Time for a COVID Update

Time for a COVID-19 update. We haven’t done one of these in a while, but since the President is dealing with the illness, maybe it’s time.

The President's Weekend Story

To catch you up, the President made the announcement that he and the First Lady had both tested positive. I saw it around 1:00 AM Friday morning where I live.

Earlier, on Thursday I believe, he had been on Sean Hannity, debriefing the Tuesday night debate. At that time he mentioned that he was being tested, because White House aide Hope Hicks had tested positive. He is tested frequently regardless. Everyone who works with him is tested frequently. And all kinds of precautions are taken, since he is the President of the United States. 

He did say in the interview that it was difficult, when you meet with people, like military and veterans, and they want to come up and hug you—it’s difficult to push them away. You don’t want to do that. And Hope Hicks, he said, is a very caring person. He seemed to be saying, it was inevitable at some point that she would get it because of her loving care for those she would meet. He wasn’t attempting to praise himself, but he was saying there are social limits to caring about yourself.

Also on Thursday he met with a group at a fundraising event at a golf course. I don’t know details of the event, but some 200 people who were there have been contacted to be cautious. That was before the positive test results came back—and, as I mentioned, he’s tested frequently, so he doesn’t shut down his schedule pending the results of every test. Also, he only removed his mask to speak, at what should have been a safe distance from the audience.

As of Thursday evening he wasn’t showing symptoms; late in the day Friday he was. So it is conceivable that he was contagious on Thursday. But the usual precautions were taken that day as always. It is possible he spread it to no one. It is, of course, also possible that he did spread it.

Since Friday several others have tested positive. I’m unsure of all of them, but they include Chris Christie, Kellyanne Conway, and Kayleigh McEnany. Did he spread it to them, or did they contract it from the same vector the President got it from? Maybe somebody knows that, but the news spreaders do not.

The response has been mixed. A great many people are praying for the President. And he is leaving the hospital today, apparently improving greatly already—just three days later. Those who wish him death have revealed that it is not our President who lacks decorum.

The Accusation

President Donald Trump, outside Walter Reed Hospital, October 3
Reuters image from here

There was something in my Facebook feed I want to respond to today. This is from a friend whose relationship I value. I will not mention her name. I do not hate her for disagreeing with me. But I’m very concerned that this person, who is very bright, cannot see what I see. And it may be that she literally never sees the information I see. In an interview Scott Adams did with Glenn Beck recently, they both shared experiences about people not even seeing the many stories that we think are relevant; we conservatives, on the other hand, do see the stories they refer to. Nonconservatives often live in a media blackout bubble. Maybe some conservatives do too, but that’s not my experience.

My friend linked this story from Reuters, posted October 3rd: “Infected Trump greets supporters in motorcade outside hospital; his health unclear.” There is some news in the story, but there is also a slant, full of innuendo and speculation that is, of course, not news. And there are additional accusations, beyond this story, that maybe the President is faking it and isn't sick at all. My friend responds with this:

I genuinely can’t tell what’s more disturbing: the possibility that he has faked his diagnosis, or the possibility that the diagnosis is real and he is INTENTIONALLY exposing others. It’s one or the other, and both are horrifying.

The Logic Lesson

Here’s a lesson in logic: when you haven’t looked at all the possibilities—particularly the most likely possibility—then you shouldn’t go with an either/or statement.

Did the President fake his diagnosis? Why would he do that? If he’s, as you say, trying to act like it’s not all that prevalent, why would he fake it? And why would a person who maintains his image assiduously allow himself to look weak for the sake of a fake story? And how could he possibly expect, in a place where “deep state” lifetime government workers have proved themselves more than willing to leak information, true or not—how could he expect all doctors, aides, and associates to go along with such a lie? Seriously, that simply does not ring true.

Did the President intentionally expose others? What is your evidence? He went to the hospital, in a helicopter, with any accompanying individuals protected in the highest level gear. While he was in the hospital, spontaneous thousands gathered outside to show their support of the President. Most with masks, outside, socially distanced, so let’s not worry about them for now. He surprised them by getting in a motorcade car and driving through the street to wave at the supporters. He was wearing a mask, in a presidential motorcade car, with the windows up.

