MAPS - First Blog
I will start my blogs with my latest scientific endeavor, modeling the pandemic. I have been astounded by the level of political discourse that has been injected into the scientific research and our subsequent suggestions at tackling this dire disease. I experienced the same, many times derision, while a climate researcher at NASA. In fact, I left to private industry renewables when GOP led assaults' led to censorship and drastic funding cuts at Earth Sciences. Despite this I believe science is finally prevailing in the climate war. Let the luddites walk into the dark ages, they are becoming more irrelevant each passing hour.
With that said, I will be brief in this initial post. I should be working on a Covid model problem introduced by the CDC's ineptitude in data management.
I have noticed recently that there is a general public view that Covid is over and this is the "new normal". This is often paired with the view that "capitalism will fix this". The first is not sustainable and the second has clearly fucked up the situation more. So let's examine briefly how the new normal meets capitalism.
I start with long Covid (LC). First, there is a problem here. the term "long covid" has never been really well defined. A general consensus is that it is medical conditions that persist after the battle with the virus I "over". Notice I put over in quotes because it is not. I remember back when the first wave of omicron I noticed that Covid infections were spiking in many world locations and the susceptible population to support this was not even close to being large enough. My first thought was screw the natural immunity and <1% reinfection rate of Delta. Omicron is like the Honey Badger, it doesn't give a shit about natural or vaccine induced immunity. Naturally, the "established" folks in the know scoffed at this, just as they did when my model predicted in June of 2020 that by January of 2021 we would be seeing a fatality rate of 3000+ a day because capitalism had won and mandated mitigation strategies were be abandoned like the last shiny object on the MSM. The only one that believed was the kind soul named Dr. Peter Hotez (more on him in the future). Again the mantra was it's over (vaccines started 12-8-2020) and capitalism would fix it.
Fast forward to the present day. Omicron is now accepted as the Honey badger of viruses and over 300 deaths a day continue. BA.5.1 is on the watch list along with several more concerning variants. The health care industry is breaking and will continue to spiral under the "new normal". So let's take a look at the just the LC implications. The numbers range from 4% to >20% of Covid infections lead to long term post infection conditions (CDC study). We now have experienced over 90 million cases in the U.S. at a enormous emotional and fiscal toll. A large fraction can be attributed to the politicization of the pandemic. The luddites again have left their mark. Using the 90 million case figure we can easily get an idea of the cost of long Covid. I am in contact with Brown University to nail this down much better than I can (for example they put the cost of the lied into Iraq/Afghanistan wars at 8 trillion). I will pull out a number out of my ass, let's say $10,000 for each LC treatment per year. You can adjust easily by adding or subtracting zeros to the final number. You might ask will LC be a chronic lifetime disorder or will it only last a few months. Truth is we are seeing signs of both, but remember our current disjointed strategy will continue to produce LC ad nauseum. Now for the capitalism aspect, at 90 million cases, we are looking at 3.6 to 18 million LC cases. At a cost of 10K per case that is between $36 and $180 billion per year. Over the next decade, if the new normal is followed, the cost is $360 billion to $1.8 trillion. So maybe this might wake up the capitalists. Lest we forget, the CDC has also estimated the attrition of the healthcare workers is projected to be 20% over the next five years. That is also a huge price tag in replacing them and a vast loss in experience. Brighter medical administrators can likely put an accurate cost on treating each case of LC and Covid infections. Hospitalization, and especially ICU beds, will likely dwarf what I have presented so far.
https://www.axios.com/2022/10/06/long-covid-cdc-data-disabling
I will flatly state my belief is the new normal is a pathetic idea and capitalism has failed in this arena.
You can seen my bi-weekly forecasts on my twitter profile @jlerollblues For those that are used to a graph showing predictions and reported numbers for the USA my take is the problem is a local problem that scales up to a national and global problem. My model predicts on a 1km mesh that covers the globe but due to resources and providing guidance for local public health officials I have scaled it back to cover most of North America with a U.S. focus. Here is a sample. I think I will post these here in the future. I nearly have monkeypox (soon to be renamed) ready in the model. Hope you enjoy! Questions/comments welcome.
Love the blog!!! Keep it up my friend, you are doing excellent work.
ReplyDeleteThanks! I am starting to figure things out here. Got some traffic on the most recent forecast!
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