Dr. Birx: “We underestimated very early on the number of asymptomatic cases”
Dr. Birx made this claim in an interview on Saturday:
I think we underestimated very early on the number of asymptomatic cases. And I think we’re really beginning to understand there are people that get infected that those symptoms are so low-grade that they don’t even know that they’re infected.
And we’re beginning to see that with the New York studies of their sero-antibody studies. So we’re really beginning (AUDIO GAP) and in every other country before they had the antibody test, all they could really see are the cases that showed up with serious symptoms. And so things are changing on a day-to-day basis.
Excuse me, but no. We did not just learn this.
I wrote a post on February 29, over two months ago, in which I wrote the following [emphasis added]:
There are two main issues with COVID-19, and we don’t know all that much about either yet: contagiousness and lethality. But the situation of the Diamond Princess cruise passengers offers an opportunity to learn about both under a sort of worst case scenario, which is confinement of healthy with ill passengers in a closed system, and an especially susceptible population because of a high percentage of people of advanced age. So let’s take a look…
The first thing you’ll notice is that the headline blares that the ship started with 10 passengers testing positive for the virus and ended with 700 testing positive within the two weeks of the quarantine. That’s quite a leap. The total number of people on the ship was 3,711. So the final number testing positive represented about 19% of the whole, or a little less than a fifth…
This part is especially interesting:
“More than half of the infected people (322) showed no symptoms at all, which suggests that some coronavirus carriers in China could be going undetected.”
That’s a fact that indicates less mortality – and even less serious morbidity – than has commonly been reported.
The Diamond Princess data was available early in the process of the virus’ spread to the US and the world. The ship represented a very special opportunity to study a population in which the entire group was tested. It was a population with a large number of older people, as well, and people with pre-existing conditions. I have never seen a discussion of how many of those positive-yet-asymptomatic people from the ship remained asymptomatic over the course of the next two weeks, but if it was a relatively large number, that would have been an enormous clue that the people we were seeing who were substantially sickened from COVID were the tip of a more substantial iceberg.
Did Birx and company ignore that? I can understand if they felt they needed more data and more proof. But to not have strongly suspected quite early on that there was a huge percentage of asymptomatic COVID cases would be to have ignored the obvious that was staring them in the face.
I think the tag team of Fauci and Birx are just like their kin in climate science. At the time of the Diamond Princess they were (and still are) very much in love with their models. Empirical data right in front of their face be damned.
They are very representative of a whole generation of science where the magic black box of the computer knows all and tells all. The thermometer, ruler, etc., and just doing simple counting are so old school. Combine that with both of them being life long bureaucrats, and it’s a lethal combination.
The precautionary principle poorly applied. They also failed to understand, or anticipate, the amount of economic devastation that would come from shutting down entire sectors of the economy. Our government leaders, including President Donald Trump, made the mistake of “following the science” because they trusted that the scientists understood the situation. Yet it was all faulty models with bad assumptions and a misunderstanding of the data.
Fauci and Birx are trying to distance themselves from the decision making. They’re just scientists, after all. /sarc
steve walsh:
I think sometimes people forget the situation at that point, which is that a lot of businesses were already closed (sports, etc.) before the government did anything, and people were already scared and not going out much. I stopped going to restaurants before they closed, for example.
The public saw what was happening in China and Italy. So although the government rules exacerbated the economic problems, they didn’t cause them and I’m not at all sure it would have been all that much better economically if the government hadn’t stepped in.
I second physicsguy. Even worse, it was obvious from the beginning that the Oxford model was nonsense. The model author is a notorious publicity hound who has multiple times in the past produced wildly inflated predictions that were later shown to be false. Within two weeks of predicting 2.2 million deaths in the US from Wuhan virus, he dropped his estimate to sixty thousand with no explanation. The man is grossly incompetent but Fauci and Birx swallowed his bs without thinking.
Eisenhower had a saying, “scientists should be on tap but not on top”. He understood that they might be very good at what they do but their focus could be too narrow. It’s clear that our medical bureaucracy isn’t even very good.
