.

California COVID Crazy

Now and then, my wife and I go up to Solvang, a Danish-themed tourist town north of Santa Barbara. It does a lot of Christmas business, while the temperate climate there has always allowed outdoor dining and beer drinking. Gov Newsom's order last weekend to shut down outdoor dining over most of the state threatened the town's existence, so its city council promptly voted to except itself from the ban and requested that local law enforcement not enforce it, which of course California sheriffs have generally announced they will not do.

There's another particular twist to Solvang's situation, because Newsom added an entirely new level of regional COVID enforcement based on hospital ICU capacity, over and above an existing county-level color-coded enforcement based on COVID statistics. The problem is that Santa Barbara County, where Solvang is, has been lumped into a new Southern California region for ICU capacity.

Santa Barbara, Ventura, and San Luis Obispo counties are currently considering appealing to the state to create a Central Coast region, which would separate them from being part of the Southern California region. Seceding would also mean that these counties wouldn’t be forced to react to the higher infection rates in Los Angeles and further south, the Los Angeles Times reports.

“We believe it’s reasonable to have the Central Coast as one region instead of including our county with over half the state’s population in the current Southern California region,” said Ventura County Executive Officer Mike Powers. The three counties say they will seek separation from the Southern California region if their ICU capacity stays above 15% for the next three weeks.

But of course, that puts any remedy, if it takes place, past the Chrsitmas season, so Solvang (and lots of other places) are screwed no matter what. The problem is that Newsom is simply making things up as he goes along. Hey, the color code system isn't solving a whole new problem the models have identified, but we'll leave it in place while I impose a whole new blunt instrument to sove this whole new problem.

Meanwhile, the hysterical news stories continue:

]T]he virus continued to spread rapidly across the country. Newly reported coronavirus cases topped 231,700 Friday, a new record. Hospitalizations continued to break records, as a wave of critically ill patients being admitted to hospitals around the country strains health-care systems in many parts of the U.S. And the daily death toll surpassed 3,300.

Well and good -- but every indication is that well over 90% of the population is wearing masks and social distancing. And they've been doing it for months,

The data demonstrates very clearly that Americans have overwhelmingly exceeded the masking compliance percentages needed to supposedly “flatten the curve” and reduce transmission of the virus. The problem, of course, is that the models have not matched reality. Americans are wearing masks, but the hypothesis behind universal masking has not worked to stop the spread of COVID-19.

Meanwhile, Newsom bans outdoor dining, but it has no effect on the continuing surge. Just last night, Cuomo banned indoor dining (again), but hey, outdoor can continue. Why is it OK in New York but not in California? Well, I guess Cuomo can fix that soon enough.

The level of incompetence among our public officials is astonishing.

You Don't Need To Be Einstein To Figure Out A Scam

Via the New York Post,

The US topped 15 million cases of COVID-19 this week, but that number is likely exponentially higher — by as much as seven times, a top Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official said Thursday.

. . . “The total estimated number of infections is likely two to seven times greater than reported cases,” [CDC Suit Aron] Hall said, adding that the evidence was based on seroprevalence surveys and models.

So let's take this official's highest estimate, that the number of infections is as much as seven times greater than the 15 million reported. I brought up my calculator and found that 7 times 15 million is 105,000,000, Later, the same article says there have been 289,000 deaths to date. So I divided 289,000 by 15,000,000 and got a case fatality rate of 0.0027 of 1%. If 105 million people have been infected in the CDC's worst case scenario, but only 289,000 have died, then we definitely don't have mass graves in public parks the way they said we would back in March, right?

What's the explanatiion? 105 million is like a third of the country, but nobody's getting all that sick. And if a third of the country is infected, what's with the lockdowns and masks? Obviously they haven't worked, huh?

Curious, I looked up the daily new deaths in the US vs the daily new cases. As of December 5, there were 218,671 new cases and 2,461 deaths, which gives a case fatality rate of a little over 1%, which is consistent with the observation that the case fatality rate in the US has been steadily declining since the start of the pandemic.

Healthcare workers are now seeing unprecedented increases in COVID-19 diagnoses and hospitalizations -- but there hasn't been a congruent rise in mortality rates even as case counts set records.

That decline has no single, clear explanation, but experts have pointed to a host of contributing factors. . .

This table gives a survey of case fatality rates in various countries at all dates over the course of 2020. As of December 5, the case fatality rate in the US was 1.9%. As of June 27, it was 5.1%. The decline in rates is almost certainly an artifact of testing -- as more people test positive, but the number of new deaths remains relatively constant, the fatality rate is going to decline.

The CDC official at the New York Post link above also said "the death toll is also likely higher" than the published numbers, although it's generally acknowledged that the published COVID death totals include a large proportion of people with comorbidities. But let's examine what he's said and take the numbers for granted. He's said the actual case rate is two to seven times higher than the published numbers. So again, let's take his worst-case estimate of 105,000,000 infections.

