A Cold War-Esque Experiment in 'Lockdowns'
Tuesday, March 31, 2020
Michael Fumento again urges calm about the cornavirus pandemic in a piece at The New Criterion. As he did in an earlier piece, Fumento bases his reasoning on Farr's Law of Epidemics, which he argues:
... has precious little to do with human interventions such as "social distancing" to "flatten the curve." It occurs because communicable diseases nab the "low-hanging fruit" first (in this case the elderly with comorbid conditions) but then find subsequent victims harder and harder to reach. Until now, more or less, COVID-19 has been finding that low-hanging fruit in new countries, but the supply is close to running out. While many people assume that the draconian regulations implemented in China are what brought the virus under control, Farr's Law offers a different explanation. Even The New York Times admitted that South Korea recovered far more quickly with regulatory measures nowhere near the scale of China's -- although the Times still attributes that entirely to human intervention, of course, assigning no role to Mother Nature. [link in original, minor format edits]Given that many public health experts are urging us to "flatten the curve," almost everyone will find the above paragraph hard to believe. (Assuming he is correct, we will know when the pandemic is slowing down, "when the death count begins to slow down." If he's wrong, I don't think we would know even that much. And it is hard to dismiss the idea that South Korea nipped its epidemic in the bud through testing and contact tracing before it got out of hand.)
That noted, Fumento offers an interesting piece of evidence that will remind old timers of comparisons of life on either side of the Berlin Wall back during the Cold War -- and everyone of satellite photos of Korea at night, with its south aglow and its north dark:
Fumento's piece notes evidence that the epidemic is slowing down and offers timely comments on the situation in Italy.Meanwhile, it's very difficult to assess the effectiveness of the restrictive measures blanketing most of the country. We know hermits don't get contagious diseases, but there's a reason the term "society of hermits" is an oxymoron. South Korea didn't need such drastic measures and Sweden hasn't used them, even as its neighbor Norway has been praised for early implementation. For its efforts, Norway has been rewarded with twice as many cases per capita and is suddenly suffering its highest unemployment rate in eighty years. [bold added]
Image by NASA Earth Observatory, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
In the meantime? American public health experts are preparing us for lockdowns at least until June.
-- CAV
12 comments:
I would caution against endorsing interpretations and predictions by non-specialists on the epidemiology aspect of COVID-19.
There have been a lot of contrarian takes on the pandemic going around blogs, editorials, and social media. But think about this as a sanity check: we have the division of labor for a reason. Which is more likely -- that the people who do epidemiology for a living are missing some huge, obvious facts that even non-scientists can see, or that the opinionated non-specialists are misunderstanding something and are in over their heads?
I understand the temptation, given that so much of the playbook of statists (usually, but not always, the Left) consists of saying, "Science says fact X; therefore, we must have policy Y." Their opponents recognize that policy Y is unacceptable, and so they believe that this requires that fact X not be true. This appears to be a valid rebuttal in formal logic ("denying the consequent"), but it's a trap! Sometimes, fact X is true. The real error or deception is the premise that facts mechanically dictate policy.
This error is where advocates of liberty should put their efforts. We should challenge the politicians' alleged *remedies* to problems, and also specialists who venture into offering political prescriptions (e.g., as happens with the climate change issue). But objectivity demands that anyone who wants to get knee-deep in the science aspect of an issue will need to demonstrate that they've done their homework, and also have a good explanation of why everyone else is wrong (if that is their conclusion).
Andrew,
That is a good point, and, although Fumento mentions South Korea, I understand that they successfully headed things off. I also believe that a variable that describes how many people a sick person infects is heavily affected by behavior.
One thing that really bothers me about the drive to flatten the curve is that, if the virus is going to infect so many of us is that as soon (or not soon) as the restrictions are lifted, infections will come roaring back, if Fumento is wrong.
Then what? We have likely already brought on a depression with what we have done so far.
Gus
Fumento's track record has been excellent regarding viruses.
I'm not going to argue the immunology of the situation, because I am not a pandemic specialist, but I can speak to the fact that the economy will be shut down very much at least until April 30, one month from now. Can you imaging the great harm that will come from so many people not being allowed to work for a living will have not only on their psychology but also on the entire economy, bailout or no bailout, which is worse than the cure anyhow.
I am very angry at the sacrifice culture we live in today. Everywhere we turn we are asked to sacrifice for this group or another group, and asked to completely disregard the harm this does to one's self-esteem, one of the supreme values that needs to be protected in life.
Now we are being asked to sacrifice our futures for the sake of some people who *might* get the virus if we live our lives, and I resent that. I think we need to return to freedom, test people, and isolate those who are carriers, but leave everyone else alone. Otherwise, it will be socialized medicine within our generation, and that is very, very bad.
Malcolm and Tom,
The more I think about models -- and all the missing information in this pandemic -- the less comfortable I get!
For example, I read somewhere that Farr's Law is "empirical." If so, it would roll in lots of variables including human actions. Part of me wonders if Fumento's track record is nothing more than looking back at the inevitable bell curves and saying, "See! I told you so!" I'm home with kids all day for the foreseeable future, so if anyone has a quick reference on this, I'd love to see it.
