One last comment on coronavirus.  I saw Bill Gates on TV last night complaining that President Trump is taking advice on COVID-19 from a pseudo-expert.  He was referring to Dr. Scott Atlas.  Mr. Gates has amassed one of the world’s great fortunes through the development of software, but that doesn’t qualify him as a medical expert nor as a judge of medical experts, real, quasi-, pseudo-, or otherwise.

Dr. Atlas is criticized by Mr. Gates and others (including Dr. Zeke Emmanuel, brother to Rahm) because he is thought to advocate “herd immunity”.  Herd immunity is not a position to be advocated or opposed.  It is a real-world effect that results from the spread of an infection through a population.  A person who is immune to a virus does not transmit it to others.  When sufficient numbers have achieved immunity, the ability of the virus to spread is reduced to the point that it is of limited danger even to those who are not immune.

The size of the portion of the population that is needed depends on how contagious the virus is.  Measles can spread if less than 95% of the population (the “herd”) is immune.  On the other hand, rubella (formerly “German” measles) can be stopped when 80% of the population is immune.  (Both percentages from Wikipedia.)

We don’t know how much of the population must be immune from COVID-19 to achieve “herd” immunity.  I have seen suggestions between 40% and 60%, but no one knows.  (Wikipedia says 60% to 75%.)

So, how does an individual achieve immunity?  One way is to become infected with COVID.  A second is to be born with T-cells that confer immunity.  The third way is to be vaccinated.

We don’t have a vaccine.  Most of us don’t have T-cell immunity.  So, the alternatives are (1) close as much as possible and wait for a vaccine or (2) open the economy back up while protecting the vulnerable.  If we adopted the second alternative, we would quarantine anyone with symptoms of the disease and ask anyone who is vulnerable to isolate.  The vulnerable are the elderly and those with co-morbidities.

That means letting everyone out to pursue happiness and economic gain as they will, to let freedom ring except for people who are ill with the disease or are in a vulnerable classification.

Remember, for those who are not elderly and do not have co-morbidities, the survival rate if they are infected with COVID-19 is in the neighborhood of 99%.  The survival rate is higher than that for the young, a bit lower as you approach 50.  Even for those in the vulnerable groups, it’s worth keeping in mind that most of the 5% or so of people so classified who die with COVID-19 infections in fact died of something else, or died of a combination of factors one of which was COVID-19.  So says the CDC.

This is not a matter of advocating for “herd immunity”.  It is a recognition that once we isolate the sick and the vulnerable, for the large majority of the population, the psychological, economic, and above all moral benefits that derive from living as free people in a self-governing society massively outweigh the risk of contracting an unpleasant but non-fatal illness.

Getting on the wrong side of a federal law enforcement agency can have devastating consequences, even for someone who has not violated the law.

Take the case of Nancy Black, reported by George Will a few years ago.  She had captained a whale-watching vessel in Monterey Bay.  One of her employees had whistled at a whale to induce the animal to remain near the boat.  NOAA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, asked Ms. Black to send a video of the incident.  They wanted to investigate whether the whistling constituted harassment of a marine mammal, a federal crime.

She sent the video after editing it to highlight the incident in question.  Investigators found that Ms. Black had not harassed the whale.  Although her interaction with the whale was innocent, the feds wanted her stopped.  She was indicted for making a materially false statement to a government agency.  Her crime was editing the video to highlight the information that demonstrated her innocence.  At one point a dozen federal agents raided her home to remove computers containing years’ worth of data that she had collected.

https://www.silive.com/opinion/columns/2012/07/the_government_leviathan_goes.html

Or consider the case of Jim Brown, a Merrill Lynch executive who testified before a grand jury during the Enron investigation back in 2002.  A prosecutor asked him about a phone call which, it was alleged, was part of a financial conspiracy.  Mr. Brown had not been part of that telephone call.  He didn’t have any first-hand knowledge.  The prosecutor told Brown that it didn’t matter whether he had participated.  What was wanted was Brown’s understanding of what was discussed “whether it was accurate or not”.

