Oregon has lost its mind over COVID-19

“We are in a race between the ideology of safetyism and the facts.”

By Professor Hinkley May 4, 2020

If you’re reading this, I’m here to tell you that you’re not alone and you’re not crazy. A well-known scientist, who of course wouldn't let his name be used, said it so well that I’m just going to start with him:

“The lack of science behind the world’s response to the virus is the most frightening thing I have seen in my lifetime. We have given up all of our constitutional rights for all intents and purposes live in one of the most restrictive police states in the history of mankind…This is not about a virus—and it’s certainly not based on a scientific assessment of the data about the virus. I voted Democrat and have always leaned left. But CNN, Washington Post, and NY Times have become purveyors of fearporn, outright lies, and/or data presented in a slanted way meant to mislead the masses.”

What in the world is going on? Six weeks ago, we needed to “flatten the curve” allowing hospitals time to get ready for, and manage, the onslaught of COVID-19 patients. In this relatively realistic world (that we’ve since departed), it was accepted that the virus would always be here, we just needed to hunker down to give the sickest the very best chance of surviving by having proper medical care when they all arrived at the hospital. But that was then. We’ve entered something altogether different now, as this excellent article written today explains:

“…the idea behind bending the curve wasn’t that we would bend the curve until there were no more cases. Indeed, it was expressed that we might end up with a similar number of cases, but that by spreading them out we would lower the number of fatalities. This, then, is something different: The idea that we should use the shutdowns to eradicate the virus as best we can, and that weighing lives against the economy reflects a choice tantamount to sacrificing some portion of the population.”

Exactly. “Bending the curve” is no longer enough. Are we supposed to hunker down until we avoid all death or until the virus just disappears? Since neither of these is possible, I can only conclude that Oregon has lost its mind. Let’s see what the facts say.

Facts still matter

Regardless of what you might read, the facts about COVID-19 are PLENTIFUL versus five weeks ago. Plentiful enough for me to say the following, and then back it up with details and sources:

We now know the Infection Fatality Rate (“IFR”) for COVID-19 is not only dramatically lower than feared but also starkly different by age group; we know that Oregon’s hospitals are virtually empty; we know that children are not vectors for COVID-19 and that their IFR is effectively zero (so they can safely return to school); we know that the virus isn’t transmitted outdoors nor in retail environments; and, finally, we know that the data on lockdowns being an effective way to manage the virus is sketchy at best, and that the negative side-effects of lockdowns through other deaths and economic ruin will meaningfully exceed the benefits of lockdowns. Meanwhile, our Governor here in Oregon appears wed to a model (not science) that has been disastrously wrong so far to keep us all hiding in our homes.

Yes, I said it. And I will make it even more clear: I think the choice to lockdown most of America—including my beloved home state of Oregon—will be viewed as the biggest and most costly policy blunders in the history of the United States. Luckily, I’m not the only one saying this, I was pretty shocked to see the centrist and widely-respected Fox News commentator Brit Hume say the exact same thing:

“I think it’s time to consider the possibility, Shannon, that this lockdown – as opposed to the more moderate mitigation efforts – is a colossal public policy calamity,” Hume said, according to Fox News. “That the damage to the economy, businesses that I see, businesses are closing. Many may not reopen. Those jobs will be lost. Those businesses will be lost. Those incomes will be lost.”
“Plus, the effect on children who don’t have their normal life,” he continued. “They don’t have school. They can’t play with their friends, even outdoors. All these things are accumulating. They’re not going to get better, Shannon. They’re going to get worse with time. And, as I say, we may not recover from many of these losses for a very long time if ever.”

IFR: We never would’ve locked down for this

You have two kinds of fatality rates in epidemiology: the CASE fatality rate, and the INFECTION fatality rate. Early on, all we had for COVID-19 was a CASE fatality rate, and it was scary, telling us that perhaps 5-10% of diagnosed CASES of COVID-19 ended up as death. Now, any epidemiologist would tell you that’s always how it works with a new disease, but this trend was lost on the paranoid media. Since that time, we now know the ACTUAL fatality rate—the IFR— for COVID-19, because we are now counting ALL the people who have been infected by the virus, including this who were asymptomatic. As Dr. Scott Atlas of Stanford explained in the NY Post last week:

First, we know the risk of dying from COVID-19 is far lower than initially thought, and not significant for the overwhelming majority of those infected. Multiple recent studies from Iceland, Germany, USC, Stanford and New York City all suggest that the fatality rate if infected is likely far lower than early estimates, perhaps under 0.1 to 0.4 percent, i.e., 10 to 40 times lower than estimates that motivated extreme isolation.
In the Big Apple, with almost one-third of all US deaths, the rate of death for all people ages 18 to 45 is 0.01 percent, or 13 per 100,000 in the population, one-eightieth of the rate for people age 75 and over. For people under 18, the rate of death is zero per 100,000. Of Empire State fatalities, almost two-thirds were over 70 years of age. And regardless of age, if you don’t already have an underlying chronic condition, your chances of dying are small. Of 7,959 NYC COVID-19 deaths fully investigated for underlying conditions, 99.2 percent had an underlying illness.