You’re worried about the driver and secret service? Do you know whether they had any contact, or whether there was a window between the driver and back seat? Do you know whether the driver and service members were chosen because they already had immunity to the disease? Did you ask? Did you notice or learn about their special gear to protect themselves? Did you know that the secret service members would need to stay near the President even if he had remained at the White House?

The story itself says, “White House spokesman Judd Deere said the trip had been approved by medical staff and that appropriate precautions had been taken.” In other words, the President wasn’t being cavalier. He may have asked whether the drive-by appearance could be done. If it could not have been done safely, his security team and doctors would have said so.

The other accusation is that he was spreading it to other patients at the hospital. As I understand it, Walter Reed Army Hospital has a private official area for the President. There is an office where he can continue work. Ronald Reagan worked from there as he recovered from his gunshot wound. It is more secure than the White House; that may be one reason he was taken there, rather than simply treated at the White House. Plus, it would be easier to safely handle his food, hygiene, and medicines at the hospital.

But that’s about his security; what about the others? The story posed this worry, rather than find out any answers: “He said he had been meeting soldiers and first responders at the hospital, raising new questions about whether he was now directly exposing others to the disease.” And followed with a quote from a critic: “’The irresponsibility is astounding,’” Dr. James Phillips, an attending physician at the hospital, said on Twitter.” An attending physician means a doctor at that hospital, not one attending to the President. Not someone privy to any more information than the general public has had. Did the media follow up with anyone who had first-hand knowledge of the President spreading a disease to recuperating servicemen? No? Why didn’t they?

So you think the President, knowing he was sick with a contagious disease, was allowed to go bed to bed to unsuspecting patients and breathe on them, and no doctors would be there preventing that? Did he meet them in person? If so, were they people who were already dealing with the same disease, or who already had it and were immune, or who had a barrier between them? Did you ask? Just because you hate the President doesn’t mean he’s doing evil things.

There’s a third possibility in that insufficient either/or: You don’t have the full story. Most likely, he has the disease, and he and everyone around him have taken every precaution to both keep him safe and get him well, and safeguard those around him. That is the most likely scenario. That is the task, the mission, of everyone surrounding him—which he does not have the power, particularly while ill, to override.

He can’t override his security team even on a good health day. That thing you hated him about a few weeks ago—a report that he wouldn’t go honor veterans at a cemetery because he was worried about his hair, and he thought those who died were losers, a story without evidence but with 5 anonymous sources, totally debunked by a dozen or so people who were actually there at the time, including those who didn’t like the President, verifying that the accusation was an outright lie. That story. The President had wanted to go to the cemetery. He would have been taken by helicopter, but the wind and rain were too worrisome; you don’t risk the President of the United States. His protectors said no. So others, including I think the Vice President, went by taking a three-hour car drive that neither the President’s schedule nor his security detail would permit. (And, no, of course he didn’t say anything disrespectful of those who died in battle. That would also be out of character.)

When I read stories like that, where I see logic holes filled with spiteful speculation, I raise an eyebrow and wait for more information. I did that even with a president I had every reason to dislike and disbelieve.

COVID-19 Data Update 

Now for the more general COVID-19 data update.

This morning on Glenn Beck’s radio program, he went through some statistics—from, as he ironically put it, “that right-wing think tank the CDC”:

·       America is 10^th worldwide in COVID-19 deaths per million population.

·       America’s guidelines for reporting COVID-19 deaths are more generous than other countries; any death in which COVID-19 was suspected as a co-morbidity is included, whether or not the actual cause of death was unrelated. This difference in counting inflates our comparative death numbers.

·       Excluding deaths in New York, America would be 47^th in the world in COVID-19 deaths per million population. In other words, most of America on average (even including New Jersey) is doing rather well at keeping deaths low.

·       America tests more than other countries. Far more. Roughly 30% of the US population have now been tested. This inflates the total confirmed cases in comparison with the rest of the world.

·       America’s case fatality rate is average; 4% of the treated patients die. That’s the worst stat we have.