This has been a personal crusade of mine from the beginning. Maybe CDC et al are just learning this, but anyone paying attention to actual facts knew this at least ever since Webasto.
I agree with Physicsguy. The model-obsessed people live in a universe where reality matters less than models.
The last thing the Democratic party wanted to see happen when this started was for Trump to be successful leading our nation through the bat flu. Never let a good disease catastrophy go to waste. Who wins, the socialist progressives, the commie type nations and who loses? Good old working class Americans who might be wanting to vote for Trump in November, conservative losers.
The government and the media have convinced a large cohort of the country that they should be extremely terrified of their fellow citizens, and policing their neighbors’ degree of compliance with various directives has taken on the flavor of a moral crusade. The social damage from this is extremely difficult to get one’s mind around. Public behavior conventions that we all loosely agreed on eight weeks ago have now been shattered, and people have little way of knowing what the expectations of others are or if they are facing great offense and discord by behaving in ways that they feel are either good or harmless but others feel literally threatens their lives.
If we didn’t have children to raise, my husband and I would go off the grid and let you all fight it out amongst yourselves. It’s very difficult to have a civil, logical conversation about this anymore and that scares me far more than the disease ever did.
There are a whole bunch of different models, and the modelers, with few exceptions, have not done a good job of explaining the assumptions embedded in these models in a way that non-expert policymakers can understand and apply sanity tests to.
There was really no alternative to doing *some kind* of modeling, even just on a piece of paper or an Excel spreadsheet; there was a need to predict need for hospital beds, doses of any potential treatment medicine, etc. However, I think the whole field of mathematical modeling for public-policy purposes has been pretty sloppy. The whole idea of science is *replication*; experiments are supposed to be described in enough detail that another investigator can *try it for himself* and see if he gets the same results. Any mathematical model that is being proposed as an input on policy decision should be expected to include a description of the model’s methodology, at a couple of different levels of detail, and the actual *source code* of the model, properly documented and commented.
physicsguy and Paul are 100% correct.
During WWII Operations Research – applied mathematics – ( or the British term Operational Research ) was used to inform the military decision makers on the POSSIBLE outcomes of their choices.
The guys at ‘the pointy end of the stick’ decided how best to apply that information from a military point of view.
And those mathematicians wouldn’t have dreamed of overstepping their authority.
The computer is a just tool.
It’s up to human beings – or it should be – on how best to apply it.
A couple of examples of Experts and Policymakers:
In 1914, the Kaiser had second thoughts about a two-front war and directed Moltke to redeploy the troops slated to invade Western Europe and send them to the Russian front instead. Moltke said flatly that it was impossible; the intricate railway schedules could not possibly be revised quickly enough. After the war, the *real* railway expert, General von Staab, heard of this conversation…which he had not been brought into…and published a whole book demonstrating that it *could* have been done.
In 1936, at the time of the Rhineland incursion, France was still militarily much stronger than Germany. The government directed the General Staff to prepare a possible plan for expelling the Germans, and were told that the only possible plan was full mobilization of over a million men, requisitioning of civilian vehicles, etc…highly disruptive to the society and the economy. Way overkill for the size of the German force, but the Staff said no other plan could be developed and carried out quickly enough.
The French Army had enormous prestige in view of its role in the victory of the First World War, and the political leaders probably felt that they couldn’t challenge the Staff’s assessment. I bet that if a President Trump had been running France, and alternate and practical plan would have been developed and executed rapidly.
Were Fauci etc. really “following the science”, or was this all a Gates/ WHO scam from the start?
Read about a Surgeon General Jerome Adams radio interview, where he breaks ranks from the Bill Gates/CDC/WHO predictive contagion model, see
https://madhousenews.com/2020/04/u-s-surgeon-general-adams-dumps-bill-gates-who-cdc-predictive-contagion-model/
Yeah, steve, DJT trusted that the scientists understood the situation, when their connections to the China/ WHO crowd should’ve raised huge alarm bells.
