WolfeNotes.com

Media praise of “data driven response” provides cover for initial failure to act

Delays exacerbated panic and diminished NJ’s testing & treatment capacity

[Update below]

Once again, NJ Spotlight has acted as cheerleader for the Murphy administration’s response to COVID-19, instead of holding them accountable.

Once again, they have relied exclusively on statements made by the Governor and private sector instead of fact checking them against the actual text of the underlying State planning documents and laws.

Yesterday, NJ Spotlight wrote about “lessons from the past”, while completely ignoring existing State pandemic preparedness and response plans.

As I’ve written, those plans found that the current COVID-19 pandemic was “looming” and “inevitable”.

Those plans projected 50,000 deaths, a severe shortage of ventilators, and that the healthcare system would be “severely taxed if not overwhelmed”.

Those plans laid out a detailed strategy and programs to prepare for and respond to a pandemic.

Those plans were not adequately funded and staffed and invoked in a timely way. As a result, NJ was poorly prepared, the response was delayed and confused, and people needlessly died. 

NJ Spotlight ignored all that, while praising the preparedness and response of the Murphy administration and private sector medical facilities.

In today’s story, this one really set me off:

‘Informed decisions’ instead of ‘educated guesses’

“The more we have facts, the more we can make fully informed decisions as opposed to just educated guesses,” Murphy said at the state media briefing Tuesday. “Getting our arms around (the data) is going to be critical to winning this public health battle.”

If Gov. Murphy and his Commissioner of the Department of Health are so interested in “getting their arms around the data”, then why didn’t they adequately fund, staff, and immediately implement the laboratory coordination and testing provisions of their own 2015 Pandemic Plan?

That NJ DoH plan has a strategy and extensive technical requirements for, among other things, testing and laboratory reporting. Hit the link and read them, or just look at the table of contents:

All these things should have been in place and deployed in NJ MONTHS ago, when the World Health Organization and US Centers For Disease Control (CDC) recognized the Chinese data and a pandemic flu.

Had these plans been implemented, NJ would have had scaled up capacity and equipment, and had testing and lab procedures in place. NJ would have had a sufficient number of masks, respirators, ventilators, and increased hospital ICU beds. NJ would have had public communication, exposure tracking, “social distancing”, quarantine, facility closures, and critical things like food distribution all in place before chaos set in and the pandemic exploded.

Again failing to hold State officials accountable while providing cover, NJ Spotlight also quoted NJ Homeland Security Director, who invoked NJ law, the same law pursuant to which the State adopted one of it pandemic plans, known as  NJ Hazard Mitigation Plan:

In his letter Monday to all clinical laboratories authorized to perform COVID-19 testing, New Jersey’s homeland security director Jared M. Maples said the state’s Domestic Security Preparedness Act of 2001 allowed him to compel them to provide testing information the state needed to protect public health.

Yet, while giving the administration a softball, Spotlight failed to ask Director Maples about why that letter had not been written MONTHS ago, when the pandemic was initially recognized.

If Director Maples and the State DoH acted in accordance with the science and their own pandemic preparedness plans, procedures for testing people, laboratory analysis and data reporting would have been in place MONTHS ago.

With respect for the context of coronavirus testing and data reporting, in addition to failure to implement existing preparedness plans, there are key facts that are not being reported in US media or by NJ Spotlight.

For the national story of what went wrong in preparedness and response, listen to yesterday’s NPR “Fresh Air” program:

• All Of This Panic Could Have Been Prevented

In addition, key facts are not being reported. They are:

1) the Chinese, while they engaged in a coverup domestically, were transparent on the science and early on provided important genome data to WHO in December.

2) Based on Chinese data, WHO published the coronavirus gene sequence on their website the first week in January, which enabled labs around the world to very easily and quickly develop test methods.

3) the Germans, South Koreans and others used WHO gene sequence data to develop test methods and field test hundreds of thousands of people, which enabled them to greatly reduce transmission.

