What If We Did a Little More Math? - Rogue Thinking #2

 

If you don’t remember or haven’t seen the simple math that was done for the Rogue Thinking #1 article, then hopefully you will be able to accept its basic results. Those results are:

·         COVID infections are running at 33 new cases daily per 100K people as of the first week in December 2021.

·         Between the 234M vaccinated people and the 99M unvaccinated people, a little math will show that the Vaccinated sub-population’s new case rate is 5 people per 100K and for the Unvaccinated sub-population their new case rate equals 103 people per 100K. That is a 20-fold increase.

·         This disparity between the two groups carries forward to hospitalization and death rates (or even increases).

What those numbers tell us does not have to be limited to just how COVID progresses within those two population groupings. With a little more math there are other things that we can learn or be able to forecast.

You might also remember there was a “political” dimension to these results. Whether the connection between political alignment and/or ideology and the decision to be vaccinated or not is an interesting aspect of the results, we can agree that it is what it is. But we can look at what is and use a little math to see where we are going. The relevant view is given these correlated positions: Vaccinated & low new case rate versus Unvaccinated & high new case rate, provides some useful future results that ought to be ‘informing’ us or others about strategies and actions that are being taken (or ought to be taken).

For example, there are the mid-term elections in just under a year. The vaccine mandate issue is already playing out between the political parties. So, what would a little math tell us?

Let us assume that 1/3 of the country is dedicated to one side, 1/3 is dedicated to the other, and 1/3 is not dedicated to either political side. To simplify things lets’ split this last 1/3 into equal parts that are attracted equally to one of the other two groups. Thus, half the population is in each political group. Taking the new case rates would say that over some period of time the two groups cannot stay equal. One group benefits at the expense of the other. Now for the math.

If the new COVID cases run at the current 33 people infected per 100K across the population and this continues for 1, 2 or 3 months. Then we would see 3.3M new case in 1 month, 6.6M new cases in 2 months, and 9.9M new cases over 3 months. Those numbers don’t change anything unless getting infected caused individuals to change their political alignment. We can assume that it does not. So, no impact on the political front.

However, we can’t stop (or should not stop) here. For all those cases there are also deaths (and hospitalizations). Deaths could have an impact in the political sense. For one thing, everyone who dies before the mid-term elections will not be vote for their preferred political party. [I am going to forgo and ignore the inane assertion that one party will have the dead voters vote anyway. This seems reasonable because we have a lot of really stupid people who will be trying their best to find them, and experts who will easily be able to identify them if a state keeps its voting process even moderate effective.] What we need here is a death rate to use. Generally, 1 person per 100 infected dies within the US based on recent data. That means that we can forecast 1% of those monthly projections will die; or 33K in 1 month, 66K in 2 months, or 99K in 3 months. As tragic as this would be, it isn’t equal between the two groups.

Remember that 20 to 1 disparity, this is where it has some importance to our political entities. For one party 31K voters will die in 1 month and only 2K for the other party. Comparably, 62K voters versus 4K for 2 months and 93K voters versus 6K for 3 months. Those voter differences might be important to which party’s candidate wins in some elections. It will also have the potential to carry over into the next presidential election.

It’s not hard math to do. It is even rather obvious that you should not have to do the math to know that the original disparity of 20 to 1 would have implications to our political conditions on the ground.

Now someone might argue that while these loses are regrettable, they will be spread across the entire nation. Well, you ought to be able to do a little simple math and see if that’s true. I am thinking there is a Rogue Thinking #3 coming.

By the way, do they award Darwin Awards to politicians?