From a UPI story.
The first, published June 5 by the journal Photochemistry and Photobiology, found that sunlight — specially ultraviolet solar radiation — kills SARS-CoV-2 in 30 minutes.
The second, published by JAMA Network Open on June 11, suggested that climates with warmer temperatures and higher humidity — like much of the United States during the summer — might slow the spread of the virus.
. . .The authors of both studies argue that people might be safer outdoors. This runs counter to many of the lockdown and social distancing measures implemented across much of the country in March, the researchers told UPI.
I posted What I Have Come to Believe on April 23. I said,
A fresh-air lifestyle is good for you. I am struck by the low death rate among homeless people and in India. Those populations ought to be at high risk, and the only story I can come up with is that they don’t spend as much time as we do indoors with HVAC.
I did not have much to go on. But I think what I said holds up. You are better off outside. The problem with hot weather in the U.S. is that it drives many people indoors for the air conditioning. UPDATE: According to Tyler Cowen, Nate Silver agrees on this point.
In fact, pretty much everything in that post holds up. I think that if you go back to March and April, I out-performed the professional health care experts in drawing inferences about the virus.
“In fact, pretty much everything in that post holds up. I think that if you go back to March and April, I out-performed the professional health care experts in drawing inferences about the virus. ”
True. Now, given that, ask yourself, is it “time to build” institutions, or time to burn them down and start over?
I’m actually not sure. On the one hand, the current stable is half-full of bad experts. On the other hand, a new stable would probably be completely full of them.
https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2020/04/why-outside-air-is-safe-and-park.html
The next 2-4 weeks will probably tell us quite a bit about the virus, particularly here in Texas.
Would anyone like to make a prediction?
Sure. I predict steady but slow decline from about the current level of around 30 Grims (covid-attributed fatalities per day), all summer long.
Independence Day is usually in the peak “stay indoors with lots of AC” season, and Houston is currently in the 90’s and Dallas is pushing triple digits.
At least three more months like that down there.
People tend to catch a lot of colds when they breath cold, dry air, or keep moving between warm and chilly air environments which keeps shocking the sinuses into action.
What happens is that cold, dry air – or at least a sudden shift to air that’s relatively colder and dryer than that of one’s previous environment – tends to make your sinuses produce a lot of moist mucus on the surface to condition the air before it hits your lungs.
I think most people are familiar with this kind of mild drip in the winter and sometimes when walking into a chilly room from hot outdoors, that requires a tissue but isn’t the kind of runny nose you get from an illness.
But, turns out that all that wet stickiness is just perfect for a stray virus particle to get stuck in and then get the express route to infecting exposed respiratory cells.
So we’ve seen a lot of people get infected in wintry conditions, and frequent transitions from that to crowded social scenes (e.g., Ski Lodges were ultra-spreaders), and also in places like meat processing plants. Not a lot of UV in those places, either.
God also plays his great joke on humanity by making men and women comfortable a few degrees apart leading to jokes about endless thermostat wars, but also the observation that professional women will actually wear light sweaters indoors in the middle of hot summer because the AC is uncomfortably cold for them, or having personal heaters under their desks in the winter, because the heat isn’t hot enough for them.
But it’s also true for old people, for example, in nursing homes, who like it warmer than the staff members who, in the nature of things, have control over the thermostat. The point is, if someone feels cold, they likely have an infection-hospitable nose.
“Sure. I predict steady but slow decline from about the current level of around 30 Grims (covid-attributed fatalities per day), all summer long.”
Thanks for the reply. Can you please elaborate further? Why the forecasted decline, particularly with the high usage of AC that you mention pessimistically?
Whether or not something is the correct thing to do depends on whether it is rationally related to what one is trying to achieve. Have you noticed how is hasn’t been at all clear what exactly we are trying to achieve with all this Lockdown Socialism?
We are not trying to prevent the infection from getting in the country, to make sure outbreaks don’t happen or get stopped in their earliest stages. That ship sailed a long time ago.
We are also not trying to get the heterogeneity-adjusted R0 far below 1 to quickly drive the thing to extinction, since we can’t do it, and we knew that a while ago. It also doesn’t do much good unless the whole world also drove it to extinction, and if they haven’t you have to maintain a right quarantine bubble around your country indefinitely like Taiwan or Australia or Israel and we aren’t doing that now or politically capable of ever doing it.
If we’re not trying to stop outbreaks, and local viral extinction makes no sense, then we accept the fact that either we get to herd immunity the old fashioned way, or we get there once everybody has been vaccinated. The former involves a lot of deaths, and the latter involves an extensive period of extreme and severe economic distress and distortion in order to save some of those lives.
Well, what are we trying to do? Shouldn’t that be an easy question to answer? There is no answer.
The original pitch was to “flatten the curve”, which by implication involved getting to herd immunity as quickly as possible but without any preventable deaths not being prevented because health care system resources were over-saturated. But the health care system is able to handle some multiple of the current level of serious cases, so the efficient level of behavior is the one that gets us out of lockdown soonest, which means throttling down lockdown measure and reopening to the extent it keeps the level of hospitalizations at the maximum the health care system can handle. That is, a throttled version of “let ‘er rip”. Which we’re not doing, and indeed, the “””experts””” are all over the place with regard to how much lockdown for how long.
If we’re trying to buy as much time as possible so that many people who might die will instead make it to the mass vaccination, well then, we need tight lockdowns into 2021, but who is admitting that and showing that it’s worth the tremendous costs?
