The Financial Times (FT) just updated their “excess deaths” data. For anyone who doesn’t yet believe COVID-19 is killing lots of people, this data is the best source – it looks at how many more people are dying (of ALL causes) than normal for this time of year. Upshot: Lots more.

The excess deaths data also suggests that typically deaths are undercounted because people die at home, or people never tested positive, etc., so their deaths don’t go into the official stats. I know some people have argued that all of this is a big overreaction and deaths being attributed to COVID-19 are just “normal” deaths being miscategorized, but the excess deaths data does not bear this out. (The NY Times had also written on this back in April using CDC data, and their analysis looks roughly right to me. But the FT analysis linked above is more recent and makes the same point.)

Also, buried in the stats on the FT article, it seems that some countries have already lost more than 0.1% (that is, more than 1 person in one thousand) of their populations to COVID-19 – particularly, Ecuador, Peru and Spain). To me that seems like a lot, but this isn’t over yet – not by a long shot.

What about mandatory masks?

I fielded this question on Facebook:

How do you feel about Mandatory Masks outside, with the threat of fines or imprisonment?

I’m not sure exactly where my friend is coming from on this, but I know there are people out there who feel that masks are a grave infringement on personal liberty and/or a real health hazard. I don’t quite understand that perspective (maybe someone can explain it to me?) but this is what I wrote back to my friend:

It makes sense to me. I mean, even in normal times if I were headed in for, say, surgery and my doctor weren’t wearing a mask I’d be out of there – it’s the doctor showing whether they care about my health/survival. Indeed, my expectation is that they must be wearing a mask or they would lose their medical license and maybe go to jail, because not wearing one would show reckless disregard for my health.

Given COVID-19, I don’t think the logic is that dissimilar about my own mask wearing. I’ve been wearing a mask in public places since long before it was required, because if I’m not doing so, I’m showing a disregard for other people’s health. I’m not high risk, but someone I pass by may be, and I don’t want to be responsible for essentially killing them by giving them COVID-19 if I’m an asymptomatic carrier.

I don’t see a problem with the health agencies temporarily requiring masks. This has been part of what’s worked so well in most places which have gotten it under control. So why not here? It’s just a mask. The science seems to show it dramatically reduces risk.

I don’t understand why some people are seeing this as a dramatic infringement of liberty. I mean, I don’t HAVE to go out into public if I don’t want to wear a mask; I can hire someone to do it for me, or get a friend to do it. And we put up with other infringements of liberty that are also for public safety – e.g. “don’t drink and drive”, licensing for drivers, age limits on driving, traffic laws, or even my doctor example above. Or restaurant inspections/sanitation/licensing.

What am I missing?

I suppose I might agree with this question more if I thought the government was requiring me to wear a mask to keep ME safe – after all, isn’t it my life to risk? – but that’s not the point of masks. The idea of masks is to keep other people safe. The type of cloth masks we’re making/wearing don’t do much to protect us – but they do quite a bit to keep us from emitting droplets that might infect other people if we’re not aware we are sick.

Honestly, I hadn’t thought that much about this type of logic until my daughter had a near-death experience due to the RSV virus some years ago – a virus which most people have had, is usually harmless, but would have killed her without modern medicine. Read my logic in the prior post, but it helped me realize I want to take COVID-19 related precautions to protect other people, not out of fear. And that’s what I see these mask orders doing.

The latest news from California: We’re shutting down again

Looks like California is broadly shutting down again, with the governor shutting down malls, gymns, nail salons, and churches in many counties. Given spikes in infection locally I think I broadly agree with this action.

Overall, though, I’m a bit frustrated by how much we seem to be following some of the early projections from back in March from the Imperial College team and from Thomas Pueyo. The Imperial College folks had argued that people wouldn’t be willing to tolerate a sustained lockdown, so instead we’d see a large series of “lock down, then let people out again, then lock down” type events – as explained, for example, in this MIT Tech Review piece. At the time I hoped that was overly pessimistic, but if anything we in the US seem to be doing far worse than what Imperial College suggested – we “locked down” but not well enough to really bring things under control in most parts of the US. For example, in California, cases didn’t grow as rapidly under lockdown, but they were still growing (see new confirmed cases stats for California on this page about halfway down). Then once we came out of lockdown, the growth curve just got sharper again. So, now we’re locking down again. At the time I had hoped we stood a good chance of following the approach suggested by Pueyo which he called “the hammer and the dance”, where we’d find a way to carefully stay right below the critical threshold that would allow the epidemic to grow again, but this seems not to be the case so far.

Any way, at the moment it still looks like we’re in this for the long haul, as suggested by that earlier Imperial College study – we’ll probably be dealing with this until there is a vaccine or we make a new discovery that dramatically changes things. I suppose it may still turn out that some people have pre-existing immunity to the virus, providing a natural limiter on how severe it can get – but I’m not aware of any evidence of that yet.

So, here we go, back into lockdown in California – just as the experts were predicting back in March.