Fumento on the COVID-19 Pandemic
Tuesday, March 10, 2020
Michael Fumento has weighed in against corona virus hysteria. Although he concedes that old age increases the risk of the virus causing life-threatening illness, he is absolutely correct to call the media on sloppy reporting of death rates:
This has been obvious to me from the start. Not so obvious is the following, which I am under the impression is panning out:As for death rates, as I first noted in these pages on Jan. 24, you can't employ simple math -- as everyone is doing -- and look at deaths versus cases because those are reported cases. With both flu and assuredly with coronavirus, the great majority of those infected have symptoms so mild -- if any -- that they don't seek medical attention and don't get counted in the caseload.
Image from National Cancer Institute, via Unsplash, license.
Furthermore, those calculating rates ignore the importance of good health care. Given that the vast majority of cases have occurred in a country with poor health care, that's going to dramatically exaggerate the death rate. [link omitted]
China is the origin of the virus and still accounts for over 80 percent of cases and deaths. But its cases peaked and began declining more than a month ago, according to data presented by the Canadian epidemiologist who spearheaded the World Health Organization's coronavirus mission to China. Fewer than 200 new cases are reported daily, down from a peak of 4,000.I am not a medical professional, but Fumento does seem to be employing a standard model, and publicly-available data that I looked at are consistent with the above. (Scroll down to the "active cases" graph.)
Subsequent countries will follow this same pattern, in what's called Farr's Law. First formulated in 1840 and ignored in every epidemic hysteria since, the law states that epidemics tend to rise and fall in a roughly symmetrical pattern or bell-shaped curve. AIDS, SARS, Ebola -- they all followed that pattern. So does seasonal flu each year.
Fumento's column offers other good news, as well as some precautions once can take to improve one's odds of avoiding the illness.
-- CAV
4 comments:
One reason for the panic is that we've distributed the information far better this time than in past pandemics. This means that people are seeing maps, graphs, and charts nearly in real time, watching the numbers grow. Not going to lie, watching the virus come towards me and my family is scary. However, what people forget (and what I constantly remind myself) is that this isn't sufficient context. The spread of the virus is exactly what we expect for ANY virus--it follows trade routes. In isolation, this data means nothing; to fully appreciate the data you have to compare it against other diseases, like the seasonal flu.
A similar thing happened in the company I work for. They started tracking the number of injuries in a way that allowed everyone to see them in near-real-time. Upper management saw the numbers start to climb and panicked. The H&S staff pointed out that compared to past years, the numbers were actually LOWER, meaning that telling folks how often injuries were occurring helped prevent injuries. But seeing that number creep up has a terrifying effect on people who drop the full context of the situation.
Dinwar,
A problem I keep noticing is that attempts to improve the context of the information are often met with skepticism, as if, say, comparing this to the flu is an attempt to conceal its "real" severity. I liked Fumento's pointing out that many different diseases rise and fall in a similar fashion.
A better presentation of statistics could possibly help. New cases instead of total cases comes to mind.
Gus
I just wish people would realize how shaky the lethality figures we have are. You can't measure lethality without knowing how many people are infected, and you can't know that without widespread testing of asymptomatic people, and we just aren't doing that.
Instead we only give the test to people who are showing severe symptoms. That creates a sampling bias that drives up the perceived lethality. My understanding is that nations that test more broadly, like South Korea, show lower lethality rates.
Is this disease more serious than the seasonal flu? Yes. Is it 30 times more legal? Almost certainly not. But understanding that requires numeracy, and we have a media that thinks 500 million divided by 330 million is over a million.
Kyle,
Even within China, the measured lethality rate is lower than in the province that had the first cases. (And IIRC, even THAT was without sampling for undiagnosed cases, which I agree should be done.
Gus
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