I was in the Oval Office with the president and his economic team in February (when COVID-19 cases were beginning to spread). His staff was worried that the FDA would not be interested in removing any more approval barriers. But the President was confident, telling us that “I’ve done it before and will do it again … bring the FDA management in here.” President Trump initiated his Operation Warp speed, led by HHS, to give many private companies incentives for “speed and scale” of vaccine production and to give all companies the opportunity for streamlined FDA approval.
Read the whole post. Pointer from a commenter.
Unless Mulligan’s account can be disputed, Mr. Trump successfully fought the bureaucracy on the vaccine issue. Thus, contrary to the standard view on the left, he is a hero rather than a villain of the virus crisis.
2. The daily average death rate seems to have finally leveled off, albeit at a high level of about 2500 deaths per day.
3. In a podcast with Russ Roberts, Jay Bhattacharya says,
if you’re under 70, the infection survival rate is something like 99.95%. 99.95%
He argues for a policy that I would call “expose the young, protect the old.” Let me play Devil’s Advocate on that.
–His numbers say that the chances of dying if you are under 70 and get the virus are 5 out of 10,000. Suppose that 200 million people get it with that death rate. That means that 100,000 of them die. Is that low for people in that age group? I don’t know.
–And what if he is a little off–and the death rate turns out to be 8 out of 10,000? That would mean 160,000 deaths in that age group.
–And what about survival but with long-term damage? I think it was Bret Weinstein who speculated that the virus takes an average of 10 years off of the life of everyone who gets it, or perhaps everyone who is symptomatic. That is a lot of life-years lost, even if it only kills people who otherwise had less than 10 years of expected life.
–And in practice can you really protect the old while the young are exposed?
Of course, he deals with these objections in the podcast.
If we take these numbers as accurate, and I admit to not having the time to look into them, then 99.95% is crossed somewhere in the age 50s? (I’m trying to eyeball the graph). It seems like if you lower the age cutoff another 5 or 10 years the average mortality rate becomes dramatically lower then even 99.95%, and I suspect at younger ages its almost entirely a story of pre-existing health conditions (so those people would know about their own risks and behave accordingly).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0/figures/2
The survival rate for elementary age children, who BTW we denied schooling to this year, is OVER 99.999%.
Given that hundreds of thousands have died in status quo, I’m not sure the numbers your citing are an issue, but if they are shocking it doesn’t take much of a change to get better numbers.
*By “those numbers” I mean my link.
What we needed? A national placebo shot.
Trucks of saline solution advertising 99.95% survival rate w/o side effects. Already FDA approved for pennies a shot. A line would form around the country to get the scared masses moving again.
The numbers are not accurate. About 80% of covid-19 deaths in the US are people >=65 (source). This means that of current ~320k covid-19 deaths, about 65k are people under 65. Suppose those people had 99.95% survivability, then their 65k deaths stem from 130M infections which is x7 more than the registered 18M infections so far in the US, for all ages. The number of infections is undercounted, but not by x7, best estimates are x2-x3. And this is for 65 years, for 70 the survivability is quite worse still.
“… contrary to the standard view on the left, he [Trump] is a hero rather than a villain of the virus crisis.”
He’s probably a combination of villain and hero. He got the vaccines through in a record time and deserves a lot of credit for that. Yet, he was also a fountain of misinformation about the disease and its treatment. He also ridiculed people who wore masks, making the issue a test of loyalty to him. After the election, he seems to have lost interest in everything other than overturning the vote – this at a time when more Americans are dying from COVID than ever.
What misinformation has he given? I admit to not following all of his statements, but most times when people say he said this or that I look it up and its out of context or a fabrication.
“ridiculed people who wore masks”
I think people that wear masks outside deserve ridicule, and I’m against attempts to force the practice where it doesn’t make scientific sense or is impractical. It’s also pretty clear from things like shoulder to shoulder shouting BLM protests that masks are seen as some kind of magic talisman that protects you from your own stupidity.
My general rule of thumb is that if your trying to avoid the virus and your in a situation where you think you should be wearing a mask, you probably shouldn’t be in the situation in the first place.
