Parsing Out Dystopia: America is a COVID-19 Wildfire

Latest graph of new COVID-19 cases per day in the US.  We have entered a new reality with the virus.  Just wait until schools reopen.  Dr. Fauci says we may be headed to 100,000.  Yesterday's 67,000+ cases is a new record.  Now Donald Trump wants to control the data we see.  The graphs in this post are from the excellent Johns Hopkins website.

My recent blog post expressing concern for the sudden spike in the number of 30,000+ days has been blown away.  Yesterday over 67,000 Americans contracted COVID-19.  This is a record daily total that went under-reported partly because a surprising announcement by the Trump administration that future reporting would not be handled by the Center for Disease Control.

According to a New York Times report, “The new instructions were posted recently in a little-noticed document on the Department of Health and Human Services website. From now on, the department — not the C.D.C. — will collect daily reports about the patients that each hospital is treating, the number of available beds and ventilators, and other information vital to tracking the pandemic.

“Officials say the change will streamline data gathering and assist the White House coronavirus task force in allocating scarce supplies like personal protective gear and remdesivir, the first drug shown to be effective against the virus. But the Health and Human Services database that will receive new information is not open to the public, which could affect the work of scores of researchers, modelers and health officials who rely on C.D.C. data to make projections and crucial decisions.

[...]

“Public health experts have long expressed concerns that the Trump administration is politicizing science and undermining its health experts, in particular the C.D.C.; four of the agency’s former directors, spanning both Republican and Democratic administrations, said as much in an opinion piece published Tuesday in The Washington Post. The data collection shift reinforced those fears.”

Let’s set that aside for a moment and consider why the narcissistic, fascist, dictator wannabe Trump needs to personally control the COVID data.  Obviously, the CDC reporting was not an issue until the numbers exploded again, long after Trump (falsely, of course) claimed that we passed the peak in mid-April.  Today we are at a new plateau of consistent 60,000+ cases per day because:

• Lack of testing.  We still are not proactively testing but we are nevertheless obtaining a better understanding of the virus.  There are not nearly enough test kits in the US.
• Trump downplayed the importance of the virus from the beginning.  His statements went from “it’s totally under control, just one person coming out of China” to “it will just go away” to “I want to reopen by Easter” to “bleach could be a good remedy” to  “if we keep it under 100,000 deaths we’ve done a very good job” to “everyone is lying because things didn’t turn out the way I willed them to.”  (This methodical creep from one self-absorbed lie to the next reminds me of Hitler and his minions still looking for victory in 1945.  Same mentality.)
• This is an important point I’m not seeing discussed anywhere.  The American people as a whole do not respect the “scientific method.”  That is, science makes its best determinations not based upon faith or opinion but upon the facts as they present themselves.  Initially, there was conflicting data on the efficiency of wearing face masks.  After months of collecting additional information, it is now clear that wearing face masks is essential.  But our 19th-century minded population, the dim-witted Trumpets, see this change of definitive recommendation as confusion on the part of scientists.  They fail to grasp that, in science, conclusions change as information accumulates.
• We did not ever properly lock down the country.  Georgia, for example, was locked down for about seven weeks. Unquestionably, countries who locked down their economies for a full ten weeks (or more in some instances and always accompanied by mass testing as in South Korea) now have the virus under control.  Meanwhile, America is a COVID wildfire.
• Beach goers, bar-hoppers and people in general did not social distance.  Americans were reckless, and they still are.
• Wearing face masks has become a symbol rather than a health practice.  Trump only recently started wearing a face mask and has done much harm here by indicating that face masks were not essential – basically holding to the original scientific debate and not acknowledging a change in opinion as more data has revealed it as a “best practice.”  Around my small town most people still do not wear masks.  As of this post, the number of cases in my county have doubled in the past month and are up 20% this week over last week.  Overall, the 7-day average of cases has gone from just “2” as recently as May 28 to “16” today.  This is a microcosm of southern rural America at the moment.

