New York City’s boroughs and COVID-19
The explanation for why New York City is being hit so hard is that it has such a dense population as well as a great deal of reliance on public transportation, as well as a lot of international travel. The more crowded together a population is, it stands to reason that the easier it is to spread a disease such as this one.
That makes sense to me overall. But I crunched some numbers for the different boroughs and find them puzzling. Maybe it’s just statistical noise at this point, but I found that the figures for confirmed cases don’t follow the pattern I would imagine, which would be that the most dense boroughs would be hit the worst, and that the differential would be significant.
I’m relying on figures I found here. And then I adjusted them for basic population. Here’s what I got for what percentage of the population of each borough has been found (so far) to have COVID-19:
The Bronx: .0027
Brooklyn: .002
Manhattan .0024
Queens .003
Staten Is .0027
The figures are all very very close. And they are constantly changing, I’m pretty sure. But why would Manhattan and Brooklyn be lowest? And one of these things is really not like the others in terms of population density or use of public transportation: Staten Island.
I’m doing this quickly and haven’t been able to find more recent data for population density, but I don’t think the relative densities of the boroughs have changed all that much since these 2000 figures, which indicate that Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx are all roughly similar to each other (Queens the least and Brooklyn the most dense of the three), Manhattan has roughly double the density of runner-up Brooklyn and triple that of Queens, and Staten Island is an outlier. It has only 11% of Manhattan’s density (the densest borough), and 37% of the density of Queens, the least dense other borough.
So why is Staten Island right up there in its COVID cases at this point? I don’t think the people in Staten Island use public transportation anywhere near as frequently as in the other boroughs, either.
I haven’t seen any explanation and can’t think of one. I’m crunching these numbers very quickly, so perhaps I’ve made an error somewhere. Please take a look and see what you think.
Maybe more from Manhattan have gone to their homes in Florida and the Hamptons.
expat:
But it’s not Manhattan that’s the puzzlement. It’s Staten Island vs. Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx. Staten Island’s rate should be much lower and it isn’t.
I would guess testing is a bottleneck in collecting statistics and probably isn’t proportional to population density.
If you take the average, you get 0.00236. Then taking the standard deviation yields 0.00026. So you’ll get about 67% of the samples running from 0.0021 to 0.0026, and about 93% of the samples from 0.0018 to 0.0029.
Granted this is a very small sample size of N=5, but I would say that the numbers are not statistically different from each other, except for maybe Queens, but that’s just barely.
I believe that Staten Island has buses, and I also believe that many Staten Islanders rely on the Staten Island Ferry (which can get pretty crowded) to ferry them to their jobs in Manhattan, where many then continue on to their jobs — using public transportation.
Ya know how everybody—especially governor Cuomo—is crying for masks, and how everyone is trying to scrape together some here and some there but, it seems never anywhere near enough, especially of the N95 masks? How various companies are trying to step into the breach and put together “MacGyvered” substitutes?
Well, lo and behold, just three days after the AG said he was going to go after those who hoarded critical medial supplies, the SEIU union in California suddenly found a stash of 39 million N95 masks, and said that they knew of some other sources of supply for tens of millions more masks and face shields..
It’s a miracle I tell ya.
One wonders if this stash would have been “found” if the AG hadn’t made his announcement.
See https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/03/hmm-seiu-union-in-california-suddenly-finds-mysterious-stash-of-39-million-face-masks-3-days-after-ag-bill-barr-announces-theyre-going-after-hoarders/
Isn’t Staten Island heavy on cops, firefighters, EMTS, nurses, etc?
And word is many of the ritzy buildings in Manhattan are near empty as wealthy Manhattanites flood Westchester, the Hamptons, (both areas with fast raising positive rates) as wells as summering areas (areas I hope aggressively enforce quarantining on newly arrived New Yorkers)
I believe that Staten Island has buses, and I also believe that many Staten Islanders rely on the Staten Island Ferry
IIRC, it doesn’t take much communication between regions to equalize rates of infection.
“I don’t think the people in Staten Island use public transportation anywhere near as frequently as in the other boroughs, either.”
Help me understand why you think that. I am not familiar with NY Boroughs, but if you live on an island, and you work somewhere else, wouldn’t you have to ride a ferry? I have commuted on both wheeled/tracked and floating mass transit, and my hunch is that I was exposed to a lot more people on the boat.
