Are we over reacting with our self imposed quarantine? Well, it sure looked like hysteria as toilet paper and paper towels disappeared from store shelves with lightning speed.
I went into Sam's Club on a weekday morning with a plan to stock up on essentials like beer in the event we had to quarantine ourselves. I forgot the popcorn, but I remembered to pick up enough canned tuna, canned chicken, coffee, evaporated milk, and mayonnaise to last for a couple of weeks. I'll carefully venture out on an as-needed basis to pick up fresh milk and bread.
Meanwhile Wall Street is going wild. Somebody's gonna make a fortune, but it ain't me. My formerly robust IRA account has lost more than 20% since the end of February, and today is shaping up to be another brutal day. Yes, the market will come back, so in the long run I'm not worried. Besides, I can scrape by without it. Still, it's disheartening to see the losses pile up, even though I expect they will never be anything but paper losses.
On a somewhat brighter side Willis Eschenbach posting on Watts Up With That? thinks that things may not be so dire. The source of his optimism is the Diamond Princess cruise ship that was quarantined for weeks with a Coronavirus breakout.
We had a perfect petri-dish coronavirus disease (COVID-19) experiment with the cruise ship “Diamond Princess”. That’s the cruise ship that ended up in quarantine for a number of weeks after a number of people tested positive for the coronavirus. I got to wondering what the outcome of the experiment was.
So I dug around and found an analysis of the situation, with the catchy title
of Estimating the infection and case fatality ratio for COVID-19 using age-adjusted data from the outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship (PDF), so I could see what the outcomes were.
As you might imagine, before they knew it was a problem, the epidemic raged on the ship, with infected crew members cooking and cleaning for the guests, people all eating together, close living quarters, lots of social interaction, and a generally older population. Seems like a perfect situation for an overwhelming majority of the passengers to become infected.
And despite that, some 83% (82.7% – 83.9%) of the passengers never got the disease at all … why?
Michael Levitt, said the same thing. Levitt is an American-British-Israeli biophysicist and Nobel Prize laureate who accurately predicted that the spread of the virus in Wuhan would slow down in February. Levitt says "the end of the pandemic is near," pointing to the Diamond Princess to reinforce his argument.
The Diamond Princess cruise ship represented the worst-case scenario in terms of disease spread, as the close confines of the ship offered optimal conditions for the virus to be passed among those aboard. The population density aboard the ship was the equivalent of trying to cram the whole Israeli population into an area 30 kilometers square. In addition, the ship had a central air conditioning and heating system, and communal dining rooms.
“Those are extremely comfortable conditions for the virus and still, only 20% were infected. It is a lot, but pretty similar to the infection rate of the common flu,” Levitt said. Based on those figures, his conclusion was that most people are simply naturally immune.
Statistics for the Diamond Princess outbreak can be found in this analysis: Estimating the infection and case fatality ratio for COVID-19 using age-adjusted data from the outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship. I decided to compare those numbers to an earlier epidemic, the 2009-2010 H1N1. Nothing fancy, just calculated the percentages from the Diamond Princess Coronavirus numbers, applied the percentages to the U.S. population, and compared the results to the H1N1 numbers. I compiled the following table from those statistics.
Diamond Princess Coronavirus Outbreak
Age |
Passengers |
Infected |
Deaths |
%Infected |
%Deaths |
0 - 9 |
16 |
1 |
0 |
6.25% |
0.00% |
10 - 19 |
23 |
5 |
0 |
21.74% |
0.00% |
20 - 29 |
347 |
28 |
0 |
8.07% |
0.00% |
30 - 39 |
428 |
34 |
0 |
7.94% |
0.00% |
40 - 49 |
334 |
27 |
0 |
8.08% |
0.00% |
50 - 59 |
398 |
59 |
0 |
14.82% |
0.00% |
60 - 69 |
923 |
177 |
0 |
19.18% |
0.00% |
70 - 79 |
1015 |
234 |
6 |
23.05% |
2.56% |
80 - 89 |
216 |
54 |
1 |
25.00% |
1.85% |
Totals |
3711 |
619 |
7 |
16.68% |
1.13% |
|
|
|
|
|
|
H1N1 2010
|
308,745,538 |
60,800,000 |
12,469 |
19.69% |
0.0205% |
USA 2020 |
330,000,000 |
55,044,462 |
622,474 |
16.68% |
1.13% |
Seven deaths out of 3,711 doesn't seem like a lot, but actually it is. When you compare the infection rates of H1N1 to that of the Coronavirus, 19.69% vs. 16.68%, you can see that they are roughly comparable. However, applying the infection rate, 16.68%, and the fatality rate, 1.13%, from the Diamond Princess to the entire 2020 U.S. population, it turns out there is no comparison to the H1N1. The Coronvirus is far more deadly with over 622,000 projected Coronavirus deaths compared to 12,469 actual H1N1 deaths.
OK, it's not apples to apples, comparing the entire U.S. to the Diamond Princess. Social distancing was nearly impossible on the Diamond Princess, but we are doing it as a country, and it's sure to lower the fatality rate.
When Trump began reinstating border enforcement, when he started construction of the wall on the southern border, when he imposed tariffs, when he renegotiated trade contracts, when he devised a tax policy to repatriate U.S. companies' foreign earned income, it was all with the objective of rebuilding our manufacturing capacity, and helping American workers. All of those things have put us in a position to better withstand our current Coronavirus crisis. We can wait it out.
Open border policies never made any sense before, but now they make even less sense, if that's possible. And suddenly we make another startling discovery: Rebuilding American manufacturing capacity — for producing our own life saving drugs which are now produced in China, as an example — isn't really such a bad idea. Things Trump has done to protect American jobs, will help to protect American lives.
The fact is, though, our concern over the Coronavirus is not hysteria.