Tag Archives: health care

New Case Rates and Death Rates

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Current data indicate a reduction in new (read: confirmed) cases of Wuhan Virus—45,000 cases on Independence Day vs 50,000 cases the day prior.  Fun with statistics: that’s a 10% drop—wow.

It is promising, but a single datum isn’t very dispositive.

What really interested me, though, is this, also presented in the article at the link:

In contrast to the surge in positive diagnoses, the death rate has slowed mostly to the hundreds a day in recent weeks, from a peak of more than 2,000 daily during several weeks in April.

And:

Infectious-disease epidemiologists caution that deaths typically lag behind other indicators, as the disease often progresses over the course of weeks in the most severe cases.

The rise in new case detections has only been in progress for a week, or so, and many of those detections are the result of massively increased testing finding massively increased existing infections (hence my correction above to consider “confirmed” rather than solely “new”).

With this virus’ incubation period of 2-14 days, and the fact that, if the infection proves fatal to an individual, that will occur generally from 4-11 days after hospitalization, I’ll be looking at hospitalization rates over the next week, or so, and mortality rates over the latter half of July. Those are the data most likely to be associated with the recent rise in cases detected.

New/confirmed infection rates by themselves are pretty meaningless.

A Judicial…Misunderstanding

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The Supreme Court has struck Louisiana’s abortion law that required doctors to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital before they could be permitted to carry out abortions. The ruling was by a 5-4 vote; the five hung their ruling on the Court’s 2016 Whole Woman’s Health decision holding that there were “no medical benefits” to such a requirement, and so “a woman’s constitutional right to end a pregnancy” was circumscribed.

One of the five was Chief Justice John Roberts.

Here’s his rationalization for his vote:

I joined the dissent in Whole Woman’s Health and continue to believe that the case was wrongly decided. The question today however is not whether Whole Woman’s Health was right or wrong, but whether to adhere to it in deciding the present case.

Wow.

If the decision being used as precedent was wrongly decided, the correct response is to overrule that precedent and correct the error, not to flip and bureaucratically uphold the error and, by doing so, codify it.

Codifying error as precedent also has a strong whiff of legislating from the bench.

With his logic, maybe Roberts would have argued against going to war to overrule a Dred Scott, or argued against altering Plessy.

Borderline….

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According to Johns Hopkins’ CSSE data, the US has suffered 116,000 deaths from the Wuhan Virus as of 16 June. That’s not the whole story, though, and the raw number overstates the case along one critical dimension.

The US death toll from [Wuhan Virus] in nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities has topped 50,000….

That’s 43% of all our virus fatalities occurring in those old folks homes.

Those same CSSE data indicate that the US has some 2,100,000 cases—of which 250,000 have occurred in those facilities. That’s 12% of all our virus infections concentrated in those old folks homes, and a 20% fatality rate for our old folks, given infection in our old folks homes. Which compares with a 3% fatality rate outside those facilities.

Unfortunately (or conveniently, depending on perspective), many States don’t disaggregate cases effectively, so that old folks home death rate actually maybe be understated to some degree.

New York, for example, doesn’t include cases in which nursing-home residents died in a hospital….

Some States—New York and New Jersey come to mind—badly exacerbated this death toll concentration and infection disportionality by actually requiring nursing homes and the like to accept into their midst Wuhan Virus-infected patients simply because those facilities had empty beds.

Borderline? It’s right next door to criminal.

New York’s Nursing Home Intakes

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You may recall that New York’s Progressive-Democrat Governor, Andrew Cuomo, ordered all New York nursing homes to accept into their midst folks who were “recovering” from, but not yet cleared of, their Wuhan Virus infections and folks who might only have been exposed to the virus.

Nursing homes house the demographic most vulnerable to the virus: the aged, many of whom also have the most virulent comorbidities.  Residents, within days, began dying of the Wuhan Virus to the extent that their deaths alone make up a significant fraction—roughly a sixth—of all the Wuhan Virus deaths in a State that has the nation’s highest number of such deaths.

Of course, Cuomo is trying to weasel out from under his disastrous order, having rescinded it only after a couple of months of dead and dying. He’s blaming the whole thing on President Donald Trump and his administration’s medical experts. Cuomo, after all, was only

following guidelines issued by the Trump administration.
The guidance [Cuomo] says [is] “nursing homes should admit any individuals that they would normally admit to their facility, including individuals from hospitals where a case of COVID-19 was/is present.”

Here’s his secretary and top aid, Melissa DeRosa, last Saturday:

Not could. Should. That is President Trump’s CMS and CDC…There are over a dozen states that did the exact same thing.

That’s a cynical and dishonest quibble. “Should” is just a strong version of “could;” neither remotely amounts to “required.”

Beyond that, DeRosa carefully omitted to mention that there also were a number of States who did not require nursing homes and the like to take Wuhan Virus-infected or -exposed patients, and none of those States’ equivalent facilities have had anything like the death rates of New York’s nursing homes.

Cuomo and DeRosa just as carefully continue to omit to mention that CMS and CDC also mandated separation/isolation criteria for the Wuhan Virus patient intake, or that these were not well followed in New York.

Active Dependency

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The Transportation Security Administration is looking into the prospects and processes for taking passenger temperatures among all of TSA’s actual security duties.

Airlines have been pushing for the Transportation Security Administration to start taking passengers’ temperatures as part of a multifaceted effort to keep potentially sick people from boarding planes and to make passengers feel more comfortable taking trips again.

Such a thing is supposedly to cost under $20 million, and it won’t cost passengers anything. Instead, all of us taxpayers will be paying for the passengers’…concerns. To the extent those exist; it is, after all, the airlines pushing, not pax.

There are better uses for the money, though. One would be simply to pass the bucks along to me, and I’ll undertake to not travel by air. That would net out to considerably less than the twenty mil, though, as I’d owe a heft tax bill, even after the 2017 tax cut.

Seriously though: nothing is keeping airlines from taking passenger temperatures themselves. The foolishness of this actively seeking dependency on government to do for us is getting old and tired.