Yancey Ward has expressed the anxiety that a Lombardy situation was developing in NYC due to failure to follow proper protocols in hospital settings – careful monitoring of staff for infection, segregation of respiratory distress patients, &c.
My guess is that it is the transportation between boroughs and not the actual living space population density that counts. Just saw an NYC councilman who spoke about how the transportation might be key.
Neo, I don’t understand why you don’t think Staten Island folks don’t take the ferry a lot. I guess you can drive a car, but dealing with a car on Manhattan is not fun. I know nothing about the transportation numbers.
Jean,
Queens is the most ethnically diverse county in the country with a very Asian immigrant concentration in Flushing and Elmhurst. Additionally, Queens is the site of NY’s two major airports with JFK handling international arrivals from Europe and Asia.
Very good questions.
While I don’t know that there’s a problem with the numbers for sure, the sarcastic tone of some of the doubters (especially those who aren’t familiar with NYC) is out of place and unsupported by logic.
I am familiar with NYC, and the high rate for Staten Island surprises me. I remember reading yesterday that 200 NYPD members tested positive, and if a lot of NYPD lives on Staten Island, that could be related.
I guess I should have added an obvious fact to my hunch about rolling vs. floating commutes: in my last 20 years of commuting, my floating commute always had to be supplemented by a rolling one, usually on both ends. No ferry ever took me to my office building, or back to my own house. Buses often did or got very close.
I’ve officially given up making sense of the numbers. One site says +19 new deaths in NYS, another site says +100.
Garbage In, Garbage Out. I’m done.
David:
I recall reading, after 9/11, that Staten Island had the highest losses per capita because of all the police and firefighters who lived there.
Raymond J G:
I have no trouble understanding a high-ish rate in Queens. I have trouble understanding the height of the rate in Staten Island.
Tommy Jay:
The ferry is a fairly non-dense form of transportation compared to the others. And only about 1 in 5 Staten Islanders commute to Manhattan anyway.
Staten Islanders spend a lot more time in cars than people in other boroughs do.
Neo, I had heard that Staten Island people are more automobile oriented than other parts of NYC.
A few years ago my wife & I took the ferry for the fun of it. While on board it was plenty comfortable, though I don’t know if I would call it low-density. It was crowded. However, the cattle call for boarding the ferry was an absolute mob crush.
Almost everyone on Staten Island uses public transportation on a regular basis. More residents of Staten Island as a percentage own cars than the other boroughs, but they use public transportation if it’s going where they’re going. it’s been years since I’ve been there. But the 103 and 113 buses (was 103 and 113 when I was younger), and the SIRT all run from Tottenville to the St George ferry terminal. 3 different routes to get there from the other side of the island.
17.6% of Staten Islands population is on a local bus route each day.
14.7% of Queens
22.9% Manhattan
30.5% Bronx
21.2% Brooklyn
The MTA listing I’m looking at has 5 express routes by borough and “special”. Staten Island has 32,515 of the 39,658 riders.
Bus numbers from http://web.mta.info/nyct/facts/ridership/ridership_bus.htm
Staten Island Ferry has, depending on where you’re looking, 70-90 thousand riders a day. And every Staten Islander on the ferry or express bus is headed to another borough to work or in normal times, shop. Almost no one from another borough works on Staten Island.
Now I realize those numbers don’t give a whole story, for example, no subway ridership. But most of the people from Staten Island rising the ferry get on a Manhattan subway, and a smaller number on a bus. Manhattans subway ridership likely has far more commuters from the other boroughs and surrounding suburbia than their bus lines.
Public transportation is like picking up ten to fifty hitchhikers and letting them ride in your car. Include me out.
Doing some interpolating, it appears the commuter belts around New Orleans, New York, and Seattle account for the majority of the deaths in this country (but < 8% of the total population), with the problems most intense around New Orleans. The situation is quite dynamic in New Orleans and New York, much less so in Seattle right now.
From covidtracking.com for the whole of NY State:
They got the results for a little more than 12K tests yesterday, Wed. Mar. 25. 42.2% of them were positive for covid-19.
The day before, Tues., 36.9% of test results were positive.
Brian: Regarding stats, I have found the best results taking the previous days’ daily totals each morning and keeping my own spreadsheet. It seems unclear and inconsistent when they update “New” data.
physics guy is correct: no statistical difference, given Neo’s numbers.
