As of April 6, 3DDRR for the U.S. was 1.53, still falling. For the U.S. excluding New York, it’s at 1.47, and that is also falling. So I see no reason to rescind my claim that in the United States the worst is behind us.
19 thoughts on “Latest 3DDRRs, for April 6”
Rapid spread means rapid path to equilibrium.
Indeed. Large, massive and fairly unprecedented shutdowns have correlated with a fall in 3DDRR.
Overall, not surprising.
The only question that matters at this point is whether 3DDRR can continue to fall with targeted re-openings, widespread mask adaptation, appropriate self-isolation of the most vulnerable, and enhanced public hygiene at the level to which we can be expected to pull that off or whether prolonged shutdowns are necessary.
If the answer to that question is that the latter is necessary and the former insufficient, then it is in fact not at all clear to me that the worst is behind us.
By the worst, Arnold means the initial growth rates. And he showed fairly convincingly that if we return to those growth rates we very soon run out of New Yorkers.
If the worst wasn’t behind us after weeks of lockdown we’d be in big, big trouble. The big Q is what happens when we start to resume semi-normal activity.
Your three day ratio of cumulative deaths will decrease towards 1.0 even if the number of new daily deaths is constant.
More interesting, I think, is that cumulative deaths of 8314, 9498, 10680, over the past three 4 PM (Eastern time) show that this is the first time we have two consecutive decreases in new daily deaths.
Specifically the change in new daily deaths was…
-12.4% on April 5.
-0.2% on April 6.
I applaud ASK’s optimism, which is always a valuable trait.
But we still have a novel virus and a naive population. Hong Kong tried lockdowns, came out of lockdowns and went back into lockdowns.
Lockdowns look like a dead end, there is no exit strategy.
So now what? My guess is that lockdowns kick-the-can-down-the-road but at fantastic expense.
In March, US Deaths From COVID-19 Totaled Less Than 2 Percent of All Deaths
—-
At ten thousand deaths we are tracking a pandemic four times worse than the 2009 Swine Flu. But what we mostly remember from 2009 are the bailouts.
If this rate holds, likely not, then we are tracking the 1957 Flu pandemic.
Judge your behavior by how you would act in an extreme flu pandemic.
I’ve heard they’re no longer testing the deceased for COVID-19 in NYC. Basically, if someone dies at home of COVID-19 symptoms but never received a test, that death doesn’t show up in the numbers. They get classified as something else, pneumonia I think. I suspect if you compare pneumonia deaths this year to years prior you could adjust for this possibility. When the dust settles, that is.
I guess I’m wondering if the deceleration in COVID-19 deaths is really due to things slowing down, or some other feature such as this one. One constant in this pandemic seems to be that you can’t trust any of the data, at least not without understanding the limitations of how it was collected. I think this applies to death rates too, even though they’re probably more reliable than any other measure.
Be safe out there Arnold!
Except pneumonia and influenza-like illness (ILI) deaths are well below average for the last few weeks. And the CDC was recommending that death be attributed to COVID-19 even if a test isn’t done but the symptoms fit. That might explain the stopping of postmortem tests.
Here is a non-PC topic. This COVID-19 novel coronavirus is “zoonotic” meaning it passes between species.
“domestic cats and dogs testing positive for the virus after their owners became sick with COVID-19. A 17-year-old Pomeranian in Hong Kong tested “weakly positive” in February and died in March, but the dog might have simply died of old age, according to reporting from the South China Morning Post. A two-year-old German shepherd in Hong Kong tested positive after its owner came down with the disease, while another dog that lived in the same home didn’t. A cat in Hong Kong and another cat in Belgium have also tested positive. The cat in Belgium “showed clinical signs of digestive and respiratory disease,” according to information from the National Veterinary Services of Belgium.”
–30—
And the zoo tigers in NYC. Maybe bats in China.
So…how about squirrels and rats?
Can we lockdown the animals too? Will infections commonly travel back and forth from pets to people and other animal populations?
So, we come out of lockdowns…and people start getting sick from COVID-19 again. Then what? Is it from animals, or other people?
Sure, a squirrel-sneeze is not likely to infect a human. But if it happens, it is back to the races….
What if COVID-19 becomes endemic to animal populations everywhere?
On my neighborhood walks I have seen a couple of squirrels in extremis, easy prey for birds.
If it was cv19, then that would be a good sign, for us. The animals have immune systems too (well, the ones that survive) and if they get herd immunity to a species-crossing bug, so do we. Better it spread fast enough in them to see signs already, and have fatal effects in potential natural reservoirs, than to leave them alone, but contagious carriers.
