by Karl Denninger, Market Ticker:
None of this is in dispute; if you have an argument to make with any of these alleged facts let’s hear it in the comments, with your data source.
- As many as half, and in some states as many as 80%, of people who have died from Covid-19 were nursing home or other long-term-care home residents.
- Black people have a higher fatality rate for the virus than white people. Various commentators have attempted to explain this as a race-based difference in health care access, although no such evidence actually exists (e.g. in KY, where the Governor has announced an explicitly racist and thus unconstitutional program to “cover all black people” with health insurance — a program based on ethnicity and thus constitutionally impermissible.) However, black people also have a higher attack rate than whites, which cannot be explained by any alleged difference in health-care access. Obviously, if you are attacked at a higher rate given the same percentage of bad outcomes more of that group on a numerical basis will have bad outcomes.
- Meat-packing plant workers have a materially higher attack rate than non meat-packing workers. Said workers are also over-represented, by a lot, among Hispanics.
- Said meat-packing plant and other agricultural workers, however, have a lower fatality (bad outcome) rate than among the general population in places such as New York. And not by a little either — by a factor of 10 or more. That’s well beyond statistical significance. Indeed the CFR among these groups are in the low tenths of one percent. That’s in the realm of ordinary seasonal flu.
- Japan controlled their outbreak without lockdowns. People like to point to “mask-wearing” but are ignoring the 900lb Gorilla in the room when it comes to Japan and South Korea — about 3/4 of all homes have bidets. The percentage of homes in the US with a bidet is an effective zero. (I have one and like it; among other things it dramatically reduces the use of TP, so my one roll of consumption is your three or five rolls!) Use of a bidet, however, absolutely reduces the amount of feces contact with a toilet user’s hands by a huge factor — probably to 1/100th or less than a user of a toilet without one, since it washes nearly all of the feces off your butthole and into the toilet before you get off the pot. This dramatically reduces the risk of fecal:oral transmission of any bug at the source and thus should be expected to dramatically reduces infection rates.
- South Korea controlled their hospital transmission without extreme PPE measures. Their solution? Militant hand-washing in health care facilities; before entry to and at exit of every room and after contact with any potentially-contaminated person or surface. That step alone cut the transmission to health care workers to nearly zero. This was known in March. We are still seeing crazy-high transmission in health-care workers in the United States, especially in nursing homes and other care facilities (ITC homes for disabled people, etc.) in the United States and we have not instituted said militant hand-washing standards here.
- Homeless people appeared at first to not get the virus at all. This made absolutely no sense and I talked about it at the time as a major confounding piece of data; I could not explain the apparent lack of infections. Subsequently, serology and mass-testing of shelters later proved that in fact damn near all of said people tested were in fact positive for either antibodies or the virus itself, meaning virtually all of them either had it or have had it. We originally thought they didn’t get it because they didn’t get sick! But they sure did get the virus — they just didn’t get sick enough from it to require medical attention. I note that “getting the virus” but not getting sick is good, not bad. In fact it’s very good not just for you but for everyone around you; provided you get some amount of immunity out of that the benefit to the general public is considerable. Among said homeless people nearly zero of them have died of Covid-19.
- Prison populations continue to report extremely high attack rates and yet again post near-zero serious case and fatality rates. Note that prisons and jails universally have the toilet in the cell and thus fecal/oral contamination via surface contact is going to be extremely easy with no possible way to control it. We keep seeing huge “bursts” of reported cases in various states which are prisoner test batches that show up all at once — yet what we don’t see are prisoners dropping dead or ending up in the ICU with the bug. Note that incarcerated individuals are materially more likely than the general population to have lived an extraordinarily unhealthy lifestyle prior to incarceration, including drug and alcohol abuse. Therefore you would expect them to have much higher mortality statistics from Covid-19 than the general population but this has yet to occur on a systematic basis in the United States.
- Native Americans appear to have extremely high attack, severe disease and death rates. Arizona is the poster child for this problem but is by no means alone; they just happen to have entire counties where a huge percentage of the population is Native American due to the presence of large reservation areas within same. The net-positive test rate among NE Arizona counties in particular is astounding on a comparative basis.
- Protesters don’t get it either despite ignoring “social distancing” writ large and often or even usually ignoring masks too. Never mind that if you’re gassed by the cops you cough like a son-of-a-bitch so if you have anything now so does everyone within 20′ of you. The transmission rate should be much higher than the statistical average for everyone in the state if gathering together in close contact for hours at a time without masks transmitted the bug. The data says it does not; their positive rate of 1.4% is less than half the index rate (average) of 3.7% in the state of Minnesota.
- Delaying infection does not prevent it. Remember that flattening the curve mantra? That’s delay. The area under the curve (number of infections) remains the same but is simply spread out over more time. Now suddenly that people are still getting infected results in screaming when this was not only a known outcome it was the expected outcome. Has the collective IQ of Americans dropped below their shoe size? It appears the answer is a resounding YES!
Note that exactly nobody pressing the racissssssss! screaming is accounting for any of this. Until and unless we cut the crap with that intentional suppression of logical analysis we shall never get to the facts. There are very important epidemiological facts in this data and in fact there are likely pathways to suppression of severe outcomes from Covid-19 to below the nuisance level found therein.
