TX Progressive: Coronavirus, wk 26 — calling out tribalism

Just a brief update this week, with politics-relative COVID news as well as medical items. Indeed, half the items on here or more this week are more politics than medicine. And not just Trumpist politcs.

Here in Tex-ass, Democraps as well as Rethuglicans have grifted off local governments to enable friends with shady pseudo-medical claims to win sweet contracts on COVID-related issues. That's some of the elected Democratic grifters at left.

Texas has the nation's largest "digital divide," kind of like having the highest uninsured percentage and other "We're No. 1" stuff that Gov. Strangeabbott and other Texas Rethuglicans don't like to discuss. The Observer asks how this is going to affect remote learning over a full school year. 

DMag has a photojournalism report from the lonely virtual State Fair.

Erin Garcia de Jesus worries about the "twindemic" of COVID plus influenza.

National

Sturgis-related? COVID diagnosis are up sharply in South Dakota and three other upper Plains states. And, hospitalizations are up strongly in South Dakota and every bordering state except Iowa.

Wisconsin had a massive spike in cases that started last week. Fortunately, deaths haven't spiked much, so far.

AND ... breaking after I first posted, but a HUGE example of tribalism? Shasta County, California, a new hotbed of coronavirus denialism. Businessman there (sadly, not named by Michael Lewis, a leader in this denialism. And then, his mother dies. Of COVID. And, let's let Lewis take it from there.

Only weeks ago, one of the loudest protestors in Shasta County, a businessman who had refused to take steps to prevent the spread of the disease, had watched his mother die of Covid. In that moment, a political opinion was challenged by a fact; one of them needed to be altered. The man called the coroner and demanded that the county change the cause of death.

Just wow.

AND ... breaking after that? Of course, the news that Trump himself has "got it." See this Twitter poll and this second Twitter poll about the Trump Train and my thoughts as to whether or not Trump breaks quarantine.

Global and COVID tribalism

• Tribalism has more than two sides on COVID stories both here and abroad, as a WaPost opinion columnist talks about sub-Saharan Africa's successes and never mentions South Africa, including never mentioning it has the 10th highest total number of cases in the world and a death rate higher than Canada's. (South Africa's daily cases are down NOW, but two months or more ago, it was a mess.) And, the reasons why many countries there appear to be doing well may sometimes be appearance, not reality. Poor public health monitoring and reporting structures come to mind, for example. Disruptions by civil wars also come to mind. Yes, select African nations did well in battling Ebola outbreaks a few years ago. BUT ... while it has a higher lethality, it has a much lower spread vector and it never was a pandemic in the sense of "all nations."

And, there's one other factor. We DON'T EVEN HAVE TESTING INFORMATION from seven sub-Saharan African nations. NOTHING, per Worldometers. It is the empirical equivalent of a classical informal logic fallacy to claim "success" when you literally have nothing by which to measure success.

Per Our World in Data, a product partially of the University of Oxford, confirming what I was hinting at above, there's a fairly tight correlation between testing frequency and per-capita income.

In addition, I'm going to "concern troll" Karen Attiah over things like this:

It’s almost as if they are disappointed that Africans aren’t dying en masse and countries are not collapsing.

Ahh, "they."

And this, related to the correlation link above.

The BBC came under fire for a since-changed headline and a tweet that read “Coronavirus in Africa: Could poverty explain mystery of low death rate?”

Yes, in this case, the Beeb could have phrased it better. But, poverty is correlated with lack of testing, which means that many cases that would have been reported as COVID-caused here in the US might not be so in sub-Saharan Africa. That's just reality.

Update, Oct. 9: In the wake of new Nigeria-focused protests on Twitter about SARS, it's interesting, or "interesting," that Attiah never mentions battles with SARS, or Nigeria as a country.  (Different SARS, I now realize, but, still, ties to the original SARS.)

And, as far as sub-Saharan Africa's success against Ebola? Well, also, it has an R0 a fair amount lower than COVID, per Skeptical Raptor.

Speaking of, on to related ...

• I mean, the Beeb notes that India has the second highest cases in the world AND has abysmal testing. So, Karen Attiah is coming off like an African-American tribalist for sub-Saharan Africa. It's not quite as bad as being a "Plandemic" or other type of conspiracy theorist tribalist, but it's bad enough. (And one blue wave #TheResistance type got a mild earful back after calling me out on Twitter.

• And, speaking of testing? Tribalists, or whatever, claiming that Vietnam has "crushed coronavirus" a second time? Given that it ranks 164th in the world's countries in per-capita testing, we don't know that it's crushed anything. I mean, a country that's not much better off financially, the Philippines, has done more than three times as many tests per capita. Uzbekistan four times as many. And, the India above? Five times as many. (Of countries for which we have test rates, only 30 rank lower.) We DO know that, because of claims it's crushed COVID a second time, it obviously did NOT crush it the first time, despite naivete or whatever of some Western doctors. Logic 101.