Unfortunately, Mr. Brown’s understanding of what was said on that call was not correct.  It was later shown that the content of the call differed from the information Brown had been given and had repeated at the prosecutor’s direction.  That will happen when you report on an event in which you did not take part.  Brown was charged with perjury and obstruction of justice.

The prosecutor was Andrew Weissman, later the leader of the Russian collusion investigation for which Robert Mueller acted as the titular head.  The Enron task force reported to Christopher Wray, then the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, now the director of the FBI.

These are not isolated incidents.  For more detail, see Sidney Powell’s “Licensed to Lie”; Conrad Black’s “A Matter of Principle”; Dinesh D’Souza’s “Stealing America”; or Harvey Silverglate’s “Three Felonies a Day”.  There are plenty of other sources.

Which brings me to Tony Bobulinski.  He is a former business partner of Hunter Biden.  He says that he can confirm the authenticity of some of the materials found on the Hunter Biden laptop that you have been reading about on your favorite news sites and hearing reported on TV.  (Irony.)

He claims to be able to demonstrate that Mr. Biden’s protestations of innocence in connection with the flow of foreign money from China and Ukraine toward members of the Biden family are false.

We now learn that the FBI took possession of the Hunter Biden laptop in December 2019.  At a time when the federal establishment was honeycombed with whistleblowers on matters dealing with Ukraine, was there an FBI whistleblower who breathed a word about the laptop to the House Intelligence Committee, the House Judiciary Committee, the Senate Judiciary Committee, the White House, or anyone in the media?

The FBI got the laptop from a computer repair person.  The repair guy found the potentially damaging materials in the course of trying to fix the computer.  He contacted the FBI through an intermediary.  The FBI initially took a forensic copy of the hard drive.  Later they came back and took the laptop.  Evidently, the repair guy kept a copy of his own.

I should emphasize that Mr. Biden denies any wrongdoing.  He has said in the clearest terms that he has never received money from a foreign country.

The FBI sat on this information during the impeachment hearings in the House, through the delay that ensued when the Speaker of the House refused to transmit the articles of impeachment until she was satisfied that the Senate process would be satisfactory, and again through the parade of witnesses who presented the case in the Senate for the removal of the president from office.

How happy do you think the FBI are with that computer repair guy? Or with Tony Bobulinski?

I’ll go out on a limb and say, not happy at all.  In fact, very unhappy.

And now we read that Mr. Bobulinski is going to meet with the FBI.  Think well, Mr. Bobulinski.  Think of George Papadopoulos, who in an interview with the Mueller team misstated the date when he met a certain obscure Maltese professor named Josef Mifsud.  Mr. P is now a convicted felon.  Think of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.  Read a chapter or two of any of the books I mentioned above.  And consider hiring the best lawyer you can afford, maybe the best lawyer you can’t afford.

On a frivolous note, the instant I heard Mr. Bobulinski’s delightful name, I thought of “Babalu’s Wedding Day”, a song briefly popular in my youth.  It was recorded in 1959 by a group named The Eternals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEqSRGHt1HY

Here is the same group (with some personnel changes) on video, 40 years older and a bit thicker in the waist, but still in fine voice, performing before a “live” audience.  (What other kind of audience is there?)  Before performing, they mention that Babalu was not their biggest hit.  Their true hit song, “Rockin’ in the Jungle” made it to number 11 on the charts in 1959, number 5 in the New York area.  For this reprise of “Babalu”, the song for which they are best known even if it wasn’t their biggest hit, they incorporated some tricky dance moves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP8kaFkHLqI

During her address to the Republican convention last month – you were watching, right? – Ivanka Trump said something that I had not heard before.  She was extolling her father’s accomplishments including the low unemployment rate and expanding prosperity that the country enjoyed through early 2020.  She stopped in mid-extol with the grave pronouncement that her father gave all of that up to fight the coronavirus.

The President himself made the same point a couple of times after the convention.  I haven’t heard it repeated since then.  Still, it is striking that a politician would take credit for an economic contraction.  Neither Herbert Hoover nor Franklin Roosevelt, the two grandmasters of shrinking an economy through government action, ever bragged that this was among their achievements.

