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Bulletin 268: Special alert: the novel corona virus is rapidly changing the world; it will change your life too

• Previous Bulletin(267, 2/8/20): US plutonium pit production plans advance, part II: at least $25 billion in LANL life cycle costs omitted in past comparisons; more

February 25, 2020

Dear friends and colleagues –

Like many of you we have been terribly busy, with many responsibilities.

And we aren't epidemiologists. So we mostly haven't much shared our reviews and internal discussions of the growing epidemic of novel coronavirus infections (officially, Covid-19), which have been going on for the past month. (Michelle Matisons, our new Research Associate, did write a good short piece for Multibriefs: "Public health cuts undermine US pandemic preparedness.")

Over the past weeks, we also were afraid you wouldn't credence our concerns, because we lacked much knowledge and authority and perhaps even more so because of normalcy bias, which is deep and widespread in the so-called First-World.

We did bring up our concerns about the growing pandemic, face to face, with selected congressional defense staff, and also with Thom Mason, the director of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Mason pooh-poohed our concerns as expected, saying the flu was more dangerous. Well, Mason is a busy guy -- and a physicist. (I didn't hold his ignorant reply against him and didn't try to convince him because he certainly wouldn't believe me. I mention this here because of the ridiculous authority so many uneducated people -- especially in New Mexico -- lend to "experts" like him. His cognizant staff disagrees with him about this, by the way -- see below.)

Finally, the U.S. mainstream media is beginning to catch on, and so is Congress.

A moment ago the New York Times finally had an up-to-date article with almost the right tone ("The C.D.C. warned Americans to begin preparing for the possibility of a coronavirus outbreak: 'This might be bad.'", February 25, 2020).

As usual the NYT is somewhat wrong. This is already bad and it is going to get a whole lot worse. This novel coronavirus is already changing the world. It will affect everyone's life in one way or another.

The primary purpose of this Bulletin is simply to say, in the insouciant American context where hardly anything is treated seriously any more, that this is a serious matter, which will directly or indirectly affect everything we all do, whether in the political, national security, climate, or energy policy spheres, or personally. As we have been saying for decades, we face converging crises. "Converging" simply means each challenge or crisis increasingly affects our ability to respond to others.

Should this coronavirus become a "community virus" in the U.S. this year or next, as the Director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) says is likely (CNN video), it will likely kill far more people in this country than World War II (that conflict killed ~419,400 US persons). If as Harvard's Lipsitch says, half ("40-70%") of the world (applied to the US, 165 million [M]) contracts the virus and let us say 2% of those who contract the virus die, that would be 3.31 M deaths. At a 1% mortality rate that is still 1.65 M deaths, about four times total World War II mortality for the US.

Lipstich's "40-70%" case rate, of which perhaps 10-20% would be serious cases requiring hospitalization, would quickly overcome the US hospital system and public health system overall, raising the death rate from this disease and others, not even considering the serious risk of transmission within health facilities.

US military personnel in World War II had about a 2.5% mortality rate, very roughly comparable to this virus so far, given the huge uncertainties in the data.

Of note, the death rate among "resolved" cases -- as opposed to the death rate among all cases known and unknown -- is much higher than 2%. So far that figure, worldwide, is 9%.

Worldwide -- again, with many uncertainties -- casualties from a first coronavirus pandemic might broadly be expected to be in the general range of World War II (~80 M).

By way of contrast, the CDC estimates that the flu causes between 12,000 and 61,000 deaths each year in the US since 2010, even with partially-effective vaccines widely and cheaply available. Annual flu cases number 9.3 to 45 M.

So this virus, in its first time through the US population, is likely to cause very roughly two orders of magnitude more deaths than the annual flu season. The figure could be lower, or higher. In any case, this is a dangerous disease.

As is the case with the flu, having the disease confers no lasting immunity.

Unless it is somehow controlled or mutates into a more harmless or less infectious form, we might reasonably expect this pandemic -- again, should it continue as our leading experts are now saying is likely to be the case -- to temporarily halt or reverse global population growth, now running about +1.05%/year.

Back on February 5, LANL epidemiologists estimated the initial R-sub-0 basic reproduction number for this disease at a very high 4.7 to 6.6, which was reduced to the 2.3 to 3.0 range (roughly the figure for pandemic influenza) by China's enforced social distancing measures, aka quarantines. The Chinese data, of course, is very suspect. The authors did the best they could.

If we are lucky, this virus will mutate into a less deadly or less transmissible form, or an effective vaccine or treatment will suddenly appear and quickly be supplied to the world, or some other happy change in circumstance occur.

I know of nothing so hopeful immediately on the horizon, however, and so can only echo what the greatest and most authoritative experts are now saying: this is now a grave, worldwide emergency.

Today's NYT piece ("The C.D.C. warned Americans to begin preparing for the possibility of a coronavirus outbreak: 'This might be bad.'") said Congress had received a "frightening classified briefing:"

Even as the president offered his sunny view of the crisis, Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, said lawmakers had received a frightening classified briefing on the epidemic. The assessment should be made public, he wrote on Twitter, and people “would be as appalled and astonished” as I am by the inadequacy of preparedness and prevention.”

On Monday, the Trump administration requested $2.5 billion to help stop the spread of the virus. It asked Congress to authorize $1.25 billion in new emergency funds and called for diverting another $1.25 billion from other federal programs.

The request is a significant escalation of the White House’s response, but Representative Nita M. Lowey, Democrat of New York and chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee, called the request “woefully insufficient.”

We have asked Senator Heinrich to make that briefing public.

We think you should be calling and writing your congressional delegation to start taking this a lot more seriously than they have so far. We don't need partisanship. We need preparedness, as Michelle and Ben Hunt have said. There is a built-in tendency to minimize this -- for the sake of the stock market, right?

I don't want to load up this Bulletin with too many references. The half-life of truth in news on this pandemic -- that's what it is now, a pandemic -- tends to be measured in hours.

That said, Ilargi at The Automatic Earth has done a pretty good job of corralling current information (such as today's edition), and we commend you to it.

Just as we are finishing this Bulletin, I see that Ilargi has put up a fresh post on this topic. It’s The Virus, Stupid. I hope you read it.

Greg Mello, for the Study Group