PollyAnna vs. Chicken Little

"There are three kinds of lies:  lies, damned lies, and statistics." (often misattributed to Mark Twain, but actually only requoted by him from an anonymous source).  I am having some trouble wrapping my head around the numbers for Covid-19. 

The LA Times reports that Stanford biophysicist Michael Levitt doesn’t think things will be so bad (they have a paywall so see TechTimes summary).  He seems to be looking at micro numbers in places were severe precautions have been taken and extrapolating from there.  He does provide a brief caveat about social distancing but still concludes with a PollyAnnish "we're going to be fine." 

Not surprisingly, the Trumpian PollyAnnas at Fox and US News & World, among others, have been pointing to flu deaths, 22,000 since the Fall.  They implicitly compare this to the 430 or so Covid-19 deaths so far in the US.  This is completely bogus.  Covid-19 is a new disease vs the flu which is an old disease with effective vaccine treatment that millions of Americans have had.  What must be looked at is the trajectory of the new disease under different conditions, especially the little caveat, social distancing, offered by Dr. Levitt.

NY Times has a chart showing the death rate by country.  The “zero” point is countries with at least 25 deaths.  The X axis shows days since that point.  China has reached a rate of less than 10 deaths per day.  But that is NOT a natural phenomenon.  Their curve did not begin to flatten until 20 days after implementing draconian “social distancing” measures, e.g. shutting down public transit in Wuhan, population 11 million.  Those restrictions continue.  We are still not at that level of isolation even in NYC.

And Chicken Little says “But Italy!”.  And rightfully so.  Over 1,200 deaths in the last two days!  I won’t even do that math.  Italy implemented severe restrictions in the north 14 days ago but has only gone to full lockdown in the last few days.  Based on the Chinese experience they have another week or two at least before their curve even BEGINS to flatten.  The United States is a week or so behind the Italian trajectory.

So where are we?  Unfortunately, with PollyAsshole in the White House, it looks like Chicken Little is winning here.  Many governors and local officials are stepping up to the plate.  My PollyAnna says I hope that will be good enough.  My Chicken Little says “HA!”.

Apart from the numbers, a former Homeland Security official, Juliette Kayyem now at Harvard, had what I thought was one of the most realistic takes on the situation in an article in The Atlantic.  No Chicken Little, but not very optimistic.  This is like a military situation.  We must evaluate and prioritize the mission(s) and plan on casualties.

But not a PollyAnna either.  A somewhat positive “we’ll muddle through”.  Plan for at least a couple of months like this, then a gradual easing until 18 months or so when a vaccine becomes available.  Seems about right to me.