GvdL: Which is why low disgust threshold dysgenic mutant progressives positively fetishize public Petri dish transport.
Manhattan, china town
Queens, flushing…
Both would give each borough an early start given travel from certain places..
[my wife is Chinese/Indonesian]
Testing numbers would probably explain this, Neo. It may be as simple as Staten Island getting more tests per capita because of it being easier to do drive through sample giving. If you can find borough level testing numbers, we can crunch them for you.
Neo:
Aren’t you glad you moved?
It is much harder to get approved for a test in New York, Tommy- you have to be really, really sick, be working directly with COVID-19 patients, or have direct contact with a known confirmed case. This is why New York is so much higher in positives. You can get a test here in Tennessee with only mild flu symptoms.
New York reported over 33,000 cases of coronavirus, and 325 dead. The state, however, estimates that it is still two to three weeks away from suffering under the deluge of peak infection. Accordingly, the New York Times reports that the state has requested 85 refrigerated trailers from FEMA to house the anticipated number of bodies as a result of COVID-19. New York City has additionally purchased 45 refrigerated truck trailers on its own, Bloomberg says, with each one being able to hold 44 bodies, respectively
I think you can see this in the numbers of “hospitalized” in the Google Docs tracking for the US states. As of right now, New York has hospitalized just shy of 20% of the active cases while most other states have hospitalized less than 10%. I think every state that is at that 20% or worse level is one that has allowed the disease to spread in the hospitals themselves. I will explain:
95% people who test positive don’t need hospitalization, and I am sure the medical staff, to conserve resources, are actively pushing such patients to stay home isolated. So, how does a state end up with 20% hospitalized? The answer seems obvious to me- they were already in the hospital with something else and became infected there. This may have happened in Lousisiana, South Carolina, and a few other states.
It is literally insane to not have these patients in their own dedidated facilities with dedicated personnel. This should have been the very first decision made by all these state health departments- setting up dedicated facilities.
I would not be surprised to learn later that a number of hospitals in the New York City and the suburbs have 25% plus positive in the patients who had been admitted for some other reason.
SEIU Union in California Suddenly Finds Mysterious Stash of 39 Million Face Masks — 3 Days After AG Bill Barr Announces They’re Going After Hoarders
ok… who is hiding the 100,000 respirators and people who run them…
ny wants more than its fair share…
Population density is computed using all the land, and Staten Island has a lot more empty land than the other boroughs. So population density can be a misleading statistic. Having said that, Manhattan IS more crowded.
Satellite view of Tottenville:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Staten+Island,+NY/@40.5150152,-74.2448409,3882m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x89c245ef79f4d4e7:0x50271f8534babc78!8m2!3d40.5795317!4d-74.1502007
Same scale view of Bay Ridgevand Bensonhurst in Brooklyn:
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.6248697,-74.0336989,3875m/data=!3m1!1e3
Not a whole lot of difference visually, is there? The houses in Bensonhurst are closer together. They’re also bigger. According too Zillow, median house price in Tottenvile $612,752, Bensonhurst $735,429.
Thanks Yancey, That explains a great deal. So they are being highly restrictive in their testing, while doing lots of testing.
One might think that it would be informative to dedicate perhaps 100 tests per day to just random sampling of NYC residents who are out of doors. That might at least hint at how wide spread the infection is.
“I think every state that is at that 20% or worse level is one that has allowed the disease to spread in the hospitals themselves. — It is literally insane to not have these patients in their own dedidated facilities with dedicated personnel. This should have been the very first decision made by all these state health departments- setting up dedicated facilities.” — Yancey Ward
I was talking on the phone to old friends that I hadn’t seen in a while and of course we discussed the coronavirus. Somebody they knew thought they had covid-19 so naturally they went to the local emergency room. NO!, I said, don’t do that!
If you think you’ve got it, telephone your primary care physician or maybe a doc-in-the-box and ask them what you should do. My friend’s friend never got tested anyway.
I think the overarching point is that we are never going to have very good numbers while we are in the middle of something like this.
It will ultimately be great if the corona-skeptics turn out to be right but they really weren’t making much more than an educated guess.
Mike
Some are better educated than others (whether or not officially so), and those tended to not have anything to gain unlike the experts..
I just ran the numbers using New York’s population compared to the U.S. total.
