COVID-19 Update: 3/12/2020
Posted on
22Good morning, everybody.
There are two major issues confronting the US (and the world) today: How high will the C-19 numbers go, and how low will the markets go?
I’ll deal with the second in a separate post, although the two issues are closely related. But they are different.
Here’s a chart:
Now, the first thing you need to know about this chart is that it is utterly farking worthless. The numbersdon’t even remotely represent the state of C-19 in the United States.
Follow this link.
Testing in the U.S. Updated March 11, 2020 This page will be updated regularly at noon Mondays through Fridays. Data close out at 4 p.m. the day before reporting.
The charts are too big to reproduce here, but here’s what you need to know:
The CDC divides government testing into two categories: Tests done by the CDC itself, and tests done by “US Public Health Labs.”
US Public Health Labs are:
*Reporting public health laboratories are 46 state public health labs (AK, AL, AR, AZ, CA, CO, CT, DE, FL, GA, HI, IA, ID, IL, IN, KS, KY, LA, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, MO, MS, MT, NC, ND, NE, NH, NJ, NM, NV, NY, OH, OK, OR, PA, RI, SC, TN, TX, VT, WA, WI and WY), New York City, USAF, and 5 California Counties.
So here is a screen grab of the past five days:
| 3/6 | 16 | 1155 |
| 3/7 | 0 | 947 |
| 3/8 | 0 | 741 |
| 3/9 | 0 | 396 |
| 3/10 | 0 | 8 |
The figures on the left are from the CDC labs. They have apparently stopped testing entirely.
The figures on the right are from the “Public Health Labs.” They seem to be shrinking the number of tests they are doing rather quickly as well.
There are a few possibilities for this:
1. Commercial labs – ie. LabCorp and Quiagen, primarily – are now doing almost all of the testing. And they aren’t reporting numbers, as far as I can tell.
2. Government entities are slow-walking testing, or ceasing to do it entirely, for…reasons.
3. Hospitals are doing their own tests in their own labs, and also aren’t reporting their results.
So we really have no idea what the actual source(s) of the numbers Worldometer is reporting might be. I think we can be fairly certain that they are highly inaccurate, though. And via the CDC’s own page, the number of tests the government is doing is minuscule. (Divide those numbers by anything from two to four to get the number of actual patients tested, because multiple tests are required per individual to produce an “official” diagnosis.
Bottom line: How high will it go? We don’t know. Frankly, disease statistics are crap. Even with something as established as seasonal flu, we get BS like the following:
2019-2020 U.S. Flu Season: Preliminary Burden Estimates | CDC
34,000,000 – 49,000,000 illnesses
20,000 – 52,000 deaths
Some really tight error bars there, eh? Could be 35 million sick, or 50 million. We don’t know. Could be 20 thousand dead, or 52000 dead. We don’t know.
The Trump administration is terrified (speaking of panics!) that its enemies will be able to use COVID-19 to defeat it in November. And Trump has reason to worry, because the left and the media are doing everything they can to wield the disease in precisely that way.
So Trump has plenty of reasons to downplay and soft-peddle the actual prevalence of the disease as much as he can. And I think there is a fair amount of that going on.
That said, Trump’s reelection is not an issue in S. Korea, or Italy, or China, or Iran (well, maybe Iran is an exception), but the disease is there anyway. It’s a virus. It doesn’t know, or care, about Trump. Or anything, for that matter.
I personally think Trump is underestimating the American people here. Americans traditionally rally around their leaders when crisis hits. They did around both Bushes, and (believe it or not) they did around Herbert Hoover for a good while after the stock market crashed. Remember, the market crashed in 1929, but FDR did not defeat Hoover until 1932, when it had become obvious for several years that things were not getting better, but were getting worse.
If we don’t get a solid handle on what COVID-19 is doing here in the US, and where it is doing it, then we guarantee that the final results will be much worse than otherwise. Stopping the Euroflight Incoming is nothing more than Pandemic Kabuki. The disease is here . We have to deal with it here. Showy, meaningless gestures are worse than useless.
Test, test, and test some more.
Be transparent about the results. The American people will support you if they believe you are being honest with them, and doing the best you can with what you are telling them.
It won’t be the Coronavirus that kills you, it will be the Coronavirus Coverup.
Stop doing it.
As usual, updates in the comments.
UPDATE:
Coronavirus testing numbers:
-CDC tested 77 people this week total as of Wednesday
-States are testing an average of 50 people per day.
-A single private lab is up and running w. coronavirus tests. The next soonest will be ready to go on 03/16.https://t.co/HwnjMhnD94
— Alexander Nazaryan (@alexnazaryan) March 12, 2020
Goody.