Like bats.
This is exactly the problem with bats.
Bats are unique because of special metabolic and immune system changes they had to make in order to fly as mammals. They need to be able to withstand simply incredible heartbeat rates and body temperatures, which they experience on a daily basis every time they fly. Those changes allowed them to coevolve and host with impunity literally over a hundred diseases that are devastating for man.
Kill All The Bats.
Would be interesting to compare rate of slowing within the US in states with and without mandated lockdowns. My guess is that general social distancing measures are increasing regardless of those mandates so it’d be a dirty control for the effectiveness of less severe social distancing.
Caveats.
Testing is flatlining from the data I have seen- we have been between 120,000 and 150,000 tests/day for over a week now- there is an illusion that testing has increased by about 40,000 tests/day over that time, but that is due to California allowing a huge backlog to build up that was cleared this weekend in some fashion. This can easily affect both new cases and deaths and make things look like a plateau. This, of course, is a direct effect on new cases, but it could also do the same to deaths if we aren’t really testing all respiratory deaths of people who did not take a test while alive, and I have no reason at this point to believe we are testing dead people. How many deaths are being missed here? We don’t know because the data collectors don’t behave like scientific investigators.
I will also point out something else about Europe- no country is increasing tests/day any longer that I can tell. All the cumulative graphs of tests conducted look linear to me over the last 10 days- all of them. What looks like a peak/plateau in Spain, Italy, Germany, the UK, and elsewhere- in new cases and deaths= may only be an artifact of that apparent cap on tests run each day.
Take Italy for example. The peak in new cases (worldometers.info) was March 21 at 6500+ and on April 6 it was 3500+. This suggests but does not prove that Italy’s daily testing capacity is adequate or that they do not need to grow it.
Or people are getting resistant to taking the tests, and the requirements for doing so are being relaxed in response to draw in more respondants.
Italy’s tests/day have dropped 25% in the last week, so not even a plateau any longer.
I would like to see the rolling average cases for Tuesday – Friday as better days to use as many states are showing slight declines on Weekends and higher during weekdays. (Not New York but here in California that is true.) There could be dozens of reasons for this, but here a lot of the lag is coming from our limited number of testing facilities are behind on results.
Rapid spread means rapid path to equilibrium.
Indeed. Large, massive and fairly unprecedented shutdowns have correlated with a fall in 3DDRR.
Overall, not surprising.
The only question that matters at this point is whether 3DDRR can continue to fall with targeted re-openings, widespread mask adaptation, appropriate self-isolation of the most vulnerable, and enhanced public hygiene at the level to which we can be expected to pull that off or whether prolonged shutdowns are necessary.
If the answer to that question is that the latter is necessary and the former insufficient, then it is in fact not at all clear to me that the worst is behind us.
By the worst, Arnold means the initial growth rates. And he showed fairly convincingly that if we return to those growth rates we very soon run out of New Yorkers.
If the worst wasn’t behind us after weeks of lockdown we’d be in big, big trouble. The big Q is what happens when we start to resume semi-normal activity.
Your three day ratio of cumulative deaths will decrease towards 1.0 even if the number of new daily deaths is constant.
More interesting, I think, is that cumulative deaths of 8314, 9498, 10680, over the past three 4 PM (Eastern time) show that this is the first time we have two consecutive decreases in new daily deaths.
Specifically the change in new daily deaths was…
-12.4% on April 5.
-0.2% on April 6.
I applaud ASK’s optimism, which is always a valuable trait.
But we still have a novel virus and a naive population. Hong Kong tried lockdowns, came out of lockdowns and went back into lockdowns.
Lockdowns look like a dead end, there is no exit strategy.
So now what? My guess is that lockdowns kick-the-can-down-the-road but at fantastic expense.
https://mises.org/wire/march-us-deaths-covid-19-totaled-less-2-percent-all-deaths
In March, US Deaths From COVID-19 Totaled Less Than 2 Percent of All Deaths
—-
At ten thousand deaths we are tracking a pandemic four times worse than the 2009 Swine Flu. But what we mostly remember from 2009 are the bailouts.
If this rate holds, likely not, then we are tracking the 1957 Flu pandemic.
Judge your behavior by how you would act in an extreme flu pandemic.