Dr. Atlas cites 5 separate studies above that all show how much more of the population has already been exposed to COVID-19 than we previously thought, which allows us to calculate a true fatality rate for COVID-19. He also cites the non-partisan Center for Evidenced-Based Medicine at Oxford that is tracking the IFR in real time, and here’s their very latest:

“Taking account of historical experience, trends in the data, increased number of infections in the population at largest, and potential impact of misclassification of deaths gives a presumed estimate for the COVID-19 IFR somewhere between 0.1% and 0.41%”

I’m going to say this as simply as I can: IF we had known the IFR for COVID-19 would be between 0.1% and 0.41%, there is no way any country would’ve locked down. Now that we know that, every state and country should immediately end their lockdown, including Oregon. Every day we wait is causing so much damage, with no science to support it.

Oregon’s hospital are EMPTY and have never been taxed

Today in the Oregonian, it was reported that as of today, 92 Oregonians were hospitalized with COVID-19. While the article does mention that’s a 40% drop from early April, it fails to mention Oregon’s hospital capacity, which you can easily find on the OHA website. And, when you do, I hope the number shocks you as much as it shocked me. Oregon has 8,298 hospital beds in the state. COVID-19 patients occupy 1.1% of all hospital beds! You can get a sense of the minuscule amount of COVID-19 patients visually through this chart in the same document, showing COVID-19 patients as a % of all patients here in Oregon entering the emergency rooms (my comment in the red box, the text at the top of the slide is from OHA):

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There was a singular reason for starting these lockdowns: flatten the curve of people getting the virus so that the healthcare system wouldn't run out of space to serve those in need. Governor Brown made that very clear on the day she issued the stay at home order, stating she was doing so “to help avoid overwhelming local and regional healthcare capacity.”

It would stand to reason that once healthcare capacity was no longer at risk, the stay-at-home order would be lifted, but that’s not what’s happening. Instead, we Oregonians are being subjected to ambiguous metrics (having robust testing and contact-tracing is the current mantra) and date-free timelines. I think it would be fair for any reasonable person to ask, “what the hell is going on?”

By the way, a large hospital system out in Pennsylvania is choosing to get back to work, in defiance of Pennsylvania’s own lockdown—the irony!!

A UPMC doctor on Thursday made a case the death rate for people infected with the new coronavirus may be as low as 0.25% — far lower than the mortality rates of 2-4% or even higher cited in the early days of the pandemic…“We’ve learned that way more people, far, far more people have actually been exposed to the infection without any knowledge of it. That makes the overall death rate much lower,” said Yealy, who is UPMC’s chair of emergency medicine. “Many people just didn’t feel sick at all and recovered without difficulty.”…Yealy was asked whether people should worry about COVID-19 more than the regular flu. He said people should be “worried differently," pointing out that both take their heaviest toll on the elderly, especially nursing home residents, and people weakened by other medical conditions. Yealy said he “would not think of it as more or less, just two different illnesses that share some features, but have some distinct differences." Sackrowitz said she expects COVID-19 will be part of the ongoing “disease burden” affecting Americans and, as with the flu, doctors will find treatments.

Children are NOT vectors, and have a fatality rate of 0%

That Oxford center I mentioned above that has been doing the most thorough job maintaining data on COVID-19’s IFR said something else that really should matter to policy makers:

Mortality in children seems to be near zero (unlike flu) which is also reassuring and will act to drive down the IFR significantly.

If that wasn’t enough for you, consider a brand new study from the U.K. with a fairly stark conclusion, as explained last week in the Irish newspaper The Independent:

“No child has been found to have passed coronavirus to an adult, a major review of the evidence about the virus has found.”

It continues with more detail:

Led by Dr Alasdair Munro, a clinical research fellow in paediatric infectious diseases, the research concluded: "Covid-19 appears to affect children less often, and with less severity, including frequent asymptomatic or subclinical infection…"The role of children in transmission is unclear, but it seems likely they do not play a significant role." The review by the Don't Forget The Bubbles paediatric research project added: "The China/WHO joint commission could not recall episodes during contact tracing where transmission occurred from a child to an adult."

