Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Here’s an article with data…or at least assertions…about various ways in which Covid-19 spreads and their relative risks.
To the extent that data at this level of detail can be obtained and verified, it seems a lot more useful than generic claims about lockdowns and social distancing, or the elimination of same.
Mike K, any comments?
Covid-19, as a virus, generally does not directly kill. Instead, it fools our own immune system into killing us via the mechanism of a cytokine storm.
It is not the only disease that can provoke cytokine storms. We don’t know how to reliably stop cytokine storms. If we did, we wouldn’t have to shut down the economy. We could just treat those who are starting to get sick so they wouldn’t develop into a cytokine storm, pay the bills, however, and we would all come out trillions of dollars ahead with a death toll of no national or international significance as the only people who would succumb would be those already on death’s door.
If nobody else will say it, I will. We don’t need to close down the majority of our economy just to change what’s written on a death certificate that was coming out anyway.
Diseases will continue to emerge. Any disease that provokes cytokine storms while not killing many itself will be just as scary as Covid-19 and we’ll be back to the question of whether we have another economic shutdown.
Cytokine storms are not just associated with infectious diseases. The first mention of the term in the literature was about graft vs host disease in a 1993 article. They entered into the general public’s imagination 15 years ago with the H5N1 flu. We don’t really understand why they happen and how to reliably stop them from taking a life. This is a public health issue deeper than how we pay for healthcare. It threatens us all and will continue to do so at irregular intervals as new diseases emerge that cause cytokine storms.
So as we move past our currently unsustainable shutdown due to Covid-19, we all have to decide whether we’re going to let cytokine storms go until the next time some disease breaks out and kills significant numbers of people via this mechanism or whether we’re going to treat this seriously so that the next time we’ll be ready. It’s our choice.
Robert Prost follows up his previous email (posted here):
Plotted below are the covid-19 confirmed cases for Wisconsin. The data is graphed so that the first derivative plot is scaled up for better visibility. The fact that the graph has been jumping so erratically means that somebody is manipulating the data. This first derivative is the rate of change of the accumulation of new cases. That fact that it jumps around means that either someone is pushing the hospitals to change their definition of ‘confirmation’ or the virus has a mind of its own. If the changes were due to the sudden availability of additional testing, the increase should be all in one direction if additional cases were being detected. Someone is playing games in pursuit of a political agenda. Were I to hazard a guess, I’d say it is due to our addled governor, aka Tony Baloney.
Robert concludes: “This data certainly does not give a good reason to extend the lockdown.”
There are lots of hopeful reports — despite the USA COVID-19 infections being over 1/2 million and the total deaths of over 20,000 people — that the pandemic will soon be “Over.”
This is fantasy thinking at best. SARS-CoV2/COVID-19 won’t be over, until it is over, for YEARS.
“Over” being defined as world wide mass vaccinations to the tune of 70% of humanity or human herd immunity. Assuming such a thing is possible, which it may not be, given this recent report from the UK Daily Mail on post SARS-CoV2/COVID-19 infection immunity —
Blow to Britain’s hopes for coronavirus antibody testing as study finds a THIRD of recovered patients have barely-detectable evidence they have had the virus already
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– Nearly third of patients have very low levels of antibodies, Chinese study found
– Antibodies not detected at all in 10 people, raising fears they could be reinfected
– Explains why UK Government repeatedly delayed rolling them out to the public.
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Related studies:
Wu F et al. Neutralizing antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2 in a COVID-19 recovered patient cohort and their implications. medRxiv 2020.03.30.20047365; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.30.20047365.
and
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Zhao J et al. Antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2 in patients of novel coronavirus disease 2019, Clinical Infectious Diseases, , ciaa344, https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciaa344
total by July 1st 51,197
Or this South Korean story on coronavirus “reactivation” —
South Korea reports recovered coronavirus patients testing positive again
APRIL 10, 2020
Josh Smith, Sangmi Cha.
The issue with most COVID-19 tests, like the ones mentioned in South Korea, is they detect SARS-CoV2 RNA. They do not detect whether the viral particles are active or not. The issue here is whether these people are shedding active viral particles that can re-infect people. We don’t know if that is the case here from the story text. Given how infectious it is. This coronavirus will tell us in due course.
