Energy Blog

April 28.  Lots of Sad Milestones, New Projections, and Testing and Tracing

In the last few days, the World crossed the three million case number, being 3.11 million tonight.  The US crossed the one million case number, at 1.01 million tonight.  So the US has one third of the world’s cases.

World deaths are 217,000, and US deaths are 58,335, or 27%.  Everybody agrees that actually infected people are many times those that needed to be tested.  Sadly, the US deaths above now exceed those of the Vietnam War, of 58,220 US deaths.  Almost 40,000 Americans died in the Korean War.

The IHME has new projections today, which has US total deaths by the end at 72,860.  The 95% upper probability is 122,000.  This has accounting fo rather states relaxing restrictions before meeting Trump’s or the IHME criteria.  The US fit is 9 days past the peak resources, and 13 past peak daily deaths.

The Harvard Road Map for Testing for restarting is 5 million tests a day, and 20 million a day by midsummer.  So far, the White House plans are only 6-7 million tests a month.  The cost involved is $46.5 billion.  This is broken down as follows.  The cost for 180,000 workers to trace and contact is $12 billion.  The cost to isolate contacts in hotels is $4.5 billion.  The cost for 18 months of support is $30 billion.  While it sounds like a lot, the $46.5 billion is only 2% of the $2.5 trillion bailout budget.

Oxford is claiming that they can have a vaccine by this fall.  But Fauci still wants the full year and a half for testing.  One can imagine Trump endorsing and producing the vaccine long before conventional testing is done.  The question is, who would take it then?

This is the map of states starting up now with separate rules in green, yellow ones start up in early May, and red ones stay locked down.

Colorado and Nevada have joined the west coast states of California, Oregon, and Washington in a coordinated group.

We present tables of a few large states which are not relaxing their stay at home programs, and of a few states which are.  We present the projected and present deaths.  The states keeping the restrictions are relatively near their final projections, while the relaxing states are projected to double their present deaths, which are taken as of April 27th.

States Keeping Restrictions:

States Relaxing Restrictions:

As Sanjay Gupta pointed out, the infection probability is not just stopped by a six foot separation, but it depends on how long one is exposed in an enclosed room.  Hence, hair cutting and gyms are scary to me.  It’s different from passing someone in the market. 

California has now developed more data on how minorities are more affected by the Coronavirus, in given age groups, since Latinos are younger than whites.  In the age group 18 to 49, Latinos make up 64.9% of the deaths, while being 43.5% of the population.  African Americans made up 15.3% of deaths in that age group, while being 6.3% of the population.

While Trump has been blaming China for covering up the initial infection, Trump also cut our C.D.C. Delegation in China from 47 to 14 before the pandemic began.  We really have to stay and contribute to the W.H.O. In order not to make similar mistakes again.

As we speculated from previous small business programs, much of the small business loans went to large businesses.

Worldwide Coronavirus deaths is almost at 200,000.  The US has passed 50,000 deaths.

The Vice President said that he had a list of 16 states that were starting to loosen restrictions.  I’m going to discuss five now, and along with the seven I gave the preferred restart dates for yesterday, makes up 12 of them.

Today, the IHME site had a date for when Georgia reached only one case per day per million, and that is a late June 22.  So they are opening two months early.

Four more are Missouri on June 10, Pennsylvania on May 27, Oregon on May 27, and Idaho on May 16.

Sweden, which doesn’t have a lockdown, is projected to have an IHME release date of June 22.  They are projected to have about 10,600 deaths within a very wide range.  With 20.2 million population, about the size of New York State, the final death rate would be 0.05% of the population.  I’m guessing that very old and vulnerable people would confine themselves anyway.

On the New York City data from yesterday, with some approximations since I didn’t have the dates and stats for the days on which they did the testing, I estimated that the number who had had the virus, compared to those tested positive with the virus, was a whopping 150.  This beats 50-85 in San Jose, and 40 in Los Angeles.  I hope that they release an official number on this in New York City.  I don’t trust my value that much, so don’t quote me.

In New York State’s largest health care system, the fatality rate was 20% of those hospitalized.  Of those who died, 57% had hypertension, 41% were obese, and 34% had diabetes.  Asthma did not play a role.  Of those admitted, 70% did not have a fever, in contrast to that being the main indicator, by the CDC.

In that system, before COVID-19, of those who needed to be on ventilators, 80% died.  With COVID-19, that rose to 88%.

In China, 44% of the cases were passed on before symptoms appeared.

Today’s New York new COVID hospitalizations per day are about a third of what they were at the peak, and have been below the peak for 19 days.  They would qualify for Trump’s transition to phase I, but you can see that the drop off is very slowly.

The Trump administration is bragging about how many and how fast they can get Coronavirus testing approved.  The testing companies are responsible for self verifying their tests, and they aren’t accurate.  The FDA has only approved four tests.  They are bypassing the FDA with its $3.16 billion dollar budget, of which 22% is for Human Drugs.  They have 17,500 employees.

“It’s summertime, summertime, sum, sum, summertime” the Jamies.