The feds didn’t lock down the national economy.  The federal government issued guidelines and recommendations regarding lockdown, but not orders.  I doubt that the federal executive branch, acting without Congress, has the power under the Constitution to shut down the economy in the face of a pandemic.  But if they have it, they didn’t use it.

It has been state governments who have taken the lead on lockdown.  There has been an observable divide along party lines between those who want to close and those who want to open.  New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, California, Oregon, and Washington have been the most enthusiastic proponents of lockdown.  All have Democratic governors.  The large states with Republican governors, Texas and Florida particularly, have resisted lockdowns or have implemented them piecemeal.  Less populous states with Republican governors such as South Dakota and Wyoming have not locked down.

Why the difference?  Depending on the governor and the stage of the lockdown you’re talking about, I think the reasons fall into three categories:

• Self-regard
• “This is the life we have chosen.”
• Kryptonite

Self-regard.  People like Governor Cuomo, Governor Newsom, and Governor Inslee (D, Wash.) think of themselves as brave souls willing to be guided by science (or as they like to say “the” science) as they form public policy.

It doesn’t seem to occur to these governors that there are usually several policy alternatives informed by scientific findings and scientific research.  The policy recommendation they accept is likely to be the one they would have preferred before they referred the matter to scientific experts.  Politicians who select a policy based on “the science” or recommended by “the scientists” are likely to be rationalizing a choice that was pre-determined.

Prior to the current coronavirus outbreak, epidemiologists recommended against lockdowns.  There is growing disagreement among epidemiologists, physicians, and public health authorities over the efficacy and advisability of the lockdowns that have been implemented.  For every Anthony Fauci there is a Scott Atlas; for every CDC and WHO (on alternate Thursdays), there is a Great Barrington Declaration.

The temptation to preen as one declares that he or she is guided solely by “the science” likely masks nothing other than a raw policy preference. And political leaders who lean on “the scientists” might remember that scientists whose careers include advising political leaders have studied their audience even better than they have studied their subject matter.  This is a skill that courtiers have been honing since the days of the Pharaohs.

“This is the life we have chosen.”  For a person whose ambition is to serve as the governor of a state, COVID is the opportunity of a lifetime.  You sought the job and you want to keep the job.  Why? To have political power.  To exercise it.  To demonstrate to a grateful public that you champion the public interest against those small-minded people pursuing their own selfish interests.

The past six months must have been intoxicating to someone with that ambition.  You issue a declaration and it’s law.  Who gets to collect rent?  Who gets to run a restaurant?  Who gets to worship in a public setting?  Who gets to take to the streets to make a political point? For this and hundreds of other questions, the answer is found in the will of the governor, expressed in edicts issued at times and in the manner chosen by the governor alone.

Some executives love the limelight.  Governor Cuomo luxuriated in daily media briefings.  Others prefer a Delphic persona.  The governor of Washington State was asked what he planned to do about an insurrection that was reaching a fevered state in Seattle.  His laconic reply was that he had not been notified of any such event.  Louis the Sixteenth could not have shown an icier detachment.  But whatever presentation style our governors prefer, they are free to express themselves.  The citizens subject to their will do not have the same privilege.

Those without political power may still thrive in this environment if they play their cards in the right order.  Anthony Fauci has toiled for more than 40 years as a second-tier federal administrator.  But the sun shines most brilliantly just before it sets.  He has achieved at the end of his career the fame that he so clearly has hungered for during the preceding 40 years.

If the thought ever occurs to Dr. Fauci that his tenure as the head of a section within a federal bureau does not qualify him to have an opinion on every subject on earth, he keeps it to himself.  And that’s the only thought he keeps to himself.  Will there be football?  Will we vote in person?  Can we trust China?  Should we wear masks?  Dr. Fauci has an opinion, sometimes two contradictory opinions, that he is read to share with an adoring press.  Here is a sampling of headlines from a few days last month:

Dr. Fauci says you should hold off on this annual health appointment — The supplement Dr. Fauci takes to help keep his immune system healthy — Dr. Fauci warns:  Don’t eat in restaurants–Will the coronavirus vaccine be mandatory?  Here’s Dr. Fauci’s answer — Dr. Fauci says these states don’t need to lock down again — Dr. Fauci warns these places are COVID hotbeds — Dr. Fauci predicts when this will all be over — Dr. Fauci says the government won’t make these two things mandatory — Dr. Fauci would bet ten cents on Trump having a COVID-19 vaccine by November –The US is at risk of losing Dr. Fauci’s guidance — Dr. Fauci just called this state the “model” for COVID success (Vermont) — Dr. Fauci says this is the worst thing you can do right now — Dr. Fauci could’ve just gave [sic] the worst news about coronavirus yet — Six immunity tips from Anthony Fauci: How America’s top doc keeps from getting sick — Forget vitamins: Fauci says the 3 best things ‘to keep your immune system working optimally’ cost nothing

The President came down with COVID.  Dr. Fauci volunteered that the treatment that the Walter Reed doctors had provided was appropriate.  How does he know?  He’s not a clinician.  Dr. Fauci told us that the Rose Garden gathering to announce Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination was a “super-spreader event”.  Might that conclusion be ever so slightly influenced by politics?  Dr. Fauci refused to blame “peaceful protests” for a single case of COVID.

The opportunity to dictate the terms of life to other people has a broad appeal to a certain type of politician, whether elected to an executive office or appointed to an administrative post.  The COVID-19 outbreak has allowed those individuals to live out their dreams.  Such people have an incentive to talk up the crisis rather than calm the populace.

Kryptonite.  It’s hard to remember the days before COVID.  At the start of this miserable year, Donald Trump’s chance of re-election seemed fairly good.  The economy was strong. There was no significant foreign or domestic crisis.  Under those conditions, the voters usually retain an incumbent president, even one whose personal style irritates many people.

Mr. Trump’s political opponents have persuaded the public to blame him for the pandemic.  There seems to be little difference between what he has done and what they say they would have done.  It’s more a question of attitude.  He has said that we can’t allow the cure to be more damaging than the disease.  A risk-averse population appears to be willing to put up with unheard of intrusions and disruptions by government in order to battle a disease, even as the evidence mounts that the severity and fatality of COVID-19 are much lower than was first feared, particularly for those under the age of 75.

In earlier times, those stricken with disease would seek a cure from the hand of the sovereign.  The touch of one anointed by God was thought to have curative force beyond the power of physicians.  Evidently the President of the United States is expected to have such powers and will be held to account for disease on his watch.

Other countries that have been held up as models for how Mr. Trump ought to have acted have had outcomes no better and in some cases significantly worse than those in the United States.  Indeed, Sweden, one western country that did not lock down and accepted the risky strategy of encouraging herd immunity, seems to be coming out of this mess in better shape than those who scoffed.  That might matter to a neutral observer, but this has become a political issue, indeed a political opportunity.  In a political argument, neither the attackers nor the defenders are expected to present evidence dispassionately.  It’s up to the voters to discern the facts and evaluate the arguments.  To this point, it appears that COVID-19 is the kryptonite that Mr. Trump’s opponents were looking for.

The lockdowns deprived Mr. Trump of his most effective campaign mode, the large rally where indoor arenas are filled with Mr. Trump’s fans and he tells the crowd what’s on his mind.  He is remarkably effective in this mode.  As we approach the end of the campaign, he has moved these events outdoors and is holding two or three every day, but for months he was cut off from a favorite way of communicating and campaigning.

At the same time, the lockdowns have worked to the advantage of Mr. Biden.  He has managed to campaign successfully with limited public appearances.  He is not a compelling public speaker and is better suited to a “front-porch” style of campaign, last used by William McKinley in 1896, but used successfully let’s remember.

The lockdowns have prevented Mr. Trump from doing the very thing that Mr. Biden’s handlers don’t want their candidate to do.  When we consider that lockdowns are favored almost exclusively in blue states, it is tempting to think that partisans are exploiting a political advantage.

I am not suggesting that blue state governors locked down their states to damage Mr. Trump.  I think they locked down their states out of self-regard and because of the joy of exercising political power in a raw form.  Once they had taken those actions, they noticed the partisan advantage they had produced inadvertently.  Retaining that advantage is part of what motivates them now.

