More from Rufo:

But new data are undermining this [housing crisis] narrative. As residents of West Coast cities witness the disorder associated with homeless encampments, they have found it harder to accept the progressive consensus—especially in the context of the coronavirus epidemic, which has all Americans worried about contagion. An emerging body of evidence confirms what people see plainly on the streets: homelessness is deeply connected to addiction, mental illness, and crime.

Homeless advocacy has become big business in cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland. Donations and government grants have left advocacy groups flush with cash and turned them into powerful political players in most major cities.

A housing-problem narrative means broad strokes - build more buildings, advocate rent control, etc. An addiction narrative means narrow strokes - one-on-one counseling, therapy, etc. There's more political power in the directing the broad strokes, almost none in directing the narrow strokes.

There's also more satisfaction in homelessness being a function of housing. Build a new homeless shelter and you can claim to have helped hundreds of homeless in one stroke. Counsel homeless addicts one-on-one and your victories are one at a time - and will be lost more than won, a frustrating and disheartening outcome.

Does anyone know of a coronavirus infection tracker that has the number of infections divided by the local population?

The high infection rate in New Orleans isn't surprising to anyone who has actually been there. It is a generally dirty and lawless city. Some have made the same argument about San Fran and Seattle based on their infection numbers and their ineffectual homeless policies and public sanitation issues.

But only knowing the infection numbers is useless in this context. You need to know the rate of infection instead. Those cities have a lot of people in them. LA having a higher number of infections than Tucker, TX isn't surprising. One has ~19 million people, the other ~1000.

I'm confused because all the progressives I know blame the homeless crisis on the mental institutions closing in the 80s. They blame Regan.

That’s because the progressive don’t know any history. The mental institutions and state hospitals closed because the progressives of the ACLU and their allies in the health care industry fought court battles to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill and go to a community based treatment options, where they would theoretically get help from an army of newly minted psychologists and social workers paid by the state and federal governments (of course probably in the end four times the cost to the tax payers)while they obediently too their medications, and maintained their dignity living regular upstanding citizen lives in the community.
This started in the late 60’s and accelerated into the seventies. By the 80’s the battle was lost everywhere.

It didn’t quite work out the way they envisioned it, needless to say.

So now the prisons, and jails (the only secure places left) to house the dangerously mentally ill have replaced the closed mental institutions and state hospitals.

There is a relatively high hurdle to be incarcerated for any length of time, and unfortunately shooting up on a public street and pooping on the sidewalk isn’t even worth commenting on anymore. Not worth even arresting them, since they can’t hold them long enough.

“Does anyone know of a coronavirus infection tracker that has the number of infections divided by the local population?”

This is also impossible to determine since we do not have a reliable accurate universal test for an active infection. We also do not have a reliable accurate universal test for antibodies to the Corona virus infection. Just guessing might give you some number to compare to some other number but it won’t give you any predictive or useable data,

Genuine science contains a list of assumptions at the start of the experiment or study. When you stack two or more assumptions on top of each other, the chances that you are doing a valid study or getting meaningful results goes way down.

They blame Regan. ~ NicoleK at March 29, 2020 10:05 AM

Isab is right (at March 29, 2020 10:56 AM) on the history of closing mental institutions. There was a movement that began in the late '50s and early '60s to stop institutionalizing the mentally ill. New psychotropic drugs were supposed to usher in a new paradigm of caring for the mentally ill.

Movies and books like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest that made mental illness out be no more serious than non-conformity helped foster the idea that mental institutions were cruel and barbaric places that needed to be shut down.

The law that implemented that program in California was signed by Governor Pat Brown, but mainly went into effect in Reagan's term as governor. Reagan did subsequently cut some of the funding for mental health programs, believing the move to community-based care required less funding (as promised by its advocates). Hence, the Progressives' ire.

The vast majority of homeless that remain unsheltered, especially in places like Venice Beach, are either drug addicts, alcoholics, mentally ill, or criminals.

This is a situation where the power of "and" comes into play. More accurately, it should be stated as being "one or more of". I suspect a minimum of two. And odds are good those abusing drugs and alcohol consider that self-medication.

I'm confused because all the progressives I know

Don't want to blame themselves for the policies they advocate(d) for? and wish to transfer that blame to someone they politically disagree with?

As for Big Homeless, follow the money. Almost guaranteed that the heads of those non-profits are pulling in a 6 figure salary. Guaranteed that politically connected contractors who want to score those building contracts are stroking checks contributing to their political benefactors come election time, and that their employees are also strongly encouraged to do the same.

I understand the limits and the necessary error bars Isab. Testing at this point is relatively connected with hospitalizations. Areas with more hospital or a higher incidence of hypochondria might skew things. Still I would find a per capita measure of infection more informative than the current raw number.

