Precision and COVID-19 Rates

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Holman Jenkins had a piece last Friday on the relationship between recessions and the end of infectious disease epidemics. His central thesis was that Covid-19 Can’t Spread if You Stay Home.  From that, folks are neither buying things nor working at the production of goods and services for others to (not) buy, and that’s the stuff of recessions.

But he closed with this comparison, which missed a larger point about what it is that we need to target in order to end an infectious disease epidemic, particularly one like the current coronavirus epidemic which has such skewed outcomes.

[N]otice that South Korea, one of the hard-hit countries, reports 0.6% [fatality rate]. When it comes to such degrees of precision, you probably would want to tune out if you knew just how fuzzy the underlying flu extrapolations are.

And they are fuzzy, with relatively large error bars, especially when only the overall affected population is considered.

It’s also useful, though, to consider the demographics: who actually becomes symptomatic, who has other medical conditions (and what those are), who gets seriously sick, who dies.

It’s also useful to put those demographics in the context of the quality of medical care available in the affected nation.

An Illustration

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A businessman in the People’s Republic of China, Ren Zhiqiang—who also is a member of the Communist Party of China—has been for some time an outspoken critic of PRC President Xi Jinping’s handling of the nation’s COVID-19 epidemic, a mishandling that allowed an early infection to blow out of control within the PRC and to become a global pandemic.

Outspoken critic: among other things, Ren wrote a widely disseminated essay that took issue with a 23 Feb speech by Xi. He wrote of a

“crisis of governance” within China’s Communist Party and blamed restrictions on freedom of speech and the press for slowing down the response to combat the novel coronavirus, thereby worsening the outbreak.

And

…after analyzing the President’s [Xi’s] speech he “saw not an emperor standing there exhibiting his ‘new clothes,’ but a clown stripped naked who insisted on continuing being emperor[.]”

Then Ren posted on Weibo

When does the people’s government turn into the party’s government? … Don’t waste taxpayers’ money on things that do not provide them with services.

Then his post was deleted, his Weibo account blocked. Ren also has been put on “probation” from the CPC.

And now he’s gone missing, making his point beautifully.

Proportional Responses

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Last week, Iran-backed terrorist organizations in Iraq fired rockets into an Iraqi military base that housed, among others, American and British soldiers, killing two American soldiers and one British soldier, a medic.

In response, we struck some of those terrorists’ operating locations.

The US strikes targeted five separate weapons storage facilities in Iraq associated with Kataib Hezbollah, a Shiite militia group operating in Iraq that US officials said has frequently targeted bases where American service members are based.
The strikes aimed to degrade the group’s ability to conduct future attacks against US and coalition forces….

And this:

The strikes were “defensive and proportional,” the Pentagon said….

On this, “the Pentagon” is dead wrong.

Tit-for-tat is not proportional; it just facilitates action-reaction cycles with mounting damage, casualties, collateral casualties, and collateral damage. This is demonstrated by a subsequent terrorist rocket attack on the same base Saturday, this one wounding three of our soldiers and two Iraqi soldiers.

A proportional response isn’t a tit-for-tat one, it doesn’t aim to degrade anything. It is an overwhelming one that destroys our enemy’s ability to act further in hostility. That is what stops the action-reaction cycle and holds down the totality of damage and casualties.

Proportionality must be considered against the overall, long-term situation, not against any single event.

Van Jones Has a Thought

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Van Jones, ex-Special Advisor to President Barack Obama (D) and now a television commentator, has concerns for Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ (I, VT) supporters now that his chief competitor, Joe Biden, appears to be pulling away.

“You have now an insurgency that’s about to be defeated. What do you do with the people that you defeat?” he asked.
Jones told a panel…that young and progressive Democratic voters had a “champion” in the increasingly defiant and intrepid Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (I).
“You’ve got young people who are graduating with a quarter-million dollars in debt, you’ve got young people with a lot of pain, and they had a champion. And, they thought they were going to be able to surround the divided establishment with their movement, crush that divided establishment, and move forward[.]

He went on:

Now, what do you do? Last time Bernie Sanders got beaten, there was an assumption that all his people were going to fall in line and vote against Trump and there was not enough care for the concern and the pain of his base[.]

What do you do with the people that you defeat?  The cynic in me recalls earlier days with the victors would run around the battlefield killing all the defeated wounded who’d been unable to escape.

That’s not going to happen here.  Still, the question is a valid one.  Biden and his team have spent the campaign, when they weren’t smearing President Donald Trump and his supporters, trashing Sanders and his socialist ideology and revolutionary policies—and by extension, Sanders’ supporters, who agreed with him.

Having done that for so long, how, indeed, can Biden, et al., go back to those supporters and say, “King’s X, we didn’t mean it. C’mon guys?”  If he tries to draw them in, what compromise can he offer them that they can believe?

If Biden moves in Sanders’ supporters’ direction, how could his current supporters believe that Biden still holds to the policies he espoused when he was trashing those Sanders ideas?

It’s a broader concern, though, than merely an intraparty tiffle.  If Biden moves far enough toward Sanders’ supporters to draw them to him, how, in the general election, could any voter believe Biden holds to any position with any sincerity, that he’s not just mouthing the policy that’s currently politically expedient—to be tossed aside when the expedience changes?

Some Coronavirus Perspective

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To put some perspective on national coronavirus infection levels, I’ve picked out some nations that have been in the news lately.  Coronavirus cases are drawn from Johns Hopkins University as of 14 March, and the population data are from Wikipedia. The per capita normalization is from third grade arithmetic.

I’ve emphasized one nation of particular interest.

Population Coronavirus Cases Per Capita Cases (per 10,000) Deaths Per Cent Deaths per Case
People’s Republic of China 1,427,647,786 80,976 0.56720 3,189 3.93820%
Germany 83,149,300 3,758 0.45196 8 0.21288%
US  328,239,523 2,175 0.06626 47 2.16092%
Japan 126,150,000 725 0.05747 21 2.89655%
Republic of Korea 51,709,098 8,086 1.56375 72 0.89043%
Italy 60,317,546 17,660 2.92784 1,266 7.16874%
Republic of China 23,780,452 53 0.02229 1 1.88679%
Iran 83,183,741 12,729 1.53023 611 4.80006%