The press has reported that the Trump CDC rejected WHO test in favor of developing their own test, which later failed.

Regardless, the delay by Trump CDC and others to test and implement existing pandemic preparedness plans is a crime.

This story from The Intercept is one of the better media reports, a highly suggested read.

I also wrote about how Trump’s reliance on a national security framework has suppressed science and blocked doctors and epidemiologists from doing their jobs.

Of course, the media is not writing about any of that either!

[Update 4/5/20 – Noam Chomsky agrees with my assessment – and he also notes China’s gene sequencing:

“This coronavirus pandemic could have been prevented, the information was there to prevent it. In fact, it was well-known. In October 2019, just before the outbreak, there was a large-scale simulation in the United States – possible pandemic of this kind,” he said, referring to an exercise – titled Event 201 – hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

“Nothing was done. The crisis was then made worse by the treachery of the political systems that didn’t pay attention to the information that they were aware of.

“On December 31, China informed the World Health Organization (WHO) of pneumonia-like symptoms with unknown origins. A week later, some Chinese scientists identified a coronavirus. Furthermore, they sequenced it and provided information to the world. By then, virologists and others who were bothering to read WHO reports knew that there was a coronavirus and knew that had to deal with it. Did they do anything? Well yes, some did.

“China, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore began to do something, and they have sort of pretty much seemed to have contained at least the first surge of the crisis.”

Weird Scenes Inside The Pandemic

Drowning In Reagan’s Bathtub

We thought year 3 on the road began with a bang. But year 4 begins in Pandemic!

What have they done to the earth?
What have they done to our fair sister?
Ravaged and plundered and raped her and bit her
Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn
And tied her with fences and dragged her down. ~~ The Doors, When the Music’s Over (1967)

Driver where you takin’ us?:

This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend

The end
Of our elaborate plans
The end
Of everything that stands
The end
No safety or surprise
The end
I’ll never look into your eyes
Again. […]

Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain
And all the children are insane
All the children are insane
Waiting for the summer rain, yeah

There’s danger on the edge of town
Ride the king’s highway, baby
Weird scenes inside the gold mine
Ride the highway west, baby~~~ The Doors, The End (1967)

Once Again, The Media Misses The Point

Professional, scientific and medical ethics require disclosure

[Important Updates below – photo was inserted 9/13/20]

There has been an avalanche of media coverage of the Senate’s corrupt insider trading stock scandal, where at least 4 US Senators unloaded millions of dollars in stock following a January 24, 2020 briefing by the CDC and Trump administration officials, see:

• Senators Accused Of Insider Trading, Dumping Stocks After Coronavirus Briefing

• Senate Intelligence chair sold stocks after coronavirus briefings

As usual, all the major media outlets are tripping over themselves to write the same story.

And in their typical tawdry feeding frenzy on corruption, what the media are missing are the far more important public health and government policy issues:

Why was the January 24 Senate briefing by CDC confidential?

Why didn’t the CDC scientists disclose the information publicly and warn the American public about the risks they were aware of regarding the exploding Coronavirus Pandemic?

Why didn’t US Senators and other members of Congress and their staffs disclose this information and warn the public?

(at a recent press briefing (no links), government officials refused to answer a reporter’s question and provide national data on key public health concerns, including the capacity of the National Strategic Stockpile, number of hospital beds, number of ventilators, masks, or number of ICU beds. Why is all this classified information?)

These are critically important questions, especially in light of President Trump’s efforts on January 22 – just 2 days prior to the Senate briefing- to flat out lie about the risks:

JOE KERNEN: –are there worries about a pandemic at this point?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: No. Not at all. And– we’re– we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s—going to be just fine.

Why didn’t US Senators and their staff’s disclose this critical CDC information so the American people could protect themselves and hold government accountable?

I did quick research to learn the Senate Intelligence Committee and Congressional rules that applied to that CDC Senate briefing, and discovered that Congressional rules allow public disclosure if “the public interest would be served by such disclosure.”

