Monday, March 23, 2020

After Stating She Won't, Whitmer Goes Ahead And Shuts The State Down

Up until today, Michigan's Governor stated she wasn't going to put the state into a shelter in place lock down.

That changed this morning: The Detroit News: Whitmer issues stay-at-home order through April 13; 15 deaths, 1,300 cases

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer issued Monday a "Stay Home, Stay Safe" executive order requiring Michigan businesses to suspend in-person operations from 12:01 a.m. Tuesday through April 13 to help stem the spread of the novel coronavirus.

3 more weeks of this? There's not going to be much of a state economy left.

The Governor in giving this kind of order is panicking and that's not good, especially as both treatments and actual statistics are coming on line that this is not much beyond a flu in terms of a death rate and not worth destroying our economy over it.

11 comments:

Jeff B said...

That's a 0.011 fatality rate....

drjim said...

Hopefully they'll rescind these orders as more gets known.

Aaron said...

Jeff B: We seem to be around that overall. Michigan has over 1,000 known cases and all of 15 deaths, which is all of .015 of all tested cases and there's likely much more than double the actual number of people infected that are asymptomatic and are thus not tested, which would halve that number or drive it even lower. Of course all the stats at this point are suspect, but looking at Diamond Princess and the other areas where we have good data, this thing while a tragedy for those killed by, is pretty darn similar to the tragedy of those who die by influenza.

Old NFO said...

Yep, I gotta do what everybody else is doing! Sigh...

B said...

The orders are merely suggestions. Can't be enforced.

Not that they can't give you a ticket for "loitering" or some such.

Beans said...

It's going to be interesting if President Trump gives the all-clear in a few days and the Governors and Mayors say "No."

Tam said...

How many of those 1,300 cases that aren't fatalities have been cleared and are off the ventilator?

Oh, you don't know?

Well, allow me to retort...

Watching morbidly obese chain-smoking 60+ y.o. pre-diabetics chortle on about "iT's JuSt tHe FlU!" has been the best thing about this whole thing.

Knock yourselves out!

Aaron said...

Tam: Getting shelter-in-place grumpiness already? Have a snickers.

You don't know either, but in fact we do know that most if not the vast majority of those 1,300 are not actually on ventilators. Most are self-treating at home.

What we do know is that Michigan now has 1,791 cases and 24 deaths for a total of .013 of all formally reported case. This of course is disregarding that 80% of all cases are mild and so much so the reported case number is drastically underestimating the actual number of cases by a large factor and thus the CFR is probably off on the high side by a lot.

While we don't have stats for deaths in Michigan due to flu this year, we've been told it was a bad year.

But going back to last year, which was apparently not as bad as this year we had more than 1,300 deaths in Michigan in the 2018-2019 flu season alone (approx 61,200 nationwide. We didn't shut the country down last year for it, nor the year before with similar stats.

Meanwhile for this current 2019-2020 season the stats aren't in yet but estimate is this is a bad year for the flu with23-59,000 deaths from the flu nartionwide. 23,000 to 59,000 estimated and the season isn't over yet and is supposed to exceed last year's toll handily.

For some weird reason we didn't kill the economy, or shelter in place, or lose our composure over it.

So far the stats are showing that with a decent medical system unlike China and Italy, this stuff while new and scary, is indeed somewhat worse than the flu to vulnerable groups but not by a run for the hills, we're all gonna die, let's destroy the economy in order to save it degree.

Tam said...

Remember how, during flu season last year, they were setting up mortuary tents in the parking lots of NYC hospitals?

Yeah, me neither.

Normalcy bias is a hell of a drug.

(nb. This isn't like a Warner Brothers cartoon with the sheepdog and the wolf where, when covid-19 checks in, the wolf checks out. The regular flu is still here killing people, too. It just has company now.)

Tam said...

Side note:

"Tam: Getting shelter-in-place grumpiness already? Have a snickers."

This was funny! That Snickers ad campaign is hilarious. <3

But I work from home and have for many years, so hardly anything has changed for me.

What you call hell, I call home. ;)

Matt G said...

That death rate rises to 3% after the hospitals get saturated.