How large a part does the partisan impact play?  Is it stronger than self-regard and joy in the exercise of power?  Here’s one way to tell.

During the 1992 presidential campaign, one of Bill Clinton’s themes was that the US was experiencing the “worst economy in 50 years”.  A mild recession began in 1990 and lasted into 1991.  We now know that it was over long before the 1992 election, but it didn’t look that way at the time and it certainly wasn’t reported that way.  Economic contractions are unavoidable and there had been worse recessions during the 1950s, 1970s, and early 1980s, but it didn’t occur to George H. W. Bush to point any of that out.  The news media didn’t do anything to correct the economic record or to put it in context.  They helped Mr. Clinton spread the message of gloom and despair that could be alleviated only one way.

On election day, Mr. Clinton had won more than 300 electoral votes.  The day after the election, NBC reported that things were looking up “now that the recession appears to be ending”.

If today’s polls prove to be accurate and Mr. Biden is the president-elect on November 4, I will not be shocked to hear reporters tell us that we can look with hope to the future now that the first signs have appeared that the end of coronavirus epidemic is in view.

The COVID-19 visitation is said to be a 100-year event.  So is the economic contraction triggered by the lockdowns imposed by state and local governments, mostly in blue states.

During the first phase of the Great Depression, 1929-1933, the U.S. economy shrank by one-third.  A stubborn adherence to wrong-headed policies brought down an economy staffed by of some of the world’s hardest working, most productive people, supplied with plentiful capital and boundless natural resources.  The policy mix — punitive tariffs, high taxes, jawboning high and inflexible wages, and a Federal Reserve grimly determined to deflate the currency and allow the banking system to go to ruin – caused an unemployment rate of 25% and a one-third drop in GDP.

It took four years to produce that outcome.  Those people were slackers.  The high-powered geniuses of 2020 managed to shrink the US economy in one calendar quarter at a rate that, had it been allowed to continue, would have matched in one year the sorrowful record of the first four years of the Great Depression.  Fortunately, saner heads began to reassert control, slowly and quietly, as the second quarter of 2020 ended.

The battle between shutting and opening has not yet been decided.

Have the benefits from this exercise in mismanagement exceeded the costs?  The dramatic percentage decline in gross domestic product does not measure the depth of the pain that the shutdown has imposed on those least able to deal with it.

Think of the anxiety suffered by a family that was fully employed in February and found itself suddenly out of work, unable to pay rent, and uncertain how to afford food, medical care, or auto repairs.  Consider the stress piled onto small business owners who had to shut down their restaurants, construction projects, and shops.  How many of them have had to abandon their dreams of independence?

Add to that the stress of parents denied the opportunity to work, who became full-time educators.  Consider the toll on patients with chronic conditions – cancer, heart disease, arthritis, to name three – who found hospitals and clinics closed except for emergencies.  Even if their clinic was open, the fear of infection from a fatal illness persuaded patients to stay away.

Economic hardship and physical isolation carry in their wake medical and psychological damage that will leave lasting scars.  The losses have not been distributed fairly, either.  Hourly workers in the service, travel, and hospitality industries have been much harder hit than, say, lawyers, government employees, and investment professionals.

What gain was achieved through the sacrifice extracted from day-to-day working people and small business owners?  The information needed to make that assessment is hard to come by.  Intentionally so, I fear.

Alex Berenson is a true resource for the conscientious citizen trying to understand this situation.  He has published two pamphlet sized chapters to what will become a longer book titled “Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns”.

Berenson worked at one time as a reporter for the New York Times.  He examines data dispassionately.  And he shows his work.  Every statement he makes is accompanied by a link to the official report or scientific study that backs him up.

Yet, when he tried to sell his book on Amazon, they refused to carry it.  They would not offer anything on their site that contradicted the received wisdom of those advocates of lockdown, the CDC and the WHO[1].  Berenson got his story in front of Elon Musk, who was able to shame Amazon publicly.  The first two parts are available on Amazon because of that intervention.  I highly recommend them.  Berenson is the chief source, but not the only one, that has shaped my thinking on this subject.