SEC. 8. (a) The select committee may, …, disclose publicly any information in the possession of such committee after a determination by such committee that the public interest would be served by such disclosure.

OBVIOUSLY, the public interest would have been served by warning people (and State and local governments) about the Coronavirus risks then known by CDC scientists and epidemiologists.

It gets even worse.

While National Security is used as a pretext to suppress science and public disclosure of public health risks, US National Security laws and policy framework do not include “health care” as a national security issue.

While the Congress covers up the COVID Pandemic using National Security secrecy, note this contradiction, according to the CDC’s  “Crimson Contagion” simulation:

the definition of national defense does not explicitly include health care resources, thereby highlighting the uncertainty of using the Defense Production Act to produce much needed medical countermeasures and matched vaccines in response to an influenza pandemic.

How twisted is that?

But it wasn’t only cowardly and corrupt US Senators and their staffs that withheld critical public health information from the American public.

I could find no laws, regulations, or policies that would restrict any CDC scientist, epidemiologist or other professional from disclosing this critical scientific, public health and epidemiological modeling information to the press and the public.

In fact, professional, scientific and medical ethics require such disclosure.

Where were all the scientists?

[Update – since I wrote this, media has reported that Trump received White House Daily briefings by national security and intelligence people on COVID risks as early as Jan. (likely earlier).  ~~~ end update]

Update: 4/28/20 – The door to the cover-up story finally opens a crack in the NY Times, but the coverup was underway long before the end of February:

• How Trump and His Team Covered Up the Coronavirus in Five Days ~~~ end update]

State Officials Were Ill-Prepared And Delayed Appropriate Response

NJ Hazard Mitigation Plan And Pandemic Influenza Plan Largely Ignored

Plan Calls Pandemic A “Looming Threat” & “Inevitable”, Yet Little Real Preparation

[Updates below]

Trump is not the only one who is failing.

There has been intense and valid media and public criticism of how the Trump administration has responded to the Coronavirus Pandemic, from delays in testing, to suppression and misrepresentation of science, to budget cuts and dismantling the government’s response capabilities:

The Trump administration has come under criticism for its proposed cuts to overall health funding in 2018. Cuts to CDC slashed 80% of its global disease outbreak program,^[103][104] forcing the four-year-old program to reduce operations from 49 countries to 10. In its fiscal 2020 budget, the Trump administration proposed eliminating funding for epidemiology and laboratory capacity at state and local levels.^{[105][106][103]} A $30 million Complex Crises Fund had also been cut entirely, which would have allowed the State Department to fund deployment of disease experts in the event of outbreaks.^[107] In May 2018, Trump’s then-national security advisor John Bolton disbanded a National Security Council global health security team set up to lead the American response to a pandemic.^[108]

While the CDC has announced plans to screen people for the coronavirus, only three of the 100 public health labs were reported to be fitted for that role even after delays, which has been attributed to the agency’s funding cuts.^[109]Trump has been further criticized for proposing further cuts to the CDC and Health Department budgets, of the amounts of 16% and 10%, respectively, in budget requests submitted to Congress on 10 February. The proposed budget also called for a $65 million cut to the US’ contribution to funding for the WHO.^[110]

But, NJ State officials have independent State legal authority and responsibility to plan for, respond to and otherwise manage pandemics that has gotten little if any scrutiny.

The NJ Emergency Health Powers Act (EHPA), signed into law September 14, 2005 (P.L. 2005, c.222), grants certain powers to state and local public health authorities to ensure effective planning and response to public health emergencies.

