Saturday 11 April 2020

Is the American lockdown necessary?

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The data for the virus are all over the place and very misleading. People who are susceptible to other types of pneumonia are also at a higher risk of the Wuhan virus pneumonia and they end up dying of the virus instead, or if not at least with the virus. You can't die twice.

Fox News mocked the seriousness of the virus until suddenly they turned on a coin and started liking the lockdown. Now they seem to have changed again, but then the story is very fast moving. 

Whatever you think of Tucker Carlson of Fox News, and understandably many hate him for his enthusiasm for Donald Trump, three days ago he made some very interesting points. They suggest that the worst is over in New York. Let's all hope so.


'For many years, the CDC has tracked the total number of Americans who die every week from pneumonia. For the last few weeks, that number has come in far lower than at the same moment in previous years. How could that be?

'Well, it seems entirely possible that doctors are classifying conventional pneumonia deaths as COVID-19 deaths. That would mean this epidemic is being credited for thousands of deaths that would have occurred if the virus never appeared here.

'We don't know that for certain, but it's certainly worth considering. Something is skewing those numbers. Nor do we know exactly why the model predicted so many more hospitalizations than we have actually had.

'Now, you will hear people say -- you're hearing them say now -- but this is evidence that the shutdowns and social distancing must be working. But not so fast -- those measures were built into the model in the first place. They've already been taken into account, and we are still doing far better than what epidemiologists believe was the best-case scenario.

'So the question is -- and it's a central question as we move forward -- how did this happen? Well, it is possible the virus is just less deadly than we feared it was, or it's less likely to send people to the hospital. Maybe it spreads less easily than we thought it did. Maybe it spreads more easily than we thought it did, and the number of asymptomatic carriers is higher than we knew.

'All of those are reasonable theories. We have no idea which one could be true. Then there's this: In a new draft paper, MIT economist Jeffrey Harris suggests that Americans are following social distancing guidelines more effectively than authorities ever imagined they would, and that's another potential explanation.

'Whatever is happening, this epidemic appears to be doing less damage than anticipated, and it's receding more quickly. Not so long ago, some of our leaders seemed on the verge of panic.'

Inevitably the virus is becoming politicised in all sorts of odd ways. 

It seems to me that in the USA the Democrats, and especially the almost entirely anti-Trump media, want badly to use the pandemic to replace Trump with Biden. 

In England the FT's Gideon Rachman and ITN's Robert Peston would like to use it to replace Boris with a coalition government led by people who campaigned for Remain in the Brexit referendum, now that Corbyn has been replaced by a man the media like. Sir Keir Starmer. they will not succeed, of course, because the Tories have a big majority but in the USA a presidential election campaign is taking place.

Roger Kimball, writing in the U.S. edition of The Spectator (not to be confused with The American Spectator), strongly approves of what Tucker Carlson has said, in an article headlined

The case for reopening the country now

Public health experts are well and good in their place. Their place is not running the country


'President Trump began by soft-pedalling the danger posed by the coronavirus. This is not to say he downplayed the danger. He didn’t. He simply noted that the seasonal flu killed tens of thousands each year and that the way to deal with this new virus was to take reasonable precautions while also going about the business of everyday life. At the same time, he took concrete steps to protect the country, the most important of which was probably banning air travel from China on January 31. In response to this action action, Congress looked up briefly from its impeachment effort to condemn his decision as an overreaction that was ‘racist’ and ‘xenophobic’.

'Sensing a mounting hysteria, and noting the media and the Democrats busy behind the scenes manning the bellows to fan the flames, the president convened a ‘coronavirus task force’ full of experts, medical and otherwise. For about a month now the nation has been subjected to near daily press conferences at which said experts discuss various models and projections of the course the disease might take. The numbers on offer have varied from millions dead in the US alone down to, just yesterday, tens of thousands. When this is all over, there are many people who will echo Tucker Carlson’s question: how did the experts screw up the coronavirus models so badly?