The distortions and half-truths on COVID emanating from official sources are breathtaking.  To start, consider the term “case”.  I notice that cases “surge” or they “soar” or they “spike”.  I can count on one finger the number of times that I have heard a news report say that cases have merely “increased”.

But what is a case? The use of the word has been needlessly provocative.  The common meaning of the term covers individuals who display symptoms of disease.  The CDC definition counts anyone with a positive lab test as a “confirmed case” without regard to the person’s symptoms.  In fact, individuals with COVID symptoms are only “probable cases” until their status is confirmed by a test.

https://wwwn.cdc.gov/nndss/conditions/coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19/case-definition/2020/

The high number of “cases” in the U.S. is not necessarily evidence of an outbreak of disease.  It may reflect a high rate of testing, nothing more.  Further, the CDC has also told us that many of those who test positive have such low viral loads that they are not in danger of suffering symptoms and are not a risk to spread the disease.  Somewhere between one-third and one-half of infected individuals will show no symptoms.  That means that the disease is much less fatal than advertised.

We know that many people counted as fatalities died with the virus in their bodies but did not die from the disease.  The CDC has acknowledged that hospitals may have a financial incentive to code a death as related to COVID, whether or not the unfortunate patient died of the disease.  It will take years of research to unravel the mess, assuming that impartial researchers can be found who are willing to take on the task.

The website www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries provides a daily update on COVID data by country.  It shows that the United States has conducted more than 117,000,000 COVID tests and that we have had 7.9 million “cases”.  Incidentally, we can’t use that information to calculate an infection rate because many people received multiple tests.  Of the 7.9 million “cases”, almost 220,000 have resulted in death.  That doesn’t mean they died of COVID.  It means they tested positive for COVID and later died – of something.

More than 5 million are shown as “recovered”.  That leaves some 2.6 million people whose “cases” are awaiting an outcome.

What this website does not tell us, and it is one of the most informative I have found, is how many of the 2.6 million “cases awaiting an outcome” are symptomatic.  The only hint is in a column labeled “Serious, Critical” which shows 14,780 such cases in the U.S.  These are people currently in ICUs “if and when this figure is reported”.

A little legwork leads me to the conclusion that fewer than 75,000 of the 2,600,000 “cases awaiting an outcome” require aggressive intervention.  The detailed daily report from Illinois on their hospital bed and ICU bed usage for COVID patients indicates that total ICU usage in that state for COVID is around 400 beds (a little less in fact) and the total of hospitalizations for COVID is around 2200 beds (including ICU).  (For context, Illinois has more than 30,000 hospital beds and nearly 4,000 ICU beds.  The Illinois system is not being overwhelmed by COVID cases.) Use that same ratio on the nationwide numbers and we find that around 67,000 people are in hospitals for COVID.

https://www.dph.illinois.gov/covid19/hospitalization-utilization

Everyone else included in the 2,600,000 “cases awaiting an outcome”, more than 2,500,000 individuals, is well enough to stay out of a hospital.  That does not seem like an uncontrollable outbreak.

The question, again, is whether this is a problem so severe that it requires us to shut down the world’s most potent economy in order to address it.  If we stop reacting and start reflecting, a clear answer starts to emerge.

Governments may not be good at preventing the spread of the disease, but they are masters at preventing the spread of information.  Even so, we can conclude that after nearly ten months during which the virus has roamed the land, less than 2% of the population, and possibly as little as 1% of the population, have had symptoms and well less than one-fifteenth of that number have died from the disease, or from something else after testing positive.

The great majority of those who have died are over the age of 75, many of them in nursing homes.  How many of those people were healthy and vigorous?  Sorry to be grim, but how many of the over-75s who died were going to die soon of something else?  Old age is a fatal condition.

Was it worth taking a fully functioning economy to the brink of ruin to deal with a threat that has proven to be much less serious, dramatically less serious, than was at first thought?

Who decided that lockdowns were a good idea?  Berenson points out that public health agencies around the world, including the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control, published guidance over recent years strongly recommending against locking an economy down in the face of an epidemic.  The agencies divide epidemics and pandemics into five categories of severity, category 1 being the least concerning.  The recommendation is against locking the economy down except for category 5 events.