If what was going on in New York was happening nationwide, we’d currently be siting at about 6,500 dead and 90,000 hospitalized with likely the peak of the pandemic still to come. The CDC says H1N1 in 2009/2010 produced a total of about 12,400 dead and 274,000 hospitalized. So, if the rest of the country had been as cavalier about the Bat Flu as New York City apparently was, there’s a decent chance this could have been a good bit worse than N1H1.
Can you imagine what the political/media establishment would be doing to Trump if there were currently 6,500 dead and 90,000 hospitalized? These lockdowns are the price we’re paying for Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Mike
“Some are better educated than others (whether or not officially so), and those tended to not have anything to gain unlike the experts.”
Yeah, but it’s not a coincidence that virtually all corona-skeptics are on the Right. They were guessing as much ideologically as intellectually.
Mike
Just confirming what Yancey said. I live in rural New York and am hearing that, at least out here, you can’t get a coronavirus test unless you are desperately ill or have definitely been exposed to someone who has tested positive. Many people who have the symptoms are being told to go home and quarantine themselves without testing. Unfortunately, I’m also hearing that nobody is tracing contacts for those who are not being tested but who are being treated as if they have the virus — which doesn’t seem to make much sense. Numbers are still very low in many of the rural counties, but if most people who seem likely to have the virus aren’t being tested, those numbers are probably artificially depressed.
Gospace:
As I wrote here, only about 1 in 5 Staten Islanders commutes to Manhattan for work. I am fairly sure that the bus riders on Staten Island are largely that same group. The way people get around within Staten Island is cars. It is very different than the other boroughs in that respect. In addition, there are no subways whatsoever on Staten Island.
Now, it may be that there still are enough people on Staten Island who use public transportation – a fifth of the population, let’s say – to have spread it around there quite effectively, as effectively as in the other boroughs where subways are heavily used as well as buses.
Migrant, household employees?
https://www.osc.state.ny.us/osdc/rpt7-2019.pdf
From this 2018 report:
Half work on Staten Island, while
one-quarter commute to Manhattan and
15 percent to Brooklyn.1 Only a small share work
in New Jersey (6 percent) or Queens (3 percent)
So almost 43% of working Staten Islanders work in other boroughs. That’s a huge exposure. That a greater number than other boroughs are commuting by car, that makes little overall difference in exposure. And assuming a very large percentage have families, they’re families are exposed also. Also from that:
Staten Island had the highest median age (40.4)
of the five boroughs. The number of residents
aged 55 and over has increased by 50 percent
since 2000, much faster than in any other
borough. More than one-quarter (29 percent) of
the population was aged 55 and over, the highest
share of any borough.
Older people are more vulnerable to it.
Staten Island is an integral part of NYC. It’s 5.5% of NYC’s population. and provides 39% of NYC firefighter, 20% of the police, and 10% of the elementary teachers. All jobs with high public exposure.
So why all the boroughs having nearly identical disease rates isn’t all that difficult to fathom.
Snow on Pine on March 26, 2020 at 5:05 pm said:
…
Well, lo and behold, just three days after the AG said he was going to go after those who hoarded critical medial supplies, the SEIU union in California suddenly found a stash of 39 million N95 masks, and said that they knew of some other sources of supply for tens of millions more masks and face shields..
* * *
They had trouble finding them behind the stacks of pre-filled ballot boxes.
Alternatively, (GP commenter)
Hauser Slot • 8 hours ago
Were they sitting on an Airport Runway in Puerto Rico..?
MBunge on March 26, 2020 at 9:02 pm said: Yeah, but it’s not a coincidence that virtually all corona-skeptics are on the Right. They were guessing as much ideologically as intellectually.
except you have it backwards… its the left that thinks collectively ideologically and thinks all others do.. the right isn’t the right, its the not left… in fact, calling groups left and right is ideologically soviet… ie. the left opposition vs right opposition (with Lenin and Stalin in the center)
Stanford medical professors: COVID-19 death toll estimates may be ‘orders of magnitude’ too high
They believe the projections are ‘deeply flawed’
.06% would be less deadly than the common flu…
Existing evidence suggests that the virus is highly transmissible and that the number of infections doubles roughly every three days. An epidemic seed on Jan. 1 implies that by March 9 about six million people in the U.S. would have been infected. As of March 23, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 499 Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. If our surmise of six million cases is accurate, that’s a mortality rate of 0.01%, assuming a two week lag between infection and death. This is one-tenth of the flu mortality rate of 0.1%. Such a low death rate would be cause for optimism.
maybe it is, but we got a 2 trillion dollar medical bill for it…
In the early stage of an outbreak, it spreads in pockets and it doesn’t correlate with population density. As the outbreak continues, infection rates level up so you will likely see more correspondence between population density and cases. This is basic epidemiology.