So, lack of testing, absence of leadership, a failure to adapt to a better understanding of the virus, failures in the lockdown period, the reopening period and in wearing face masks have combined to ensure that COVID-19 is now out of control in America.  Nothing we can do will stop its exponential growth now.  Which is likely the primary motivation for Trump getting control of the totals.  Things are going to get a lot worse and he wants to be able to manipulate the numbers for re-election purposes when they do.

Unfortunately, one thing that we have learned through more testing complicates the picture and makes it difficult for “the herd” to grasp the problem.  It is highly probable that the majority of people who contract COVID-19 never know it or show any symptoms of illness.  The exact percentage is still evolving and Trump has seized on this lack of definitive exactitude to proclaim that “it is totally harmless to 99% of the people who get it.”  That unsubstantiated claim is, of course, parroted by those within the fascist administration but not by the medical community, the people who are actually trained to deal with and understand the virus. 

My personal guess is that the percentage is high, probably 67% to 75%.  The trouble, of course, is that no one knows whether you will be in the majority or the minority if you contract it.  Let’s run with 75% for the sake of discussion.  Of the 67,000 Americans who tested positive yesterday, about 16,750 will exhibit symptoms.  Going by the original percentages that 20% of those people will become severely ill, then we are looking at roughly 3,350 people who will get badly sick and of that number about 675 will die.  

So, the herd looks at the fact that so many are infected but most everyone either has no symptoms or a manageable illness and mistakenly believe that the virus does not pose that big of a harm – to them.  That may be true on the individual level but if we look at the nation as a whole the deaths add up.  Over 136,000 Americans have died already.  Some of those people might have died for other reasons anyway, but certainly giving them COVID in their various conditions was a death sentence.

The issue is not whether or not COVID is harmless for most people.  Rather, the issue is that COVID is more harmful the more people that contract it.  You might not suffer much but you are contributing to the spread the virus that will end up making 25% of the population miserable and push the death totals higher.  By not worrying particularly how badly the virus might affect you and your family should you contract it, you become a co-conspirator of the pandemic, enabling it to kill many more Americans.  That is what you should consider.  Each of us has a personal responsibility for the spread of the virus.

This site is the best I have found for tracking daily deaths.  I started following it about a month ago.  It projects deaths based upon the trends exhibited in the data.  On June 27 there were 546 deaths due to COVID-19 in America; a low since the virus accelerated its growth in March.  Deaths are a lagging indicator of the virus due to the fact that it takes time for people to actually die.  Those 675 deaths that will come from the 67,000 that contracted it yesterday will not show up until the symptoms have emerged (5-14 days) and run their course (another couple of weeks).  

Most people dying today of the virus contracted it 4 – 6 weeks ago.  So the recent rise in the number of daily cases won’t mean more deaths until sometime in August.  When I initially started following the site link above the model predicted just over 200,000 American deaths by November 1.  As recently as this week that number was 208,000.  Today that number is 224,000.  This is a projection based upon the recent rise in daily deaths, which are up to 635 confirmed for July 7 and an estimated 777 daily deaths for today.  There is a delay of one week on confirmed deaths versus anticipated deaths.

Now I realize that 777 deaths per day does not add up to the 675 deaths I calculated for the number of confirmed cases yesterday.  The reason for that is that there isn’t a clean, consistent number of days it takes for people to die.  When they do die each day it is from a number of different days when the virus was contracted. 

So, don’t get too bogged down in the numbers.  The important thing to be aware of are the trends.  Right now, the number of new cases and the number of new deaths are both trending upward.  There is no reason at all to think, especially with schools about to reopen, many without any regard to face masks or any protection, that these numbers are going to go down without administering a vaccine or the virus mutating into a more harmless form.  

Trump is taking a page from the Joseph Goebbels propaganda playbook.  Get control the information, claim that everyone is conspiring against you, and discredit those who are most insightful.  This Nazi tactic worked pretty well in the 1930’s and it will work well among the dim-witted Trumpets, roughly 40-45 million of American voters; his beloved "base" which does not live in the same century as the rest of us.  (But they will vote, so don't discount the power of stupidity in a democracy.)