Although the current published COVID case mortality rate in the US is 1.9%, let's round it off at 2%. So if there are 105,000,000 infections, we would in fact be seeing 2.1 million deaths, I mean right now. not next January. You'd need Ryder rental trucks to haul the dead off to the mass graves in public parks. But we aren't seeing this. Why not?

So you say OK, maybe it's unfair to take his worst-case estimate, that's way out of reasonable range. Let's take his best case estimate, there are only twice as many infections as reported. Twice 15 million is 30 million. At a 2% case mortality rate, that's 600,000 deaths, more than twice what we've seen all year. But allowing for a number of deaths that's anything like what's reported, that's an actual case mortality rate of less than 1%. The CDC estimates that the case mortality rate for the 2019-20 flu season was in the neighborhood of 0.1%.

In other words, the more COVID cases the suits at the CDC find, with deaths remaining relatively constant, the closer the case mortality rate for COVID comes to that for the flu. And I just don't see where they can find equivalent numbers of extra deaths to make up the difference. This is a guy who's apparently authorized to speak on behalf of the CDC as an "official", but he's talking the purest moonshine.

When I first talked about moral panics last week, I said that one feature of them is that the perceived threat is disproportionate to the actual threat in some measurable way. The New York Post story is an example: we have a "CDC official" saying that the number of COVID infections right now is so great that, if his estmate were true, just based on published case mortality rates, we'd be seeing Category 5 level disasters in every city.

We aren't. At least some people are beginning to lose patience. The problem for the CDC becomes how much more the rate is going to decline as more and more people are tested -- and at what point this indicates that, as a practical matter, the problem has been solved, even without a vaccine.

Judge Issues Injunction Against LA County; Never Mind

Last week I covered Los Angeles Superior Court Judge James Chalfant's instruction to the Los Angeles County health department to return to his courtroom December 8 to provide actual research on the reasons to ban outdoor dining as a COVID lockdown measure. On Tuesday, this didn't go well for the county.

The judge had little sympathy for the county's arguments and sided with the [plaintff, the California Restaurant Association]. At one point, Chalfant said the county's arguments about being unable to confirm a link between outdoor dining and coronavirus might have flown early in the pandemic but not anymore.

"I am shocked that in nine months, [government officials] have not looked seriously at outdoor dining," Chalfant said. "I am not laying this at the county's feet but that is a failure of government."

. . . Attorneys for the plaintiffs claimed the outdoor dining ban would do little or nothing to stop the rising tide of coronavirus cases. [Plaintiff Mark] Geragos called the outdoor dining ban "feel-good political theater."

Judge Chalfant appeared to agree with that sentiment. At one point, he told L.A. County's attorney, "You want to look like you're doing something so you're restricting outdoor dining."

However, the injunction applies only to an LA County ban on outdoor dining, which was imposed independently by the county not long before Gov Newsom imposed a set of regional bans based on hospital ICU caoacity, which I covered in part yesterday. This in turn sets up an entirely new set of restrictions that overlays a still-in-effect set of color-coded restrictions imposed on counties based on COVID statistics.

The practical effect is that, although the injunction applies to the county's ban on outdoor dining, the separate state ban on the same thing is still in effect.

A different situation was resolved by going through political channels to get Gov Newsom to revise a decree.

Democrat California Governor Gavin Newsom reversed course on closing playgrounds because of the coronavirus after citizens and even his left-wing colleagues and supporters called foul on depriving children of the opportunity to play outdoors.

. . . “According to the state’s updated guidance, playgrounds located at schools that remain open for in-person instruction, that are not accessible by the general public, may also remain open, as long as they follow state guidance for schools and school-based programs,” Fox reported.

It sounds as though the modification to Newsom's order was very, very narrowly tailored to accommodate the particlar situation of a crony or small group of cronies. As we saw last week, apparently a favored TV producer was able to set up outdoor catering at a film location right next to a restaurant whose outdoor dining had been closed by the governor's order.

What we've seen in places like California is that an intricate and multi-layered set of extra-legislative, and increasingly extra-judicial, controls has sprouted up with remarkable speed. Although some remedies seem to be on the horizon, it isn't going to be an easy matter to clear this up. And a vaccine isn't going to solve a thing.

Fool Me Once

On December 2, Joe Biden announced there may be 250,000 further deaths due to COVID between 'now and January'. Now, Joe has had a history of adding a zero here and there to his estimates, but this one was widely published without challenge, and at least 250,000 isn't 250,000,000. But is even this number remotely reasonable?

It took eight months, between March and the end of October, for the US to reach a total of 250,000 COVID deaths. And keep in mind that health authorities throughout this time have repeated that COVID deaths are calculated as any death in which the decedent tested positive for COVID, whatever the underlying cause. Someone killed in a skydiving accident would be a COVID death if he tested positive. Someone who died in a hospice from terminal cancer would be a COVID death that way.

On December 5, there were 2,190 COVID deaths that day in the US. which seems to be generally consistent with the totals in recent weeks. (The numbers jump around in the low four figures.) Since this is December 9, we have 22 days remaining in December.