In the United States, the novel coronavirus outbreak is likely a category 2 event, but may in the end prove to have been a category 1 event.  A category 2 event produces between 90,000 and 450,000 deaths in the U.S. population of 325,000,000 individuals.  Right now, 220,000 deaths have been attributed to the disease, but that count may be high because of loose standards for attributing cause of death.

Why did CDC depart from its prior guidance?  A certain British researcher named Neil Ferguson (not be confused with the estimable Niall Ferguson), a man with a very spotty forecasting record, predicted that the virus would cause 500,000 deaths in the UK and two million deaths in the United States if no action were taken.

How did he come to that conclusion?  Two key statistics are the “Case Fatality Rate” and the “Infection Fatality Rate”.  Divide the number of deaths caused by the virus by the number of people with symptoms to get the CFR, and by the number of people infected (with or without symptoms) to get the IFR.  (These definitions use “case” in its original sense to cover individuals with symptoms.)  It appears that Ferguson’s team relied on a study (among others) that looked at coronavirus deaths in the Wuhan area reported by Chinese sources to get the numerator of their equations.  To get the IFR denominator, the study on which they relied tested people returning to the UK from Wuhan.  They tested a few hundred people returning to the UK from China from a handful of flights arriving within a few days of each other.  From that information, they extrapolated to calculate the denominator, the number of infections.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf (see page 5)

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033357v1

When Ferguson put the two together, he came to the startling conclusion that the virus was going to cause untold suffering, up to 500,000 deaths in the UK and 2,000,000 in the U.S.  In the U.S., the University of Washington was equally apocalyptic.

On the basis of these projections, many prominent public health professionals lost their nerve and abandoned their previous recommendations.  A policy that was the result of careful evaluation by teams of professionals – the very model of progressive governance by experts – was thrown out in an afternoon on the basis of some back-of-the-envelope calculations by an analyst with a poor forecasting record.

Ferguson’s numbers are flexible.  His original estimate of 500,000 deaths in the UK would drop to 20,000 if the UK government shut the economy down for a year.  Shutdown for him means: (1) quarantining anyone who is symptomatic; (2) keeping everyone else isolated in their homes; (3) shutting down schools; (4) maintaining social distancing for people who venture out of their houses.  According to Ferguson, if you do that for a year, all may yet be well.

He warned that if his advice were ignored, hospitals and ICUs would be overwhelmed by a wave of patients.  Officials imagined lines of feverish patients, many of them voters, unable to breathe on their own, requiring round the clock intensive care.  If the Ferguson numbers were correct – and a chorus soon claimed that he had underestimated the coming disaster –the U.S. medical system was about to be overwhelmed.

The immediate reaction of some U.S. state governments was to use executive emergency powers to shut down economic activity to “flatten the curve”.  The idea as originally stated was that while we can’t control the number of people who will get the disease and require treatment in hospitals and ICUs, we can spread out the demand over time to avoid crashing the ability of hospitals to meet the crisis.  A brief lockdown, fifteen days or so, would flatten the curve and avoid hospitals being overwhelmed.

The initial short-term lockdown to flatten the curve was extended.  Then, somehow, the goal of the lockdowns became something different.  Now, we are “fighting” to prevent the spread of the virus, not to slow it down.

But events have shown that we can’t stop the spread of the virus.  Nor does the spread of the virus mean that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are abroad in the land.  The vast majority of people who have symptoms have a few bad days and then recover.  The recovery rate for the most vulnerable – those over 75 – is about 95%.  It’s almost 100% for the young.  It’s roughly 99% for everyone else.

If you graph the number of deaths from an epidemic against time, you get an asymmetrical bell curve.  The left-hand side of the curve, tracing the early deaths, is nearly vertical as the virus scours the population to seek out the aged, the infirm, the ill.  After the rate of death peaks, the number of deaths in each period of time starts to fall.  Now the people being infected are younger, healthier, better able to deal with the illness.  It is still unpleasant but it is less and less fatal.  It helps that viruses are known to evolve to become less fatal.  If you are a virus trying to survive and replicate, killing your host is a losing strategy.

