Monday, June 7, 2021
US COVID-19 statistics all are making new lows in the first days of June 2021
The current case rate of 44.11/million yields about 14,600 cases daily nationwide.
The current death rate of 1.27/million yields about 420 deaths daily nationwide, which sustained over a year would yield about 150k deaths.
Using New York Times data, deaths from Mar 7-Jun 6 = 72582, cases = 4,334,762 for a case fatality rate of 1.67%. That's 6.7% lower than the rate which obtained during the first year of the pandemic to 3/7/21, which was 1.79% using the data compiled by covidtracking dot com.
It remains to be seen if we'll see a repeat of last winter. The rapid decline of cases after the first of the year before the mass vaccination effort took hold suggests the disease is seasonal like influenza. Apart from the initial appearance of the disease, the graphs below all suggest late autumn seasonality.
We won't really know how effective the vaccines are until they are put up against the next seasonal test.
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| 44/million on 6-5-21 |
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| 1.27/million on 6-5-21 |
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| 16856 on 6-5-21 |
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| 2.8% on 6-1-21 |
The default position of liberalism is to blame obstruction by reactionaries for republican failure, not the revolutionary impulses of the autocrat
"The republicans made me seize power".
You know whose side they are on when people talk like this. Spengler long ago observed how liberalism is all about tyranny, but does anyone still read him?
"The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is all that Liberalism sets out to be."
The voices opposed to the US Senate filibuster, are, to put it bluntly, not related to our founding.
Caesar would soon seize autocratic power, and Cato would commit suicide rather than live under Caesar’s rule. Goodman and Soni argue Cato’s obstructionism — however high-minded — was a contributing factor to the Roman Republic’s collapse. America’s Founding Fathers, however, idolized Cato. George Washington’s soldiers staged a play about Cato at Valley Forge. Patrick Henry’s famous quote, “Give me liberty of give me death,” is derived from a line in that play.
Sunday, June 6, 2021
Fauci and others are not wrong to make comparisons between influenza and COVID-19 in terms of infection spread
One year of COVID-19 infected ~ 8.67% of the US population.
The average influenza year produces a similar result: about 8%.
Deaths are another matter entirely.
A typical flu year involves 36,000 deaths, or about 11/100k at current population.
COVID-19 gave us roughly 515k deaths in one year, March on March, or about 155/100k.
C19 has been 14 times more deadly than the flu.
But will it continue to be?
At this same point last year there were about 27k more dead from C19 than there are today, 108k vs. 81k.
Keep in mind that there are only just so many people with comorbidities and other vulnerabilities to fuel the death fire.
If the S&P 500 regressed to trend level tomorrow, it would fall to about 1551 according to the geeks
Think of it as fair value.
Another way to get there:
GDP(63) = S&P fair value
$22.061 trillion x 63 = 1390
That formula worked for most of the post-war up until the Trump era. The fancy regression analysis done by the geeks always came up pretty close to the same result, but not lately.
Still another way to look at it:
S&P 500 4230 / GDP 22.061 = 192.
That's an elevated ratio which was common before 1929, but we've never seen such levels in the post-war.
Sum ting funny goin' on.
Today is the 77th anniversary of the Normandy invasion by the Western allied powers
My dad served in France and Belgium. He never talked about it much at all, when I was growing up or when I became old enough to understand.
We didn't "celebrate" the day or otherwise mark it in any way. Neither did anyone else. Same with most of the "war" holidays.
They just wanted to forget the war and move on.
And they did.
They were young and had lives to live.
The war sucked.
Biden can crow all he wants about "creating" jobs: The deficit in full-time compared with the 2019 average is still 5.1 million in May; just getting back to where we were before this debacle occurred will take years
May 2021 full-time jobs: 48.5% of population
Average 2019: 50.4%
Missing full-time compared to 2019: 5.1 million
Federal extended unemployment pandemic payments are scheduled to end in early September, coinciding with the US withdrawal from Afghanistan
Or is it the other way around?
In any event, the Taliban is already taking control of the Afghan countryside while the US Taliban of Commerce is celebrating victory here at home.
Saturday, June 5, 2021
Wednesday, June 2, 2021
Fredo Fauci on US mortality rate for COVID-19 vs. influenza
Anthony Fauci should have known better than to make a mistake like this in March 2020, saying the coronavirus mortality rate was 2%, but I think he's getting beat up over this unfairly.
He meant case mortality rate.
Technically that's not a thing, but that's how most of us were talking at the time, as a synonym for case fatality rate. Admittedly using the word "mortality" in this way only confuses matters. And to this day. Yes, I'm talking about Alex Berenson.
Fauci was, after all, responding to the popular press, understanding correctly how the popular press talks about these matters.
Mortality rate is a technical measure of the number of deaths in a particular population per unit of time, usually annual, usually expressed as the number of deaths per 100,000 of population (not per cases!). Since the virus was barely 3 months old, any annual rate could only be a projection, not an observation, and I don't think Fauci was so foolish as to be making such a projection based on not even three months experience with a new virus.