'Meanwhile, hospitals across the land, having turned themselves almost overnight into factories bent on dealing almost exclusively with victims of the virus, found their wards empty and their coffers hemorrhaging cash, as nearly all non-emergency procedures were postponed in order to deal with the floods of COVID-19 patients that, in many places, never arrived.

'Let me pause to acknowledge that COVID-19 is a dangerous virus, especially for the elderly and infirm. One of my best friends — now recovering, I am happy to say — had a nasty bout. But this observation by a former New York Times writer is to the point:

'‘Nobody says COVID-19 is not real, that it can’t tax hospitals or kill people, esp. if they are over 75 or have co-morbidities. But right now the best CURRENT projection is for 61,000 US deaths. That was the 2017 flu season. Why have we shut the country?’

‘Why have we shut the country?’ That question is now being repeated with increasing urgency across America. I should also note that that 61,000 figure is probably too high, since the CDC is now recommending that everyone who dies who can plausibly be thought to have been exposed to the disease be declared a victim of it. Julie Kelly cites a typical case: ‘an 86-year-old female non-ambulatory stroke victim who developed a fever and cough days after being exposed to a sick family member later diagnosed with COVID-19. Even though the decedent wasn’t tested, the coroner nonetheless determined that the woman’s underlying cause of death was COVID-19’.

Roger Kimbell certainly politicises the crisis in his closing lines.
'The political philosopher James Burnham once observed that civilizations die more often from suicide, not invasion. He was thinking of the rot of progressive politics, which is the politics of fecklessness and surrender. Our response to the coronavirus has been a version of that spiritual inanition. We must reopen the country. We must start today.'

19 comments:

  1. "there are many people who will echo Tucker Carlson’s question: how did the experts screw up the coronavirus models so badly?"

    Because they always do. Because when it comes to dealing with anything complex and not fully understood (such as climate or a brand new virus) computer models are nonsense. They're a mixture of propaganda and astrology.

    And in this case the problem is too much data, but data that is incomplete, unreliable, ambiguous and contradictory. The idea of using computer models to model COVID-19 is madness. And that's not taking into account the fact that data from some places (such as Italy) may be entirely worthless since it seems that thousands of deaths are being wrongly assigned to the virus.

    It's also not taking into account the likelihood that there's more than one strain of the virus and that the more dangerous one has been spread from Italy (so maybe we should call it Italian Flu or Lombardy Flu).

    It certainly does appear that western governments have destroyed their economies and doomed their countries to long-term economic misery for nothing. A lot of incumbent governments in the West are going to end up being very very unpopular.

    As I've said before, this is a very good time to be in Opposition rather than on the government benches.

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  2. Fraser Nelson yesterday in the Daily Telegraph:

    'At the end of last week, the Prime Minister was beginning to wonder if the country was taking his advice too much to heart. He asked us to stay at home - and we have. At each daily press conference, medical and scientific advisers talk about the plunge in use of transport and how well rules are being observed. What they don’t say is that this was not quite in their original plan. Government modellers didn’t expect such obedience: they expected workers to carry on and at least a million pupils to be left in school by parents.

    'The deaths caused by Covid-19 – up another 881 today – are shocking. But so, too, are the effects of the lockdown. “Our message was supposed to be: keep working, but work from home if possible,” says one minister. “But that message has got lost.”

    '....The Cabinet, now, is split into three groups. Some think still the lockdown is, if anything, too lax. (One minister has even proposed adopting a French-style system, demanding that no one steps outside without papers authorising them to do so.) Then we have those who think the cure is already worse than the disease and want to phase out lockdown at the earliest opportunity. Then a third group, who think it doesn’t matter what government thinks. Public opinion, they argue, led us into the lockdown so only public opinion can lead us out. The trick is to be ready to seize the moment when it comes.'

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/04/09/boris-worried-lockdown-has-gone-far-can-end/

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    1. "Public opinion, they argue, led us into the lockdown so only public opinion can lead us out. "

      It would be more accurate to say that media opinion led us into the lockdown so only media opinion can lead us out. Public opinion is whatever the public is told it is.