”Summertime, and the living is easy”, Porgy and Bess, by George Gershwin.

No less than the Department of Homeland Security has shown that the Coronavirus is destroyed by sunlight, with a two minute half life on a lit surface.  The aerosol is also destroyed with a 1.5 minute half-life.  Here is my reliable source:

These aren’t identical radioactive particles decaying with equal probabilities, with an exponential decay curve.  The drops or aerosols have a finite size and dry up or are destroyed from the outside in.  Since only a few virus cells can spread it, you really have to know how long the aerosols or droplets last totally, which depends on their size.

The U. Washington IHME team (Institute of Health Metrics’s and Evaluation) has a slightly changed map but the same data date as yesterday.  This is their prediction of when the number of new daily cases is projected to fall to one per million of population.  Here is the map.

We now examine states partly opening this weekend or on Monday.  Texas and South Carolina, are projected to be free on June 8.  New York is projected for May 27.  Tennessee (May 20), Mississippi (May 29), Ohio (May 14), and Colorado (May 26) are also opening some businesses next week.  Georgia doesn’t have a prediction on the IHME website, but is June 8 or later on the map.  California is not opening now, but is projected to be free on May 10.

New York Gov. Cuomo preliminarily released the antibody testing for New York areas, showing that in New York City, the fraction with antibodies was 21.2%.  Long Island had 16.7%, and Westchester/Rockland had 11.7%.  The rest of the state had 3.6%.  Knowing the number of deaths, they figured that the mortality rate was 0.5%, which is a factor of 10 less than the obvious fraction of deaths to confirmed cases of 5.6%.  So 0.5% is both good, but also bad as it is 3 to 5 times the death rates for seasonal flus.

About equal numbers of men and women were tested statewide around grocery stores, but viral men were 16%, and women 12%.  The overall statewide rate is 14%.  Seniors 65-74 were 11.9%, and elders over 75 were 13%.  Other decadal percentages starting at 25-34 were even higher, giving 15.9%, 13.6%, 16.7%, and 14.9%.  Younger people are out working and getting around, so they are more vulnerable.

Modelers at Northeastern University have figured that on March 1, there were actually on the order of 10,000 infected in both New York and San Francisco, 3,000 in Chicago, and 2,000 in Boston and Seattle.

April 22.  It’s all about Coronavirus reopening.

Using the IHME model, CNN has made a map of the reopening dates of the 50 states, which we show below.  The different color bins are for weeks of opening starting May 4-10 in dark Green, May 11-17 in medium green, May 18-24 in light green, May 24-31 in bright yellow, June 1-7 in medium yellow, and after June 8 in dark  yellow-brown.  California is in the May 11-17 group.

I’m going to add a clearer version here, but its earlier two date groups are two weeks in length.  Since the IHME uses a given error function curve to fit the data which is close to other countries more advanced in the infection, it is not really 100% predictive.  In any case, data fluctuates for many reasons.  Their criteria is to get down to one new case per million per day.  Nobody is going to wait that long.  If you have a team to do contact tracing of 100, say, you probably could stop at 20 new cases per day per million.  The model assumes that every state and every person is isolating.  People travel, and as states open early, the virus will start respreading. The Las Vegas Mayor wants to open, regardless.  Since it is a major tourist spot, it could send new cases all over the country.  New York is in the May 18-31 category.  Georgia is after June 8.  Trump disagrees with the Governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, opening up now.  But he is letting him make his decision.

A 2007 paper in the Journal of the AMA, JAMA, traced the number of cases and histories of major US cities in the influenza pandemic of 2018-19.  It shows second waves in cities that did not lock down long enough. I’m just going to show one graph from the paper itself, that compares the history of three sectors of the US.  The complications this fall will be having both the flues and the Coronavirus cases impacting our public health facilities.  Dr. Robert Redfield, CDC Director, really want’s us to take the flu vaccine, and I want all to take the pneumonia vaccines.

All three had a late surge or second wave, but the West Coast, shown by circles in the curve, had the worst.  National Geographic showed curves for separate cities.

The 1918 pandemic was called the “Spanish Flu” since that was the only country not censoring its occurrence during the First World War.  (Sounds familiar.)  It is not known where it started.  It was an H1N1 flu virus.  Many people died from ordinary pneumonias, which we now have vaccines for, as well as for different H1N1 viruses each year.  The strategies used then were closing schools and theaters, closing churches, and banning gatherings.

The JAMA paper estimated total US deaths at 500 per hundred thousand, or 1 death per 200 people.  At present, the US has 45,153 deaths, out of a population of 320 million, which is 14 per 100,000, or 1 death per 7,000 Americans.  In the 1918 flu, New York City had 452 deaths per 100,000.  The Coronavirus in New York City now has 170 deaths per 100,000o.  In 1918, Los Angeles had 494 deaths per 100,000 people.

The JAMA paper is Aug. 8, 2007, Vol. 298, No.6, pp 644 -656 , by Dr. Howard Markel et al.

The much touted 15 minute (10 minute, 5 minute) test by Abbott labs, turns out to give 15% false negatives.  This is used to test everybody who has contact with the President.