You see the problem? Our approach is completely incoherent and disorganized because it’s impossible to figure out unless someone actually announces the actual mission and strategy. “We see certain things going wide open over here, but other things closing tightly shut over there, and the whole system seems bipolar and schizophrenic.
We need good leaders, but we don’t have any.
For those interested in making a prediction, I have prepared the following spreadsheet that graphically represents three big population states- one that had the big outbreak in March/April, one that has had a fairly steady outbreak since March, and one that has had the biggest outbreak in the last 2 weeks.
New York, Texas, and California
I will predict that Texas eventually gets to about 70-80 deaths/day by the second week of July, but will never get close to New York’s daily death rate from early to mid April. After mid July, I expect Texas’ daily new cases to drop in a fashion similar to that of New York regardless of whether or not Abbot reshuts the state (which I don’t expect he will do).
I additionally predict that New York, once they reopen to the extent Texas did in May, will see new cases surge back to 2-3K/day, but that deaths/day won’t increase much from their current rate- the vulnerable died in April.
I suspect that it would make for better prediction if the data collection in Texas were a bit more…, accurate?
GIGO strikes again.
“Lindsey Rosales, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of State Health Services, confirmed to Just the News this week that the state is categorizing every inpatient in the state with a positive COVID-19 test as a COVID-19 hospitalization.
“The number of hospitalized patients includes patients with a lab-confirmed case of COVID-19 even if the person is admitted to the hospital for a different reason,” Rosales said.
https://bit.ly/2NLWuZf
The NYTimes and I presume others have headlines like “coronavirus growth in youth unsettling”. Why is it unsettling? Aren’t healthy people with lower risk exactly the kind of people we want exposed instead of the elderly and at risk. If case counts grow, but deaths don’t, is that a problem? I thought that was working as intended.
Also, it turns out a lot of the increased case counts are happening in places like prisons for meat packing plants. How does locking down my kids playground slow the spread of the virus in a prison?
I think the lockdowns are a power grab and little more. There is no clear goal and no clear evidence based decision making. If anything allowing some things but not others just crowds people into the few places they are allowed to go.
Places like Portland, Seattle, and San Fransisco are surging and they don’t have hot weather and I think we can all agree they are left wing.
I’d say its a mixture of not being hit bad the first time and Floyd Protest nonsense.
+1 Just don’t count on the MSM to tell us any of this. The current narrative is that this is concentrated only in Southern states that opened too early. Please don’t question it or provide any alternative narratives.
Congratulations, Arnold. I appreciate your independent thinking on this throughout.
Far UVC light can help indoors.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-67211-2
There appear to be quite a few lamp air sanitizer products on the market. However, far UVC light bulbs would be much safer. Great market opportunity. This will turn around the A/C related outbreaks in the southern USA.
” these results suggest the utility of continuous low-dose-rate far-UVC light in occupied indoor public locations such as hospitals, transportation vehicles, restaurants, airports and schools, potentially representing a safe and inexpensive tool to reduce the spread of airborne-mediated viruses. While staying within the current regulatory dose limits, low-dose-rate far-UVC exposure can potentially safely provide a major reduction in the ambient level of airborne coronaviruses including SARS-CoV-2.”
However, summer is indoor season in some places, such as a long strip east of the SoCal coast. Fortunately, the snowbirds will have moved North by now.
re: 4 in your April 23rd post. Whether covid is worse than previous flu epidemics, this morning Nic Lewis posted some possibly counter analysis from Swedish data:
“In the absence of a change in trends, it seems likely that the epidemic will peter out [in Sweden] after a thousand or so more deaths, implying an overall infection fatality rate of 0.06% of the population (0.04% excluding COVID-19 deaths of people in care homes). This is broadly comparable to excess deaths from influenza infections over two successive above-average seasons, such as 2016–17 plus 2017–18.”
Not sure that this baby has been put to bed yet.
I actually bookmarked that April 23rd essay and linked to it many times on other sites during the 2 weeks afterwards. It is still, in my opinion, the very best essay on what was likely to be true about the virus- and this includes the hundreds of articles I read from so-called experts in the field.
When the gyms in Tennessee closed in late March, I started walking outdoors 6-8 miles/day to get a major portion of my exercise, and have continued to do so since the gyms reopened the first week of May, but down 4 miles/day. If you can do it, I recommend it to everyone- the Sun exposure has improved my mood greatly.
Congrats to ASK.
Now, orthodox macroeconomists can link arms with orthodox epidemiologists and tell us what to do next.
I agreed with your 6th point since March after listening to the Johns Hopkins epidemiologist explain surface risks on a couple of podcasts. He didn’t say no risk, but I thought it likely before listening to him that there was to much concern about surface spreading and that based on what I saw, too few downplayed what the CDC wrote about the much higher risk of sustained close contact.
I don’t think your 9th point has been shown yet. In February, a YouGov survey shows that 65% of Japanese were wearing masks, which went to 76% by April. Taiwan, China and Hong Kong were at 90% but Australia with 100 deaths had 26% wearing masks and unlike in East Asia, many of those were worthless cloth masks.
I’d say 4th point is partially wrong. I think everyone knew this virus was worse than the common flu but consensus as reported in the media was that it was around ten times worse or more than the flu. I thought in mid March based on testing in Germany and South Korea that coronavirus would be between 2 and 7 times worse than the flu and likely closer to 2 to 4 times worse due to early testing bias toward the elderly. Also, this virus *does* act like the flu in a few ways despite the differences.
Paging John Alcorn. Please pickup a white courtesy telephone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0CYtHnkhXg