Why is Oregon still on lockdown?
The data reveals little to no benefit, and seismic losses
By Professor Hinkley April 4, 2020
(Author note: after more than 50,000 reads in about 8 hours, medium.com deleted this article from their site. Read my brand new blog post HERE.)
Like most areas of the world right now, my amazing community here in Portland, Oregon is absolutely suffering as job losses and crushed lives mount with each passing day.
So far, Oregonians are stepping up and doing their part to help save their fellow citizens, which is the reason we’re all sheltering in place, right? But what if the data, the data we already have, tells a different story? What if the data tells us that we never needed a lockdown, and that the COVID-19 virus is already running its course here in Oregon on its own? Most people will refuse to believe what I’m about to show you.
The mega-complex of Oregon Health Sciences University
OHSU’s data
Portland’s largest single employer is Oregon Health Sciences University with over 17,000 employees. US News & World Report voted OHSU the best hospital in Oregon, they treated over 300,000 patients last year, and currently have 562 staffed hospital beds. OHSU also has taken the rare step of publicizing all of their COVID-19 data for anyone to see, which makes it easy to determine how many Oregonians are currently hospitalized at OHSU for COVID-19. And that number, as of tonight April 4, 2020 is…wait for it…SIX.
From OHSU’s website
Hospitalizations tell us everything
We’re inundated with daily tallys of the number of people who have tested positive for COVID-19. Like every state who has increased the number of tests they have given, Oregon has seen their number of positive cases rise, too, and it’s tracked every day on the Oregon Health Authority’s website. Today Oregon has 999 positive cases. And it means absolutely nothing, because there’s no standardization for how, when, or why people are tested, and if you only test people with symptoms, more likely test positive. Does Oregon’s 999 positive tests mean that 999 people in the state have COVID-19? 9,000 people? Or 900,000 people? That’s the problem, no one has any idea, which means the tests are useless for determining the most important question we all want to know:
where we are in the cycle of the disease?
Hospitalizations on the other hand, are the best data we have. We know for certain when someone goes to the hospital — and stays — for COVID-19. They are the “tip of the iceberg” of COVID-19 carriers (since we know 50% of COVID-19 carries are asymptomatic, we won’t find them until we test everyone) and if their numbers are exploding, then you know the virus is exploding in the state, too. Also, if the lockdown works, hospitalizations DECREASING should be your first sign that the lockdown is working…unless of course hospitalizations were decreasing before the lockdown could have had an impact (oh rats I just gave away my punchline, but I hope you will read on to see the data for yourself…)
Oregon’s Hospitalization Shows: COVID-19 was on its way out before the lockdown happened
Every day, the Oregon Health Authority releases new data about COVID-19. Here’s today’s released this morning at 0900. I will pull out two of the most important charts, and try to explain. Here’s the first one:
So the chart above shows us COVID-19 cases, by date, stratified into people who were hospitalized and not hospitalized. See the blue column? That’s hospitalizations, over time, for people who have COVID-19. And now I’m going to make my most important point:
COVID-19 cases were on the decline, following the classic arc of a virus, before the shelter in place orderwas given by Governor Kate Brown on Monday, March 23rd. And, as importantly, the ongoing decline has happened before the shelter in place could have had any impact.
It’s important to understand WHEN we should see the impact of Governor Brown’s 3/23 request for all Oregonians to stay home. At a bare minimum, someone exposed takes 5 days to exhibit symptoms, and 10–13 days (from exposure) to be hospitalized, which means at the very, very earliest, we should start to see a decline in hospitalization from a shelter in place order 10–13 days AFTER the order starts, which would be for the state of Oregon, somewhere between April 2nd and April 5th…so let’s look at that same chart again:
We can see the same phenomenon with a second kind of data provided by Oregon Health Authority, which was also in this morning’s information packet:
Here, we see the percentage of COVID-like symptoms presented at emergency room visits in Oregon. This doesn’t mean someone has COVID-19, so it’s a bit more of a crude measure, but this number would certainly SPIKE if COVID-19 was spiking. If you check the dates versus the shelter in place order, you see the exact same thing.
In Conclusion
COVID-19 was on the decline before massive economic and societal damage to the state of Oregon through a shelter in place order was delivered on March 23, 2020. The data does NOT support maintaining that order. What data is our Governor relying upon if not the hospitalization data, which tells a clear story?
I know, we don’t want Oregon to become the next New York. That’s part of the fear that keeps Oregonians hunkered down and trusting that Governor Brown and the OHA know what they’re doing. So what if I told you that New York’s hospitalizations data looks exactly like ours, but just with bigger numbers (and keep in mind that New York City’s population density of 26,403 versus Oregon’s of 35.6 means any viral illness is going to get a lot more people in New York City)? What if New York was already passing through the natural viral arc long before they, too, got locked down? Here’s their data:
COVID-19 is no joke. If you are over 65 or have co-morbid conditions, self-quarantine makes a ton of sense. Locking down an entire state and causing 20–40% unemployment for a virus that was already on the tail end of its arc? That’s madness. Lift the order, Governor Brown, let Oregonians take appropriate cautions and get back to their lives and livelihoods.