Thus spake the NJ Department of Health’s Pandemic Influenza Plan:

The Looming Threat:

History tells us that Influenza pandemics are inevitable but unpredictable and arrive with very little warning. Should an influenza pandemic virus again appear that behaves as the 1918 strain, the results could be catastrophic, even when taking into account the remarkable advances in medicine. Air travel could hasten the spread of a new virus, and decrease the time available for implementing interventions. Outbreaks would most likely occur simultaneously throughout much of the U.S., preventing shifts in human and material resources that usually occur in response to other disasters. The effect of influenza on individual communities will be relatively prolonged (weeks to months) in comparison to other types of disasters. Healthcare systems could be rapidly overburdened, economies strained, and social order disrupted. […]

If a severe (1918-like) pandemic hits NJ, the impact on the healthcare system and the number of deaths is estimated as follows:

Deaths                                                5,000 (2% of ill)

But the NJ Hazard Mitigation Plan’s Pandemic Chapter estimates 10 TIMES more deaths:

Three major influenza pandemics affected areas across the globe in the 20th century, causing millions of deaths. New Jersey saw the impacts of these pandemics. If a new influenza virus were to begin spreading throughout the world, New Jersey could experience more than 50,000 deaths, more than 275,000 people hospitalized, and more than 2.5 million people ill (NJDOH, 2012). Table 5.21-3 provides details on pandemic events that have impacted New Jersey.

In addition to a huge order of magnitude conflict in the projected number of deaths, the NJ Hazard Mitigation Plan (“will be”) is also far more blunt, honest and certain than the DoH Pandemic Plan (“could be“) about the totally inadequate capacity and likely collapse of the healthcare system:

The healthcare system will be severely taxed, if not overwhelmed, from the large number of illnesses and complications from influenza requiring hospitalization and critical care. CDC models estimate increases in hospitalization and intensive care unit demand of more than 25%. Ventilators will be the most critical shortage if a pandemic were to occur (Global Security, 2011).

What did NJ State officials do with this knowledge?

Knowing of this shortfall, did they procure and stockpile an adequate number of ventilators? Test kits? Hospital capacity? Face masks? Budget sufficient resources? Staff state DoH offices with qualified experts?

I found nothing about any of this in the FY’20 budget testimony of Gov. Murphy’s Commissioner of the Department of Health or on the OLS analysis of the DoH proposed FY’20 budget.

Why did they wait on the failed Trump administration response?

Is anyone asking Gov. Murphy and the State Department of Health these questions?

Gaps and lack of resources are no secret. As Robert Reich writes:

Local and state health departments are already barebones, having lost nearly a quarter of their workforce since 2008, according to the National Association of County and City Health Officials.

Healthcare in America is delivered mainly by private for-profit corporations which, unlike financial institutions, are not required to maintain reserve capacity. As a result, the nation’s supply of ventilators isn’t nearly large enough to care for projected numbers of critically ill coronavirus victims unable to breathe for themselves. Its 45,000 intensive care unit beds fall woefully short of the 2.9 million that are likely to be needed.

Despite a dire lack of resources, the NJ State Hazard Mitigation Plan Pandemic element abdicates State leadership and shifts the burden to local government – and inappropriately relies on police to respond to what is a public health emergency:

We saw the same fatal abdication in the response to Superstorm Sandy, which was exacerbated by Gov. Christie’s “unfunded mandates” “State Mandate/State Pay” policy under Executive Order #4. Gov. Murphy has not repealed Ex. Order #4 and has retained the same State abdication.

Finally, Gov. Murphy has championed climate change, so he and DEP Commissioner McCabe should be asked about this finding in the Hazard Mitigation Plan:

Climate change has the potential to increase the probability of pandemic occurring. While the relationship between climate change and increase in virus susceptibility is difficult to predict with certainty, there are scientific linkages between the two.

[Update: In an interview with CNN Sunday, Harvard University epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch said the coronavirus crisis “was foreseeable, and foreseen, weeks and months ago.”

“Only now is the White House coming out of denial,” said Lipsitch, “and heading straight into saying it could not have been foreseen.” ~~~ Jake Johnson, Common Dreams

[Update:  3/11/22 – Now two years later, with 1 MILLION people now dead in the US, it sickens me to write that State official knew THIS too:

Older, sicker, poorer, Blacker or browner, the people killed by COVID were treated as marginally in death as they were in life. Accepting their losses comes easily to “a society that places a hierarchy on the value of human life, which is absolutely what America is built on,” Debra Furr-Holden, an epidemiologist at the Michigan State University, told me.  ~~~ HOW DID THIS MANY DEATHS BECOME NORMAL? (Th Atlantic, 3/8/22) ~~~ end update]

 

[Update: 3/25/20 – this writer expands upon my point and connects the dots between nature and Coronavirus. ~~~ end update]

The World Health Organization (WHO) provides the global pandemic response management framework for all nations and states to follow.

