FROM “An Epidemic of Irrationality,” by C. Griffin Trotter MD, PhD :
Today (March 27, 2020) is kind of a landmark day. The front-page headline in the Seattle Times screams “U.S. has most virus cases: With 1,000-plus deaths, more grim milestones ahead.” But the real milestone is that the stark irrationality of our public response to COVID-19 has become manifest as never before. Today the Times has three front-page articles featuring three radically incompatible claims.
The first article makes the same old claim that has been featured on the front page every day for the last month. It is the claim that Coronavirus is a nearly unprecedented medical catastrophe, destined for “grim milestones” of almost unthinkable proportion.
The second article correctly claims that it is very difficult for patients to get tested for Coronavirus. The policy in Washington state is still to test only sick patients. In fact, even sick patients are still often turned away if they are not sick enough, as several examples cited in this article document.
The third article reports that the death toll from Coronavirus, according to a model from University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, could reach 1,430 by July (at which time the model estimates the seasonal epidemic will be over).
Do these three articles hold together logically? Not even close. Washington’s population of 7.5 million persons makes up about 2.5% of the population of the United States. Even in the extremely unlikely event that every other state eventually gets hit as hard as Washington, the death rate referenced in the third article would translate to 57,000 deaths nationwide. That is substantially less than the death toll from influenza in 2017-18, which the media almost entirely ignored. So if the third article is correct, then the first article is radically incorrect. If the third article is correct, then this is not an unprecedented catastrophe, and in fact it will not even be as bad, mortality wise, as a bad flu season. Read More »