I will go out on a limb with a few predictions: If daily death counts continue to fall off a cliff for the next couple of weeks, it will not be because it’s spring and coronaviruses are highly seasonal, and will most definitely not be because only a small percent of people get seriously ill and the virus may have already ripped through that pool of susceptible people. It will be because of the lockdowns and therefore, in two weeks, as lockdowns ease, if everyone fails to wear hazmat suits any time they step out of the house, there will be an explosion of new cases and 3,000 deaths a day by June x. When that doesn’t happen, it will be because coronaviruses are seasonal, and just you wait until it comes back in the fall, and since there’s no vaccine, no one will be immune, and it’ll be just like the Spanish flu – umpteen times worse the second time. And so forth.
At some point, most people will come to their senses but fully expect a certain subset of the population to hyperventilate every few days for quite some time to come over every new mutation that will kill us all because it’s more deadly and no one will be immune, or because “they say” that everyone who had the virus and survived are starting to have (random medical condition) and 20% of them will die.
Sorry. I’ve just had it with the unfounded hysteria that just goes on and on.
“asymptomatic” is a new word for, I suspect, a great majority of Americans. I suspect the reason is that the concept is so common that a word isn’t necessary to describe it. Everybody knows, if only intuitive, that some people have the crud, or whatever kind pretty heavily. Others get by with an extra handkerchief for a day, or something off the shelf for a week.
And it stands to reason that it can be even less serious to the extent you don’t know it. And we need a word for that? Doctors have to study to figure out this sort of thing happens?
I’ve had flu–presuming it wasn’t a cold–once in the last fifty years. It followed my first flu shot, which, when I correlated the two with my physician, elicited “Oh, stop.”
When in Basic in 1969, winter at Ft. Dix, everybody brought his own bugs from all over the country. Standing in formation sounded like a convention of barking seals. Five guys in my platoon–forty–had to be recycled after they returned from recovering from meningitis.
I probably had seventeen different kinds of flu at once but was so run down had no idea.
Maybe my bugs were all asymptomatic. And I had a cold.
Anyway, why is asymptomaticishness a surprise to the professionals?
Neo: I understand and agree, however I expect more and better from the experts and our elected leaders than to fall into the emotional trap of the scary stories coming out of China and Italy.
Whenever ‘experts’ trot out models I instantly assume they are resorting to SWAG.
Yeah, steve, DJT fell into the emotional trap of the scary stories.
But, I suspect, Pritzker, Whitmer, etc. were delighted to “fall” into the trap.
Birx should have listened to Bill Gates. The New England Journal of Medicine published a piece by him on February 28th that has this:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2003762
Ann:
Bill Gates and the IHME have done quite enough damage already in WA, thank you very much.
One thing you cannot underestimate is the nadir of the American IQ, and the larcenous instincts of the criminal opportunists.
https://nypost.com/2020/05/04/covidiot-says-she-cut-hole-in-mask-to-make-it-easier-to-breathe/
https://nypost.com/2020/05/04/man-wears-kkk-hood-while-grocery-shopping-in-california/
https://nypost.com/2020/05/03/women-dressed-as-healthcare-workers-steal-packages-in-washington-state/
https://nypost.com/2020/04/29/cockfighting-ring-busted-during-investigation-into-stay-at-home-violation/
But this, while sad, has been on the prediction radar (model?) since the beginning of the Tyranny of the Traumatized Tyrants.
https://nypost.com/2020/05/04/dollar-store-security-guard-may-have-been-killed-over-mask-dispute/
That story is probably going to be pounced on by the gun-grabbers; however, my bet is on the perp being a known offender, and not a 2A-Citizen-supporter.
Maybe like this guy.
https://nypost.com/2020/05/03/man-arrested-3-times-in-a-day-released-over-coronavirus-fears/
And then you get a story like this one!
https://nypost.com/2020/05/04/anonymous-donor-gives-heroic-hospital-workers-1-million/
“Employees at a California hospital have received a welcome shot in the arm – an anonymous $1 million donation for their hard work amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to a report.
“Thank you for standing up (and staying up!) to care for our community,” the donor wrote in a note to the staffers at Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz. “This humankindness is what makes you heroic.”