Ok. So we now know that children have a) no risk of dying from COVID-19, and b) no evidence they pass the disease on to others. Tell me, Governor Brown, why our kids can’t go to school? Sweden NEVER stopped letting kids go to school, and they are resuming school in many countries, including Australia, Germany and the Netherlands. Oregon? Silence.

(For any data dogs, here’s the original report from the U.K., DFTB COVID-19 EVIDENCE REVIEW 22ND APRIL 2020)

The virus isn’t transmitted outdoors, or in retail stores

Professor Hendrik Streeck from the University of Bonn is leading a study in Germany on the hard-hit region of Heinsberg and his conclusions, from laboratory work already completed,

Instead, claims Streeck, his study found that: "There is no significant risk of catching the disease when you go shopping. Severe outbreaks of the infection were always a result of people being closer together over a longer period of time. When we took samples from door handles, phones or toilets it has not been possible to cultivate the virus in the laboratory on the basis of these swabs….”

Uh oh. You mean closing parks, closing stores, wearing gloves at the grocery store, fumigating our groceries, and just being generally paranoid wasn't necessary? As Dr. Streeck confirms:

"It is important to obtain this data in order to make sure that decisions are taken based on facts rather than assumptions. The data should serve as a basis of information for the government so they can then think about their further course of action," he said.

And he continues:

“People could lose their jobs. They might not be able to pay their rent anymore and staying inside for a longer time can lead to weakening of our immune system.” He raises questions like: “The goal is not a complete containment of the virus. We need to know where the actual capacity limits of our hospitals are. How many infections are too many? What do intensive care medics say?”
“It is important to start thinking about a “rollback” strategy and his hope is to “deliver the relevant facts so that people have a good foundation for their decisions.”

Published science from China showed exactly the same thing. In a study titled, Indoor transmission of SARS-CoV-2, scientists studied outbreaks of 3 or more people in 320 separate towns in China over a five-week period beginning in January 2020 trying to determine WHERE outbreaks started: in the home, workplace, outside, etc.? What’d they discover? Almost 80% of outbreaks happened in the home environment. The rest happened in crowded buses and trains. But what about outdoors? I mean, surely Kate Brown must know something since she’s closed all of our parks and beaches, right? The scientists wrote:

“All identified outbreaks of three or more cases occurred in an indoor environment, which confirms that sharing indoor space is a major SARS-CoV-2 infection risk.”

Said differently, there’s really no science to support all the outdoor bans that Oregon, and many other states have put in place, but there is plenty of science to support the fact that sending people home to get cooped up with their family guarantees transmission, which is exactly what happened in Italy.

Still think you should wear a mask in the store, while driving your car, or while running?

“…’there is no compelling medical reason for people who are exercising outside and maintaining social distancing to wear a mask’, says Henry Chambers, a professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of California, San Francisco…Experts warn that poorly fitted masks could impede the hearing or vision of walkers, runners and cyclists on the road. Dr. Auerbach says any type of mask will hinder breathing somewhat.”

Still not convinced? I saved the best article I have read on this topic for last. Written late last week by Heather MacDonald in Spectator Magazine, a fellow at the Manhattan institute, she absolutely decimates many of the crazy things we are watching our fellow Oregonians do—it’s a worthy share with anyone starting to wonder what the heck is going on, here’s a few of my favorite passages:

Every day the lockdown continues, its implicit message that we are all going to die if we engage in normal life is reinforced. Polls show an increasing number of Americans opting to continue the economic quarantine indefinitely lest they be ‘unsafe’. The longer that belief is reinforced, the less likely it will be that consumers will patronize reopened restaurants or board airplanes in sufficient numbers to bring the economy back to life.
It is worth briefly reviewing the facts about outdoor viral transmission in order to assess the rationality of New York’s park users. The chance of getting infected across a wide open, windswept space is virtually nil, even if the imaginary carrier were not moving quickly past his potential victim. When it comes to viral infections, dose matters. Proximity to the carrier, prolonged exposure, and being in an enclosed space are the biggest risk factors. Even the New York Times, one of the most aggressive purveyors of virus hysteria, could not avoid acknowledging this commonsensical truth about outdoor transmission. The director of Australia’s International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health told the paper: ‘Outdoors is safe, and there is certainly no cloud of virus-laden droplets hanging around.’ Infectious droplets would be quickly diluted in outdoor air, director Lidia Morawska said, so their concentrations would quickly become insignificant. Bottom line: ‘It is safe to go for a walk and jog and not to worry about the virus in the air.’…The suburban counterpart to these urban neurotics is the unaccompanied driver wearing his mask in his car.