Only in situations that are inherently dangerous where its unavoidable not to be there, like the doctors office, does something like a mask mandate make sense, and I suspect private individuals would comply in those situations on their own.
“After the election, he seems to have lost interest in everything other than overturning the vote”
Actually, I’ve been really impressed with everything he’s tried to shove through since the election ended. In my own industry he has passed legislation that he didn’t need to simply because he thought it was the right thing to do, taking on special interests. I’ve heard the same from others working in different areas. There is in fact a lot of substantiative stuff going on in his lame duck period, and it raised my opinion of the man.
asdf, he asked aloud at a press conference whether the flu shot covered covid. He said it would magically go away by Easter. He tried to restrict testing because he didn’t want the case numbers to look bad. He focused on blaming China rather than playing the hand he was dealt. I could go on.
Every other recent Republican president would have made a moral argument about protecting their friends, family, neighbors, and fellow Americans by wearing masks. Certainly we know GW Bush was concerned about pandemics. Instead, Trump literally hosted a superspreading event at the White House.
“He said it would magically go away by Easter.”
If by go away you mean “no new cases at all, absolute zero” then its a wrong statement. If it means “COVID is seasonal like most respiratory viruses and the warm weather will help” then it was in fact correct. In fact the places that had some issues over the summer were the places so far south that people have to stay indoors with the air conditioning.
Beyond that, I would say that by easter it was starting to become apparent that COVID wasn’t a big deal and that life should go back to normal. The huge surge in cases and deaths that centered on NYC had already peaked and gone into decline by Easter, and we have never reached that level of mortality since then even though a much wider swath of the country is dealing with it then the March NYC wave.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
The hard lockdowns should have ended earlier then they did and much of the continuing measures also should have been lifted. Trump was correct on this, Fact Check: True.
“He tried to restrict testing because he didn’t want the case numbers to look bad.”
My understanding is that Trump actually worked hard to overcome the train wreck that was the FDA/CDC attempt to make their own failed test and restrict others from offering their own, and that this cost us about a month of progress on testing.
Beyond that, testing is highly inaccurate and done so with the purpose of increasing case counts. 37 or 40 PCR cycles is a meaningless number full of false positives. Ask Fauci himself:
https://twitter.com/jimgris/status/1326518250386063361
Considering that a false positive means:
1) Having to isolate yourself for two weeks
2) All of your close contacts having to isolate and get tested
3) Any institution you are in having to shut down (my kids daycare had to shut down because a relative of a kid, but not the kid, got a positive test).
4) Test positivity rates are used to determine things like school shutdowns
Then its really really important that you not have a ridiculous false positive rate. The reason the ratio of excess all cause mortality deaths and cases has collapsed is because case counts and cause of death criteria have become meaningless. Trump is more right then wrong no this. Fact Check: True.
“He focused on blaming China rather than playing the hand he was dealt. ”
Trump was right to restrict travel from China and his opponents called him racist for it. Democrats were telling people to go to Chinese New Year. “Playing the hand he was dealt” is a little vague. Focusing only on the China part of the comment, it seems spot on.
“Every other recent Republican president would have made a moral argument about protecting their friends, family, neighbors, and fellow Americans by wearing masks. ”
Which is a good reason why Trump won the nomination. There is nothing moral about wearing masks in situations where they do no good, and something immoral about forcing others to do so when its a big cost with no benefit.
“Instead, Trump literally hosted a superspreading event at the White House.”
Which he appears to have emerged from despite being 74 and obese, which shows you how overblown the virus is. I respect people that continue to live their lives in spite of a mildly elevated mortality risk versus those that hide in their basements in fear waiting to die. The blue check attitude on the virus is about the opposite of “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” I’m glad to see someone pushing against that.
“In fact the places that had some issues over the summer were the places so far south that people have to stay indoors with the air conditioning.”
I agree that it’s people congregating indoors and HVAC blowing virus around during hot and cold weather that facilitates spread. So there is some regional seasonality. But note that the flu isn’t a big deal in the south during the summers, typically. And saying he was correct that it would go away by Easter and then acknowledging that the south had its big wave in the summer is incoherent and shows a willingness to ignore facts.
