RUTHFULLY YOURS

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Perhaps it is because with age has come cynicism regarding our political class and the press. I am not sure. What I do know is that I am confident in the innate ability of Americans to adapt to trying situations and, if left free, to change conditions for the better for themselves and their fellow man, be that through government or industry. But I am less enamored of our political leaders in Washington and the media.

The United States is the richest large country in the world. We have a healthcare system that attracts the world’s wealthiest individuals. While we may lag some Asian and European nations, we are more literate and better educated than most of the world. We value personal freedom more than any other people, having inherited a unique form of government from our forebearers. Yet, we have a history of gullibility. We believed the editors of Newsweek and Time when they ran articles in the 1970s titled, respectively, “The Cooling World” and “A New Ice Age?” We failed to understand the difference in time to a geologist and opportunistic reporters. We were frightened by Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s prophecy of doom in their 1968 book, The Population Bomb: “The battle to feed all humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death, in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” We were shocked by stories of disasters related to Y2K and of those about asteroids. More recently, entire industries have been built around scaring people about the alleged anthropomorphic causes of global warming: Teslas to wind farms to solar panels – all of which require government assistance to survive.   

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/dont_count_on_the_model_prediction_for_coronavirus_deaths.html

For the first time in decades, Americans who hear the word “model” are more likely to visualize a graph than a woman on a runway.  Now, in the era of the coronavirus, we all are morbidly fixated on the projections that the experts are making regarding the number of people who will contract the virus and the number of them who can be expected to die.

On March 31 at the daily White House briefing, we heard from Drs. Fauci and Birx that the most credible model anticipates a final outcome of 100,000–200,000 American deaths due to the virus.  Subsequent discussion repeatedly stressed that the actual number might be much higher or much lower depending on whether the social distancing guidelines are followed.  The more these two highly respected scientists discussed the matter, the more evident it became that the model cannot be relied on to provide assurance about how the pandemic will play out.  This is not a failure on the part of these two credible scientists; it is a failure of the model.

When one does not know the current level of infection in the population, when little information is available about how quickly the virus can be transmitted from one person to the next, when we remain unsure of whether asymptomatic corona carriers are as contagious as those with symptoms, when nobody seems to know how long the average asymptomatic carrier remains in that state, when we are unable to determine the actual mortality rate among the afflicted — when basic pieces of the puzzle such as these have yet to be inserted into the bigger picture, it is unreasonable to expect this particular model to predict accurately.