Harry Shannon
Some thoughts on the coronavirus and its impact.
- I am not paying attention any more to the number of new confirmed cases. That’s because, as far as I can tell, whether someone is tested is rather arbitrary: has the person sought care; does the person have symptoms; how severe are the symptoms; are there enough testing kits; how backed up are the labs processing the tests? And there’s the accuracy of the test to consider, which hasn’t had the same attention in the media. So we don’t know the number of infections, we just have a lower limit on it.
- That’s why I am now just looking at the number of deaths from COVID-19 as a measure of where we are. It’s somewhat lagging, of course, since recent data suggest that it takes an average of 18 days from onset of symptoms to death. (And just as the tests have some error, the stated cause of deaths will too. But it shouldn’t affect the broad picture.) You do have to be careful – in the UK, up to now, they have not counted deaths in homes, care homes and other non-hospital settings, although the number was likely small.
- The New York Times has a very informative tracker, which shows numbers for countries with more than 25 deaths. The number of deaths is plotted on a log scale against time since the 25th death. Since it’s a log scale, a straight line shows that the number is increasing exponentially*. The slope of the line relates to the doubling time for the number. And if the slope is flattening out, the doubling time is longer, which is good.
- They also have a chart for each state, this time, it shows deaths since the 10th death in the state. The line for New York state is horrible, the number of deaths doubling every two days.
- The numbers for Low and Middle Income Countries are still low. It would be wonderful if that was because they are going to avoid the problems we’re having in High Income Countries – but I fear that’s false hope.
- At some point we’ll have to consider life after the pandemic passes. I won’t get all philosophical and go on about how social/physical distancing has got me thinking about what we really need to live a good life, and how I’m now meditating for hours a day (I’m not). But there is one thing I hope we will be thinking about. Our governments will have huge debts. They must finally realize that decades of kneejerk tax-cutting have left our public services on the brink, and tax rates on high incomes and wealth will have to sharply increase. And Universal Basic Income (UBI) must be brought in; we’re half way there with some of the stimulus spending. (UBI does work – see Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman. I wrote about it in this post a while ago.) We need to get our heads around this.
*‘Increasing exponentially’ means that it’s increasing by a fixed factor over time. So it may increase by, say, 40% each day. After two days, it will have increased by an additional 40%, so the number will be 96% higher (1.4 x 1.4 = 1.96), and after three days, 174% higher (1.4 x 1.4 x1.4 = 2.744). After ten days, it would be 29 times higher – which is why exponential growth is scary, and you want to see the slope on the log scale flattening out. If the increase is 20% a day, after ten days the number will be about six times bigger; still a lot more, but much less than with the 40% a day increase.
Of course, the curve has to flatten out at some point. There are only so many people in the population.