General
o The US study which suggested - after sample testing of antibody levels - has been dismissed as fatally flawed. (See the article below). But we wait to see if the results are replicated in more rigorously designed trials.
Spain
o The most draconian lockdown in Europe has been extended until at least May 9, with the PM describing progress in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic as “fragile and insufficient”.
o But the government has bowed to pressure and will allow kids under 13 to leave their prisons from April 27. Needless to say, circumstances have not been defined, which should give our zealous police plenty of scope to fine malefactors.
Germany
o Some are saying Germany's success is more apparent than real, pointing out that the death rate is rising and suggesting that, over time, there'll be a higher death rate than in less 'successful' countries. Such as Sweden, perhaps. Who can say?
o Britain's Deputy Chief Medical Officer has said there's no evidence to connect German’s policy of continued aggressive testing with its significantly lower mortality figures.“We are at different phases of the pandemic” she said, cautioning that the rates of disease in Germany are starting to rise. “I think we have rather ended up with a conversation which is a demand on testing without necessarily seeing that causal link.”
o The government is under pressure to make mask-wearing compulsory in public after the success of a city-wide trial.
Sweden
o Sweden's infectious diseases chief has said parts of the country could achieve "herd immunity" as early as next month, as debate rages over the rising death toll.
o "Here in Sweden we're playing the long game, and listening to science, not fear".
The UK
o The deputy Chief Medical Officer has described the initial “Contain” phase of the response, where testing of suspected cases was vigorously pursued, as “very successful”. But she has declined to say whether the UK had "passed the peak" of the virus.
Life in the Time of Something Like Cholera
- Another look at the businesses which are benefitting from the lockdown.
- It's always been permitted here to take your dog out for a short walk and now I read - though with incredulity - that, though your can't go out for exercise or to give your kids some air, you can go out to feed bloody feral cats.
- The egregious Vox party is reported to have opened hundreds of Twitter accounts to spread misinformation and fake photos.
- On a lighter note . . .
Real Life in Spain
- María's Chronicle Day 36.
- Soccer matches and other sports events in Spain will take place in empty venues at least until the end of the summer, the mayor of Madrid has said.
- Not a huge surprise . . . There's been a spike in searches for homes with gardens and terrace. Not that anyone - except my new neighbours, apparently - would be allowed to move home right now.
- The OFC continues to put the November elections at the top of his Priorities list and persists with a PR campaign which, gratifyingly, seems to be impressing fewer and fewer Americans. Though 40% of them will always hang on his every inane word.
- The Pre-Covidian world of gender transition and supposedly being able to choose whether one is a man or woman has been made obsolete when we live in a world where what matters is infection and the immunity that is determined by the chromosomes we are born with. . . The idea that a man could choose to be a woman would not have occurred to a previous age that struggled to feed and clothe itself. It came from the decadence of too much abundance, too much money and too much time to waste on making distinctions that are without difference such as the one that supposedly exists between sex and gender. Full article here.
- Word of the Day:- Confinamiento: Lockdown, I guess.
- Eptitude. The antonym of ineptitude but one of those words you never see in the positive sense these days, tho' I read it yesterday. Like kemp, couth and ane.
- You might have noticed that my usual quote at the head of this post is missing today. This comes at the 'suggestion' of my elder daughter.
- You will have noticed a change of background colour and text. This is to make the links at the bar at the bottom visible.
Neither change is necessarily permanent . .
THE ARTICLE
Sadly, Stanford's antibody study will not save us: there are no pandemic short-cuts: Ambrose Evans Pritchard, Telegraph
At first glance, Stanford University’s study of Covid-19 antibodies is the magic bullet that political leaders and global markets have been praying for.
It suggests that fifty to eighty-five times more people in California’s Santa Clara County have been infected with the virus than officially confirmed.
Ergo, the case death rate in this sample region is lower than feared by orders of magnitude - indeed, no worse than a bad flu season. It means the world is by now well along the path to herd immunity.
The study implies that global lockdowns are grotesquely disproportionate to the actual threat, that the measures may be doing more harm than good even in terms of health, and that we can safely return to normal life within weeks.
