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Groucho Marx famously said, “politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies”. We’ve seen this recently in panicked political responses to disasters, real and imagined, which actually cause more harm than that which they’re supposedly remedying. Fukushima, “climate emergency”, the Millennium Bug…
Is COVID-19 Millennium Bug 2.0?
The current coronavirus disease, Covid-19, has been called a once-in-a-century pandemic. But it may also be a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco.
[…]How can policymakers tell if they are doing more good than harm?
Vaccines or affordable treatments take many months (or even years) to develop and test properly. Given such timelines, the consequences of long-term lockdowns are entirely unknown.
Well, there’s one known: massive economic disruption. The Millennium Bug cost hundreds of billions in “remedies”. Given that countries like South Korea, which spent almost nothing on “preparedness”, encountered negligible problems, it seems likely that that was money mostly wasted. The Millennium Bug hysteria also caused almost exactly the same panic-buying as we are seeing now.
Like climate change, too, much of the hysteria is being fanned on the basis of very poor evidence.
The data collected so far on how many people are infected and how the epidemic is evolving are utterly unreliable. Given the limited testing to date, some deaths and probably the vast majority of infections due to SARS-CoV-2 are being missed. We don’t know if we are failing to capture infections by a factor of three or 300[…]Reported case fatality rates, like the official 3.4% rate from the World Health Organization, cause horror — and are meaningless[…]
The one situation where an entire, closed population was tested was the Diamond Princess cruise ship and its quarantine passengers. The case fatality rate there was 1.0%, but this was a largely elderly population, in which the death rate from Covid-19 is much higher.
Projecting the Diamond Princess mortality rate onto the age structure of the U.S. population, the death rate among people infected with Covid-19 would be 0.125%. But since this estimate is based on extremely thin data — there were just seven deaths among the 700 infected passengers and crew — the real death rate could stretch from five times lower (0.025%) to five times higher (0.625%)[…]reasonable estimates for the case fatality ratio in the general U.S. population vary from 0.05% to 1%.
Which means that the Chinese Virus could either be rather less deadly than seasonal influenza, or somewhat worse.
That huge range markedly affects how severe the pandemic is and what should be done. A population-wide case fatality rate of 0.05% is lower than seasonal influenza. If that is the true rate, locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies.
A mid-range guess of 0.3% fatality rate translates to about 10 000 deaths worldwide.
This sounds like a huge number, but it is buried within the noise of the estimate of deaths from “influenza-like illness.” If we had not known about a new virus out there, and had not checked individuals with PCR tests, the number of total deaths due to “influenza-like illness” would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average. The media coverage would have been less than for an NBA game between the two most indifferent teams.
So are we panicking over nothing much at all?
Governments like big sticks and media love whipping up hysteria, but some minimal safe practises will go a long way to seeing us through the next few months. Wash your hands. Practise social distancing. Stay home unless you need to go out. Don’t panic buy.
If we decide to jump off the cliff, we need some data to inform us about the rationale of such an action and the chances of landing somewhere safe.
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