There may be cohesive communities in Staten Island who attend the same religious services, shopping and restaurants.
Living in NYC, residents of the various boros rarely socialize, mainly because it’s hard to get there. So, I second the pocket theory.
I don’t think I ever knew any body who lived on Staten Island— wait, actually, besides my husband:-)
I live on Staten Island. It’s the commute and the prevalence of city employees. You first need to understand the geography. Staten Island is larger than Manhattan with terrible public transportation. A few people take a very limited train to the ferry. Most take buses with long and circuitous routes that take an hour or more and are packed with commuters and school kids. Due to some recent construction boondoggles, most parking at the ferry has been eliminated causing buses to be more crowded. People arrive at the ferry terminal to await the boat in an insanely crowded waiting room and are then herded like a pack of animals through a small doorway and across a pretty long distance in that pack to the boat. The boat itself is spacious, disembarking is the same crowded mass of people waiting for a good ten minutes to be squeezed out of a narrow doorway and herded over a very long distance. Most then get on very crowded subways. So three different modes of crowded transportation over a long period of time twice each day – with different people on each of the six legs. Thousands commute by express bus, which are closed, crowded. airless boxes for a trip of an hour and a half or more in each direction. There are a lot of police, firemen, nurses and bus drivers living here. Also sanitation workers. Two of our three sanitation garages have been closed due to the virus this week. Also a lot of teachers. Last week after the schools closed for kids, the mayor and chancellor didn’t have a remote learning plan, so he had teachers locked in large group meetings for four entire days to craft their own plans. Staten Island is a community of more than half a million people on a land mass larger than Manhattan and similar In size to many “big” cities, cursed with some of the worst public transportation, highest toll burden, and worst traffic in the country. We always say that the commute is killing us. We just didn’t think it would be a virus.
My uneducated guess is that Staten Islanders are not truly isolated from the other boroughs.
Thanks to Carole Diker for the best blog comment I’ve read in a long time.
I don’t live there, but my impression is Queens has relatively more Chinese (Flushing) and Staten Island more Italians. I also believe that the Hasidic population was unusually hard hit.
So… demographics and links to source countries.
Ok, I don’t know New York. But don’t a very large percentage of the people who live in the less dense boroughs commute to the higher density boroughs for work… mostly on public transportation?
Reading Carol Diker’s post you might wonder why anyone would tolerate SI. A friend of mine lives there and loves it. She commutes to Manhattan via express bus, about 90 minutes each way door-to-door, doesn’t mind it. More relaxing than trains, subways, ferries. But on SI it’s very suburban, with parks and quiet woods within a few minutes walk from her house. And of course much less expensive. As to the fairly equal virus spread, I’m sure it’s all about commuting patterns. Outside of the work day, the boroughs don’t mix that much socially, as Esther says.
I disagree that the boroughs don’t mix socially. That is factually incorrect. A majority of Staten Islanders are originally from Brooklyn and return there to see friends and family, to shop, visit doctors and service providers. We send thousands of our kids off the Island every day for school and activities. Those kids then socialize with their classmates in other boroughs. We socialize with our coworkers and patronize cultural institutions in Manhattan regularly. Finally, Staten Island lacks city services that are available in other boroughs, so we travel to other boroughs to handle those matters that residents of other boroughs take for granted locally. Staten Island is a good place, and for those of you who wonder why the problems I’ve detailed exist, about 30 years ago the City Charter was amended and instead of having equal government, we got a city council based on population. Henceforth a community the size of Baltimore was left with 2 1/2 seats on a 51-member city council. Not enough to form a coalition with anyone, so we are taxed disproportionately and left with basically no local representation. Which is why we have tried to secede for 30 years.
Morning update: OK this is interesting. For yesterday’s data, we now see the active cases slightly below the best fit exponential curve. Even more significant, the new cases has now been running below the exponential curve for 3 days straight. No flattening, but it does mean that if plotted on a log scale the slope of both lines would have decreased; i.e. the value “b” in y = a*e^b*x has decreased. This is a hopeful sign IF it continues. Yesterday I predicted based on the fit a total of about 90000 active cases and we ended up with close to 82000. For today, I predict at the end, about 105,000, unless the data continues to move away.
