Last week, when their health weather map debuted, I noted that it was nifty but that itd be nice to be able to see at a glance on the map whether fevers are becoming more or less common. Kinsa added that feature (Trends) yesterday.
As you can see above, theres a band of counties in Colorado and New Mexico that are showing a modest increase but otherwise the fever rate is declining practically everywhere coast to coast. Dark blue areas reflect the steepest decline. Check out L.A.:
Not only are they not (yet) seeing atypical rates of fever, theyre waaaaaay below where Kinsas historical data would project them to be in a normal year. Whats happening here, one would think, is that the social distancing being practiced by locals is sharply reducing the total number of seasonal infections caused by all influenza-like illnesses. COVID-19 isnt the only bug out there; the flu is circulating, as are other well-known and milder forms of coronavirus. Because Kinsa can only measure fevers and not the underlying cause, it cant say definitively that rates of infection by COVID-19 specifically are decreasing. Its possible that that rate is still rising but is being offset (and then some) in their data by dramatically declining rates of infection by all other forms of influenza-like illness. The overall trend is downward but maybe not the particular trend for COVID-19, especially since its more contagious than flu. And thats the one we care about.
But. Obviously its possible that social distancing is driving down the infection rate of COVID-19 too. Thats what these lockdowns are designed to do, after all. The self-isolation strategy is probably working, too late for New York but hopefully not too late for a lot of places. Even Florida, the most worrisome fever hot spot in last weeks Kinsa data, is beginning to cool off.
Seems like a good moment, then, to flush this promising collective effort down the toilet and start owning the libs again by hastily sending people back to work:
The LameStream Media is the dominant force in trying to get me to keep our Country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success. The real people want to get back to work ASAP. We will be stronger than ever before!
Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 25, 2020
ASAP is correct but Im guessing his idea of when ASAP is and when Faucis idea of it is diverge starkly. Heres a sneak preview of our country lifting isolation measures before local health departments are ready:
This dickhead who licked a toilet seat for the #CoronaVirusChallenge on Tik Tok has tested positive for COVID-19 and been suspended from twitter.
Darwin is working overtime for this years awards show pic.twitter.com/6V4k4RMm35
KFC (@KFCBarstool) March 25, 2020
Theres another, more radical way to interpret the Kinsa data. What if its not social distancing thats driving down fever rates? What if much of the country has already been infected by coronavirus and begun to recover, as the Oxford study I wrote about last night speculated? That study theorized that (a) coronavirus may be spreading at lightning speed, (b) half the population of Great Britain may already have it, and (c) the disease is actually exceedingly mild in almost everyone whos infected, to the point that few people whove gotten it will ever even know theyve had it. There are severe cases, of course, as American doctors and nurses are seeing firsthand now, but the severe cases might not be one-in-50 infections. They may be more like one-in-5,000 infections. There may be a crunch at hospitals now only because such a tremendously large number of people in NYC have been infected that even the tiny percentage of severe infections currently represents a big raw number.
A piece in the Wall Street Journal echoes that theory. Were making BIG decisions as a country based on an assumption about how dangerous COVID-19 is to most of the population. If one in 50 or so need hospital treatment then we really are staring at a potentially apocalyptic load on our system and we need to do everything we can to start managing the spread for months to come. If only one in 5,000 need hospital treatment, then many millions of people may already have recovered and gained immunity, with no second wave on the way this fall. What well experience over the next month or so may be the worst of it, with herd immunity shortly to follow.
Fear of Covid-19 is based on its high estimated case fatality rate2% to 4% of people with confirmed Covid-19 have died, according to the World Health Organization and others. So if 100 million Americans ultimately get the disease, two million to four million could die. We believe that estimate is deeply flawed. The true fatality rate is the portion of those infected who die, not the deaths from identified positive cases
[T]he northeastern Italian town of Vò, near the provincial capital of Padua. On March 6, all 3,300 people of Vò were tested, and 90 were positive, a prevalence of 2.7%. Applying that prevalence to the whole province (population 955,000), which had 198 reported cases, suggests there were actually 26,000 infections at that time. Thats more than 130-fold the number of actual reported cases. Since Italys case fatality rate of 8% is estimated using the confirmed cases, the real fatality rate could in fact be closer to 0.06%
The epidemic started in China sometime in November or December. The first confirmed U.S. cases included a person who traveled from Wuhan on Jan. 15, and it is likely that the virus entered before that: Tens of thousands of people traveled from Wuhan to the U.S. in December. Existing evidence suggests that the virus is highly transmissible and that the number of infections doubles roughly every three days. An epidemic seed on Jan. 1 implies that by March 9 about six million people in the U.S. would have been infected. As of March 23, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 499 Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. If our surmise of six million cases is accurate, thats a mortality rate of 0.01%, assuming a two week lag between infection and death. This is one-tenth of the flu mortality rate of 0.1%. Such a low death rate would be cause for optimism.
Thats the same argument made in the Oxford study, and the same made by Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis in a widely read piece last week. We know the numerator in calculating the fatality rate from COVID-19; the momentous question is what the denominator is. What if the new coronavirus is extremely infectious, almost always mild (unless, perhaps, you get a high dose of it like front-line health-care workers do), but severe in some freak cases? There may be enough infected people out there, say the authors, that we should expect a death toll in the range of 20,000 to 40,000 people, which is serious business but in line with the death toll from the flu and orders of magnitude below the death toll of two million people predicted in some worst-case scenarios. The reason hospitals are being crushed by COVID-19 when they arent crushed every year by the flu is because we have few ways of slowing down transmission of COVID-19 like we do with the flu (vaccines, naturally gained immunity, and so on). An enormous number of people are sick with it at the same time. Its just that only a very unlucky few actually end up feeling it.
Thats not to minimize what New York is dealing with now. Its bad. But the falling fever rates on the Kinsa map could be partially explained by many more people than we realize having already contracted the disease and now reached the recovery stage.
Two questions, though:
1. If the virus spreads like lightning, why werent more people quarantined on cruise ships infected? Many were, but when Dr. Jeremy Faust offered his theory a few weeks ago that COVID-19 is less lethal than we think, even he noted how surprisingly low the rate of infection onboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship was (705 of 3,711 passengers). Given the close quarters and recirculated air, you would think they might all have been quickly infected, not just 20 percent or so. Only six infected people died, but thats close to one percent, not the .01 percent rate about which the Journal piece speculates.
2. Why havent we seen any atypical rates of fever in L.A. yet, per the Kinsa data? A virus as contagious as the Oxford study imagines should have infected many people in a city that size already, one would think, and some small but detectable percentage of that group should have developed fevers. Shouldnt there be some recent spike? If not, then maybe fewer people have been infected than the Oxford study would imagine, which means maybe the virus is less contagious than it imagines, which means maybe the death rate isnt as low as we hope.
In lieu of an exit question, read this grim piece about what the next few months will look like if the theories about a massive undetected population of infected people are wrong. Quote: A recent analysis from the University of Pennsylvania estimated that even if social-distancing measures can reduce infection rates by 95 percent, 960,000 Americans will still need intensive care. There are only about 180,000 ventilators in the U.S. and, more pertinently, only enough respiratory therapists and critical-care staff to safely look after 100,000 ventilated patients. Abandoning social distancing would be foolish. Abandoning it now, when tests and protective equipment are still scarce, would be catastrophic.