Revisiting my Covid Article from March 2020

In March 2020, I wrote a blog article called Reasons for Hope about the Coronavirus Pandemic.  Let's just say that I was wrong about a lot of things.  But I was in good company.  From epidemiologists, to doctors, to politicians, Covid-19 made fools of us all.  So let's take a look at the article, what I got right, and what I got wrong.

Rating: Mostly accurate

I'm going to say that this was actually... mostly true.  It's true that China was almost certainly fudging the numbers.  They had more cases and deaths than they admitted to, especially early on.  But it does appear that China was able to mostly contain the initial outbreak and prevent further outbreaks from starting.  Unfortunately, their success seems to be in large part driven by a top-down central government which strictly controls the lives of its citizens.  The only other countries that have seen similar success are either islands like Australia or other authoritarian places.

Rating: Technically accurate

I'm not going to give myself too much credit here because "making progress" is a weasely statement.  South Korea did initially seem to stop Covid in its tracks.  By early May, cases had fallen to zero.  But like almost every other country, the progress was temporary and new cases started appearing as soon as restrictions were eased.

Rating: Technically accurate

I never anticipated just how large the government response to Covid would be.  For an American such as myself, it was shocking to see the government dictate what a person could or could not do with their life.  What I also didn't anticipate was how ineffective these measures would be.  I assumed, like most people, that the pandemic would be largely ended after the first wave subsided.  I thought lockdowns or other measures such as track and trace would prevent further outbreaks.  After all, previous outbreaks such as SARS and Ebola had been successfully contained.  This assumption proved to be very wrong. 

And while reasonable people can argue about whether the lockdowns prevented the outbreak from being even worse, it's clear that they did not achieve their primary objective of ending the pandemic.  U.S. states which had loose restrictions did not suffer higher per-capita casualties than ones with stronger restrictions.  It may be that, to totally eliminate Covid, it would have been necessary to impose harsh and unprecedented restrictions that would have caused far more damage than the disease itself.

Rating: Accurate

Finally one I got right, although this was a pretty obvious conclusion.  It still took a lot longer than it should have to fix the testing shortages.  Another problem was that free and easy testing didn't actual seem to slow the pandemic.  The worst months in the United States and Europe occurred this winter when testing was universally available.

Rating: Accurate

In my original article, I estimated the infection fatality rate due to Covid at less than 1%.  This turned out to be true for every country except for Japan (source: Nature).

Polls of U.S. citizens showed that average people vastly overestimated the risks of Covid, especially for the young.

Rating: Mostly accurate

In the United States only about 0.05% of deaths with Covid occurred in people under the age of 17. 

Rating: Mixed

The success story here is obviously the vaccines which came out much faster than anticipated and seem to be largely effective at preventing the virus.

But I was wrong about improved treatments for Covid.  I assumed that the medical industry would quickly discover therapies that would radically reduce the chance of death.  And while there were some changes to medical care, it was far from drastic.  Proposed medications such as Remdesivir or Hydroxychloroquine did not seem to be highly effective at treating the disease.  I'm still surprised that a better treatment hasn't been found.

Rating: Inaccurate

It didn't take long for this to be proved completely false.  Less than one month after my article, consumers could once again purchase bats and dogs for consumption as food at China's famous wet markets.

Even more concerning, evidence is accumulating that the disease may not have had its origin in a wet market after all.  The idea that Covid-19 originated as an accidental lab release was once dismissed as a fringe conspiracy theory.  No longer.  This article published by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists presents evidence that the virus was created during "gain of function" research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.  Then, last week, news broke that three researchers at that facility became ill and sought hospital care in November 2019, just before the start of the outbreak.

We may never know the true source of the pandemic, but an accidental lab release now appears possible, even likely.

Rating: Mostly accurate

Of all my statements, this one got me the most flack.  In the end, I think it has turned out to be mostly true.  Like the flu, Covid has emerged as a seasonal illness in northern countries.

There is one caveat to this.  In extremely warm temperatures, people may tend to stay inside in air-conditioned spaces, which is ideal for the propagation of the virus.

Rating: Accurate

Unless the virus mutates, less than 0.1% of the world's population will die from Covid-19.  By comparison, the Spanish Flu killed somewhere between 1% and 5%.  Other plagues, such as the Black Death were far worse.  We got off easy.  This time.