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  3. The slanderous contempt for Donald Trump is unwarranted

    The relevant facts are that GDP growth per capita in the United States declined from 4.5 per cent under President Ronald Reagan, to 3.9 per cent under President Bill Clinton, to two per cent under President George W. Bush, to 1.5 per cent under President Obama.

    The elites, unaffected, didn’t notice it, but the people and Trump, a populist billionaire, television star and impresario, did.

    The 20 years preceding Trump were the worst period of presidential misgovernment in the country’s history: endless war in the Middle East to hand most of Iraq over to Iran and create an immense humanitarian refugee disaster, the greatest world financial crisis since the Great Depression, almost entirely generated by the Clinton and second Bush administrations, steady loss of ground in the world to China, a flat-lined “new normal” that included no growth in real income for more than half the people and, under Obama, higher rates of poverty and violent crime and a shrinking workforce.

    He has delivered on his promises of tax cuts, deregulation, drastic reduction of illegal immigration, better trade arrangements, constitutionalist federal judges, renovation of the military, the smashing of ISIL, revival of nuclear non-proliferation in respect of Iran and North Korea (which had swindled his predecessors), elimination of unemployment and net oil imports, reduction of poverty and violent crime and expansion of manufacturing and of the workforce. Trump has effectively, if histrionically at times, managed the public health crisis and produced an economic assistance package that will provide a swift restoration of pre-coronavirus prosperity.

    His public personality is an acquired taste, or not, though his talents as a showman, which is always important in the U.S., are considerable.

    No one speaks of China’s impending elevation to primacy over America now. Canadians of all people should have noticed this, and contemplation of the Chinese alternative, especially after its shameful performance in the coronavirus crisis, is a sobering thought. In reviving America, Trump is carrying the whole of the West with him.

    Our failure to perceive that is more disappointing than our ingratitude.

    https://nationalpost.com/opinion/conrad-black-on-covid-19-the-slanderous-contempt-for-donald-trump-is-unwarranted

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    1. and contemplation of the Chinese alternative, especially after its shameful performance in the coronavirus crisis, is a sobering thought.

      The really sobering thought is that China handled the crisis well and successfully, while the West has handled it incredibly badly. That's why so many people on the Right are desperate to make China the scapegoat. And Trump supporters are especially desperate to divert attention away from Trump's handling of the matter which has been erratic at best.

      Faced with what will probably turn out to b a relatively minor crisis the West has failed utterly. One shudders to think how western countries would handle a serious crisis.

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    2. Lord Black is always interesting and worth reading. The West has not handled this well, I agree. The EU in particular.

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  4. Donald Trump has weaponized everything from Bill Clinton's infidelity to Obama's golf game. His style is flamboyant, to put it kindly, and fellow Republicans are starting to feel nervous about his long, self-aggrandizing press conferences full of contradictory information and gratuitous swipes at rivals. Of course Trump has made enemies who are coming after him now. It could not be any other way.

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    1. No it could not and both sides will use this crisis to defeat the other.

      "Trump's true adversary in this election is not Joe Biden, the hermit candidate sheltering in place. Biden is but a name on the November ballot you mark if you want to remove and replace Donald Trump.

      "Trump's real antagonists are the media who detest him and are determined, having failed to impeach and remove him, to drive him from office by portraying him as a foolish, failed president in the worst crisis to hit the country since Pearl Harbor.

      "The crucial decision Trump will make is to choose the exact moment to reopen the country and the economy, without igniting a new spike in the pandemic that induces despair and causes a panic."

      https://www.creators.com/read/pat-buchanan/04/20/trumps-presidency-hangs-on-one-decision

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    2. No it could not and both sides will use this crisis to defeat the other.

      Yes, that's been the story of the western response to COVID-19 - it's been entirely politicised. That's why the West is no longer capable of handling any sort of crisis. Everything has become political.