If COVID deaths continue at the December 5 rate, there will be only 48,180 deaths between now and January, not 250,000. This is off by 80%. Put another way, for there to be 250,000 deaths between now and January, there would need to be over 11,000 US deaths per day. The trend since Joe's announcement on December 2 has nevertheless been chatter in the low four figures. We aren't seeing these numbers.

Actually, this is the classic "if present trends continue" fallacious argument that used to be taught in middle school.

Let's recall that last March, the Imperial College COVID model, which drove early US policy, forecast 2 million US deaths. Joe seems to be making forecasts based on similar premises, which, within even a week of his making them, are pretty clearly not proving out.

Another issue from last March is the estimates of hospital ICU capacity that drove President Trump to send Navy hospital ships to New York and Los Angeles. The original intent, recall, was for them to provide additional intensive care capacity to allow local hospitals to devote their own units to the predicted flood of COVID patients. But the flood never materialized, and the ships were not actualy needed. As of late April, the Mercy "had treated a few dozen non-coronavirus patients for everything from heart and lung conditions to gastrointestinal problems," and it left Los Angeles in May.

However, Gov Newsom is using what appear to be similar wildly inflated estimates of ICU capacity to impose a new lockdown on California. This appears to disregard normal hospital practice and seems to be a repeat of the wild overestimates from last March:

In any given year, most parts of California reach 90% ICU capacity in December. This is usually due to the surge in flu cases, but the flu is allegedly non-existent this year, replaced on paper by the more lucrative COVID-19 diagnoses preferred by hospitals. They knew it was coming, which is why they made moves separate from the state to increase ICU capacity. But without the state’s help, there was no way they were going to stay below the Governor’s 85% threshold. And they were okay with that.

Dr. Brad Spellberg, Chief Medical Officer at the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, said, “Where we typically run well above 90% of our ICU beds occupancy because we’re such a busy trauma center. And this is taking us to almost capacity.”

In other words, in California, ICU capacity never falls below 90% in December, so why treat 2020 as an emergency? In addition, hospitals do reconfigure their facilities to meet demand in any case. It's completely unclear why a lockdown is needed to avert a problem that is quite possibly non-existent. Newsom justifies the lockdown based on "projections" and "models", but it's unclear how those differ from the ones that sent unneeded hospital ships to New York and Los Angeles last March.

But last spring, people thought this was a completely new situation and took the authorities' word for things.

Fool me twice, shame on me.

No California Policy Movement After Supreme Court Signals

On November 25, the US Supreme Court ordered a preliminary injunction in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo, holding that New York may not enforce 10- or 25-person congregation-size limits on certain Catholic churches and Orthodox synagogues, pending further Supreme Court litigation. On December 3, the justices sent the dispute between the Harvest Rock International Ministry and California Gov. Gavin Newsom back to the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals to further consider the case in light of its Movember 23 ruling.

However, as one commentator put it, this effectively changes nothing for California churches.

Vacating the district court decision leaves the Governor's order in full effect. Another two or three full months could elapse before this case gets back to the Supreme Court. Harvest Rock remains subject to the very regime they sought emergency relief on. This punt leaves the church in a very difficult place.

In response, on December 3,

Lawyers for a church with more than 160 congregations across California said they would seek an immediate court order Thursday allowing indoor worship after the Supreme Court told a lower federal court to reexamine state coronavirus restrictions on church services.

So far, there's no news on that front.

Also on December 3, Gov Newsom announced a completely new state lockdown scheme based on models of hospital ICU capacity in regions of the state. As far as anyone can tell, this overlays the existing color-coded scheme based on COVID case statistics by individual counties and does not replace it,

The new guidance allows travel to "important activities" like "worship", but it restricts worship services in all affected regions to outdoors-only, instead of limited worship indoors in a small number of counties. The bottom line appears to be that fewer areas will allow any indoor worship at all.

What the Su[preme Court telegraphed is that, whatever the restrictions the state imposes, they can't single out houses of worship for special treatment. Currently under the color code system, indoor worship is prohibited over most of the state, but much of the retail industry is allowed to operate indoors, albeit under capacity reatrictions. If Target or Home Depot can operate, even at 20% capacity, a church should be able to hold indoor services at 20% capacity as well.

However, Abp Cordileone seems to have been aware of his dilemma in last week's statement quoted here:

We prefer not to go to court to win this fight. We prefer, and have been working hard for a long time to achieve, resolving this impasse with mutual understanding and respect. That would save a lot of valuable time and resources. It would also help to build up good will.

Right now, it seems to me that the Supreme Court signals have put the nonconforming megachurches in a pretty good position, because tjey're continuing to operate indoors without "permission", amd their legal cases for continuing to do so look a lot better. On the other hand, efforts by the churches that play by the full set of rules are likely to be delayed for months, leaving the moral enforcers in a continuing position of power, for however long that lasts.

Remarks by Abp Cordileone earlier this fall suggest that attempts by the archdiocese to submit plans for reopening indoor worship, no matter how carefully worked out, are simply ignored by the authorities.