Category Archives: COVID-19

CDC graph improved by Down With Tyranny:

All too credible with so many states deciding to give up on anti-pandemic rules while COVID-19 is still just as widespread

To be fair, no one knows what the true R0 (the rate of reproduction of the infection) is for the US; indeed in a country this size one might more reasonably speak of different R0s for different parts of the country. But even if R0 is currently just below one, which it might be given the US infection rate has plateaued and even trended down a tiny little bit, that’s thanks to all the state-imposed ‘social distancing’. Change the rules and the infection rate surely will go back up again.

I live in a state in which all but the very southern part is, our governor says, about to “reopen”. Looking at that graph at the top, it seems all too likely that we’re not learning anything from history.

No, this isn’t a cheery post. I want to discuss three aspects of the news that three Trump-Pence staff members have tested positive for COVID-19. (That’s Trump’s military valet, Pence’s press secretary, and now a “personal assistant” to Ivanka Trump.)

The first point is that these results strongly suggest the folly of having staff go around without masks for fear someone might take their picture.  It’s really dumb.

The second point is that these results show the complete hypocrisy of the Trump administration’s failure to go all-out for a national max testing policy: the White House will respond to this news by doing more testing — something it says the rest of the country doesn’t need.

As the links above show, both these points are getting some airing.

But there’s a third point I haven’t seen in the news yet: no test is totally reliable. I read that some people in the White House are being tested every day.  Let’s assume that the White House has the best test.  What’s the rate of false positives for asymptomatic people? I can’t figure it out. I read that, at least under lab conditions,  Abbot’s new test for people who have had symptoms for a couple of weeks is very very accurate: 99.9% specificity, or about one false positive out of a thousand healthy patients, and 100% sensitivity, or a complete lack of false negative results in patients confirmed to have had COVID-19.  But that’s for people with full-blown disease, and also it’s not clear if anyone is using it yet.

What the false positive rate might be for asymptomatic people will vary with the test, and the quality of the implementation.  If it’s 99.9% then ignore all of what follows. But suppose the accuracy rate is ‘only’ 99%.  In other words, suppose that 1 out 100 flagged as positive are in fact not carrying the virus.  What are the odds of a false result if someone is tested every day?

The way you work that out, if I remember Freshman math, is to take the odds of the thing not happening (.99), and multiply it by itself for the number of events.  So (.99) to the 30th power gives you the odds that all that month’s tests will be accurate, which google tells me is about .74.  So there’s about a 1 in 4  chance of an erroneous result if we use a test that is 99% accurate on one person for 30 days.  That’s pretty high. Increase the number of people being tested daily, and the odds of a false positive on someone go up quickly.

So maybe they don’t all have it.  But it’s still very likely that at least some of them do, and given the no-mask rule, there’s a quite decent chance they will have exposed someone else.

That said, in the grand scheme of things, a 1% false positive rate is not much to worry about — the victim quarantines unnecessarily, but no one else is harmed. It’s the false negatives that are the worrying problem, because they allow the unknowing to go out and spread the disease.  And we also don’t know what the false negative rate for asymptomatic persons is for whatever test the White House is using.  Want to bet it’s not below 1%?

The folks at ‘Honest Government’ have a new video called ‘The Machine’. 

You can see the unexpurgated version, or the allegedly PG version below.  Personally I think even this should be rated XXX or something as what it describes it is so disgusting:

PS. The surprisingly honest Australian Government ad about visiting East Timor is also quite good.

Today’s NYT has, on its front page both physical and virtual, what I think is an unintended juxtaposition. On the left side of printed paper was this story:

The gist of the story is that in China what would be an independent civil society group in the US prioritizes real and imagined state interests to the point of paralysis and unhelpfulness in a crisis. (Unmentioned are allegations of incompetence, greed, and mendacity of the US Red Cross, but never mind, we’re talking about the Commies here!)

As the NYT tells it,

In Wuhan, the charity’s officials were quickly paralyzed by bureaucracy, competing mandates and chaos. For days, tens of millions of dollars in funds went unused, while piles of protective gear sat in a sprawling warehouse as desperate health workers battled the virus without it.

When officials did distribute aid, they sent tens of thousands of masks to private clinics that were not treating coronavirus patients. In one early shipment, they prioritized local officials over health care workers. In another delivery, the equipment was substandard.

Compare that to the story on the right hand side of my morning paper:

Here we have the head of the US Government announcing a plan to prioritize the supply of goods over the lives of the people who prepare those goods.  Although there is no justification in law that I am aware of, President Trump also claims he will issue an order protecting Big Chicken and Big Meat companies from liability — that is somehow immunize the firms from suits by workers exposed to COVID-19 on the assembly line whom the firms endangered by poor safety practices.  Or, maybe, this immunity is meant to be only prospective, i.e. to block lawsuits by the workers whom the firms will endanger if they obey the order to go back to work (the temporal aspect of the claimed authority is as unclear as its alleged source).

So, on one side we have a structure in which the Party comes before efforts to get vital PPE and other supplies to hospitals and others who need them, and which diverts supplies to government favorites who do not.

And on the other side we have a government which injects confusion into the mask supply chain and stockpiles substandard ventilators, led by a man who proudly puts the interests of a few large firms ahead of the lives of their workers, and seeks to erase any financial claims of their survivors’ families.

What are we to make of this juxtaposition? Under Chinese Communism civil society is corralled to serve the interests of the Party,  as (mis)understood by bureaucrats, even if it leads to the the deaths of first responders and other citizens.  Under US Capitalism, the power of the state is invoked to serve the interests of large firms, even if it kills the workers due to the firms’ organization of the workplace.  No wonder other countries now pity us.