As Alex Berenson’s two pamphlets demonstrate, none of this is new information.  Epidemiologists have studied many disease outbreaks over long periods of time and have worked out a set of responses that can control the worst aspects of an outbreak without doing damage to the economies that provide life and sustenance to populations as they brace themselves against the onslaught of a novel disease.

No government before now has ever tried to lock down its economy in the face of an attack by a novel disease.  There was a massive flu epidemic in 1918-1920.  There was another less dramatic outbreak in the 1950s.  We had swine flu in the 1970s, avian flu in the 1990s, SARS, and H1N1 in more recent decades.  These were widespread viral epidemics that did a lot of damage.  Yet no one ever suggested shutting down a thriving economy in order to flatten a curve, much less stop the spread of a life form that has worked out over the course of countless millennia how to spread, reproduce, and increase its numbers.

There is plenty of middle ground between taking no action and watching people die and shutting an economy to fight the spread of the disease.  Many experienced medical professionals favor letting healthy people go about their business while encouraging the vulnerable to isolate when possible and to practice social distancing.

So why, in the year 2020 did so many western governments and particularly those in English-speaking countries, entrusted as they are with securing the liberty and security of their people, embark on a policy of suppressing freedom of movement and freedom of association to fight a disease?

I’ll share my speculations on that subject in another post.  Check back, please.  Sorry for any inconvenience.

[1] Just before posting this note, I saw a report that the head of WHO now recommends ending lockdowns.  WHO has proven to be susceptible to political pressure. We’ll see if they stand by this recently announced change of heart.

Wine tasting notes are notorious for their pretentiousness.  Here is an excerpt from the tasting note for a Tuscan wine that I have put aside for a few years:

[The wine] opens to an inky dark appearance followed by a thick and succulent texture. It offers a certain firmness to the tannins and a thinner spot on the mid-palate that thickens quickly as the wine hits the palate. Dark plum, prune and blackberry emerge at the top. Lighter notes of spice, smoke and tar also appear.

Here’s another typical example:

[P]roves to be better contained and more carefully etched than I would have anticipated. The bouquet starts off with black fruit and light shadings of spice, but the best part is in those mineral aromas of flint and slate.

Despite the pretense, the notes convey a lot of information to the consumer.  I don’t necessarily taste “pencil shavings, wet stones, and violets” but when I see that description, I can form a picture and have some idea what to expect if I buy.  You may not taste pencil shavings but you can figure that when this particular reviewer does taste them, the wine will, or won’t, be to your liking.  On top of that, I like to check Robert Parker and a few other sources if I am in doubt about whether a wine is ready to drink.  Parker’s Wine Advocate is reliable, which in this business is a high hurdle.

Which brings me to the strangest tasting note I have ever come across.  I stopped at a local wine shop, the old-fashioned kind with a storefront facing a sidewalk.  Inside there are two narrow corridors between intelligently stocked shelves.  I was looking for some items I had never tried before to fight against the tendency to stay with the familiar.

I picked up a wine from Provence.  I wish I had written down the name, but I have forgotten it.  I left it on its side for a few days, opened it, and poured a glass.  When I put my nose into the glass, there was the definite odor of – and here I pause to try to find the word that Robert Parker might use had he reviewed this wine – here it is: barnyard. 

I hesitated to taste the wine.  I mean, I wanted to get off the well-trodden path, but within reasonable limits.

I tried it.  It did not taste at all the way it smelled.  It was quite nice. 

I wondered if I had a bad bottle.  I checked Robert Parker, but he had not reviewed the wine. Several amateur reviewers had left notes at cellatracker.com.  One of the notes said the wine had the aroma of “salty poo.”

I gave you the word “barnyard” a moment ago to avoid crude terms but also to avoid something an eight-year-old might use.  The cellar tracker people made their own editorial judgment, something that reasonable people might differ on and remain friends.

But where on earth did “salty” come from?  I refuse to believe that it comes from the lived experience of the reviewer.  If there are people who use salt in that particular way, surely they are not taking notes on the odor so that it will be front of mind if they ever come across a wine whose aroma merits that description.

The passing scene grows stranger by the day.