I urge readers & intrepid journalists to read The WHO 2013 updated Pandemic Guidance.

Then compare the WHO Guidance to NJ Gov. Murphy’s Hazard Mitigation Plan – Pandemics

The WHO 2013 Guidance is is FAR more detailed than the NJ plan, because the Murphy 2019 Plan relies on an outdate WHO 2009 framework, not the 2013 update.

The 2013 WHO update includes a major new section on “Risk Management”.

NJ’s pandemic planning and response strategies are way behind the scientific curve.

Validating Bernie Sanders’ Medicare For All, WHO also recommends FREE healthcare – see WHO Guidance (@ p.31):

Explore ways to provide drugs and medical care free of charge (or cover by insurance) to encourage prompt reporting and treatment of human cases caused by a non-seasonal influenza virus or virus with pandemic potential.”

I assume that politically powerful NJ based Big Pharma and healthcare insurance industries kept that policy out of NJ’s policy planning.

Trump is not the only one who is failing.

[End Note: Once again, the historical and artistic context is stunningly apt:

In the Garden of Earthly Delights and elsewhere Bosch distinctly personalizes his indictments, by extending his warnings about human evil to encompass even his noble patrons, in this case the counts of Nassau. Bosch was extremely class-conscious, as the centerpiece of the Haywain triptych (fig. 17) reveals, with its mounted noble riders, literally chevaliers, lording their position of patrician privilege above the struggling pedestrian plebeians. In similar fashion, the sin of Luxuria, enacted in the central panel of his Garden of Earthly Delights, connects to the aristocratic tradition of courtly love gardens, which would have been an indulgence available chiefly to the wealthy, like his workshop’s depiction of Luxuria in the Seven Deadly Sins tabletop.

 

Update 3/19/20 – The NY Times writes a devastating story, similar to NJ failures, at the national level:

• Before Virus Outbreak, a Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded ~~~ End Update]

[Update 4/5/20 – Noam Chomsky agrees with my assessment – and he also notes China’s gene sequencing:

“This coronavirus pandemic could have been prevented, the information was there to prevent it. In fact, it was well-known. In October 2019, just before the outbreak, there was a large-scale simulation in the United States – possible pandemic of this kind,” he said, referring to an exercise – titled Event 201 – hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

“Nothing was done. The crisis was then made worse by the treachery of the political systems that didn’t pay attention to the information that they were aware of.

“On December 31, China informed the World Health Organization (WHO) of pneumonia-like symptoms with unknown origins. A week later, some Chinese scientists identified a coronavirus. Furthermore, they sequenced it and provided information to the world. By then, virologists and others who were bothering to read WHO reports knew that there was a coronavirus and knew that had to deal with it. Did they do anything? Well yes, some did.

“China, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore began to do something, and they have sort of pretty much seemed to have contained at least the first surge of the crisis.”

NOTHING TO FEAR BUT FEAR ITSELF

So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is…fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance….

…rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.

The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing.

Restoration calls, however, not for changes in ethics alone. This Nation asks for action, and action now.  ~~~ FDR, First Inaugural Address (March 4, 1933)

[Updates below]

Hey XXXXX – just checking in – how’s it going in your neck of the woods?

I’m astounded by virtually everything I read lately, so I’m trying my best to stay away from the news, but it is almost impossible.

I read that Camus is on the best seller list. But the literature for the day is not Camus’ The Plague, but rather Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. 

