Minnesota Governor Tim Walz held a press conference yesterday afternoon to announce the extension and slight modification of his current shutdown order to May 4. The new executive order is accessible online here. I have embedded video of the press conference below.
The Star Tribune covers the extension in another verbose page-one story, this one by Jeremy Olson and Glenn Howatt headlined: “Gov. Tim Walz extends Minnesota’s stay-at-home order to May 4.” Subhead: “Stay-home order extended to buy extra time; virus could peak in July.” At this stage of events we travel deep into the land of bafflegab and pretense. Olson and Howatt don’t put it that way. They put it this way:
The pandemic has played out differently than expected in Minnesota since the coronavirus first emerged in Wuhan, China, in December and spread worldwide. Minnesota so far has 1,154 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 39 deaths.
People aren’t needing to be hospitalized for as long as initially predicted, which is good news because shorter stays mean more beds available for other patients and potentially fewer deaths. On the other hand, it now appears that an infected person on average spreads the coronavirus to four others, making it nearly twice as infectious as forecast.
National studies also have found that nearly one in five infected people have no symptoms, making them unwitting spreaders of the virus, said Kris Ehresmann, state infectious disease director.
This new understanding produced new state modeling results. Walz’s initial decision last month rested on modeling suggesting that a stay-at-home order could reduce deaths in Minnesota by as much as a third — from 74,000 to about 50,000 — over the course of the pandemic. Now, the modeling predicts the state actions might cut the death toll in half or better — from about 50,000 if the state had done nothing at all, to a range of 6,000 to 20,000 deaths.
While state officials said they provided the death estimates for transparency, they stressed that the modeling is intended to determine whether social restrictions and policies will work — not to project a death toll.
“We’re not predicting a certain number of deaths will happen or won’t happen with these scenarios,” said Jan Malcolm, state health commissioner. “It’s directional. It’s all about helping us understand which levers have the biggest impact. And what the model confirms … is that the biggest levers really are building up ICU capacity and isolating the most vulnerable.”
This requires some translation. As I write early Thursday morning, I am sure only of this. Clearly I have erred in taking the governor’s projections supporting the current shutdown at face value. We screwed up — we trusted that Walz was speaking frankly when he issued his shutdown order on March 25. (I posted the video of Walz’s remarks here yesterday.)
In other words, laboring to make literal sense of Walz’s projections was a mistake. Now we are instructed that Walz’s projections are only “directional.” They are metaphorical. Walz only means them in a Pickwickian sense.
I note literally that, according to the Situation Update compiled by the Minnesota Department of Health, Minnesota has sustained 39 deaths attributed to COVID-19 (median age 86). The number of those hospitalized in ICU is 64. It is not clear to me why the state must be shut down to “isolate the most vulnerable.”
The most current state data indicate that 11.4 percent of the state’s labor force — some 355,000 Minnesotans — has filed for unemployment benefits. As Dave Orrick notes in the St. Paul Pioneer Press: “It’s an astounding turn for a state economy that, in February, was seeing unemployment below 4 percent — and a labor market so tight that the lack of available workers was seen as a drag in some quarters.”
Directionally speaking, we want out.
Despite the tenor of the Star Tribune article, Governor Walz relies on certain projections with a 95 percent level of confidence. See the video below at about 17:30. How that is to work out in lives saved is left hanging now that we are told the bottom-line numbers are not meant to be taken literally.
Quotable quote (Governor Walz): “Modeling was never meant to be absolute and provide a number. It was meant to show trend and direction.”
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