We are daily bombarded with stories about
the lethality of COVID-19. The assumption of every broadcast is that
if you don't follow the suggestions of the experts and the executive orders of
the governors, you will get sick and die.
Only by extreme sanitizing, staying away from other people, and
wearing a mask everywhere — if you must leave home — will you be safe.
Is that really true?
There are so many contradictory
opinions floating around in media that it is almost impossible to logically
decide. I decided to look at a map: where were these cases and
deaths occurring? At first glance, it appeared that the numbers were
higher in big cities. New York City, for example, had the highest
rates of death—208 per 100,000 population.
It seemed that COVID death
rates had more to do with population density than anything else.
To test that hypothesis, I
got population density per square mile by state from the U.S.
Census Bureau and COVID death rates per 100,000 population from
the CDC. If
my hypothesis was correct, the higher the population density, the higher the
death rate would be.
Plotting the data gives the
following graph:
Death rates are the independent (y) variable, population density
the dependent variable. The relationship is so clear that the
regression line is superfluous. And just in case the eye doesn't
make it obvious, the correlation coefficient is 0.992511! For
reference, 1.0 means a perfect 1:1 correlation. Statisticians begin
to posit a causative relationship with a much lower correlation than that.
Also of interest is how close the individual dots appear to the
regression (trend) line. You can always draw a regression line
through a series of data points, but the fact that the dots are all so close to
the line points to low variability (hence the high correlation).
What does this mean?
Without considering masking, sanitizing, socialist
distancing, or any other measures advocated by the experts, population density
alone explains death rates. Everything else is political spin.
It also means that the variations
in policy state by state mean little, if anything. It doesn't matter
if the governor is Republican or Democrat. Texas, relatively loose
in its application of rules, and California, relatively strict, both have death
rates of 24. The same is true of Colorado (32) and New Mexico (31).
Why not use "case rates"?
The media love to use case rates. Epidemiologists use
case rates because they focus on the spread of disease. It's what
they do. But for citizens and their elected leaders, it's the death
rates that matter.
Besides, the case rates we are seeing are unreliable data in the
statistical sense. Case rates are really positive tests — and there
are different tests measuring different things and with different accuracy
rates. Death is certain. Death rates, too, are probably
somewhat unreliable — speculation a month or so ago went that as high as 40% of
"COVID deaths" were caused not by the disease, but rather by other
pre-existing conditions. I assumed that while the data may be
exaggerated, it would be exaggerated about the same in every state.
Is this really a causative relationship?
One should be careful: correlation is not necessarily
causation. But it does make sense logically. If this
disease is primarily transmitted between people in close contact in a confined
space for 15 minutes or more — as we've been told — then people riding the New
York City subway are more likely to catch the virus than a park ranger in the
middle of the forest.
So if all the draconian measures taken in the U.S. have
been ineffective, does that mean we should do nothing? Let's see.
The government of only one country in the world trusted its
population enough to let them make up their minds themselves, with little
interference: Sweden. Sweden's infection rates were initially higher
but have since dropped off.
Resurgence in the number of cases is to be expected if people stop
practicing distancing and get together again in large groups. Is
that a bad thing? While
case rate have gone up, death rates have remained low, at least in the U.S.
And what are those death rates, overall?
The CDC
reports for 2018 2,813,503 deaths total, or 863.8 deaths per 100,000
population. By extrapolation, in the first half of 2020, there would
have been a little over 1.4 million deaths in the U.S. without
COVID. Yet the
medical and political establishment in this country is freaking out over an
additional 154,471 deaths — a roughly 11% increase if none of the
people who died from COVID would otherwise have died.
Yet we know anecdotally that
many reported COVID deaths were not caused by the virus. If doctors
were allowed to honestly report cause of death, we would have a better idea of
the real magnitude of the COVID impact. It is likely that we never
will.
If stopping the
spread of the virus is the goal of government policy, then you may be wearing a
mask in public for the rest of your life — and it won't make a
difference. It is hubris of the greatest magnitude to believe that
we can eradicate this or any other virus from the face of the earth.
Al Maurer is a political scientist and technologist. He
writes on topics of limited government and individual rights.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/08/understanding_covid19_death_rates.html