It has generated gasps of excitement and is now a factor driving Wall Street’s torrid rebound, along with hopes of salvation from Gilead’s antiviral drug, and other apparent Godsends. It has been seized upon by advocates in the US, the UK, and Europe to push for an early restoration of our civil liberties.
Unfortunately,the results are too good to be true. It was not a random sample at all. The ‘pre-print’ study - still awaiting peer review - is already falling apart under scrutiny.
The level of ‘selection bias’ among those tested is becoming all too clear. “I participated in the study because I had been sick the week before and was very curious,” tweeted Matthew McNaughton, one of the study’s guinea pigs.
Investors should tread carefully if they are plunging back into equities or junk bonds based on these heady fumes.
The trial was designed and led by apostles of herd immunity with the express purpose of validating their theories and bringing about lockdown relief, an intention they divulged in a Wall Street Journal comment article before the study began.
“A universal quarantine may not be worth the costs it imposes on the economy, community and individual mental and physical health,” they said. This is what is called ‘digging in your heels’ in academia.
In that article, 'Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say', professors Bendavid and Jay Bhattacharya suggested that the final US death toll would be 20,000 to 40,000 even if the virus were largely allowed to run unchecked. It will blow through that figure this weekend despite lockdowns and even though large areas of the country have hardly been touched so far.
The Stanford study inferred that the infection fatality rate is between 0.12pc and 0.2pc, far lower than the rates of 1pc or more as assumed by most health authorities - and which would in the UK lead to several hundred thousand deaths and swamp the NHS under a let-rip policy
The problem is that we already have concrete death figures from Italian communes that render this conclusion almost impossible.
We know that the numbers of confirmed Covid deaths in a string of hotspots in Lombardy, Piedmont, and the Veneto - which do not include care homes and a large numbers who never reached hospital - is already well above 0.2pc.
The ratios go much higher if you look at the sudden jump in deaths above the seasonal average. Giorgio Gori, the mayor of Bergamo, says there were 626 extra deaths between early March and mid-May in his city of 113,000 inhabitants. This implies that 0.55pc of the entire population died either directly from the corona virus or from the broader shock to the health system.
The figures were over 1pc of all inhabitants in the worst afflicted communes of Nembro, Gazzanica, Brembate Sopra, etc.
The region’s hospitals were overwhelmed. This of course led to higher deaths. But there is other data around the world that points in the same direction.
South Korea arguably has the best regime of testing, tracing, and isolating cases - along with Taiwan - but its declared death rate has nevertheless crept up to 2.2pc of confirmed cases, (0.8pc for people in their fifties, and 2.5pc for the sixties cohort)
The country is undoubtedly missing silent cases (perhaps half?) but they have tracking data on every single infection, and an army of sleuths hunting down each contact, with strict quarantine in controlled facilities for those who test positive. It stretches credulity to argue that there are ten or twenty times more cases that have escaped Korea’s notice.
Even New York City’s data are already overtaking the Stanford study. There have been 13,157 Covid deaths so far out of 8.4 million people. That is 0.16pc of the entire city.
The Stanford study made a fundamental error, leaving aside questions about the reliability of the serology tests. It recruited 3,330 volunteers from a Facebook ad in the hope of finding a random sample, but the screening was inadequate.
Several volunteers admit that they had been ill and latched onto the serological test to find out if they had antibodies. That is why they braved the sheriff’s order to stay at home and drove to wait for an hour at a testing site on April 3 or 4. The effect was pre-selection bias.
Most epidemiologists think the true infection rate in the US is around ten times higher that the official numbers - or was, at the time of the study in early April - but that is a far cry from 50-85 times. It entirely changes the death ratios and the nature of the public healthy emergency.
There is another grim feature of this pandemic. People keep dying long after infection. Chile’s acclaimed writer Luis Sepulveda, author of the Old Man Who Read Love Stories, died aged 70 last week after 48 days in Oviedo hospital. We do not know how much lasting damage can be done to people who seem to shake it off lightly at first. We are still groping in the dark.
It would be wonderful to think there is a short-cut to escape this infernal lockdown. But clutching at straws is not a public health policy. Nor is it a strategy for investors. It is speculation.
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