[Update: 3/23/20 – Edward Curtin finds Camus relevant at a very deep level, but notes the irrational panic dynamics at work that Miller illustrates.  ~~~ end update]

It’s important to recall why Arthur Miller wrote that play (in his words):

McCarthy’s power to stir fears of creeping Communism was not entirely based on illusion, of course; the paranoid, real or pretended, always secretes its pearl around a grain of fact. From being our wartime ally, the Soviet Union rapidly became an expanding empire. In 1949, Mao Zedong took power in China. Western Europe also seemed ready to become Red—especially Italy, where the Communist Party was the largest outside Russia, and was growing. Capitalism, in the opinion of many, myself included, had nothing more to say, its final poisoned bloom having been Italian and German Fascism. McCarthy—brash and ill-mannered but to many authentic and true—boiled it all down to what anyone could understand: we had “lost China” and would soon lose Europe as well, because the State Department—staffed, of course, under Democratic Presidents—was full of treasonous pro-Soviet intellectuals. It was as simple as that. […]

The more I read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off corresponding images of common experiences in the fifties: the old friend of a blacklisted person crossing the street to avoid being seen talking to him; the overnight conversions of former leftists into born-again patriots; and so on. Apparently, certain processes are universal. […]

I am not sure what “The Crucible” is telling people now, but I know that its paranoid center is still pumping out the same darkly attractive warning that it did in the fifties. For some, the play seems to be about the dilemma of relying on the testimony of small children accusing adults of sexual abuse, something I’d not have dreamed of forty years ago. For others, it may simply be a fascination with the outbreak of paranoia that suffuses the play—the blind panic that, in our age, often seems to sit at the dim edges of consciousness. Certainly its political implications are the central issue for many people; the Salem interrogations turn out to be eerily exact models of those yet to come in Stalin’s Russia, Pinochet’s Chile, Mao’s China, and other regimes.

Nothing to fear, but fear itself, indeed! (in politics, economics, ecology, and public health)

The Coronavirus has exposed a badly broken, dysfunctional, privatized, and deregulated corporate “public health system”, what the NY Times today has cast not as an ideological and political construct, but as an essential feature of  “the American tradition” of rugged individualism (“individual rights and limited federal power”), voluntary association, community response, and localism (“decentralized“), all of which they portray as far preferable to “centralized” “command and control” (surprised they didn’t find a way to insert “Soviet” or “Cuban”, given their Sanders smears):

“You can be too centralized, and a lot of the problems in China reflected an excessive use of the command-and-control model, in which everything had to run through Beijing for approval,” said Robert Dingwall, a British sociologist who has studied responses to pandemics.

But what that “American tradition” amounts to is: you’re on your own in a Neoliberal Nightmare:

Without clear guidance from the government, “it feels like we’ve been left on our own to decide what would be best,”

The obvious and blatant ideology in that NYT story is remarkable – propaganda beyond Orwell and Manufacturing Consent.

[Update: 3/23/20 – this author sees similar propaganda, manipulation, and opportunism. ~~~ end update]

And they put that totally political and ideological claim in the mouth of an academic (a British sociologist, no less) as if it were objective and rigorous. Of course, there was no mention of the fact that China was able to build hospitals in 10 days, test millions of people, and apparently contained the spread of the virus – while the US can’t even seem to test people in timely way with functioning tests methods.

And they write this story AFTER the Trump administration testified to Congress that they expect to rely primarily on “market forces” and the private sector. The best analysis of all this I’ve heard was by Jeff Sachs of Columbia, in a podcast interview of The Intercept.

In other frustrations, I sense that Bernie Sanders’ is going to fold tonight against Biden.

First, he telegraphed his “questions” days in advance, giving the Biden spinmeisters ample opportunity. But the larger problem is that Bernie seems unwilling to go on offense, against his “friend” Joe Biden. Ironic in how Bernie echoes Biden’s “friendships” with racist southern senators and vile Republicans, like Dick Cheney.

Because “electability” has gotten Biden this far, the debate tonight should be about Sanders criticizing Biden’s awful corporate warmongering Neoliberal record, not asking him softball questions about how to solve problems.