·       America’s infection fatality rate (IFR)—total number of people infected versus total confirmed deaths—is .63%. That’s well below the world average, which the WHO estimates to be .94%; 38 countries have IFRs higher than the US.

·       America’s IFR went from 1.18% in May to .63% in August; we cut the IFR in half as we improved therapies by switching from treating COVID-19 as a lung disorder to treating it as a clotting and blood pressure disorder.

·       Our IFR broadly—total mortality among total population—puts us in a better position than 37 other countries; the IFR data is this good even when we include New York, which badly skewed our data.

·       Researchers at Lawrence Livermore Labs estimated in June that, without the travel restrictions from China and the EU, implemented by President Trump against the advice of “experts,” the case fatality rate would be the same as those countries; we would have by now 720,000 dead. Travel restrictions dramatically slowed the death rate by slowing the infection rate, sparing us from an additional 500,000 (half a million) dead.

I continue to gather data locally. I took this screenshot on October 3^rd. (Data is from Domo.com/Covid19/daily-pulse/.) It shows Change by US County, New Cases compared to 7 Days Prior. Harris County is down 63% from the previous week.

Changes in New Cases from a week earlier
Data and graphs from here on October 3, 2020

Just to show you how confusing data can be, I looked again today, and our county is up 62%. But when I look at the raw number of new cases, it’s lower than it was on Saturday. It’s down from 919 to 872, but the 62% increase is because, I'm guessing, last Monday showed only 537 new cases. In other words, it’s a direct comparison to the week before, not a weekly rolling average the way I do them. This source is new to me, so I'll keep looking and try to figure it out.

I gave up on getting accurate case counts quite a while ago; the sources kept changing their criteria, and sometimes changing what data they provided. So I’ve been doing a weekly rolling average chart of deaths in my county and state. Here are the updates.

This is the new deaths per day for Texas. I’ve used the daily coronavirus data printed in the Houston Chronicle from official sources. This is the data I’ve had the longest. You can see a peak a while ago. But some parts of Texas are still having the occasional spike.

This is Harris County, where Houston is located. I’ve been keeping a daily count of new deaths, taken from the county public health site. They don't give historical data on deaths, so I need to go there daily to capture the data (you can see I missed a few days). Before this chart, assume there was a gradual rise in May, a spike in early June, and back down to this in early July, when I started this chart. Our peak is mid-August, a bit later than the Texas peak.

Out of curiosity, because it was available on the county public health site, I’ve been tracking my zip code. While case numbers are generally inaccurate, I thought I’d see what new cases looked like just in my area. At the same time I’ve tracked changes in active cases in my area, which you can see is either low or negative most of the time. I think we're about average for Harris County. 

The county keeps changing what they show. In mid-September, they changed from graphing the increase in cases per day to showing a combo of recent and older cases—which I hadn’t been tracking. But they started showing an alternative graph called “Epi Curve of Cases Over Time,” which I think is a more accurate picture of how we’re doing. Today it looks like this.

We hit our peak in late June, about a month before we hit our death peak, and we’ve been on a downward trend ever since. But the “helpful” county public health site added this COVID-19 meter on August 5^th, a month past the peak. It hasn’t budged from that bright red "severe" level since they put it there. It blocks my zip code data; I actually have to go to a separate page for that now, instead of just taking one quick snapshot. I guess it’s anyone’s guess when the county judge might move us out of the red alarm, as though we’re on the verge of suddenly becoming New York in crisis.

Maybe it has nothing to do with our behavior, or our safety; it has to do with wielding power. It keeps the economy shut down, and keeps people cowering when we’re within a week of early voting.

What We've Learned

Good data is hard to get. Good information is harder. But good common sense only leaves if you give up using your own brain and let someone else feed you lies that affect your amygdala with fear.

This disease is a bad thing. I wish it wasn’t part of our lives. But facing the reality of it and getting on with our lives as best we can is a better solution than:

·       Blaming the president.

·       Telling lies about what is actually happening before our eyes.

·       Huddling in fear until some dictator allows you to come out under circumstances they determine.