And yes I am aware there is essentially zero effort to measure recovered also skewing any numbers. But the current raw numbers are completely uninformative and the media reporting is largely divorced from reality.

NicoleKI'm confused because all the progressives I know blame the homeless crisis on the mental institutions closing in the 80s. They blame Regan.

In the 60's advocates for the mentally ill began litigating against the inhumane treatment of mentally ill people in psychiatric institutions and in favor of managing them in the community. Around the same time states and counties that paid the costs of managing the mentally ill in psychiatric hospitals began shifting the cost to Medicare and Medicaid, who also favored more humane community-based care.

Conan: Homeless advocacy has become big business in cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland.

Likewise care and treatment for mental illness and drug abuse; with way too much involvement of the government, way too little accountability for private providers, and way too much collaboration between the two.

NicoleK:Does anyone know of a coronavirus infection tracker that has the number of infections divided by the local population?

Nobody in the US is collecting that data; and a lot of state and county health departments won't release data they have collected. Testing is still limited mostly to patients with symptoms that might require treatment. To find out what the rate of infection is in a community they would need to do random testing of a sample of the population, with or without symptoms. They've been able to do that to some extent in Iceland. There they found that about half of people who tested positive had no symptoms at all; more than 80% of those with symptoms had mild symptoms. It's been suggested that measuring the increase in the number of hospitalizations could give and idea of the rate of spread of the disease. But it still wouldn't show how many have been infected. So far no one is compiling information on the number of hospitalizations. It's possible that millions of Americans have already been infected.

Confirmed Coronavirus Cases Is an ‘Almost Meaningless’ Metric

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/confirmed-coronavirus-cases-almost-meaningless-123550415.html

An article by Dr. Anthony Fauci and some others published three days ago in the New England Journal of Medicine says:

On the basis of a case definition requiring a diagnosis of pneumonia, the currently reported case fatality rate is approximately 2%.4 In another article in the Journal, Guan et al.5 report mortality of 1.4% among 1099 patients with laboratory-confirmed Covid-19; these patients had a wide spectrum of disease severity. If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.2

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387

Isab The mental institutions and state hospitals closed because the progressives of the ACLU and their allies in the health care industry fought court battles to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill and go to a community based treatment options...

Which is true. Also at the same time states and counties that paid the cost of institutionalizing the mentally ill found that they could shift much of that cost to the federal government, via Medicare and Medicaid, which favored more humane treatment through community mental health centers.

Isab: So now the prisons, and jails (the only secure places left) to house the dangerously mentally ill have replaced the closed mental institutions and state hospitals.

When it comes to humane care and treatment of the mentally ill, jails are not that good but they're better than psychiatric hospitals - at least the two jails I've worked in, and the state and federal prisons that some of my coworkers have worked in. Unfortunately there is too much "collaboration" between government entities and private providers of inpatient treatment, which means very little accountability for for-profit providers.

From the ACLU’s website:

The ACLU's most important Supreme Court case involving the rights of people with mental illness was filed on behalf of Kenneth Donaldson, who had been involuntarily confined in a Florida State Hospital for 15 years. He was not dangerous and had received no medical treatment. In a landmark decision for mental health law in 1975, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled that states cannot confine a non-dangerous individual who can survive on his own, or with help from family and friends.

I wasn't looking for that information for the purpose you are talking about Ken R. I had a long talk with NicoleK about some of the points you bring up. Especially about how different the risks of death or hospitalization are with respect to age with COVID-19. For people under 40 the risk is near negligible. For under 20 you probably are asymptomatic.

Instead I was interested in regional differences. Just knowing how many per capita had tested positive would be interesting if you assume the biases and errors are relatively uniform across the US. I don't know if that is a good assumption, but I would be curious what the data looked like if you made it. Instead you have things like the Johns Hopkins's Corona Dashboard, which is more or less useless for the US. Other nations things are reported by the national or state equivalent level. The US appears to be county level. The map just looks like a population map of the US. All it can tell you is has corona been found in your community. And the answer by now is always yes. May as well ask a magic 8 ball.

Just to pull a few numbers:
New Orleans - ~1350 cases - 0.4M people
Houston - ~530 cases - 2.3M people

That is a per capita difference of 3375/million for New Orleans and 230/million for Houston. A massive difference that I don't think can be explained away with just testing differences. Even worse is the data point I grabbed is really marked as Harris County not Houston. Using all of Harris County brings the per capita number down to 130/M. For another data point California appears to be reported based on city instead of county. LA ends up with a per capita of 530/M. Much higher than Houston but still almost an order of magnitude lower than New Orleans.

There appear to be big regional differences. But the data is complete crap.