There are some viral diseases like Herpes that hide inside your body and reactivate to make you infectious. We do not know enough about the SARs-CoV2 virus to say whether that is the case here.
If the SARS-CoV2 virus is like Herpes in that once contracted, it never goes away and flares infectious several times a year.
And there is no herd immunity for some people no matter how often they are infected.
Then we will need multiple, cheap, out-patient style “cure-treatments” as well as multiple vaccines, based on co-morbidities, and possibly to account for racial differences like sickle cell blood mutations, as SARS-CoV2 may well be more a blood disease than a respiratory infection in terms of it’s killing mechanism.
See:
COVID-19: Attacks the 1-Beta Chain of Hemoglobin and Captures the Porphyrin to Inhibit Human Heme Metabolism
There is not enough reliable data, d*mn it!
Until we get to “Over,” our old economic world of Just-In-Time, Sole Source anywhere, but especially in China, is dead without replacement.
The world is in the same position as Germany was from August 1944 – April 1945 or Japan from August 1944 until August 1945 versus the Allied strategic bombing campaign. We have entered the world of “End Run Production“ as world wide supply chains grind to a halt from various fiddly bits of intermediate parts running out without replacement. The on-and-off hotspots world wide of COVID-19 at different times and places in the world economy is no different than WW2 strategic bombing in terms of causing random damage to the economic life support.
See also “End Run Production” here from this one volume WW2 history book The Great Crusade:
Be it automobiles, self propelled construction equipment, jets, power plants or the latest electronic gadget, anything that has thousands of parts sourced world wide with lots of Chinese cheap/disposable sub-component content anywhere in the supply chain simply won’t be produced for the next 18 months to three years.
This “random damage to the economic life support” effect is amplified by the unwillingness of Western private industry to invest in building the capitol equipment to produced those intermediate parts. Because of the threat of China coming back with predatory pricing — using bought politicians to cover for them — means those parts won’t be built without massive cost plus contract government buy out of the investment risk like happened in the USA in the 1942 WW2 mobilization.
The story of one American n95 mask manufacturer’s experience with the Obama Administration in 2009 with the Swine flu is a case in point. The n95 mask is a 50 cent item where China pays 2 cents a mask for labor versus 10 cents a mask for American labor. When the American manufacturer geared up to replace Chinese mask production. China came back on-line and the Obama Administration refused to keep buying the American mask producer’s 8 cents more expensive mask when the Chinese masks were available.
Unlike almost 80 years ago, current Western and particularly American politicians are too corrupt to go too massive cost plus contract government buy out this private investment risk. Mainly because these political elites can’t be bothered to figure out their 10% cut. Instead we are getting more “fiscal stimulus” AKA boondoggles that the elites will saddle the rest of us with high interest payments on huge public debts.
It will take local small to mid-sized business to get the American economy going during the COVID-19 pandemic via making products and services that don’t use the intermediate products China threatens with when the pandemic ends.
My read on what comes next economically is local/distributed production with limited capitol investment that is multi-product capable. The name for that is additive manufacturing, AKA 3D Printing. Here are a couple of examples:
voxeljet enters alliance to industrialize core tooling production using 3D printing
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But, like developing SARS-CoV2/COVID-19 vaccines, this new locally distributed manufacturing economy will take time. The possible opening of the American economy in May 2020 will not bring the old economy of December 2019 back.
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That economy is dead. It cannot, will not, come back.
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We will have to dance with both the sickness from SARS-CoV2/COVID-19 and the widening “End Run Production“ product shortages that the death of the globalist just-in-time, sole source in China economic model causes for years.
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And this is a hard reality, not a fantasy, we must all face.
As I was driving to work today I heard on Bloomberg that presidential candidate Andrew Cuomo requested a million health care workers to help with the crisis in New York. “A million!” I said to myself in my car.
I looked at the population of New York City and it looks like there are around 8.5 million people there, where most of the problems are. Lets say ten million to make the math easy. So one health care worker per ten patients, assuming every single person in New York City gets sick. Really?
Where would you put them all? Aren’t most of the hotels closed? That would be importing a city the size of San Jose or Austin into New York. Of course it is stupid, so my question is why does Cuomo say something like this?