April 1 2020
Q: Bloomberg reported that “Many New York Coronavirus Patients Are Young, Surprising Doctors”. That’s a different take... how do you read this?
A: Many patients are indeed young worldwide but reporters forget to say that the vast majority recovers, unless they have comorbidities, vape or do drugs. Also, the average age in NYC is 35 years vs 38 in the USA. There are more young people in NYC, hence increased incidence amongst young.
Q: Great point - the other part of the question, though, is why do they need incubation and to be put on ventilators?
A: Those are patients with multiple comorbidities: asthmatics, vapers, diabetics, etc. NYC has high pollution level which does not help. It is the same in Los Angeles: the incidence of asthma in downtown is x 4. Look at the map of air quality in Los Angeles as of today . You can see that even in a “green zone” with good air quality the difference is 36 fold! Remember that traffic is down by 60%.
Q: Good point. You still think end of April is when this will drastically drop? Also, had we not implemented the social distancing measures, don’t you think we would be in a much much worse situation with hospitals and health care system completely overwhelmed?
A: Yes, hospitalizations curve in New York is flat (do not count all cases - could day by day). Yes, the US deaths jumped to over 1,000, half of these are from outside of NYC. Something drastic must happen to fulfill doomsday prophesy of 100,000 + deaths. This will require malicious spread of the virus and a complete failure of the healthcare system.
If you take Italy’s total of 13,000 x 5.5 (US population is approximately 5.5 times Italy’s) one arrives at around 70,000. But, the Italy’s population is much older: 48 y.o. on average vs. 38 y.o. on average in the USA, and our healthcare is better equipped - so it should be many times less than that.
Q: Great point - so, why are we hearing these crazy data instead?
A: The doomsayers must be punished when all this ends, although they will claim the victory by declaring they saved 100,000 lives and avoid punishment!
Q - comment: Yeah - that’s exactly what’s going on now. Even Trump is saying it because it will widen the margin of his victory over the disease. He will be able to show how he saved over 1 million American lives… You remember that I had said it. It’s all about setting the right “expectations”. If you exceed expectations you did great Even if you botched it!
A: By the way, as of the 31st of March the fatality rate amongst diagnosed cases was 1.9%, while on April 1st 2.3%. Does this mean that fatality rate is truly higher? Not at all, because increase in total number of diagnosed cases will go up as testing ramps up. Also, there is a bias who gets tested: most are either sick or were in direct contact with sick.
The number of cases is distributed unevenly between boroughs:
Bronx - 19%
Brooklyn - 27%
Manhattan - 15%
Queens - 33%
Staten Island - 6%
Further, percent of foreign born population:
Bronx - 32%
Brooklyn - 38%
Manhattan - 29%
Queens - 49%
Staten Island - 21%
Percent of white population:
Bronx - 30%
Brooklyn - 41%
Manhattan - 54%
Queens - 44%
Staten Island - 78%
Make your own conclusions!