Addendum:
I’ve been asked my opinion for why Governor Brown and OHA could be so wrong about this, there are plenty of smart people at OHA and working for the Governor. I think the explanation is pretty simple: they were motivated to order the lockdown based on a model created by Washington’s IMHE which is proving to be disastrously inaccurate. My own guess is that the model simply assumed far fewer people had already been exposed to the virus than had, and that one assumption can reverberate through a model and make for dire predictions, that aren’t coming true, and each day the IMHE model appears to be more WRONG. Here’s how off the model is for New York right now, and this model was only created one week ago:
Will Governor Brown have the courage to say, “We were wrong, no lockdown needed”? I doubt it.
Addendum 2:
A reader remarked that Oregon’s schools were shut down SOONER than the March 23rd lockdown, which is true. They feel that explains the flattened curve here in Oregon. My response below:
Hi Chris:
The evidence is strong that COVID-19 is spread WITHIN families. The evidence is weak that COVID-19 is spread within schools or by children. Quote:
“If you look, most cases, for example, even in China, are in family clusters. Most secondary cases occur in families,” Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s health emergencies program, said during a news conference last month. “That’s been driving the epidemic.”
Closing schools and sending people home would RAISE, not lower the primary way this disease is spread. Furthermore, your argument doesn’t explain why New York is ALSO on the back end of the hospitalization curve, and closed their schools much later. Please reconcile.
Addendum 3, April 6th Update:
This morning, Governor Mario Cuomo produced a slide that looked eerily like the slide I produced two days ago:
This afternoon, April 6, 2020
Notice anything about his slide? Yes, his people drew the same viral arc trend line I drew, which shows new hospitalizations on a rapid decline. Guess what? Those bars are going to drop hard and fast. Further, because of the timing of the lockdown in NYC, the same will be true for NYC as is true for Oregon: the decline in hospitalizations happened BEFORE the lockdown’s impact. Said differently, the lockdown has been unnecessary, and catastrophic to NYC’s economy, just as it has been here in Oregon.
I’ve seen some of the negative comments about my article. Many people want to believe our health authorities know what they’re doing. They think challenging their thinking or decisions somehow puts the public at risk. I disagree. I think the policy decisions made were based on poorly constructed models that predicted dire outcomes and NEVER acknowledged the very real death and suffering that shutting down an economy can cause. As these models prove to be more and more wrong with each passing day, will governors have the humility to say, “the models were too dire, time to end the lockdown”?
Some commenters also seem to think that by challenging the lockdown I’m somehow implying that COVID-19 isn’t a real threat to some people’s health. Of course it is! I think those in the high risk group SHOULD self-quarantine, I put several of my own relatives in that category and have advised them accordingly. My point is that the draconian measures put in place of shutting down society are A) useless, because we’re already on the back end of the viral arc, and B) draconian, with little understanding of the consequences. Let Oregon get back to work!! (By the way, all the hospitals here in Oregon are suffering, too. They are EMPTY and losing money every day. Ask any doctor friend you have.)
The mainstream press didn't make a big deal of the giant decrease in hospital bed utilization forecast in NYC, but the New York Times Albany bureau chief mentioned it:
And Breitbart News picked up on it, too.
April 9th Update:
The giant whiff by the IHME—the source of the scary numbers that forced many Governors to choose to ruin their economies—are finally starting to come under fire in the mainstream press, although its oddly being covered much more by publications with a conservative bent. Why is truth partisan?
Read:
4/9/20: National Review: COVID-19 Projection Models Are Proving to Be Unreliable
From the article:
To describe as stunning the collapse of a key model the government has used to alarm the nation about the catastrophic threat of the coronavirus would not do this development justice.
In a space of just six days starting April 2, two revisions (on April 5 and 8) have utterly discredited the model produced by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. I wrote about the IHME’s modeling at National Review on Monday, the day after the first revision — which was dramatic, but pales in comparison to Wednesday’s reassessment. This was not immediately apparent because the latest revision (April 8) did not include a side-by-side comparison, as did the April 5 revision. Perusal of the new data, however, is staggering, as is what it says about government predictions we were hearing just days ago about the likelihood of 100,000 deaths, with as many as 240,000 a real possibility.
Tucker Carlson: We must ask the experts how they screwed up the coronavirus models so badly
From the article:
So miscalculations like the ones you just saw played out across the country in state after state. On March 14th, for example, the governor of Oregon, Kate Brown, warned that her state's 688 ventilators wouldn't be nearly enough to handle the coming surge of coronavirus cases.'
Before we go ahead and alter our lives and our country forever, it is fair to ask about the numbers -- their numbers, the ones we acted on the first time that turned out to be completely wrong. How did they screw that up so thoroughly? That is a fair question.