Ms. MacDonald finishes her exrtraordinary essay with something I hope we all can remember:

We are in a race between the ideology of safetyism and the facts. The future depends on which side prevails. The data is clear. The coronavirus danger is narrowly targeted at a very specific portion of the national population: the elderly infirm, especially those located in New York City and its surrounding suburbs. It possesses minimal risk to everyone else.

You can stop wearing your mask outside. New Seasons, my favorite grocery store, won’t let me in without a mask. I’m now shopping at Whole Foods.

(Special note: I hope every Oregon business owner re-opens in defiance of this order asap. If you want a great constitutional lawyer, email me and I will give you contact info: professorhinkley503@gmail.com)

The data on lockdowns being an effective way to manage the virus is sketchy at best

Luckily, we have many states and countries that chose to deal with the virus in a way that’s different from what Governor Brown did here in Oregon. The data is in and I have bad news for everyone who is simply convinced that our behavior is the only reason we’re not all dead: that’s not what the data says. But, you can decide for yourself. I’ll make my case first with this excellent article from Spiked titled, “There is no empirical evidence for these lockdowns.” Political scientist professor Wilfred Reilly analyzed all U.S. states—including the seven that NEVER had a lockdown—and found absolutely NO DIFFERENCE in COVID-19 cases or deaths. If you love data, I encourage you to read his article in full, as he details all of his methodology, here’s a few of his conclusions:

“The most basic way to test this thesis is by direct comparison. As of 6 April, seven US states had not adopted shelter-in-place orders, instead imposing social-distancing restrictions such as banning large gatherings and mandating six-foot spacing gaps and maximum customer limits inside all retail stores. Those seven states are Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming…The question the model set out to ask was whether lockdown states experience fewer Covid-19 cases and deaths than social-distancing states, adjusted for all of the above variables. The answer? No. The impact of state-response strategy on both my cases and deaths measures was utterly insignificant.”

TJ Rogers, the founder and former CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, chose to look at similar analysis along with several of his engineers in a piece for the Wall Street Journal last weekend titled “Do Lockdowns Save Many Lives? In Most Places, the Data Say No”, and found the same thing:

“We ran a simple one-variable correlation of deaths per million and days to shutdown, which ranged from minus-10 days (some states shut down before any sign of Covid-19) to 35 days for South Dakota, one of seven states with limited or no shutdown. The correlation coefficient was 5.5%—so low that the engineers I used to employ would have summarized it as “no correlation” and moved on to find the real cause of the problem.”

The subtitle of their article included my favorite line:

“The speed with which officials shuttered the economy appears not to be a factor in Covid deaths.”

The next time one of your friends says how proud they are that Oregon locked down so quickly—and remains locked down today—send them this article. I just want my life back!

The negative side-effects of lockdowns through other deaths and economic ruin will meaningfully exceed the benefits of lockdowns

Not sure this is true? Let’s start with this headline and see how it makes you feel.

Honestly, I could write a whole book on all the downstream disasters this (unnecessary) lockdown is creating, particularly in light of the now-known very low IFR of COVID-19. We know scientists estimate the economic recession in the late 2000s led to 10,000 incremental suicides, what will the economic downturn plus a lockdown do? No one knows. Worse, no one EVER considered all the OTHER deaths and destruction that might happen when choosing to lockdown Oregon, because our Governor has been a slave to a model created by the IHME, and it appears decisions are STILL being made based on that model now-Still!

Our Governor appears wed to a model (not science) that has been disastrously wrong

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the doomsday predictions of the IHME’s Coronavirus model are what caused Governors across the country to shut down their economies. Don’t take my word for it, the National Review’s Andrew McCarthy was very eloquent in explaining:

“And mind you, when we observe that the government is relying on the models, we mean reliance for the purpose of making policy, including the policy of completely closing down American businesses and attempting to confine people to their homes because, it is said, no lesser measures will do.”

Since Mr. McCarthy’s excellent critique, we now have published science showing just how absurdly bad these models really were:

“The IHME projections are based not on transmission dynamics but on a statistical model with no epidemiologic basis. Specifically, the model used reported worldwide COVID-19 deaths and extrapolated similar patterns in mortality growth curves to forecast expected deaths. The technique uses mortality data, which are generally more reliable than testing-dependent confirmed case counts. Outputs suggest precise estimates (albeit with uncertainty bounds) for all regions until the epidemic ends. This appearance of certainty is seductive when the world is desperate to know what lies ahead. However, the underlying data and statistical model must be interpreted cautiously. Here, we raise concerns about the validity and usefulness of the projections for policymakers.”

