CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--The Covid-19 pandemic came out of China in late 2019 and early 2020, but the United States was mostly spared for a couple of months.
In the meanwhile, European countries were the petri dishes for a new kind of disease. In Italy, the onslaught of sickness was so rapid, and the cases were so severe, that the world was reading about how Italian doctors were facing a dilemma. They might have to pick and choose the patients to save, based on the limited resources they expected to have on hand.
Eventually, Italy lost more than 35,000 dead, which for their population (60 million) turns out to be a lot. On a per capita basis, it is 586 dead per million people (so far). But with careful social controls, the Italians brought their epidemic under control. Since the beginning of May, the death rate has been seriously reduced, and for more than a month, the Italian Covid-19 death rate has been near-zero.
Here is the time course of the Italian epidemic, along with several other European and South American countries as well as the United States, as put together by Kevin Drum from publicly available data.
I invite you to look at the curve at the top-left, which shows the Italian results.
There are a couple of features that you can recognize in this curve. At the beginning, the number of dead rose rapidly, along what was essentially an exponentially upward curve. Eventually the death toll peaked and gradually began to decline. In all of the countries shown, the decline in the death rate is always slower than the initial rapid increase.
Since the end of June, Italy has suffered a very low number of Covid-19 deaths, so few that they don’t show on the curve.
We can probably ascribe the reduction in deaths to the strict lockdown that Italy enforced on its populace. You might remember television news videos showing Italians waving and singing to each other from their balconies as the lockdown went on. Under the supervision of the authorities, Italian streets were nearly empty.
France shows a similarly shaped curve, as do the United Kingdom and Germany. There are significant differences in the total dead in each country, represented on a per million population basis. France is at 452 per million, Italy is at 586, and Germany, remarkably, is at only 110 per million.
Trying to explain these results on something as simple as population density does not work: Germany actually has the highest population density (603 per square mile) when compared with Italy (518) and France (319), yet it has managed a better record by far than the other countries.
The United States is the serious outlier
I bring up the major European nations because they provide several comparisons with our own. The curve for the United States is at the bottom, and shown larger than for the other countries.
The U.S. death total (so far) is actually pretty comparable on a per capita basis with the European countries we’ve looked at above, having reached 464 deaths per million as of now. Since our population is several times larger than any of these European countries, our death total is also considerably higher, having reached 152,000 as of now.
But there is one other element of the American curve that is different and ought to be alarming. Our death curve initially rose exponentially, similarly to other nations, and then fell slowly. But when we got down near the zero-line, we changed. The American death curve is going back up. In fact, it’s been rising for the entire past month, growing from a minimum of about 1.5 deaths per million to the current level of about 3.5 deaths per million. In other words, our daily Covid-19 death toll has approximately doubled since the fourth of July.
We can get involved in the blame game if you like. But whatever you want to say about the way our president, governors, and mayors are handling the epidemic, it is obvious that right now, we are not doing as good a job of saving lives as the other countries. As of the beginning of August, we are losing about a thousand people a day to the virus.
For whatever reason, we have gone back to infecting each other. Maybe it’s due to the good old, all-American tendency to see ourselves as free spirits who don’t have a lot of respect for established authority. Maybe a significant part of the upsurge is the rebellion against rational carefulness so characteristic of the Trump supporters.
Whatever the ultimate reasons, the death curve suggests strongly that we are in trouble. Depending on whether the death curve continues to rise or begins to slow down again, we could potentially be in for another fifty-thousand dead. If things really get out of control, we could make that a hundred thousand. Neither of these numbers is out of the range of estimates made by expert epidemiologists.
It’s time for the American people to start taking the problem really seriously.
Addendum
Over these past several months, I’ve been talking about the way that the number of cases grow in this kind of epidemic. When the growth goes up proportionally to what it is at any particular time, we see the kind of curves described above. If on week one we saw one case, and on week two we saw two cases, we might expect that on week three we would see 4 cases and on week four we would see 8 cases. This kind of growth is referred to as “exponential” because it follows a mathematical formula which reads as “two to the nth power.”
In the case of Covid-19, we originally were seeing the number of cases doubling about every 4 days. With the lockdown and precautions people are taking, the doubling time is now quite a bit longer. But if you go to the Johns Hopkins website and look in the lower right corner, you will see that the worldwide growth in the number of cases continues to be exponential.
There is one quick way of checking on this. That lower right panel offers you a clickable button labeled logarithmic. When you click on that button, the curve becomes a straight line, and in this case, it goes upward. That confirms that we are going through a continued exponential growth in the worldwide case load.
The thing about the word “exponential” is that it refers to the shape of the curve. It does not just mean that something is bigger. Unfortunately, the word exponential has become a jargon term for the mathematically illiterate, who use it to mean “bigger” or perhaps “lots bigger.”
And so that most august of publications, the New Yorker, used the term in this innumerate way:
“When there is an exponential increase in the number of absentee ballots, many of which will be cast by people likely to make mistakes because they’re unfamiliar with the process, the number of rejections will rise, too.”
No, New Yorker, the word does not mean bigger. We will not be having weekly presidential elections, each of which has twice as many voters as the week before. We may have lots more absentee voters, but it will be, at least for the year 2020, a onetime thing.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