      Now that it's been established that the US Government can create money out of thin air I imagine the election will be a matter of which side offers the voters the bigger bribe. Trump's problem is that the Republicans will fight tooth and nail to ensure that the handouts go mostly to billionaires and mega-corporations and that ordinary people get little or nothing. If Biden is smart (yes, that's a big assumption) he'll mostly offer the bribes as direct handouts to ordinary people.

      That's going to be Boris Johnson's problem as well. The natural Tory instinct (and Boris's own instinct) will be to offer relief to the rich and give the poor nothing. Boris is lucky he's not facing an election.

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    3. I do agree with a lot of what John Gray says here, writing yesterday in the Mail on Sunday, though he is wrong about Viktor Orban. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8211397/The-fantasy-new-liberal-world-order-crumbling-says-JOHN-GRAY.html

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  5. I noticed PM Johnson politely declined President Trump's offer of miracle drugs. Probably a wise move.

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    1. I was sorry Britain jumped to the defence of the wretched WHO led as it is by a very unsavoury Ethiopian politician accused of covering up cholera epidemics when he was Minister of Health. He turned the WHO into a PR agency for China and wasted time attacking anti Chinese racism instead of warning the world about the virus. Odd how anti-racism, globalism, globalisation and the virus are entwined.

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  6. I propose an immense and unprecedented effort. I see not an initiative on the scale of the Manhattan Project, but one that would dwarf the Manhattan Project; not the creation of a giant, multi-billion dollar research institution, but the creation of a score of them; not merely the funding of individual lines of inquiry, but of richly supported fundamental research, a supreme effort in hope of universal application; not the fractional augmentation of medical education but its doubling or tripling; not a wan expansion of emergency hospital capacity, but its expansion, as is necessary and appropriate, by orders of magnitude; not to tame or punish the private sector, but to unleash it especially upon this task; not the incremental improvement of stockpiles and means of distribution, but the creation of great and secure stores and networks, with every needed building, laboratory, airplane, truck, and vaccination station, no excuses, no exceptions, everywhere, and for everyone.

    I call for no less than the creation, with war-like concentration, of the ability to detect, identify, and model any emerging or newly emerging infection, natural or otherwise; for the ability to engineer the immunization and cure, and to manufacture, distribute, and administer whatever may be required to get it done and to get it done in time. For some years to come, this should be the chief work of the nation, for the good reason that failing to make it so would be to risk the life of the nation.

    It could be very costly, yes, but it is the kind of thing that, once accomplished, is done. And it is the kind of thing that calls out to be done, and that, if not done, will indict us forever in the eyes of history. In diverting a portion of our vast resources to protect nothing less than our lives, the lives of our children, and the life of our civilization, many benefits other than survival would follow in train, not least the satisfaction of having done right. If the laws of supply and demand have not been repealed—and they have not—the heretofore unequaled abundance of medical goods and services would contribute to solving the problems of financing health care—and it would do so the old-fashioned way, by paying for it. And, as always, disciplined and decisive action in facing an emergency can, even in the short run, compensate for its costs—by adding to the economy both a potent principle of organization, and a stimulus like war but war’s opposite in effect, which would power the productive life of the country into new fields, transforming the information age with unexpected rapidity into the biotechnical age that is to come—and all this, if the nation can be properly inspired in its own defense and protection, perhaps just in time.

    Senator William Frist, M.D, in 2005
    Marshall J. Seidman Lecture for the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard University

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    1. https://eu.tennessean.com/story/news/health/2020/04/02/bill-frist-doctors-petition-stronger-action-tennessee-governor-bill-lee/5111902002/

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    2. Frist is a heart transplant surgeon and Republican who served two terms in the U.S. Senate and as majority leader from 2003 to 2007.

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    3. 'bill-frist-doctors-petition'

      That was on the 2nd. Now:

      Gov. Bill Lee announces planned 'reboot' of Tennessee's economy in May

      Tennessee is working closely with White House officials on plans, while Northeastern and West Coast states are developing their own strategies separately.

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