Interpretation: basing policy on the IHME models was a mistake. They just said it more politely. Stat News tackled this same topic in an article titled “Influential Covid-19 model uses flawed methods and shouldn’t guide U.S. policies, critics say.” They write:

A widely followed model for projecting Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. is producing results that have been bouncing up and down like an unpredictable fever, and now epidemiologists are criticizing it as flawed and misleading for both the public and policy makers. In particular, they warn against relying on it as the basis for government decision-making, including on “re-opening America.”
“It’s not a model that most of us in the infectious disease epidemiology field think is well suited” to projecting Covid-19 deaths, epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health told reporters this week, referring to projections by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
Others experts, including some colleagues of the model-makers, are even harsher. “That the IHME model keeps changing is evidence of its lack of reliability as a predictive tool,” said epidemiologist Ruth Etzioni of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, who has served on a search committee for IHME. “That it is being used for policy decisions and its results interpreted wrongly is a travesty unfolding before our eyes.”

I couldn’t agree more, indeed it is a travesty. The reason I chose to end this essay talking about the IHME and their disastrous models is because Governor Brown is still using these absurd models to guide the decision on when to re-open our state, she talked about it herself in this interview with OPB (and elsewhere, it keeps coming up), quoting Governor Brown:

“And here’s what we do know: We have the ability to use modeling. For example, we know that the social-distancing measures that I put in early have made a difference. It has slowed the transmission of the disease and it has flattened the curve. We now know that this is effective. So if we start to reduce our social distancing measures, we have to do them incrementally, step-by-step, and then test each one to see whether the disease spreads again.”

Governor Brown, you claim you are using science and data to make your decisions about Oregon. There’s no science or data that says the lockdown was necessary, and there’s certainly no science or data that says it should continue. The science is in, the data is in, please give us back our state.

Final note: we have one of the lowest death rates per capita in the entire U.S for COVID-19., and yet this NBC News article shows you how SLOW Oregon is moving compared to the rest of the country:

About Professor Hinkley:

I’m an over-educated Oregonian writing under a pen name because I want to stay employed. I’m sure you understand.

A final thought:

I thought this tweet from former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson might, sadly, be the simplest explanation for why some governors appear to be doubling-down on lockdowns, face masks, and restrictions despite the emerging facts:

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And, truly amazing opinion piece from former Supreme Court justice in the UK:

The Government has formulated them in their own interest. They think that this will allow them to avoid criticism by sheltering behind the scientists. But that is just an evasion of political responsibility. Of course it is understandable that politicians should want to shelter themselves from criticism. But there is no reason why the rest of us should help them do it.

Appendix:

So many people spoke up since the last time I wrote my blog on April 17, I just wanted to share a couple of my favorite articles, starting with this one from Dr. Scott Atlas in The Hill:

“The appropriate policy, based on fundamental biology and the evidence already in hand, is to institute a more focused strategy like some outlined in the first place: Strictly protect the known vulnerable, self-isolate the mildly sick and open most workplaces and small businesses with some prudent large-group precautions. This would allow the essential socializing to generate immunity among those with minimal risk of serious consequence, while saving lives, preventing overcrowding of hospitals and limiting the enormous harms compounded by continued total isolation. Let’s stop underemphasizing empirical evidence while instead doubling down on hypothetical models. Facts matter.”

And, from an emergency room doctor in New York City in the New York Post:

Third, inordinate fear misguides the public response. While COVID-19 is serious, fear of it is being over-amplified. The public needs to understand that the vast majority of infected people do quite well.
Finally, COVID-19 is more prevalent than we think. Many New Yorkers already have the COVID-19 infection, whether they are aware of it or not. As of today, over 43 percent of those tested are positive in The Bronx. We are developing a significant degree of natural herd immunity. Distancing works, but I am skeptical that it is playing as predominant a role as many think.
More testing will better establish the numbers among those with mild illnesses and no symptoms. My professional experience tells me the number of infected people will be high. Testing is important work, but it should happen in parallel to the immediate resuscitation of the economy and getting people back to work.
At present, the testing is imperfect. We can’t wait months. We must protect the vulnerable and mitigate without destroying the economy.
Standing up to this virus can’t be the job of essential workers only. We’ve been strong, but we’re tired, and we need the rest of you to help us. By getting back to work.