“Which he appears to have emerged from despite being 74 and obese, which shows you how overblown the virus is.”
Trump had access to the best medical care in the world, free of charge, including medicine that was not widely approved (a failing of the FDC). That’s not the typical case, so not logical to draw broad conclusions from n=1.
I agree that masks outdoors are silly (unless people are in very close contact), and I don’t think they necessarily do much to protect the wearer (unless it’s an N95), but limiting the trajectory of viral particles from infected people indoors is almost certainly helpful.
I agree that restricting travel from China was the right call, and that the claims of racism were ridiculous (made by the Chinese themselves). But he was more focused on political spin and the stock market rather than taking basic common sense actions, like helping to procure PPE in March (I mention more details in my comment below).
“ratio of excess all cause mortality deaths and cases has collapsed”
Fact check: False. For the data that is complete or nearly complete (you have go back about 4 weeks), this ratio is still clearly elevated. And given the rise in hospitalizations, you can bet on this getting worse before it gets better.
I agree that the FDC/CDC failed early on, and that the FDC has been much to strict for much of the pandemic.
Almost 1 in every 1,000 Americans is dead this year at least in part because of covid. And that’s in spite of unprecedented work from home numbers and lots of other precautions. And it’s not like we avoided a recession. I’m not arguing for unlimited lockdowns, masks outdoors, etc. I’m simply making the case that Trump didn’t do a great job on many basics of the pandemic. And Operation Warp speed, while valuable, did not result in the US having the only vaccines so quickly. Some other countries managed to get viable vaccines on that timeline as well. I’m sure ours are better, but I also believe that many others in that position would’ve been able to achieve similar results there. I can both believe that the press is unfair to Trump, and that he failed for much of this situation.
If you want to hear that Trumps press conferences were at times embarrassing you don’t need to convince me.
As to his hyperbolic speaking style maybe I’ve just always found it easy to translate. I can certainly imagine a more eloquent presentation of his basic case, but at least he’s making the right case.
“so not logical to draw broad conclusions from n=1.”
“this ratio is still clearly elevated. ”
It doesn’t appear elevated enough to justify the lockdowns IMO. Such measures were justified when it looked like March/April level death rates in NYC might spread to the rest of the country or even get worse (they had increased dramatically each week). Peak excess deaths were up over 600% in NYC at that time. If you thought that was going to happen to the entire country that would be 20 million deaths…that would justify a lockdown.
We aren’t going to get close to that. We are on track for like 300-400k excess deaths. That is like 2% of what some of the epidemiology models were spitting out in March/April to justify all this stuff. Once it became apparent that the problem was an order of magnitude or more less concerning then what got us into this mess, I just don’t think it justified many of these ongoing restrictions.
My stance on the vaccines is that they were invented in a weekend and if we had a free market in vaccines we would have done a challenge trial and had them available for purchase this summer. I have similar views on cheap instant at home testing, which itself would dramatically reduced the burden of the virus. These are human (government) caused problems mostly produced by people that likely voted against Trump overwhelmingly.
In the real world the CDC has decided to deny a vaccine to my Dad for months because old people are too white and the CDC Biden voter that did the (very bad) math behind it is a “non-binary trans (they/them) who wants to defund the police and beliefs he is on occupied Indian land.”
The only reason they even allowed 75 year olds to get the vaccine (just a bit to old for my Dad) is because shitlords and Donald Trumps HHS Secretary called them out after the first presentation explaining why they needed to double mortality to achieve racial equity was published.
So really, who cares if Donald Trumps speaking style offends. He isn’t literally trying to kill my family.
My stance on the vaccines is that they were invented in a weekend and if we had a free market in vaccines we would have done a challenge trial and had them available for purchase this summer. I have similar views on cheap instant at home testing, which itself would dramatically reduced the burden of the virus. These are human (government) caused problems mostly produced by people that likely voted against Trump overwhelmingly.