I’ve heard they’re no longer testing the deceased for COVID-19 in NYC. Basically, if someone dies at home of COVID-19 symptoms but never received a test, that death doesn’t show up in the numbers. They get classified as something else, pneumonia I think. I suspect if you compare pneumonia deaths this year to years prior you could adjust for this possibility. When the dust settles, that is.
I guess I’m wondering if the deceleration in COVID-19 deaths is really due to things slowing down, or some other feature such as this one. One constant in this pandemic seems to be that you can’t trust any of the data, at least not without understanding the limitations of how it was collected. I think this applies to death rates too, even though they’re probably more reliable than any other measure.
Be safe out there Arnold!
Except pneumonia and influenza-like illness (ILI) deaths are well below average for the last few weeks. And the CDC was recommending that death be attributed to COVID-19 even if a test isn’t done but the symptoms fit. That might explain the stopping of postmortem tests.
Here is a non-PC topic. This COVID-19 novel coronavirus is “zoonotic” meaning it passes between species.
“domestic cats and dogs testing positive for the virus after their owners became sick with COVID-19. A 17-year-old Pomeranian in Hong Kong tested “weakly positive” in February and died in March, but the dog might have simply died of old age, according to reporting from the South China Morning Post. A two-year-old German shepherd in Hong Kong tested positive after its owner came down with the disease, while another dog that lived in the same home didn’t. A cat in Hong Kong and another cat in Belgium have also tested positive. The cat in Belgium “showed clinical signs of digestive and respiratory disease,” according to information from the National Veterinary Services of Belgium.”
–30—
And the zoo tigers in NYC. Maybe bats in China.
So…how about squirrels and rats?
Can we lockdown the animals too? Will infections commonly travel back and forth from pets to people and other animal populations?
So, we come out of lockdowns…and people start getting sick from COVID-19 again. Then what? Is it from animals, or other people?
Sure, a squirrel-sneeze is not likely to infect a human. But if it happens, it is back to the races….
What if COVID-19 becomes endemic to animal populations everywhere?
On my neighborhood walks I have seen a couple of squirrels in extremis, easy prey for birds.
If it was cv19, then that would be a good sign, for us. The animals have immune systems too (well, the ones that survive) and if they get herd immunity to a species-crossing bug, so do we. Better it spread fast enough in them to see signs already, and have fatal effects in potential natural reservoirs, than to leave them alone, but contagious carriers.
Like bats.
This is exactly the problem with bats.
Bats are unique because of special metabolic and immune system changes they had to make in order to fly as mammals. They need to be able to withstand simply incredible heartbeat rates and body temperatures, which they experience on a daily basis every time they fly. Those changes allowed them to coevolve and host with impunity literally over a hundred diseases that are devastating for man.
Kill All The Bats.
Would be interesting to compare rate of slowing within the US in states with and without mandated lockdowns. My guess is that general social distancing measures are increasing regardless of those mandates so it’d be a dirty control for the effectiveness of less severe social distancing.
Caveats.
Testing is flatlining from the data I have seen- we have been between 120,000 and 150,000 tests/day for over a week now- there is an illusion that testing has increased by about 40,000 tests/day over that time, but that is due to California allowing a huge backlog to build up that was cleared this weekend in some fashion. This can easily affect both new cases and deaths and make things look like a plateau. This, of course, is a direct effect on new cases, but it could also do the same to deaths if we aren’t really testing all respiratory deaths of people who did not take a test while alive, and I have no reason at this point to believe we are testing dead people. How many deaths are being missed here? We don’t know because the data collectors don’t behave like scientific investigators.
I will also point out something else about Europe- no country is increasing tests/day any longer that I can tell. All the cumulative graphs of tests conducted look linear to me over the last 10 days- all of them. What looks like a peak/plateau in Spain, Italy, Germany, the UK, and elsewhere- in new cases and deaths= may only be an artifact of that apparent cap on tests run each day.
Take Italy for example. The peak in new cases (worldometers.info) was March 21 at 6500+ and on April 6 it was 3500+. This suggests but does not prove that Italy’s daily testing capacity is adequate or that they do not need to grow it.
Or people are getting resistant to taking the tests, and the requirements for doing so are being relaxed in response to draw in more respondants.
Italy’s tests/day have dropped 25% in the last week, so not even a plateau any longer.
I would like to see the rolling average cases for Tuesday – Friday as better days to use as many states are showing slight declines on Weekends and higher during weekdays. (Not New York but here in California that is true.) There could be dozens of reasons for this, but here a lot of the lag is coming from our limited number of testing facilities are behind on results.