Covid-19 case mortality data from ICE facilities and the knuckleheads thing

United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement — the dastardly ICE, for those of you left-scrolling from home — has a surprisingly detailed Covid-19 dashboard (Tab 4). Notwithstanding our obsession with such things, we had not seen it before clicking through a link in an otherwise irrelevant Vox post.

The upshot is that ICE has been testing the heck out of the detainees in its facilities. As of September 11, there are only 20,138 detainees in ICE facilities (down from an average of >50,000 in 2019), and ICE has administered more than 35,000 Covid-19 tests. Recognizing that people cycle through these facilities at varying rates, it is safe to assume that ICE has tested a solid majority of its detainees during the last six months, and possibly the vast majority.

The agency has found 5,810 cases of Covid-19, for a “positivity rate” from testing at an ugly 16.6%. That is the sort of rate that gets journalists screaming at governors, fun banned, and schools firmly virtual.

But only 6 detainees have died of the Covid. That is a case-fatality ratio of… 0.1%. Compare that number to the observed case fatality rates in various countries, which are massively higher. The Covid-19 case fatality rate in ICE detention centers is right in line with the seasonal flu. That made us curious.

There might be several explanations for this. ICE facilities might have excellent health care. Well, maybe, but that would be a narrative-buster of the first order. Indeed, a recent whistleblower has contended that at least one ICE facility has under-reported Covid-19 cases, which would suggest an even lower case-fatality rate than indicated by the dashboard.

Perhaps ICE is under-counting Covid-19 deaths. Again, anything is possible, but the official ICE tally is qualified by a footnote which, again, points the other way: “Detainee deaths” includes detainees who have died after testing positive for COVID-19 while in ICE custody; COVID-19 may not be the official cause of death. That seems like a risk of overcounting, rather than undercounting.

Perhaps ICE detainees are in excellent health in general, and thereby better able to resist disease. The American Medical Association would not agree with that theory, but what do they know? Coastal elite experts, probably.

What about the demographics of the ICE detainee population? Those figures are hard to come by — ICE apparently does not provide them — but an outfit called Freedom for Immigrants came up with data on the age distribution of detainees in 2019 that provides at least a clue:

Through the same link, there seems to be data that says that the median age of people deported from ICE facilities is 30. By comparison, the median age in the United States is about 38. The population in ICE facilities, therefore, is almost certainly significantly younger than the United States in general.

Furthermore, eyeballing that chart above, the ICE facilities seem to have very few people over the age of 70, which represents the preponderance of Covid-19 fatalities in the general US population.

We lack both the inclination and the data crunching skills to line up the ICE fatalities against the US population case fatality rates, and in any case that is a fool’s errand, because (i) we don’t know the ages of the six ICE detainees who have died of Covid-19 to date, and (ii) it is obvious that most ICE detainees have been tested for Covid-19 while perhaps a quarter of Americans have been even now. We can say this, though, looking at the CDC data: As of a couple of days ago, only 1802 Americans under the age of 35 had died of Covid-19, out of 182,095 total dead for whom data had been collected. That’s out of 79,890 deaths from all-causes in the under-35 population of 149,554,018 during the same time.

In other words, if you are under 35 you had a 0.053% chance of dying of anything in the last six months or so, and a 0.0012% chance of dying of Covid-19. Your chances of dying of anything were 44 times your chances of dying of Covid-19.

Under 35ers may be anti-social — there’s a surprise — but they are not knuckleheads, no matter what Phil Murphy says. At least insofar as they have accurately assessed their own risk from Covid-19. From the very legitimate point of view of somebody under the age of 35, the policy and social responses to the pandemic have come at enormous cost in both fun and opportunity for virtually no direct benefit. To the extent that young people are trying to slow the spread of Covid-19 — and a great many of them are — they are sacrificing themselves to save the most vulnerable in our society.

From that perspective, willing or not, today’s young are the new greatest generation, not knuckleheads.