The recent attacks on Dr. Fauci are designed to develop the narrative that Trump was "given bad information."  His decisions were not his fault.  Others are to blame.  But Fauci is and remains one of the most insightful medical professionals we have regarding the disease in America.  He has predicted that we will get to 100,000 cases per day fairly soon. 
 
This pandemic traveled the world via airports to begin with.  Now, it is traveling through beaches, bars, anywhere people do not distance and do not wear masks.  Schools are about to replace airports as the prime spread source for the disease as millions of American children pass it to each other and then take it home with them.  Most of these children will not get sick.  Most of the people they infect will not get sick.  But, the daily numbers will go dramatically higher. 

Most of Europe has had better success than America.  This is the United Kingdom as of yesterday.  Where is "American Exceptionalism" now?

Germany has done well.

Even Italy, once the hotspot of the world, has gotten its act together through lockdown and social distancing.

Again, it does not matter that most of the people won’t get sick.  It matters that the disease, which is largely under control in Europe, will reach a catastrophic level in America.  100,000 new cases per day means 25,000 sick people and 1,000 deaths per day.  We were at over 2,000 deaths per day back in April when testing was less widespread.   

There is nothing to stop us from getting to 2,000 deaths per day by sometime this fall.  We have no policy.  We have nothing.  Testing is on its own.  States are on their own.  Cities are on their own.  We have no leadership. In fact, we have a fascist leader who is only interested in controlling the data since he is (unlike many of his European counterparts) clueless about controlling the pandemic.  

The “second wave” that was supposed to come in the fall will just be a ramping up of the first wave.  Once again, this virus will continue to make Americans sick until we have a vaccine or until we get “herd immunity.”  Recent encouraging news about a possible vaccine won’t stop what is going to happen this fall and winter.  COVID-19 is going to try to infect 60%-70% of the US population until we can stop it.

As of now, 200,000,000 Americans will become infected over the course of several years and at least 600,000 will die during that same time period.  This was once all preventable even without a vaccine.  But, due to the issues I have enumerated above it is no longer possible to contain this wildfire.  COVID-19 is out of control in America and it will get worse before it gets better.

Trumpets such as this fool are buying in to Trump’s bullshit.  They believe that the whole system is rigged against them, against the economy, and against Trump’s re-election.  In fact, they believe that the crisis is "a system of control."  Wearing face masks is an attempt to control our behavior, whether it works or not.  That's the Trumpet worldview.  

The irony, of course, is that it is Trump himself who wants control.  It is Trump himself that will control the data and control the inaction of the government to mitigate the pandemic.  So, while his base thinks the crisis is an attempt to control the American people and harm Trump, actually it is Trump who is attempting to control everything and who is actually harming every American.  You can't make stuff like this up.

“Everyone is lying” and “it is harmless to 99% of those who get it” are both lies in and of themselves.  As I have previously mentioned, Trump is disingenuous.  He projects onto his opponents the very thing which he himself seeks to engage in.  For example, from the beginning he accused others of “fake news” when he himself was the chief arbiter of fake news and lies.  Now he accuses others of “lying” about COVID-19 when it is he himself who is and has been lying about it.  Now he will control the data.  His job will become easier.  Within a few weeks we will see a different, less harmful, COVID-19 narrative emerge from Trump’s seizure of data from the CDC.  It will be a lie.

And it will do nothing to stop us from attaining, once again, 1,000 deaths per day.  And 2,000 not long after that.  Despite advances in treatments for those stricken with this pandemic, deaths will ramp up because the number of citizens contracting it will reach record numbers.  The numbers in April were horrific.  The numbers today are already double that.  You simply can’t hide/reclassify that much illness and that many deaths.

This seizure of data is a symptom of something worse than the pandemic.  An attempt to cover up the pandemic while Trump points fingers at Fauci and tells us others are lying.  This misdirection is fairly easy to predict actually.  The moment he admits mistakes were made it is to cover-up his own mistakes.  The moment Trump accuses “everybody” of lying is the moment he is planning to tell everybody lies.  It is his personality, who he really is.  Count on it just as surely as we will approach (or surpass) 250,000 dead by the end of this year.  One is a psychological certainty, the other is a mathematical one.  No one can now stop what is about to happen.