A Prescription For Managing The Coronavirus

We have shut down the economy of the world.  Why?
Because the numbers from China were purposefully skewed.  China did not want to “look bad,” so they skewed the infection rates in Wuhan which led to the entire world freaking out about the numbers.   When China lied about the case count total, that impacted the denominator of the equation used to determine the fatality rate of the disease.

Here’s How That Hurt Us:

Over 3,250,000 people filed for unemployment in the past week.  Those numbers are going to skyrocket and make new cases of the Coronavirus look like a very small number indeed.  We already have over 6 times as many new unemployed in our country compared to the WORLD TOTAL coronavirus case count.  That is 3,300,000 unemployed versus 522,000 coronavirus cases respectively at the time of this writing.  China had 42,638 total cases and 1,016 deaths as of February 10, 2020 (worldometers.info).  To determine the death rate we divide the number of deaths by the total cases: 1,016 / 42,638 for a death rate of 2.38%.  On February 20th, the death count provided to worldometers.info was 2,236 with 75,465 total cases for a death rate of 2.96%.  That is an increase of half a percentage point (which is indicative of a nearly 25% increase in mortality in just 10 days) –  this is not accurate data!

It now seems clear that China provided bad infection numbers.  How many folks actually had the infection?  How many folks were simply walking around, asymptomatic or sick, but not dying?  If the number of infections was actually much higher, the death rate would be lower.  For example, what if the actual infection total on February 20th was 300,000?  That would make the death rate 2,236/300,000 = .7%.   

We used the wrong denominator, and got the wrong death rate.  And we still don’t know the actual number.  Not even here in the United States.

Toxic Political Environment

We the people have allowed our political situation to devolve to an utterly toxic level.  The gotcha politics of the day created the perfect environment for the “if we can save one life” mindset.  Any (inevitable) misstep is grounds for crucifixion.  Any and every move, good or bad, will be treated as an opportunity for political advancement.  We had many politicians and pundits claim that the order to stop travel from China was based on racism.  A week later, those same people are jumping up and down about action being too slow.  A classic no-win, all while an unprecedented situation unfolded.

This toxicity is “We The People’s” fault. And it is not good.

Perhaps we get our act together

So here is an idea on how to proceed:

We could build a series of statistically designed panels and test the folks in those panels.  A portion of the testing would be random, so that we can see how many folks have this ugly little jerk and don’t know it.  You have heard of this kind of thing before. You know… “This survey has a margin of error of +/- 4.2%…”  With three or four panels of perhaps 1,000 tests, we could have directionally sound data that would:

• provide an estimate of the number of people walking around infected (and fix our denominator)
• help us identify key demographics for risk
• allow us to focus on managing the exception instead of everyone
• improve the likelihood that  the actions we are taking are appropriate for the situation, including more significant action if necessary

Now we can manage the exceptions

We already know that many folks are asymptomatic or have only a slight response to the virus.  The data would allow us to find the insights into high, medium, and low risk categories and let folks decide how they want to move forward.  Instead of quarantining EVERYONE, we could likely quarantine the high risk folks and let everyone else go about their business.  That is a much easier job, and has far less impact on the world, than trying to stop everyone on the planet from doing anything, which was not ever going to work.

 

How You Can Help

If you feel this idea could have the impact needed, please post links, share it widely, talk to others and help us get this idea to the powers that be.