Recovered cases listed at 1868, where I predict 2092, so those two numbers are edging closer together; for a 1 week recovery, should be around 12,000.
CT new cases linear and for yesterday, a slight flattening of the CT active case curve.
Morning update:
Thanks.
This morning they had a Navy Doc from fema in the news coverage, and the newsie was trying to lead him to validate the fear and the scary… they are ignoring that doing a million tests will give you a much higher rate of ‘cases’… so they are all over the cases number… at one point she was questioning the medical knowlege of trump saying that 30000-40000 ventilators was too high, but then without batting an eye, claiming Cuomo, who has the same medical degree (none) was the one asking and that was ok… meanwhile the Navy Doc confirmed that the requests numbers were often too high and made no sense (a million respirators)…
then what happens AFTER? the after market for the respirator business will be horrid… i would buy put options way out against the rise in respirator manufacturers… if i had the money and wasn’t going to lose my home of 25 years over diversity and this…
At this point dying of Covid-19 would be welcome to me… given the way things have turned out all over, it wouldn’t even be a blip and more beneficial than not. Makes me sad to see more valuable people who are allowed to have a life die, i would gladly switch places…
Fair enough, Carole, SI and Brooklyn do mix. But not so much any of the others. I live and work in Manhattan and can count on both hands the number of times/year I get to one of the other boroughs at all, other than to go to the airport. I’m sure some have relatives in adjacent boroughs and cross over from time to time, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s commuting for work that is the vast, vast majority of the mixing of populations that occurs.
MBunge on March 26, 2020 at 8:44 pm said:
the corona-skeptics … really weren’t making much more than an educated guess.
It was a well-educated guess. Primarily because skeptics took into account 1) the mindset of doctors* (particularly academic and bureaucratic ones), 2) human nature, 3) that the Chinese LIE, and 4) the tendency of government officials toward control.
IOW, skeptics often took a holistic approach, rather than merely a numbers-based one. When making policy decisions it’s a much better approach than what they might call “science”.
(* Modern doctors – particularly bureaucrats and academics – tend toward an attitude, IMO, that infections must be totally prevented. All of them. They also have a tendency toward normalizing the ends of the bell curve – so extreme cases become the basis for treatment of all cases.)
these numbers tell only part of the story..maybe a small part….what percentage of the deaths are hiv positive?? what percent are immune comprromised from meds to treat Ra or ulcerative colitis?? this data would contribute a lot to our understanding of the disease..
physicsguy, thanks for the update. My husband, who does statistics in his head, isn’t running a regression analysis, but your report confirms his opinion from looking at the raw data. Fingers crossed that the rate of increase will decline.
This is a wacky idea but does ethnicity matter? I keep wondering if Italians, just like people with Type A blood, are more vulnerable. It would be fascinating to see if there are genetic similarities between those areas hardest hit.
@drcool
If you look at the procedure for estimating flu associated deaths, which is what the flu statistic is called, it can take up to two years to collate the data to make an estimate. We are in a better position with covid-19 because there is far more testing, but I don’t expect a decent estimate anytime soon. And it will still be an estimate.
Staten Island has a very large number of city workers (cops and firefighters). I am a fire chief and many of my colleagues have tested positive. I am on quarantine myself. Fdny has been hit extremely hard.
This is CRAP… if it bleeds it leads…
how many doing this have wishful thoughts..
and yet, do not realize how china treats its own people in moments like this
They do not get the deadly game of the 3-4 Marxist groups that battle in the one party country…
Coronavirus could kill 81,000 in U.S., subside in June -Washington University analysis
https://news.trust.org/item/20200326232240-2yx1f
BEFORE i excerpt a bit of the article let me point out a few things
1) Current deaths now in US: 1,301 meaning that we need 20,000 month more to reach that headline
2) The WORST part of a pandemic is in the start before people know and behaviors change, we are past the worst part
3) Other places around the world are starting to level off
4) This Panic II is by abusing the new numbers in testing
5) Medical schools that make such prognostications should lose their accreditation or other punishments because this is irresponsible attention getting at its worst
Notice that the BEST estimate is 35 times higher than current
Given that the better epidemiologists are starting to point out that most already have had it and didnt know it, this is fear mongering… these people think that by doing this they are going to get more funding… ie. they are goig to claim tat their wild crapola guesstimates would be better if they only had more cash in their pocket…
I would say that socialists have a very long relationship with FEAR… from red terror to any kind, they herd animals like old humans did, to run off cliffs to take advantage of their prey…
and so, they are being incompetent… if you are struggling to explain something, then all your doing is making up numbers that dont come close… what we need is someone tallying up how bad a schools numbers are and then making the statement that parents should not send their kids to those schools to learn as learning from such a flying level of incompetence would not lead to good careers.