Another day we’ll have to look again at Sweden, which seems to have better common sense than most of the rest of the world. Who would have thought America would need lessons in maintaining freedom from Sweden? 

Common Sense or Calamity

“Studies either confirm common sense or they’re wrong.”—Dennis Prager[i]

Common sense tells us things that eventually social science can confirm, if done correctly.[ii] If you start with correct principles, and follow the correct procedures, then you get the right answers. Same with logic, which is mathematical. If you start with the right premise, and don’t get off track with faulty reasoning, then you get the right answer. But if you don’t start with a true premise, your answers will be faulty. Or if you take a wrong turn along the way.

That’s why it makes sense to look at what has been tried and tested over many years, by many people, in many places, in many cultures. If they come to see the wisdom in the same things, they might be right. Learning from the past, we can identify the principles that lead to civilization.

It’s kind of pointless to say, “Now that we’re more evolved, or progressive, we can ignore the experience of the sum total of human history, and try something new and untried, because we’re so advanced.” That is probably what every decadent society thought: “We don’t need to cling to those old ideas of morality; we want to do things our own way.” And then they sink from civilization into savagery, and misery. Every time.

Detroit after decay

Economist Thomas Sowell wrote a piece earlier this month, comparing life for blacks in America before and after the Civil Rights movement, and then the War on Poverty in the 1960s.

You would be hard-pressed to find as many ghetto riots prior to the 1960s as we have seen just in the past year, much less in the 50 years since a wave of such riots swept across the country in 1965.

We are told that such riots are a result of black poverty and white racism. But in fact—for those who still have some respect for facts—black poverty was far worse, and white racism was far worse, prior to 1960. But violent crime within black ghettos was far less.

Murder rates among black males were going down—repeat, DOWN—during the much lamented 1950s, while it went up after the much celebrated 1960s, reaching levels more than double what they had been before. Most black children were raised in two-parent families prior to the 1960s. But today the great majority of black children are raised in one-parent families.

Sowell gets to talk openly about race by virtue of his color. It’s helpful to get truth from someone who has lived a life worth knowing. But he doesn’t leave it as a racial problem; you do the same things in any culture, and you get the same results. He suggests reading Life at the Bottom, by Theodore Dalrymple, talking about British white slums caused by the welfare state.

Sowell concludes,

You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization—including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain—without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.

He’s an economist, so the requirements of civilization he’s focusing on particularly affect economic prosperity, such as a strong work ethic. But more than that, you don’t get prosperity without the necessary behavioral standards and personal responsibility. And what are those? The principles were laid out in basic form about 3400 years ago, in the Ten Commandments. Every civilization has had something very close to that: you don’t lie, you don’t steal, you don’t have sex outside of marriage, you don’t take innocent life, you honor family, and you recognize God as the giver of life and inalienable rights. If you throw out any of the essential ingredients, you don’t get to have civilization.

image found here

In 1995 the leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sent out A Proclamation to the World, titled “The Family.”[iii] It’s a short document, and at the time we thought it seemed puzzling, because the points made in it were what we’d believed all along. They were common sense.

But very shortly afterward, ever line in it began to be attacked. Things like:

·        Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.

·        We declare that God’s commandment for His children to multiply and replenish the earth remains in force.

·        We further declare that God has commanded that the sacred powers of procreation are to be employed only between man and woman, lawfully wedded as husband and wife.

·        Marriage between man and woman is essential to His eternal plan.

·        Children are entitled to birth within the bonds of matrimony, and to be reared by a father and a mother who honor marital vows with complete fidelity.

For someone with common sense, those aren’t weird or outmoded or ridiculous in any way. They’re just the common sense way to happiness.

If you take a look at some older movies, or maybe some Shakespeare, you’ll find that the assumption that sex must only take place within marriage is a given. It was so widely accepted that even villains would expect they needed marriage before they could prey upon the damsel.  It has always been known that not everyone would abide by this societal requirement, but rebels knew they couldn’t expect society to condone their rebellions. Society must reverence marriage and family as sacred, or civilization ceases to be.

