The Governor and Executive Council met this morning. Adam Sexton live-tweeted it. Among the tweets:
This is most likely wrong. It is likely that COVID-19 has been present in New Hampshire since January, but we had been assuming that it’s the flu because we weren’t looking for COVID-19:
This makes a lot more sense than what's driving the decision-making in New Hampshire … that COVID-19 was not present in the State until March … #nhpolitics https://t.co/gyhjhDmyfY
— President-Elect Ed Mosca (@RealEdMosca) March 25, 2020
We cannot maintain the status quo until sometime in May. We are going to destroy our local service businesses and perhaps other small businesses too. And the worst part is that New Hampshire’s economic shutdown is based on a faulty assumption.
Also at the Executive Council meeting:
A shelter-in-place order could be the worst step we could take. Shelter-in-place … unless you want to make it permanent … only delays exposure to COVID-19 because there is no vaccine. It also prevents “herd immunity” … the general population developing widespread immunity, which slows or stops the spread of the virus.
Herd immunity was unthinkable when we thought the mortality rate of COVID-19 was 34-times that of the flu. But as more data has become available, we have learned that the 34-times was a massive overestimate. It has plummeted to 10-times … based on a sample-size that reflects only 20% of those actually inflected (80% of the affected show no symptoms or very minor symptoms), which means the real mortality rate is much lower. Per the link from Julie Kelly above the real mortality rate may be one-tenth of the flu.
The anecdotal evidence we have is that there has only been one death in New Hampshire from Coronavirus … the deceased had multiple preexisting medical issues … and just a few hospitalizations.
There is no theoretical or practical justification for shelter-in-place. We need to develop herd immunity, and get back to normal