“It was a well-educated guess. Primarily because skeptics took into account 1) the mindset of doctors* (particularly academic and bureaucratic ones), 2) human nature, 3) that the Chinese LIE, and 4) the tendency of government officials toward control.“
Yeah, I don’t want to beat this into the ground but basing an opinion on entirely non-quantifiable factors is the COMPLETE OPPOSITE of “well-educated.”
Mike
Neo:
Are those stats (showing the percentages of infected in various boroughs) even statistically valid for the kinds of conclusions you’re trying to derive?
Let me posit a scenario, to show you what I mean:
It’s Monday morning in Whoville, and medical professionals would like to test sick Whos for coronavirus. But there’s limited testing available, so all the testing is rationed: Only the very ill get tested. (Occasionally, once the very-ill person tests positive, other people in the same house will also be tested, but not always. If they other folks are already symptomatic, they’re merely presumed to have it, to save resources.)
As a result of testing performed prior to end-of-business on Monday, the numbers released on Tuesday morning show 250 active cases of COVID-19 in Whoville.
At noon on Tuesday, a lot of testing gear and extra personnel show up, so that there is suddenly an excess capacity for testing. Different groups of health professionals respond in different ways:
Group 1, “the randomizers”: One group goes out and starts working to conduct entirely-random testing of the Whoville population. They test 100 of the Whos by 5pm, and confirm that 22 of them have COVID-19. Some of these 22 people are asymptomatic, some have a sniffle, some are very sick and feverish, and one is about to be hospitalized
Group 2, “the symptomizers”: Another group goes out and randomly tests only persons who have symptoms. They find 50 persons with symptoms by 5pm, and test them, resulting in 35 test-positives.
Group 3, “the hospitalizers”: Finally, there’s the group that tests people who show up at the E.R. requiring hospitalization. 14 of them show up on Tuesday with symptoms that might be COVID-19. They’re tested, and 9 of them have COVID-19; the other 5 have other problems.
All groups are careful not to double-count someone who’s already been tested by another group.
On Tuesday night, they tally up the figures (the test-positives provided by all 3 groups), and on Wednesday morning they report that the number of known cases of COVID-19 in Whoville has grown by 66 (22 + 35 + 9) cases, from 250 on Tuesday to 316 on Wednesday.
Whoville’s most popular morning-show, Good Morning Whoville, has a Pretty Blonde Who With Blinding Lip-Gloss, who reports this as a 26.4% daily increase in COVID-19 infections.
But that reporting’s complete nonsense, isn’t it?
If they hadn’t stopped rationing testing, it would have been only reported as an increase of 9 cases, which is only a 3.6% increase! Big difference from 26.4!
But then, on Wednesday, Group 1 (“the randomizers”) goes out and finds a new sample-set of 100 people to test. Unlike the set on Tuesday, the 100 people tested on Wednesday produce 24 positive tests.
Group 1 also goes out on Thursday, and finds yet another 100 people to test. This time, they get 26 positive tests. Looking at their numbers across 3 different days (22, 24, 26) Group 1 announces that, in their opinion, the actual COVID-19 daily growth rate is between 8% and 9%.
Which group is right?
I think Group 1 is right, because they’re using a statistically valid methodology. But is anyone in the U.S. doing it that way?
Group 2 is using a methodology that helps us identify people who need to self-quarantine. That’s good practical information, but it’s unhelpful for guessing the spread of infection.
And the folks in the hospitals (Group 3) …what useful, actionable information does their testing give us? As far as I can tell, its sole usefulness is to put all the COVID-19 people in a separate hospital wing, and to tell the nurses to garb up, so that they don’t infect others. Or, if there’s a known treatment that’s good for COVID-19 but useless for other diseases, it’ll indicate for which patients that treatment should be used. But it’s only distantly, indirectly related to the question of how fast the infection is spreading.