Our World in Data, apparently with different info, says that Vietnam is in the sub-Saharan camp, with NO information on daily testing. It also lists China as "no data." More here. (Sadly, Our World in Data engages in the same illogic mentioned above, when it elsewhere claims Vietnam is "winning.")

Nutters on Twitter:

No, not wrong, Vietnam were testing 750 people per *case* not per day, and that was one of the highest at the start of the pandemic. When the virus is gone there is no one left to test so obviously testing figures go down. Get your facts right.

— Andrew Bennett (@AndrewB66968157) September 28, 2020

Bye, eventually. Said person eventually admitted this was circular reasoning, which it obviously is, as you can't know about total cases until you test enough people, therefore, it was only 750 per already confirmed case. And, the second sentence then means that Vietnam engaged in the faulty assumption that it had "crushed" it. Some people noted it left the Chinese border more open after spring. (Obviously, if Chinese illegals were spotted in Danang this summer.) Maybe it didn't test enough in the highlands. Maybe it left too many expat Brits bring friends to the country. (Hint, hint.) In any case, contra the Daily Mail et al, it didn't "crush" anything.

Andrew was joined by a NON-expat Brit who eventually fessed up to tribalism:

I’m not ashamed to say I have problems with a Prime Minister who has led a pandemic response 2,000 times worse than Vietnam’s. Not tribalism, just a healthy dislike of incompetence.

— Adam Hamdy (@adamhamdy) September 28, 2020

Also bye. As I told him, bad use of data (or arguably, bad use of nondata) in the service of a stance like his is tribalism.

And a non-smart freethinker:

Test positivity rate should be the focus not test per million, unless there's no proper contact tracing.

— Freethinker (@Freethi56514330) September 28, 2020

No. You could be failing to trace the asymptomatic, for one thing. Second, this assumes Vietnam had rigorous contact tracting. 

Three of the four English-language responders to me have less than 30 followers. Yes, that's close to a classical logic fallacy, but at some point? (And I will note that one of the Vietnamese respondents has "Hanoi Facts" as part of their handle.

As far as claims we'd see Vietnamese "dropping like flies"? Several things wrong with that.

1. How much non-governmental news comes to the US out of Vietnam?

2. I'm not presuming anything above the current 5-6 percent fatality rate, so that's a bit of a strawman.

3. From 1 and 2, 50,000 cases with 5 percent fatality? That's "just" 2,500. Small, but much more than now. The same as Poland, albeit with more than double the populatoin. Small enough to fly at least somewhat under radar screens.

This all said, there may be another factor. Our World in Data admits that Vietnam's youthfulness may be a factor in the low reported death numbers. This, of course, would also apply to sub-Saharan Africa, to the degree its death numbers are true. That said, COVID comorbidity may not be getting filed as COVID deaths, either. (The same webpage notes that Vietnam's contact tracing is high, but per capita testing is low.)

As I read this, I see it as Vietnam trying to do something like "ring immunity," which by itself is good, but then claiming that the success of ring immunity means "we've won." Given that general testing is low, you don't know that.

And, contra earlier breathlessness, the late summer outbreak brought deaths. It also brought an admission from the Vietnamese government that it doesn't have the testing capability for generalized mass testing. Oops.

 

Update, Oct. 16: The government has cancelled the Vietnam Grand Prix ... due to COVID fears. This was first set for April, then postponed. It was to be the initial version of the race.

I'm not saying Vietnam is horrible. I am saying that it shouldn't be used as a tribalist cudgel. I'm also saying that beyond tribalism, while Vietnam is not horrible, I have no way of knowing that it's actually fantastic.

The “why” of that is itself, per Idries Shah, an issue with MANY more than two sides.

And, tribalism is a form of twosiderism and seeing only "both sides." Can the US learn "ring immunity" type contact tracing ideas from Vietnam? Yes. Can it also learn that even in countries that appear to have COVID under control, vigilance is still needed? Yes. Can we also learn that, especially in the face of asymptomatic transmission, Vietnamese actions aren't enough? Yes. Can we learn that because of this, Vietnam's reported positivities, or deaths, aren't guaranteed accurate? Yes? Can we learn to not "elevate" Vietnam? Yes.

Ditto on sub-Saharan Africa. I'm sure there are things we can learn from Ghana on what to do. And on South Africa on what NOT to do. And, to stop considering the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, with twice the population or more, and twice the landmass, of the US, as "one country."

Will "we"? Probably not.

• Seriously. This would be like me claiming "My car gets 50mpg" when my car has neither a fuel gauge nor an odometer.

• In addition, there's the the language of "crushing it." Besides noting Vietnam didn't do that the first time, this "War on Coronavirus" language and mindset is as idiotic as the "War on Drugs."