Tracking Corona Chaos

I continue to calmly track the Corona pandemic here.

My biggest concern is that we LEARN! I'm a believer that everything including our next breath is in God's hands, and that he has given us reason as a gift to balance our emotional selves, in the best cases producing wisdom. The fear of God is the beginning of such -- without it, it is nearly certain we will be driven by our own fears, pride, envy, self righteous, desire to be "right", "poplar", "virtuous", etc.  Science / statistics CAN help, but I'll argue below in this case we seem to be ignoring standard scientific / medical procedure. (eg, FIRST do no harm!)

In short, we are all affected by "Original Sin / Sinful Nature". Sadly, we all have it -- as a panic attack sufferer, fear vs trusting in God and worship of knowledge vs God (gnostic heresy) are biggies for me ... we will refrain from a complete list in the interest of brevity.

My second worst concern is that we have fallen into a state of being WAY too prone to panic, and WAY too media / ideologically driven. Why did we not do what we have done in the past?

1. Isolate vulnerable populations (we have done that, GOOD!) 
2. Isolate areas -- like why are we still flying in the US? Certainly in/out of major cities? 
3. Do random testing (including presence of antibodies) to get a good picture of what our actual situation is. If we already have a high infection rate (which we well may not know since 80% of cases are mild), then it is already too late for the "lockdowns" to work -- keep the vulnerable isolated! 
4. If we DO see definite hot spots of infection rates, THEN lock THOSE areas down. Encourage people not to travel to / from those spots. 

My third concern is "the halting problem". Like debt, it was quite easy to get into this "distancing". How are we going to decide to get out of this? We are doing a lot of harm -- not just to money. People NEED to work and have social interaction, for both their mental and physical health. They need communion -- both Holy and secular.

My favorite statistics on Corona remain cases / deaths per million ... you need to scroll down to a table and then sort by the 2nd from right column highest to lowest if you want to find cases, right column for deaths. DATA is a wonderful thing, how look at it to turn it into information is critical 452734983 is data ... 452-73-4983 is information.

My view a week into "lockdown" is that we badly failed the "First do no harm" test on this one ... and when you compare to our reactions to previous pandemics there is a definite learning opportunity.

The 1st chart below is CERTAINLY influenced by amount of testing ... although Germany has done a lot of testing, so it's total cases are likely pretty close to right. The obvious question is "Why is the US not generally doing random testing"? When faced with a large data set, that LEAPS to the mind of any non-panic or agenda driven person.

Cases Per Million:

• I threw out the top 7 due to small population.
• Little countries with lots of people packed closely and fairly old population are near the top.
• The top infection rate countries have socialized medicine which typically means wards with 8+  people. A 2017 post showed 18 patients per ward was common. Current data is HARD to find! (I'm guessing because they are not very proud of it) Does anyone else think that a ward system might not fare well in an epidemic?
• Note China, USA, Germany near the bottom with the rate of infection / million CASES being .0002. Car fatality rate per 100k population is "10ish" ... TEN, not "point oh something". Again, I'm comparing cases rate to death rate for context, death is a lot more serious than catching Corona (see second chart).
  
  More testing may increase the infection rate, however Germany is one of the best tested countries, so we can have some hope their numbers are going to hold. I have no faith in Chinese numbers. 

Death Rate Per 1 million people (same source), top 7 excluded due to low population:

• Since we are talking deaths per million, big is better all else being equal (which it never is) Switzerland 8.5 mil, Italy 60.5 makes a difference, as does how tight they are packed ... like mountain valleys. 
• Similar point, an honorable statistician would throw out Monaco and Gibraltar and others ... however, most of the stats we are being fed are pure "total deaths", certainly evidence of statistical / media malpractice! 
• For the use and China don't make this list ... US 3/mil, China 2. Again, someone looking to honestly understand vs confuse would go to regional / local analysis. Good map for that here. 

Death rate by age:

There is VERY good news here ... if you are are under 40 you have a .2% chance of dying of Corona.  If you are 0-9 years old, it's 0 so far.




It is interesting that the Worldometer site does not include H1N1. This from WikiPedia:

It is estimated that 11–21% of the global population at the time — or around 700 million–1.4 billion people (out of a total of 6.8 billion) — contracted the illness – more than the number of people infected by the Spanish flu pandemic,[6][10] with about 150,000–575,000 fatalities.[7] A follow-up study done in September 2010 showed that the risk of serious illness resulting from the 2009 H1N1 flu was no higher than that of the yearly seasonal flu.[11]

So, "500K" vs a "billion", and "30K" vs 400K fatalities SO FAR. So we must be careful ... this might be different. We are being confidently told that it IS! Good to watch what actually happens, we clearly do know it is being treated in an VERY unusual manner.

Apparently the UK started random testing at the end of February, so there ought to be some good data from there on rate if one can find it.

Some information on handling epidemics. ... staging is the norm.