RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/thomas-allen-coburn-11585429731?mod=hp_opin_pos_3

The doctor and Senator was the model of a citizen legislator.

Politics is a lifetime career for most in American government, and then there are exceptions like Thomas Coburn. The Oklahoma obstetrician who became a Senator and then returned to a productive private life died Saturday of prostate cancer at age 72. He was what America’s Founders imagined in self-governing citizen legislators, and that mentality made him far more consequential than the usual congressional seat-fillers.

Coburn worked in his family’s optical-lens firm before going to medical school and setting up an ob/gyn practice. He ran for the House in 1994 in part to oppose the Clinton effort for government health care, served three terms and retired before running for Senate in 2004 for what he said would be no more than two terms. He continued to see patients on weekends and Mondays in Oklahoma until the Senate declared it a (preposterous) conflict-of-interest.

“I don’t think Washington can fix Washington,” Coburn told our colleague Joe Rago in 2014 after announcing his retirement two years early when his cancer recurred. “You’re always going to have this built-in conflict of getting re-elected. Parochial interests will trump the best interests of the nation, and the actors will do what’s expedient to be popular. It doesn’t have to be that way. There’s hundreds of thousands if not millions of people who could do these jobs well. All it requires is common sense and courage.” (The full interview is nearby.)

https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/oxford-and-imperial/

My dear old statistics teacher used to say that relying on any model, however good but founded on past data, was like driving by looking at the rearview mirror; fine as long as the future looked like the past. As governments struggle with their response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the $64 trillion question is “which past does the future look like?”

Science writes how models have become supremely important:

Entire cities and countries have been locked down based on hastily done forecasts that often haven’t been peer reviewed.  … The Netherlands … Prime Minister Mark Rutte rejected “working endlessly to contain the virus” and “shutting down the country completely.” Instead, he opted for “controlled spread” of the virus while making sure the health system isn’t swamped with COVID-19 patients.

Other governments have chosen different models and in place of “controlled spread,” bet on total lockdown.

Just how influential those models are became apparent over the past 2 weeks in the United Kingdom. … a group at Imperial College London [recommended an approach] not unlike the strategy the Netherlands is pursuing. … But on 16 March, the Imperial College group published a dramatically revised model that concluded—based on fresh data from the United Kingdom and Italy—that even a reduced peak would fill twice as many intensive care beds as estimated previously, overwhelming capacity. The only choice, they concluded, was to go all out on control measures.

But as new data becomes available the “fog of war” is slowly lifting and rekindling the debate between the models.