Still no Plague

I feel obligated to post an update on COVID-19 and my continued opinion that it won’t amount to much.

The current number of known cases is still under 130,000, worldwide. No one with any degree of honesty could look at this figure and claim COVID-19 is in any way comparable to a real plague. It’s just not spreading fast enough to compare to things like smallpox, typhus, and the black death. The flu infects over 10% of Americans in a typical season, and COVID-19 will need a miracle to get anywhere close to that number. In addition to spreading very slowly, COVID-19 has a low death rate compared to real plagues.

I was under the impression that the death rate for those infected was going to be considerably lower than 3%, based on what I had read. Perhaps under 1%. Now they’re telling us 1% is the expected figure. Higher figures are coming in from some places, but it seems likely that these are skewed by terrible health care (China, Iran) and/or differing levels of disease detection. The 1% figure comes from the CDC, so evidently, they have seen through raw numbers such as the 7% we see in Italy. Apparently, Italians are failing to detect a high percentage of typical cases, which are mild, so the 7% that died are 7% of a group of atypical patients.

A 1% fatality rate is bad, but the overall infection rate is extremely low compared to the flu, and almost all of the dead will be older people who are already unhealthy, so it’s not like your neighborhood will be emptied of vigorous 40-year-olds and kids.

I’ll bet the rate drops below 1% as the disease spreads. We will get better at responding, and I’ve read that viruses usually become less lethal as epidemics progresses, so my money is on a lower rate.

Here’s what will happen. If you’re in America, you’re not going to get the disease unless you’re very unlucky. If you do get it, it will probably be so mild you won’t need a doctor. Unless you’re old and sick already, and then it could be bad, but in your case, a cold could easily be fatal. Not to rattle you. You’re probably more likely to die from a cold in 2020. And you’re not going to wear a mask to prevent that.

The youngest Italian who died was 60. That’s out of over 800 people. If you’re significantly younger than that, you should feel confident. If you’re 60, you should still feel pretty good. If you have kids, you should feel great, because this disease is barely touching them.

I still don’t get the panic. When my dad was alive, I knew he could die if he got the flu, and I knew flu shots weren’t 100% effective. I got him a shot every year, and we didn’t worry. We didn’t put on masks or hide in a plastic room. We didn’t buy a year’s worth of survival crackers and distilled water.

WHO is calling COVID-19 a pandemic. Does that mean I’m wrong? No, because a pandemic isn’t necessarily a plague, in the true sense of the word. Plagues cause a huge percentage of people to become infected, and a big percentage of those infected die. A pandemic is just a disease that spreads globally. It may or may not infect a high percentage of people, and it may not kill many.

I expect the panic to get worse, and I have a good reason: Trump is trying to calm people down. He’s downplaying the danger. If Trump says “black,” the press says “white,” so by trying to reassure us, Trump has spurred the press to fan the flames of cowardice. The best thing Trump could do to help us relax would be to have a screaming fit and run around the White House lawn in a surgical mask and a rubber suit. If Trump said COVID-19 was a deadly plague, the press would immediately start telling us he was hysterical over nothing, that it proved he was mentally unfit to serve, and that Nancy Pelosi should step in and take over. Rachel Maddow would run segments questioning the existence of COVID-19.

Look, look, look. If this was a plague, we would already know it. We can’t reserve judgment forever. The disease has had more than ample time to show us what it can do. It hasn’t lived up to the hype, and if it hasn’t happened by now, it never will.

Someone tried to scare me by saying crematoriums in Wuhan, China, were running around the clock. Okay, here is where being mathematically inclined and resistant to gossip comes in.

The Wuhan crematorium story emerged at a time when the China death toll stood at 490. You can talk about crematorium shifts all you want, but the number was 490, and the population is 11 million. Even if the story is true, which is extremely doubtful, it’s not like there are trains and trucks dumping bodies in the streets in front of crematoriums.

The death rate in New York City, which has around 8 million people, is about 420 per day. This is a statistic. It is a fact. It’s not a dodgy rumor I saw somewhere on the Internet. It’s the kind of thing you try to dig up when you hear a crazy story, instead of swallowing it headfirst.

Would it really be a problem if the rate went up to, say, 475 for a couple of months? No. It wouldn’t be a problem in China, either. The Wuhan story sounds pretty fishy.

It’s impossible to believe an area containing 11 million people can’t absorb 490 cremations over the course of several months. Did anyone ask how long the 24-hour burning lasted? Let’s pretend it actually happened and then look for an explanation. What if hospitals were holding bodies that died over several weeks, and the crematoriums were only overwhelmed briefly when the rule was made? Maybe hospitals dumped a large number of bodies over a couple of days, and then the stream leveled off. I would guess that any large city would be hard-pressed to deal with 490 bodies that arrived over a weekend. Even then, though, people wouldn’t have to work around the clock. Did they work around the clock for days after the mass shooting in Las Vegas?

The best reason for skepticism: the story came from The Epoch Times, which is a fringe-nut site known for conspiracy theories and propaganda. See if you can find a real news organization making the same claims. I think the story was a fable made up by a bored reporter. It makes no sense mathematically, it came from a source with no credibility, and it has not been corroborated by major news organizations.

I’m getting more confident by the hour. The facts keep rolling in to back me up.

Anyone who feels like giving me a condescending lecture should remember that a couple of months from now, the disease will have run its course. All the facts will be in, and you’ll have to own everything you said.

I may be wrong, but the chances of my being proven wrong, as Buck Turgidson would put it, are quickly being reduced to a very low order of probability.

If the plague does pan out, I sure hope we don’t have a mineshaft gap.