Ben: Still I would find a per capita measure of infection more informative than the current raw number... Just knowing how many per capita had tested positive would be interesting if you assume the biases and errors are relatively uniform across the US... But the data is complete crap.

You can't get the per capita rate of infection because no one has any idea how many people have been infected. At least hundreds of thousands; possibly tens of millions. Knowing the number of people per capita who've tested positive isn't useful for much (the number of people who've tested positive for the flu this year is around 230,000, which doesn't tell you anything about the number of people who've gotten the flu- probably around 30 Million) To get an idea of the number of people infected in the population, or how fast the virus is spreading they would need to periodically randomly test a large number of people from the general population. They're still being selective about who they test for COVID-19 because there's still a shortage of test supplies. Most people infected aren't tested.

If you want to know the number of people with positive tests per capita on any given day you can probably figure that out. But it'll change every day. At least some- if not all- state health departments are posting information on their websites, like the number of tests conducted, number of positive tests, number of deaths. The health department in the state I live in posts that information from day to day and breaks it down by county. The numbers vary a lot between counties.

Here is a link to a website that posts data on COVID-19. It was created by some kid in Seattle. It updates automatically with data from government health department websites, CDC and WHO.

https://ncov2019.live/data

I was thinking more per capita hospitalized Ken R. Not per capita infected. I understand there isn't a clue how many people are really infected. Especially since there are so many asymptomatic people.

While Crid will call me heartless and drape himself with the corpses of strangers I don't really care much about how many people have been infected. On the health issue side most appear to have mild to no symptoms. This disease isn't a threat to them. On the prevalence side (i.e. how well quarantine is working) it is everywhere. Mass quarantine appears to not have worked.

So instead I was looking for a metric over how many people actually needed medical care. The anecdotal evidence most media prefer is pretty useless. You would think our hospital are overrun with people dying in the streets. Some places are bad with localized heavy outbreaks but many other places are empty.

I'll look over the link you provided and see if I can tease out anything reasonable. But yeah, probably not. Most of the data is crap.

I read an article where a guy who has a landscaping business in San Fran described his experience. For years, whenever he encountered a homeless person, he gave them his business card and told them to come any time and he had work. It paid more than min wage. Of over 100 cards he gave out no one ever showed up. Especially for the past 2 years as unemployment has gone down, lack of work seems hard to use as a reason for long-term homelessness.

In addition to closing mental hospitals, urban renewal has sought to eliminate low quality housing which is all the poorest can afford.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess when working class people become homeless due to bad luck they are better at figuring out and using resources... be it government run, family, church groups, whatever. I am guessing the "just bad luck" homeless are not sleeping in the street or begging. They are at the shelter, figuring out what their next step is. Or crashing at their Aunt's.

Ben: I was thinking more per capita hospitalized

Following the number of people hospitalized from day to day would be useful. It wouldn't tell you anything about the total number of people infected, but it's not affected by changes in the number of people tested, so it would give an idea of where and how fast the virus is spreading. Plus admissions to hospitals are data that every hospital has in digital form; someone just needs to compile it.

For the people who died from COVID-19 the average time from infection to death was a little more than three weeks. So a surge in the number of deaths indicates a surge in infections three weeks prior. It's nice to know but not really helpful for creating a strategy to prevent the spread of infections. Number of hospital admissions still lags behind but not as much; but the criteria for admission to a hospital aren't uniform from place to place and from time to time. As people in hospitals recover and are discharged, and the number of new infections starts to go down, overwhelmed hospitals that were admitting only the most critical patients might start admitting less critical patients, so the number of hospital admissions would stay high for awhile after the number of new infections starts to decline. So that complicates that statistic a little.

Ben: I was thinking more per capita hospitalized

Following the number of people hospitalized from day to day would be useful. It wouldn't tell you anything about the total number of people infected, but it's not affected by changes in the number of people tested, so it would give an idea of where and how fast the virus is spreading. Plus admissions to hospitals are data that every hospital already has in digital form; someone just needs to compile it.

For the people who died from COVID-19 the average time from infection to death was a little more than three weeks. So a surge in the number of deaths indicates a surge in infections three weeks prior. It's nice to know but not really helpful for creating a strategy to prevent the spread of infections. Number of hospital admissions still lags behind but not as much; but the criteria for admission to a hospital aren't uniform from place to place and from time to time. As people in hospitals recover and are discharged, and the number of new infections starts to go down, overwhelmed hospitals that were admitting only the most critical patients might start admitting less critical patients, so the number of hospital admissions would stay high for awhile after the number of new infections starts to decline. So that complicates that statistic a little.

Agreed Ken R.

But either way it looks like the data I can get access to is worthless for any sort of statistical analysis. Which is disappointing but such is life.