Lions and Tigers and Pandemics Oh My!

Truth is like a…

Greetings!

I guess I was bad.

Somebody actually blocked me on X/Twitter and it didn’t even involve any cusswords.

At least I don’t think “manure” is a cussword, but then I wasn’t the one who said it.

This blockery, near as I can tell, has something to do with pandemics.

So it turns out one of these was officially declared a few years ago. There were lots of pictures and videos on TV of people passing out in the streets and dying in hospital hallways in places like China. Hospitals in Italy and Iran were soon overflowing, with desperately mecha-ventilated patients dying by the thousands. Soon, the World Health Organization made a declaration that all that was a pandemic¹:

In the past two weeks, the number of cases of COVID-19 outside China has increased 13-fold, and the number of affected countries has tripled.  

There are now more than 118,000 cases in 114 countries, and 4,291 people have lost their lives. 

Thousands more are fighting for their lives in hospitals.

In the days and weeks ahead, we expect to see the number of cases, the number of deaths, and the number of affected countries climb even higher.

WHO has been assessing this outbreak around the clock and we are deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction.

We have therefore made the assessment that COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic. 

Pandemic is not a word to use lightly or carelessly. It is a word that, if misused, can cause unreasonable fear, or unjustified acceptance that the fight is over, leading to unnecessary suffering and death.

Describing the situation as a pandemic does not change WHO’s assessment of the threat posed by this virus. It doesn’t change what WHO is doing, and it doesn’t change what countries should do.

We have never before seen a pandemic sparked by a coronavirus. This is the first pandemic caused by a coronavirus.

And we have never before seen a pandemic that can be controlled, at the same time.  

WHO has been in full response mode since we were notified of the first cases.  

And we have called every day for countries to take urgent and aggressive action.

We have rung the alarm bell loud and clear. 

And then a few days later, as if in response to that alarm bell, more and more people than usual started dying in New York City.

Here is a plot of recorded deaths, from around that time, from usmortality.com — which is a really useful site aggregating this kind of data from the CDC:

The explosion of fatalities starting in mid March 2020

Let me explain what this plot says. The vertical axis counts the number of people that died per week. The horizontal axis is time, starting from late September 2019, and stretching out to September of 2020. The blue curve shows how many people were recorded to have died, for any reason, each week in New York City according to the CDC. Generally, it looks like for any given week, 1000 people typically die there.

Fortunately there are also many millions remaining alive there each week, so its not quite as bad as that sounds.

There are two other lines in there — the green dotted line, shows a prediction based on the past data where the normal level for that week is expected to be, with a shaded area indicating the estimated uncertainty on that prediction. There is also a red dotted line to show where an extreme deviation would be based on past data. If the blue line goes too far above the red, something bad and unusual is happening.

Through the end of 2019, and into 2020, the number of people dying in New York City stayed near normal levels. But then, starting in mid March 2020, right after the WHO rang its alarm bell, the rate of people dying took off like a rocket, peaking almost 8 times the normal weekly rate. Clearly this was due to the pandemic!

But this was an incredibly fast pandemic, peaking to max mortality in a matter of weeks. And then it came to an end by June of 2020, where the rate of weekly deaths fell right back down to the normal level of ~1000 per week. And stayed there for several months. Any fatality generating effect, any life threatening emergency ENDED there by June 2020. There were, later the next fall and in subsequent years, other rolling peaks in the mortality rate, but never anything like this explosion of mortality.

Fatalities exploded to 8 times normal in a few weeks, then the whole pandemic burned out in New York after several more weeks. This is incredible. This definitely would be alarm bell worthy if true.

With such a fantastically efficient two week explosion of infection to 8x normal fatality, it must have spread like wildfire across the US!

So OK. How bad was it in other places? Well, here is Illinois, where the city of Chicago, Second City, happens to be:

<slow farting noise> Deaths per week in Illinois from September 2019 to 2020 </f>

Now there is a bit of a bump there, but its nowhere near the magnitude of what appears to have happened in New York. In fact the rate of fatalities doesn’t even double over the normal rate. In fact, the only reason we really see it as well as we do, is the plot is ‘zero suppressed’ — the vertical axis doesn’t start at zero like the New York plot².

Now this is kind of weird. How come in New York it looks like we had this horrible infectious thing explode and kill all kinds of people, but then Illinois didn’t really?

Dr

Jessica Hockett

is someone living in a wooden house near Chicago. And she has been, very diligently with FOIA’s and everything, trying to answer this. And it is getting really hard to argue based on what she’s found, that there ever was a wildly spreading fatal US-wide pandemic in winter-spring of 2020. Or perhaps even one in New York City. Go read her stuff here: Wood House 76 and particularly with her merry band of PANDA collaborators here.

And Sage

And JJC

And Denis

And… oh yeah so…

What if it was just too cold in Chicago and nobody went there. Or something. Well there’s a lot of people who travel between New York and Los Angeles or San Francisco. And its warmer there. If you can get past the urine smell. But certainly this pandemic, if it could spread so crazily across the city of New York, also spread to and appeared in California. What if one of these poor presymptomatic superspreading saps happened to hop one of hundreds of Cali-bound planes on March 10th? What about Wuhan escapees in fact? Well, lets look:

Zero, zip, nada

Maybe there is a low bump late in the summer of 2020, but there is really nothing that happened in March/April/May 2020. Also keep in mind the zero suppression in this plot. How did a horribly fatal, apparently explosively spreading disease, which killed tens of thousands of people over several weeks in New York NOT spread everywhere? Why didn’t the same thing happen in the highly urban cities of Los Angeles or San Francisco?

This was a pandemic wasn’t it? We locked down the world for this didn’t we? We created all sorts of new tests so rapidly we could never calibrate them, so many new pharmaceuticals to cure people that we could never test them, coerced people to inject new kinds of supposedly safe and effective disease transmission ending shots…

So I mean. There must have been a pandemic right?

We like… did all this stuff and all…

Oh! OK! Here we go! — maybe it was all worth it after all:

So OK! Problem solved! Pandemics have nothing to do with people dying! THAT’s why we didn’t see anybody dying in California, and almost nothing in Illinois.

So we have must pandemics all the time! Every year³ we must have a flu pandemic!

Every year we have rhinovirus or non-SARSificated coronavirus or RSV pandemics. This is not a big deal after all!

I feel better now. Do you feel better? I sure do.

But…

We were supposed to be careful, according to the WHO alarm above:

“Pandemic is not a word to use lightly or carelessly. It is a word that, if misused, can cause unreasonable fear, or unjustified acceptance that the fight is over, leading to unnecessary suffering and death.”

So we shouldn’t be using the word “pandemic” for this.

The WHO seems to imply we should be ‘denying the pandemic’ for this after all.

I mean it didn’t seem to spread everywhere.

Or it did and didn’t kill people.

Except New York City.

This is confusing.

Time to ask a question:

And I must say several others had the same question.

But I can’t see them anymore.

Because for some reason the next day:

So there you go.

I guess thats my anwer.

“Truth is like a Lion”.

Poser.

1. https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19---11-march-2020

2. Mighta been my fault by leaving ‘maximize’ checked.

3. Well um. Except in 2020-21…