On top of all that, the debate is likely to be dominated by virus panic issues, which will divert from Biden’ record and vulnerabilities in terms of “electability”.

The chain of events and conspiracy – yes, there was a vast Neoliberal DNC, corporate, media and elites conspiracy to take down Bernie Sanders, beyond what we saw in 2016 – that have produced Biden’s lead is even more galling – and events keep breaking in his favor.

On a personal note, I left the Sonoran desert on Wednesday and am now in the mountains of Coronado National Forest, just outside a small town, Patagonia. It’s about 100 miles east of where I was in Ajo and 20 miles north of Nogales Mexico, elevation 4,300 feet, so it’s been pretty cold. Had 4 days of rain during travel, which has kept me on paved roads. Take a look:

I’m reconsidering my plans to come back east in light of the virus, and expect to stay as remote as possible in the mountains for the summer.

The poor dog is still lame – it breaks my heart to see him limp on 3 legs, given how incredibly strong and vibrant he was. But, it doesn’t seem like he’s in constant pain and I’m still giving him the painkillers and anti-inflammatory drugs the vet gave me.

On, literally, the bright side – the sun just emerged from a bank of clouds on a cold morning – all for now.

Hope you are doing OK.

ps – Want to avoid anti-science denialism, but I’m thinking that this “pandemic” is grossly exaggerated and the response driven by hysteria and opportunism.

In all the “data” and modeling about rates of transmission, incidence of cases, and deaths, a statistic I have NOT seen is how the number of Coronavirus deaths compare with the “background” mortality rate. If this virus is killing a lot of people, that would show up as excess mortality. Another key data I’ve not seen reported in the hospital admission numbers, including cases in ICU.

The absence of any mention of excess mortality may be premature, but I still find it odd given all the attention to excess mortality in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, where “heart disease” was the number one cause of excess deaths:

Methods. We obtained monthly vital statistics data on all deaths from January 2008 through October 2017. We conducted a time-series analysis to estimate excess mortality in September and October 2017 overall and by age, sex, and cause of death.

[Update: 3/23/20 – this expert made the same point on the importance of “excess mortality”:

Thus the most important indicator for judging the danger of the disease is not the frequently reported number of positively-tested persons and deaths, but the number of persons actually and unexpectedly developing or dying from pneumonia (so-called excess mortality).  ~~~ end update]

[Update: 4/6/20 – The NY Times finally covers the issues related to data on mortality, but the story did not explore the issues I’ve raised regarding excess mortality associated with COVID-19. ~~~ end update].

And on top of the gaps, all this “data” are highly uncertain, because we have so little hard data based on testing of the population (and reliance on China’s statistics may not be reliable).

[Update: 3/23/20 – this author makes the same points about uncertainty, lack of data, and the questionable reliability of data. ~~~ end update]

Of course precaution is wise, but hysteria is not. Time will tell. I hope I’m right.

pps- I just came across this grave – let’s hope it’s not a metaphor of things to come:

Wolfe

[Update 4/5/20 – Noam Chomsky agrees with my assessment about China and US failures to prevent, prepare, test and respond – and he also notes China’s gene sequencing:

“This coronavirus pandemic could have been prevented, the information was there to prevent it. In fact, it was well-known. In October 2019, just before the outbreak, there was a large-scale simulation in the United States – possible pandemic of this kind,” he said, referring to an exercise – titled Event 201 – hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

“Nothing was done. The crisis was then made worse by the treachery of the political systems that didn’t pay attention to the information that they were aware of.

“On December 31, China informed the World Health Organization (WHO) of pneumonia-like symptoms with unknown origins. A week later, some Chinese scientists identified a coronavirus. Furthermore, they sequenced it and provided information to the world. By then, virologists and others who were bothering to read WHO reports knew that there was a coronavirus and knew that had to deal with it. Did they do anything? Well yes, some did.

“China, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore began to do something, and they have sort of pretty much seemed to have contained at least the first surge of the crisis.”