Tim Challies just had a nice post, I Miss the Ordinary the Most, in which he argues that part of what’s so hard for Christians in this time is that we lack one of the great means of support God has provided for us – that of meeting together, one of the “ordinary means of grace”. Meeting together as a church body, in Christian fellowship, is part of how God provides for us so, in a way, we *ought to feel something is wrong when we cannot do this.** Challies writes:

So as I consider the stress and anxiety I feel deep within, and as I speak to others, I have been encouraging them as I’ve been encouraging myself, to understand that some of this must stem directly from what, in the providence of God, has been denied to us in this time. We should not expect to be without struggles when such important elements of our faith have been taken away by circumstances. I pray that this will provoke a longing within me and deep within the church to return to fellowship so we can once again return to those precious means.

I think that’s a great take-away. For me, I’m not finding myself stressed so much about the epidemic, etc., but small things are just grating on me more than normal. I’m more bothered by my kids fighting, more bothered by the number of dishes there are to wash, and all kinds of things.

America’s “innovation engine”

The WSJ had an interesting article the other day on how COVID-19 has helped America start innovating again in a number of areas. I don’t think we should blow this out of proportion, but it’s certainly shaking things up in a lot of ways, and the article is worth reading. Sorry that a subscription is required.

Occasionally, on social media, I’m still seeing people arguing that COVID-19 is being blown out of proportion by the media or that much of the death total attributed to it is actually misattribution, etc. I disagree, but I never seem to have the right data on hand at the same time as I see one of these posts. (Probably foolishly, I persist in believing that data can change people’s minds.)

In any case, I wanted to park some links to some of the key data here in case I need it again, so that if I stumble across one of these posts downplaying COVID-19, I’ll be able to find it rapidly.

The main answer to such arguments is to look at the background rate of other causes of death. If apparent COVID-19 deaths were due to misattribution from other causes, then “COVID” numbers could only go up when other numbers go down, and they couldn’t go higher than the total deaths from other causes.

You can see the analysis I’m talking about in this Twitter thread which focuses on New York state, but one can easily do the same at a national level. Basically, there’s a background rate of deaths due to flu (and a background rate due to other causes – “total deaths” in this plot). And if you see the rate of all deaths suddenly far exceeding normal, you know that people are dying who wouldn’t otherwise have died. There’s no way this can happen due to misattribution; COVID-19 is killing people – large numbers of them.

Here’s a graphical illustration of how COVID-19 ranks relative to other causes of death in the US over time; it’s climbed the ranks to become the leading cause of death in the US at present. This helps illustrate how it’s not doing so just do misattribution – if it were, we’d see deaths due to, say, heart disease and cancer dropping way down, perhaps nearly to zero.