I have been avoiding the network news channels like the plague, so I was surprised when I came across a Twitter hashtag this morning: #extendthelockdown. Maybe I should have known there would be no backpedaling on the alarmism, but it is odd to see people shilling for their own oppression so blatantly. There is probably some manipulation bringing it up to "trending," but then again, maybe not. The sunk-costs fallacy, or the gamblers fallacy, is a powerful force. I'm about to put another $500 into my old beater car even though I've already put-in $800 up-front and another $500 over six months. I just can't help believing that the previously spent money would be wasted if I bought another car and that after this fix it will run perfectly for another 50,000 miles. It's a Toyota!
Similarly, with lockdows that have been damaging beyond any calculation, many want to extend the restrictions because otherwise all that damage would be "for nothing." You see, there is a second wave coming, which will be far more deadly and destroy the economy even more! The only reason that all the doomsday models were wrong from the start was because lockdowns worked so well, we should do them more often! Conveniently forgotten is the fact that the Imperial College model included the scenario of lockdown and still got it wrong. Their reckless modeling triggered a global panic, lockdowns, and other draconian measures. Yet they were back-pedaling only days after the lockdowns were initiated.
Many things are being forgotten in the media-induced stampede to destroy our world and create a weird and creepy "new normal." Fear is the enemy of reason and even basic concepts of public health are being sacrificed. Even the basic justifications for lockdown are being lost. When a typical respiratory virus that is dangerous to the elderly and at-risk comes through we take extra precautions to protect those people for a month or so, which is about the length of a coronavirus cycle give or take a couple of weeks. While the kids at school and healthy adults are contracting the virus and developing immunity, those in danger must wait it out and then we can resume normal contact. We don't lock everything down because the doesn't actually solve the problem: even if measures are effective the virus will just surge back after they are lifted. However, in this case there was concern that the at-risk population was not known, therefore how can we protect a population cohort that is unknown? Lockdown may have made a bit sense for a couple of weeks while we studied the virus and determined the risk-groups to be isolated. But immediately this approach was hamstrung by the absurd CDC testing guide-lines of only using tests on those with severe symptoms, thus skewing the data and giving us little information about the overall behavior of the virus. Yet we do have that information now and we know that about 90% of infections are asymptomatic, it simply is not dangerous to the vast majority of the population.
So why are the vast majority suffering to protect a relatively small cohort of people who could be easily reverse-quarantined? There is a logical excuse, you see even if only a small percentage of the population are hit to the point that they require ICU care, that could still overwhelm the system in theory. Thus the doctrine of "flatten the curve" arose, only to itself be consigned to the memory-hole as of late, hence I will sum it up again. The constant doubling-down on failed models and sensationalist journalism has kept the public's attention for weeks, but many are becoming less informed on the basic premises and justifications for what is being done to us. There is a good reason for this obfuscation: the theory of the curve-flatteners one again rests on the fact that, in the beginning, not much was known about this corona-virus. What were the effective treatments? Would hospitals be able to provide them? What was the rate of infection? These are all good questions and theoretically could justify a short lockdown while study is being conducted and case histories aggregated to form a clear picture of what we are dealing with.
Epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski has done an analysis of the data in the must-watch video linked. To understand the data and what it means for the curve-flattening Wittkowski looks at hospitalization rates, unlike so much of the media which merely throws data around in the scariest possible way. It seems to me that is we want to determine whether or not our hospitals are going to be overwhelmed we must focus on the rate of hospitalizations since that number will determine the impact on hospitals. On the other hand, if we want to find the impact of the lockdowns we need to look at the rate of infection. What we know is that the nationwide average for hospitalizations peaked on March 18th, meaning infections peaked around March 8th. NYC infections peaked a little later, about the same time as the lockdown. This tells us that the lockdown on March 20th happened too late to prevent a wide-spread of the virus, and yet hospitals have not been overwhelmed. Even in NYC, the epicenter of the epidemic, the Jarvits Center overflow ward was closed after going mostly unused. The hospital ship Comfort also is leaving, it wasn't needed in the first-place. Respirators were plentiful, maybe even too plentiful. We now have that info that we were lacking: hospitals can avoid being overwhelmed by making some basic preparations similar to a nasty flu-season and stocking-up on respirators.
These two facts bring us to the heart of the disinformation campaign that people are falling victim to currently:
One, we did not know for sure who the at-risk population was and so could not protect only them and must lockdown.
Two, we did not know whether hospitals could handle an increased flow and so to reduce the deaths from lack of care we must lockdown.
But now we do know and we can look back and see that we were panicked into making bad decisions, decisions that should have been reviewed as soon as data was available. That data has been available for some time, so it is important for the people to forget why the information was important in the first place. We must be distracted by more fabricated models and ad hoc justifications for the disastrous lockdown. But the facts remain: there was no reason to choose a mass-quarantine of society over a selective quarantine of the at-risk, there was no threat of hospitals being overwhelmed even in the hardest hit-area.
There have been plenty of opportunities to soften the rhetoric as numbers and projections come back to Earth, the entire 42 days of lockdown have been a series of down-grades in projection and then presentation of more bad models. The excuse for modeling failure has always been "social-distancing measures and lockdown worked so well," but I suspect there are other reasons having to do with the interests of the powerful. As more and more data emerges showing that the response to COVID was utterly inept and catastrophic beyond the threat of the virus itself, they must double-down, again and again. Only by continuing to enact further draconian measures can they maintain the illusion that the hysterical reaction was necessary, continuing to claim that the sky would have fallen were it not for the nanny-state protecting us. If the lockdowns were lifted tomorrow and society allowed to return to normal with some sensible temporary restrictions, we would all be just fine if my analysis of the data is correct (please correct me anyone reading this, if I am missing something). That is to say, we would all be just fine except for those responsible for the unprecedented man-made disaster that we are living through, they would be tarred-and-feathered and discredited forever.
So we can expect to see more doomsday modeling and absurd government actions, more fear-mongering from the press, more appeals to emotion and slogans like "not even one COVID death." They will attempt to brainwash us into a bizarre world in which all the incredible suffering and disfunction we are witnessing is meaningless, only the COVID deaths matter. Everything else must be thrust aside and sacrificed to the altar of the viral God. We must remake our world into an Orwellian nightmare, normal life can never be allowed to return, although eventually it will when people are too emotionally exhausted to question the narrative and are just begging to be tested and tracked, whatever, JUST LET ME OUT OF THE HOUSE. It must be so, because a while lot of people have to cover their asses right about now and if any attention is paid to the two facts I went over in this post, there will be hell to pay!
