RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/our-dangerous-illusions-about-risk-bruce-thornton/

The coronavirus pandemic and the draconian lock-down responses to it have given us an object lesson in just how irrationally we evaluate and compare risk. For all our pretenses that “experts” have enough reliable knowledge to mitigate risk based on facts, we still make policy decisions based on fear, self-interest, or ideology. Even before the current medical crisis, our distorted and excessive aversion to risk has led to policies rife with moral hazard that create new and more dangerous consequences.

There’s no doubt that the current shut-down of the economy and public spaces is a consequence of bad risk assessment. These policies were based on lethality models that lacked sufficient data such as the rate of infection, and that projected numbers of dead later reduced significantly. Stoked by panic and incomplete models, radical self-quarantining was mandated even for the healthy young, and open-air activity proscribed even though a viral load necessary to sicken us requires enclosed, crowded spaces and prolonged exposure to a carrier.

Nor is there any certainty that these policies contributed to flattening out the rate of known infected and dying. Germany to date has had one of Europe’s lowest mortality rates, which many attribute to its early and severe lockdown. But recently the reproduction rate of the virus, the number of people one carrier will infect, has been rising after restrictions were lessened. As the Wall Street Journal  reports, “The upward drift in the reproduction rate now suggests that those measures may not have stopped the disease in its tracks so much as delayed the inevitable—and at enormous cost.” 

Science without humility is a parlor game that can turn lethal.

 D uring this entire epidemic, and the response to it, there is a growing tension between front-line doctors and scientific researchers, between people who must use and master numbers in their jobs and university statisticians and modelers, and between the public in general and its credentialed experts.

Fact and Theory

In a nutshell, the divide reflects the ancient opposition between empiricism and abstraction — or more charitably common sense and practical application versus scientific knowledge.

When the two are combined and balanced, then knowledge advances. When they are not, both are deprived of the wisdom of the other.

Unfortunately, in the present crisis, we have listened more to the university modeler than to a numbers-crunching accountant. The latter may not understand Banach manifolds, but he at least knows you cannot rely on basic equations and formulas if your denominator is inaccurate and your numerator is sometimes equally unreliable.

NOW WATCH: ‘Coronavirus Update: U.S. Turning the Corner on Coronavirus Testing’

It seems a simple matter that the small number of those testing positive for the virus simply could not represent all those who are infected with the contagion. Yet such obviousness did not stop modelers, experts, and political advisers from authoritatively lecturing America on the lethality and spread of COVID-19.

Internet coronavirus-meters feign scientific accuracy with their hourly streams of precise data. But those without degrees wondered why such metrics even listed China, whose data is fanciful, or why the number of  “cases” is listed when it hinges entirely on the hit-and-miss and idiosyncratic testing of various states and nations.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/money/trump-johns-hopkins-coronavirus-model-statistics

Johns Hopkins University said Tuesday that a leaked FEMA document featuring charts projecting nearly double the current daily coronavirus death toll by the end of May is not a “final version.”

The charts used data from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/neil_ferguson_who_started_the_lockdown_panic_cheats_on_his_own_lockdown.html

“The icing on this cake is that Staats, the married girlfriend in the posh London home, works for an anti-Semitic, hard-left Soros-funded organization”

England’s initial impulse with Wuhan virus was to go with the plan that Sweden implemented: Keep the country open while protecting those most vulnerable to the virus. Neil Ferguson changed all that. He and his Imperial College London epidemiology team predicted that, if Britain went ahead with that plan, more than 500,000 people would die. He also warned America that anything less than a total, Chinese-style lockdown would result in 2.2 million deaths.

It was Ferguson who sparked the lockdown frenzy in both countries. He later lowered his estimates and real events have shown how grossly wrong he was. Still, thanks to his initial hysteria, the harm was done.

Ferguson has often been wrong. When Frederick Forsyth blasted the British government for relying on Ferguson, he referenced past Ferguson predictions:

He was the genius who, on the issue of swine flu, confidently forecast global deaths at four million. The worldwide total turned out to be 18,500. In 2005, Ferguson said that up to 200 million people could die from bird flu. Between 2003 and 2009, just 282 people died worldwide from the disease.

With that track record, it’s possible that Ferguson doesn’t believe in his own data. That would explain the major story that broke in Britain’s Telegraph newspaper.  It seems that Ferguson was forced to resign from his government advisory position because, while he was on lockdown, he got several visits from his girlfriend, a married woman with two children:

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/megan-fox/2020/05/05/scotus-justice-ruth-bader-ginsburg-hospitalized-with-infection-n388463

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is reportedly hospitalized with a gall bladder infection. ABC News reported,

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was hospitalized Tuesday afternoon for “a benign gallbladder condition” that had caused an infection, according to Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg.Ginsburg is expected to remain at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore for a day or two but still participate in the telephonic oral arguments Wednesday when the court will hear oral arguments in a case involving the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate.

Ginsburg, 87, had participated in the oral arguments that the SCOTUS held via teleconference on Monday and Tuesday on a live stream due to the Chinese virus lockdown precautions. The famous judge has had a string of health scares over the last year. Unlike leftist Twitter that jumped on a chance to kick a conservative when he is down, like Rush Limbaugh when he announced his cancer diagnosis, conservative Twitter is wishing the far-left radical judge well.