I’ve mention Vico and Unwin before. Giambatista Vico came first. Back in 1725 he concluded that marriage between a man and a woman is essential for civilization—it is the “seed plot” of society.[iv] Religious people, statesmen, and pretty much any educated thinking person in Vico’s day recognized that sex outside of marriage was an evil against society. Vico just explained the reasoning (the social science).

Two centuries later, in 1935, along came anthropologist and “progressive” thinker (i.e., progressive movement that Woodrow Wilson foisted on us) Joseph D. Unwin, who set out to prove that the institution of marriage was unnecessary, maybe even harmful. He did an exhaustive study of some 86 cultures, all the world cultures throughout history that he could obtain sufficient data for.[v] He was forced by the evidence to conclude that only marriage with fidelity, what he called absolute monogamy, would lead to the cultural prosperity of a society—civilization. Anything else, such as “domestic partnerships” or living together unmarried, or any other type of promiscuity, would degrade society. He reported:

The evidence was such as to demand a complete revision of my personal philosophy; for the relationship between the factors seemed to be so close, that, if we know what sexual regulations a society has adopted, we can prophesy accurately the pattern of its cultural behavior... (p.5).

Now it is an extraordinary fact that in the past sexual opportunity has only been reduced to a minimum by the fortuitous adoption of an institution I call absolute monogamy. This type of marriage has been adopted by different societies, in different places, and at different times. Thousands of years and thousands of miles separate the events; and there is no apparent connection between them. In human records, there is no case of an absolutely monogamous society failing to display great [cultural] energy. I do not know of a case on which great energy has been displayed by a society that has not been absolutely monogamous…(pp.31-32).

So a society’s sexual behavior can be predictive:

If, during or just after a period of [cultural] expansion, a society modifies its sexual regulations, and a new generation is born into a less rigorous [monogamous] tradition, its energy decreases... If it comes into contact with a more vigorous society, it is deprived of its sovereignty, and possibly conquered in its turn (p.21).

It seems to follow that we can make a society behave in any manner we like if we are permitted to give it such sexual regulations as will produce the behavior we desire. The results should begin to emerge in the third generation ( p.45).

The Family Proclamation ends with a more religious sounding but nearly identical warning:

We warn that individuals who violate covenants of chastity, who abuse spouse or offspring, or who fail to fulfill family responsibilities will one day stand accountable before God. Further, we warn that the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets.

Some people have to learn by experience; I understand that. But let them experiment in their own limited lives and circles. There’s no need for them to bring on dire consequences to entire civilizations just because they want to try out ways of living that have proved misery-inducing throughout all of human history.

I choose common sense rather than the proven path to calamity.

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[i] Donna Carol Voss quotes (without quotation marks, so possibly a paraphrase) Dennis Prager at the beginning of her piece, “Could it Be? Stay-at-Home Moms Are Bad for Children?”

[ii] For example, “Why Marriage Matters: Twenty-One Conclusions from the Social Sciences,” 2002, Institute for American Values, available at www.americanvalues.org, and the updated version “Why Marriage Matters, Third Edition, Thirty Conclusions from theSocial Sciences.” See also Linda J. Waite’s tabulations from the 1987-1988 waves of the National Survey of Families and Households available in Linda J. Waite and Maggie Gallagher, 2000. The Case for Marriage: Why Married People are Happier, Healthier, and Better-Off Financially (New York:  Doubleday): 155-156.

[iii] The proclamation was read by President Gordon B. Hinckley as part of his message at the General Relief Society (women’s auxiliary) Meeting held September 23, 1995, in Salt Lake City. In its entirety at https://www.lds.org/topics/family-proclamation?lang=eng&cid=PA0414-02

[iv] Vico, Giambattista, The New Science, 3rd Edition, trans. by Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin, paragraphs 10-11:  “The first of these [human institutions] was marriage…For marriage, as all statesmen agree, is the seed-plot of the family, as the family is the seed-plot of the commonwealth…”

[v] Unwin, also Joseph Daniel, Ph.D., “Sexual Regulations and Cultural Behavior," an address given to the Medical Section of the British Psychological Society.