The gift was earmarked entirely for employees, including nurses, cleaning workers, lab techs, medical record clerks, mailroom staff and security guards, who have worked at the facility for at least a year.”
Ann:
Not the same thing.
Whether the disease can be transmitted by people with mild symptoms or even asymptomatic people (or pre-symptomatic people, which is true for quite a few viruses) has zero to do with what percentage of people with the virus are asymptomatic.
I hope some of our governors don’t see this story….
https://madhousenews.com/2020/05/china-revives-centuries-old-social-distancing-hat-for-students/
.. or this picture.
https://i0.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2020/05/93314554_1956700037797357_4791128656837607424_n.jpg?w=720&ssl=1
AesopFan:
Yep those heath care worker uniforms (scrubs and badges on lanyards) give the perps a high truthiness and innocence quotient. Removes the need for a porch pirates to cover their faces. Dunning Kreuger (lemon juice effect) in the Tri-Cities makes the national news. We are on the map! Not just potatoes, wine, and nuclear waste! 🙂
The second photo could be worse – he could have used three bicycle flags – don’t poke your eye out!
om,
The health care worker uniform and status is the new seal of goodness. I was in a county in WA today that has had 12 cases and 0 deaths and I saw one business offering half price oil changes for all health care workers and another offering free delivery on food for all health care workers. I’m all for businesses doing whatever they can to survive this oppressive government overreach but the slavish pandering to healthcare workers is kind of pathetic.
Maybe that’s just me being too cynical though.
Folks, this is what it is, and it is a big damn mess.
All of the theory in the world and statistics and estimations don’t mean dog crap because we are where we are, stuck in the mud, spinning our wheels and no idea if we will get any traction or not.
This life changing situation will not go away and all of the discussion will not change the fact that we, our nation, is in a very bad place due to either good advice or extremely bad advice. We have poked a stick into the wheel has brought things almost to a stop.
Our nation thrives on shop keepers and disposable spending that works its way down, we need our restaurants and fine dining places, bars and even strip clubs to give common folks employment as servers and clerks, not to mention our transportation and hospitality industries.
At this time we have been totally screwed because some, either well meaning, or opportunist genius’s made projections that we would be dead unless we stayed home and killed our economy including the wellness and the health industries.
If you are a Commie, Progressive (Well Played) if you are a typical hard working American you have a problem.
OldTexan…and to make matters worse, it looks like this Wuhan mess was alive awake alert & enthusiastically spreading across the world earlier than first acknowledged. That means the folks in China are still lying their tail feathers off & the Birx & Fauci dance routine along with those “sky is falling” modellers played right into crashing the free world’s economies and we may not have really “saved” a single life.
In fact we’re still losing the most vulnerable by the bed full.
Let’s cut the shackles off. We have a range of treatment options that appear to work on the infected, and many have no symptoms at all.
Then let’s crash China.
The problem with the models… they sucked…
ALL our common models are for conditions that exist or existed
and so, they had or could get the kind of data necessary to plug them in
what is required, but i bet wont happen, is to go back to such models
remove the data you cant have in the begining of new
and instead use rate…
i said very early on that there was no way the slope was steep enough to have the numbers they wanted… i bet physics guy could plot what i am saying..
ie… take the highest point of the current infection in any place, then imagine various numbers higher and lower, and what you have is a slope… in order to get to X number you need a certain slope, and the longer the starting tail is, the sharper the slope has to be…
too bad i do a lot of accurate math through intuition then go and plug numbers based on that… made a lot of trouble for me in school in having right answers but very little worksheets for the process…(or odd worksheets that used other ways to get the same answer recognizing short cuts that the specific problem and or numbers allowed)
These things are always stretched out S curves… you have the slow incoming tail, which gets faster and faster, till its the slope, and then it flattens a top with the serif of the last part descending..
the key to knowing is to not plot cumulatively… as that stacks data and hides any start of a decline till its large enough… and then to recognize that the tail and the relationship to the actual slope clues you in on the potential numbers… even more so when you realize that such things dont go on for years….
we can and could use prior plots to create gauges for models..