The implications of a 2% mortality rate would be astounding. It would mean 2% of the US population dying over the course of a year, or 6.6 million. The quick spread of the virus from China to the rest of the world by aircraft was reason enough to think this magnitude of death was possible if in fact prevalence of the disease were to dwarf that for influenza.
I don't think Fauci meant that. I think he meant case fatality rate, which fluctuates with cases and necessarily declines over time. One person gets sick with something new and dies, the case fatality rate is automatically 100%. The second case survives, the rate falls to 50%, and so on. CFR is a function of cases.
Mortality rate is function of population and time.
His flu comparison shows that he didn't mean the mortality rate technically understood. He didn't technically give the "mortality rate" for the flu.
He gave the case fatality rate for flu, which is 0.1%.
Prevalence of influenza in the US is roughly 8% of population annually on average (the morbidity rate). In any given year roughly 8% of the population gets the flu. 8% of 328 million people is 26 million cases, 0.1% of which die every year, or 26,000. If the prevalence is a little higher, you'll get more deaths. Just one more point of prevalence gets you to almost 30 million cases and 30,000 deaths, and so on. And that's what we've actually experienced in the US. As the population has aged, more older people have experienced flu which kills. Annual cases for all groups have come in at an average of almost 30 million for the last decade. Deaths have averaged almost 36k per year.
That's an average annual case fatality rate of 0.12%, just as Fauci indicated in the email.
So it's pretty clear to me that Fauci was not referring to the technical "mortality rate", but to the "case fatality rate". We were all talking about it, sloppily.
Here's how COVID-19 in the United States actually looks after what amounts to one year, using covidtracking.com data through March 7, 2021, when it quit its data gathering operation, from which we can calculate an actual mortality rate because it had been a year (population figure is US Census for Sep 7, 2020, the mid-way point, at 331.7774 million):
Confirmed US cases C19 to 3/7/21: 28.7565 million
Cumulative hospitalized to 3/7: 0.8786m
Cumulative dead to 3/7: 0.5152m
% cases hospitalized: 3.06
% cases dead: 1.79 (case fatality rate)
% population infected: ~ 8.67 (morbidity rate, very similar to influenza)
% pop. hospitalized: ~ 0.26
% pop. dead: ~ 0.16 (mortality rate).
Now let's compare COVID-19 to flu in terms of the "mortality rate", technically understood, expressed per 100k of population.
To 3/7/21, 515151 C19 deaths per 331.7774 million people works out to 155 deaths per 100k.
Average annual flu deaths of 36,000 per 331.7774 million people (0.011% of population) works out to 10.85 deaths per 100k (In 2019 it was 15.2/100k).
Thus COVID-19 in the US after one year has a mortality rate 14.3 times worse than for the flu on average. Its case fatality rate, 1.79%, has been 14.9 times worse than for flu's average 0.12%.
Fauci's 2% estimate in March 2020 was good enough for government work.
FOIA'd Fauci email shows his top people informed him 31 Jan 2020 that the coronavirus looked engineered and was inconsistent with evolutionary theory
In other words, it might have come out of a lab, not out of nature by crossing from bats to some unknown animal intermediary found at the Wuhan wet market.
Tuesday, June 1, 2021
CDC: Breakthrough cases in Kentucky skilled nursing facility outbreak in March reached 25%
COVID-19 Outbreak Associated with a SARS-CoV-2 R.1 Lineage Variant in a Skilled Nursing Facility After Vaccination Program — Kentucky, March 2021:
Among 83 residents and 116 HCP, 75 (90.4%) and 61 (52.6%), respectively, received 2 vaccine doses. Twenty-six residents and 20 HCP received positive test results for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, including 18 residents and four HCP who had received their second vaccine dose >14 days before the outbreak began. An R.1 lineage variant was detected with whole genome sequencing (WGS). ... 25.4% of vaccinated residents and 7.1% of vaccinated HCP were infected.
Looks like Pfizer vaccines are somewhat less effective in older people, but there is no age data given in this report. Critics of the Pfizer trial say not enough old people were part of it. This would seem to bear that out.
Why are 90% of the residents vaccinated but only 52% of the workers who care for them?
Seems like an ongoing phenomenon for people "in the industry" to be vaccine hesitant.
Let's hear it for democracy!
This shews how perfectly the rump
and commonwealth, in nature jump:
For as a fly that goes to bed,
Rests with his tail above his head;
So in this mungrel state of ours,
The rabble are the supreme powers.
-- Samuel Butler, Hudibras
Monday, May 31, 2021
Heroes never die
Thus am I doubly armed; my death and life,
My bane and antidote, are both before me:
This, in a moment, brings me to an end;
But that informs me I shall never die.
-- Joseph Addison
This is Ronald Reagan's baneful legacy: The appointment of libertarian Anthony Kennedy, his third choice after Bork and Ginsburg
If you could poll the American soldiers who died in World War II whether they died to make men and women free to commit sodomy, you would not like their answer.
But hey, fuck you, and enjoy your long weekend.
Since the mid-1990s, the nation’s top court has gradually expanded protections for gays and lesbians, largely under the leadership of former Justice Anthony Kennedy, who retired in 2018.
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