Coronavirus Update 20200507

The coronavirus pandemic is continuing throughout most of the world, and I wanted to put down some observations on where we stand today. First, note that I put the date in the title. This is because the situation in some ways changes day-by-day, even though there are continuities. That makes it a dangerous place to be because it is human nature to look for the latest news and jump on it if it looks good. And that is a prime mistake because we do not in fact know enough at this point to be confident in these news reports. I would refer you to my earlier essay, . Today, in just over 2 months, we have 75 thousand deaths in the US, and that is with all of the extraordinary measures we put in place to keep people safe. To make an argument that Covid-19 is no more dangerous than the flu is to be criminally stupid at best.

Didn’t They Predict More Deaths?

Why yes, they did. A widely used model in the US is from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), at the University of Washington. And they have issued forecasts that ranged from hundreds of thousands of deaths to around 60,000 deaths. Clearly they have no idea what they are doing, right? Not so fast. As the statistician George Box famously said, "All models are wrong but some are useful". In this case you have to factor in two things. One is uncertainty, of course. To forecast how many people will die, it helps to know how many people have died, and this has been subject to fierce debate.

And here it gets difficult, since one argument is over what counts as a Covid-19 death. And since every one of our 50 states has their own health reporting system, there is a wide disparity. One example of this is the idea of "excess deaths". If a given area has a pretty regular death rate for a number of years, and suddenly that death rate jumps 500% in the midst of a pandemic, it is reasonable to suspect those "excess deaths" are a result of the coronavirus. But if those deaths get counted, others will argue that it is inflating the numbers, and that only a positive coronavirus serum test should count. Since each state does this differently, this leads to the odd result that the disease appears more or less lethal depending on your state of residence. And that means politicians have incentive to get the numbers they want.

The other factor complicating things is the phenomenon known as the "self-preventing" prophecy. You see, the initial high estimates tended to be "This is what will happen if you don’t take strong measures", and of course they were very high. And we know that governments like the UK and the US looked at those predictions, and started to take some stronger measures. So after a little bit, new predictions came out that were lower as a result of those measures. And now we are seeing misguided efforts to get people to go out and resume normal life, and as a result the newest forecasts are going up again. This is a feedback loop, in other words.