So I’m not saying all these groups shouldn’t be doing their tests. Each group’s approach has its uses.
But what I fear is that the publicly announced numbers are produced by mixing numbers from all 3 groups!
The result is a big bowl of hen’s teeth, snake-legs, and unicorn flatulence, and that’s what’s being reported.
And that’s why I suspect the numbers you’re using for New York boroughs aren’t useful for the kinds of conclusions you’re trying to draw.
If they went around doing Group 1-style random testing, and then extrapolated from the rates of infection in a statistically-valid sample set to guess the number of cases in the borough, that’d be one thing.
But it looks to me like New York’s testing volumes are still largely (but not wholly) made up of test-positives from amongst people who show up at the E.R.
That’s not believable data.
R.C.:
I agree that those stats tell us little about the true incidence of COVID in the population. But I think nevertheless they can be used to compare the boroughs of NY, which I am assuming (rightly or wrongly) have roughly the same per capita access to testing and roughly the same policies on testing. After all, it’s a city.
Anyway, those statistics are all we’ve got at this point, however flawed they might be.
Davemay:
That may indeed be the key.
Best wishes for their speedy recovery!
Bookworm:
That thought occurred to me too. So I guess we’re both wacky.
Staten Island is heavily Italian.
Neo:
Thanks for the reply.
In your original post, I felt you hit the nail on the head when you said, “…I crunched some numbers for the different boroughs and find them puzzling. Maybe it’s just statistical noise at this point….”
I think it is.
I think that if someone went out and did statistically-valid random testing (of the kind that Group 1 did in my Whoville scenario) we would find that some of your boroughs would have between ten and twenty times as many persons infected (or previously-infected, and still carrying antibodies) with SARS-CoV-2 than the numbers you were using suggest.
(Correspondingly, every estimate of lethality comparing deaths from the virus with the number of known infections is, I think, overestimating lethality-per-infection by an order-of-magnitude.)
In short, I think the numbers we have are so compromised by the statistical invalidity of our varying testing-approaches that they really can’t be trusted at all, for the kind of question you’re asking in your post. Any real distinctions in viral-spread between Staten Island, on the one hand, and Manhattan and Brooklyn, on the other, would be swamped by the statistical noise.
Until we get widespread Group 1-style testing, I think we just don’t have the data to investigate such questions.
In the modern world, we are no longer accustomed to that. It is really weird for us to not “just Google it” and find relatively-believable information.
But that, I think, is where we are.
But that, I think, is where we are.
Putting error bars on conclusions derived from data dependent on lots of unknowns is
really hardimpossible.An informative, if conventional, and hopeful article at WSJ.com.
We Need to Know Who’s Developed Immunity to Coronavirus
Jeremy scahill
@jeremyscahill
Let’s look at another state – Oklahoma!
Their website has the tables of cases & deaths by age, sex, county. There is also a map where a county with a case is in red. If I added the main interstates – I44 (ne to sw), I35 (n/s) and I40 (e/w), the counties that have the interstates had the first cases. Now, the infected counties are spreading out to the edges of the state.
The Governor has a “safer at home” order that is in effect if your county has a case. The website also has daily reports of type of beds available as well as equipment and PPE estimates (9.4 days worth of supplies). So, he is already doing what Trump is suggesting – rural areas without cases don’t need to be under any type of restriction. I’m sure the farmers, ranchers, roughnecks are happy about no restriction.
I think the OK panhandle will see a tornado before it has a C19 case! Dang, there’s thunder and hail going on right now! Welcome to severe storm season.
FB:
Well then, Jeremy Scahill doesn’t have much imagination.
Contingency plans for epidemics and pandemics and the overwhelming of hospitals have been in existence for a long time. The fear has always been that existing resources would be overwhelmed, because obviously we don’t have some endless supply of rooms, equipment, and trained personnel to run the equipment and tend to the patients.
It is a problem that will never be solved, because what we plan for is not necessarily what we get, but we need to do our best.
If you look up articles during the H1N1 flu pandemic, you can find scads of them talking about the fear of hospitals being overwhelmed and the need to plan for it. Here’s just one example of such an article from October of 2009:
As of tonight’s update Washington state has 175 deaths, 3700 positives, 49,000 negative results for a 93% negative test result per the state health department.