but why would someone like me be heard? i never bother..
i am already evil and all that… so be like farting in a hurricane..
but my math intuition says more accurate numbers can be derived by the above
we just never thought to do it given that things previously studied are not studied from the view point of the information that is not available
[another way to think of it is like escape velocity of a rocket… if it doesn’t accelerate fast enough or long enough, it wont escape – but in this case, the population is the fuel that is burning (becoming immune) and so declining from the moment the rocket ignites]
In reply to Erika Reily and Griffin,
A guy started getting on the elevator in my building with me and he had forgotten to put his mask on. His reaction was frightening to me–effusive apologies, almost prostrating himself before me. It was clear he had adopted the Stasi-type attitude with regards to our new state religion of disease eradication, and projected it upon me as well, especially as I was in full compliance and masked up. He thought he was suddenly at my mercy, seeing me as a Stasi official who had caught him breaking cardinal rules.
It probably didn’t help that he identified me as a “sacred” health care worker by my clothes, and also started thanking me for my “bravery”. I wanted to say that I didn’t care that he didn’t have his mask on for a moment when he stepped into the elevator and that I was by no means a “hero” for potentially exposing myself day after day to a seasonal cold virus that has a 1 in 100,000 chance of killing me. Seeing that he was a true believer of the new state orthodoxy, those words coming from my mouth would have triggered something unpleasant to behold, so I refrained.
I found that patients battling cancer have the most realistic appraisal of things. T By and large, they aren’t keeping away from the hospital during this outbreak, especially if they are receiving treatment. They know that under normal conditions they are extremely susceptible to the common cold and other viral illnesses, and that any one of those could lay them low at any minute. They had been taking the common sense precautions all along that have been thrust upon us in the past 3 months. They know coronavirus isn’t the second coming of the bubonic plague, and as such, they just deal with it as they have with any other seasonal illness.
And not to pat myself on the back, I see CNN has already started in with the “3,000 deaths a day by June 1” claim.
I didn’t think they’d have the balls to run with something so outrageous, and moreover something that has such a short timetable to be proved right or wrong, but assume now that the gullible sheep who get their news from places like CNN will be running in terrified circles before dashing back into their homes in panic.
If it saves just one life, etc,etc, etc. so let’s not drive over 30 mph, ban all guns, ban all tobacco and alcohol, do away with micro-wave ovens and teflon skillets cause all those things can kill almost as bad as hot/cold weather.
If we could only take all perceived cautions then everyone would live forever and ever and not vote for Trump. I am reading about Democrat governors and Mayors who want to save us from ourselves and the news is kind of like a Monty Python skit and getting worse every day. It is my hope that by the end of this month more people will be thinking reasonable personal precautions will suffice and get the whole damn government out of the way.
We realize now why Stalin and Mao put so much stock in fear…
fear is like a leash for most people, a way to make irrational rational and obey
it was not possible for people to stop what happened in germany, the lesser fear was to sit tight, obey and hoped the dark cloud passed – when it didnt, it was too late
KyndyllG — I heard a rumor that the Babylon Bee bought CNN and didn’t tell anyone..
I think they have had a story for just about every observation on the board here.
https://babylonbee.com/news/scientists-who-whiffed-on-every-covid-19-prediction-confident-they-know-what-the-weather-is-going-to-be-like-in-100-years
https://babylonbee.com/news/governor-unveils-innovative-37-step-plan-to-reopen-state-over-the-next-10-years
https://babylonbee.com/news/lockdown-made-permanent-to-end-traffic-deaths-for-good
https://babylonbee.com/news/states-pledge-to-remain-closed-until-a-time-machine-is-invented-and-someone-goes-back-in-time-to-stop-coronavirus-from-happening
https://babylonbee.com/news/ban-on-salons-causes-rise-in-botched-back-alley-haircuts
https://babylonbee.com/news/facebook-introduces-new-karen-reaction-button
https://babylonbee.com/news/chinese-government-lays-off-entire-pr-team-as-american-media-already-doing-same-job
Or maybe it was China that bought CNN.