I broadly agree with this. But if Trump had been truly great, he would have discovered the above and then pushed hard and loud for them. He didn’t. He supported Operation Warp Speed but he didn’t go after the bureaucratic/professional SOPs that nixed challenge trials and cheap home testing. All those “people that likely voted against Trump overwhelmingly” rolled him.
Roger,
I agree with your assessment of Trump as a non-serious reality TV star who didn’t have what it takes. But where does that leave one? Trump never hated me. Trump doesn’t want to destroy me. Trump hasn’t ever done a single thing to harm me or my loved ones. In a general sense, I suspect his first instincts roughly align with mine.
His enemies…none of that can be said of them. They will literally be the death of me and mine and most everything I value.
So all we are left with is wanting a *better* Trump, not a repudiation of Trump. I just can’t be angry at the man, I can’t even be disappointed as I more or less felt this way about him four years ago. I support him in spite of this, because his opponents are so evil and awful and represent such a terrible future that to do anything but support him is evil itself.
If you don’t like Trump because you want a better Trump, go be that person. If you won’t be that person, suck it up and line up for the next best alternative. But if you reject him because you prefer the blue check future over him, I have no sympathy for that assessment.
The old men say:
‘Is this the shepherd of the people? Is this
the wise shepherd, protector of the people?”
-Epic of Gilgamesh, David Ferry int.
From the official NYC data (the location having the most severe outbreak in the US)
deaths per 100k for healthy individuals:
(0 to 17) 0.1
(18 to 24) 0.1
(25 to 34) 0.3
(35 to 44) 2
(45 to 54) 4
(55 to 64) 4
(65 to 74) 1
(75 + ) 1
source:
https://github.com/nychealth/coronavirus-data/blob/master/totals/deaths-by-underlying-conditions.csv
full sheet of above with additional measures
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vS2Q_PBlu70b3GslS0h5SF2T8ppsNEhjLt7QmvYSoIOLDLrNn68xZspuWpcE3mefPJH5I0AH40FCvmF/pubhtml?gid=409717874&single=true
I find all this number crunching rather absurd. What measure would save more lives how do we weigh which lives we save or not or by how many years. It feels very utilitarian like we are a herd of pigs and the farmer needs to decide how to manage the outbreak of swine flu to protect the long term health of his pig business.
A free and democratic government should not even consider any restrictions but instead find ways to allow people to make decisions based on their own risk preferences. For example reduce the regulatory burden for remote work, home schooling or tele-medecine just as examples. I am sure people and private organizations will devise ways to deal with this pandemic and implement their own measures. Governments might also use their tax collecting powers to use this money to alleviate financial distress for people in need.
All these discussions about what kind restrictions would be best takes away agency from people and makes us into something that the government needs to manage. But we already lived in this kind world even before COVID. The pandemic makes just very clear. Btw I signed the Great Barrington Declaration because their ideas seem to leave the most room for personal agency.
“Thus, contrary to the standard view on the left, he is a hero rather than a villain of the virus crisis.”
I think it’s possible for Trump to have done some things well and other mishandled other aspects of the virus. The relevant questions are:
1) Did he do exceptionally well on things that others in that position could not have, such as Operation Warp Speed?
2) Did he mishandle things that others in that position would have handled better? Setting a poor example with masks, actively trying to reduce testing, not stepping in during the spring to help procure PPE (recall that the US was actually exporting masks as individual hospitals had trouble with things like proof of funds in the markets), etc.
Impossible to know for sure, but it seems more likely to me that the answer is “no” to #1 and “yes” to #2.
Re: “He argues for a policy that I would call ‘expose the young, protect the old.’”
He argues for a policy that I would call “communicate accurate public-health information about risks, broadly trust private adaptation by individuals and organizations, and protect the old and infirm.”
Thanks Arnold for linking to Russ’ EconTalk circulated earlier today. To complement it, I suggest reading this column also circulated today
https://www.aier.org/article/twelve-principles-of-public-health/
Also, I share with you the three realities that Dr. Atlas mentions in his WSJ opinion today:
1. all 50 states independently directed and implemented their own pandemic policies;
2. nearly all states used the same draconian policies that people now insist on hardening; and
3. the federal government’s role in the pandemic has been grossly mischaracterized by the media and their Democratic allies.
Atlas is right to regret the media’s politicization of Covid. As he says: “With vaccines finally being administered, we should be entering a joyous phase. Instead we endure still more inflammatory rhetoric and media distortion.”
Finally, here in Santiago Chile, I regret daily the idiocy of government officials and the opposition: the government for pretending to fine-tune the lifting of the draconian policies imposed between mid-May and early September, and the opposition for proposing daily the full enforcement of the draconian policies. This is not about science or rationality. It’s about the idiocy of people that are fighting for grabbing power.
But Americans are lucky. Anytime that a rotten and corrupt democrat has a great idea, like this one
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2020/12/20/andrew-yangs-bar-code-proof-of-vaccination-idea-gets-demolished-on-twitter-n1221178
many Americans rise and laugh at it.
And what about survival but with long-term damage? I think it was Bret Weinstein who speculated that the virus takes an average of 10 years off of the life of everyone who gets it, or perhaps everyone who is symptomatic.
That seems rather, no, hugely overblown. Bret Weinstein is some sort of op-ed journalist, isn’t he? Is that speculation based on any firm medical data, papers or suchlike?
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20201109/evidence-shows-that-covid-19-attacks-blood-vessels
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200423/the-great-invader-how-covid-attacks-every-organ
https://www.healthshots.com/health-news/covid-19-can-cause-damage-to-your-heart-and-kidneys-even-after-recovery/
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20201109/evidence-shows-that-covid-19-attacks-blood-vessels
In a study in Spain, researchers found viral particles in the endothelial cells of patients with chilblains.
Please read the study. They found viral particles, but they didn’t check whether they were Covid-19 viral particles or not…
Here’s a Belgian study (bigger sample, and no cherry picking) contradicting this:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamadermatology/fullarticle/2767774
I would assume that if he isn’t pulling it out of his behind, he is using data from long term outcomes from people who got SARS 1. Though my recollection was that SARS 1 was a lot deadlier and more serious than the new coronavirus, so extrapolating from that to SARS 2 does not appear to me to be straightforward. It might provide a good estimate for people who were hospitalized or needed oxygen. But for people who had it and did not have that severe a case, I am not so sure that their will be any long term negative effects. Does a bad case of the flu take years off the life of a young adult?
Arnold, I hope in your next update (maybe tomorrow), you go back to your April 19 post “Sooner or later, mild or severe”.
I have been using it almost daily to revise my expectations. You were right about the relevant dimensions: they were only two –in April, and today, and tomorrow. Thus, today I expect that my probability of getting the virus “sooner” (the next quarter) is about half of the probability I assigned it last April (one third) and getting it “later” (the next 12 months) is also less than half of the two thirds I assigned it last April. The much lower probabilities are due to how much I learned about appropriate responses to the virus and the pandemic and more recently to the vaccine (as of today, my expectation is that I will be able to get it around July because of my age and my location –to get it I depend on the Chilean government).
The probabilities of becoming a “mild” or “severe” case have also changed for good. I think that if I were to get the virus, the probability of a “mild” case would be at least twice as greater as last April (one third), perhaps close to three fourths. This large increase is due to what I have learned about Covid under my particular conditions and to a lesser extent about the disease’s short-term consequences and treatments.
Indeed, I’m expecting I’ll survive well the virus, the disease, and the pandemic. My expectations take into consideration the many efforts of politicians around the world with their armies of bureaucrats and phony scientists and intellectuals and their press and social media that have been trying to persuade all of us that the probability of getting the virus is still high and will continue being high for at least all 2021 despite the vaccines and the probability of becoming a “severe” case is still high and will continue being high regardless of age and conditions because the virus’ mutations. Yes, we are surrounded by too many rotten and corrupt politicians, as rotten and corrupt as all U.S. democrats.
Happy 2021!
Speaking of heroes and villains: In the linked post, Casey Mulligan portrays FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb as a hero and Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Alex M. Azar II as a villain. I’d like to hear Kling and others comment on that? Is that a reasonable or unreasonable portrayal?