As for socialized medicine, that's a genuine threat, made all the scarier by how much more dangerous the amount of control over medicine the government already has has made this pandemic.
Gus
Gus -
After some internet searching, I've gotten the impression that Farr's Law isn't really a thing. It is mentioned here and there in passing, but it doesn't even have its own Wikipedia entry. It seems to be a broad, empirical description of how epidemics rise and fall. But it's not a prediction tool, and it doesn't tell you the consequences of an epidemic. As a grim doctors' quip goes, "All bleeding eventually stops."
The fact that Fumento (and some other recent writers) have invoked Farr's Law as a sort of fundamental principle underscores my point that non-specialists who offer opinions contrary to the experts really need to do their homework first, not just snipe from afar.
"Flatten the curve" was a slogan intended to motivate the public to take concrete actions, specifically social distancing. Unfortunately, some writers have tried to back-translate the slogan into their own interpretation of a comprehensive policy or quantitative behavior of the epidemic. The post below explains this problem:
https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/613803626535796736/mind-viruses-about-body-viruses
Andrew,
Quickly, before I log my daughter into school.
(1) I have found literature references to Farr's Law. I think it IS a thing, but that Fumento could be using it wrongly. Within the post is a link (at "we will know") to a lengthy piece for laymen looking at it that in some depth.
(2) I look forward to reading the bit on "flatten the curve." I do think this is being done wrongly on many levels.
Gus
Gus -
That post that you linked to just confirms my point that people need to be very careful about these blog posts.
The author misunderstands what a Gaussian distribution ("bell curve") is, he misapplies it to a situation where there is no reason to expect a distribution to be Gaussian, and then he commits the sin of extrapolating a fitted curve from a tiny amount of data.
And if you look at the actual data for April 1, 2020, you can see that *all* of his various predictions are way off.
In his defense, he does admit that the data can be fitted to widely varying curves. I certainly didn't leave feeling confident about the predictive value of Farr's Law. In fact, given the manipulation of infection rates we're trying with "flatten the curve," I'd be leery of drops in the death rate as having any predictive value, either.
Yo, Gus, you've probably heard already, but just in case you haven't, Ellis Marsalis has passed away at age 85, suffering COVID-19 symptoms.
Andrew Dalton:
I understand the temptation, given that so much of the playbook of statists (usually, but not always, the Left) consists of saying, "Science says fact X; therefore, we must have policy Y." Their opponents recognize that policy Y is unacceptable, and so they believe that this requires that fact X not be true. This appears to be a valid rebuttal in formal logic ("denying the consequent"), but it's a trap! Sometimes, fact X is true. The real error or deception is the premise that facts mechanically dictate policy.
Correct. You don't decide the requirements of a proper political system by checking what the weather's like outside. As to the best policy for COVID-19 in detail, it's hard to say because there's so much uncertainty, partly due to entirely avoidable policy failures. Certainly, voluntary isolation and all due precautions are very good ideas; quarantine of those who can infect others is called for, especially if they are in a position to infect those we know to be particularly vulnerable to the disease or liable to spread it widely in their turn. Other measures depend somewhat on the details of the disease--should wearing masks in public be required, and if so, for everyone or only in certain circumstances? How strongly should a policy of tracking and containment be followed? What restrictions should be put in place for large public gatherings? (I lean to a very strict approach there, but then I live in a country where there's a threat of bubonic plague every summer, so extreme overcautiousness might have been instilled into me by now. After all, this isn't bubonic plague, but precisely how severe a disease it is doesn't seem to be at all clear yet.)
In any case, those are emergency measures that should only be applied while there is a real threat of spread with serious consequences for people's health. That's different from the extreme reactions in either direction. Many state and local governments in the US, from what I have read, are being panicked, cow'ring tim'rous political beasties that they are, into enacting every wet dream of every bioethicist viewing humans as interchangeable disease vectors whose property is a fixed quantity to be divided equitably for now and forever, or at least until it's all exhausted. (Perhaps I'm just cynical after having dated a bioethicist a couple of decades ago, one of the stupidest romantic moves I ever made--an emotionally walking-wounded Typhoid Mary spreading emotional disorders to everyone she came into contact with, and basically a sick nurse in her romantic life, as well as a manipulative, deceitful coward.) On the other side you have the molten pigeons who out of one face say that it's just the flu, and out of the other face say that's what you get for having open borders, so let's close them all now and forever as the only policy needed to address COVID-19, and who have recently taken to calling any epidemiologist who says it's more than the flu and anyone who believes them a traitor, and they make it clear they don't mean metaphorically. (If pressed, no doubt they'd say they're sick of being called racists by their opponents so turnabout is fair play, even to people who never called them racists in the past, but really it's just an excuse to drop the sucker's game of civilization and something so passe and weak as truth-telling and let their inner poo-flinging monkey have his day in the sun.) In fact, I hope they're right that it's not much worse than the flu, but the indications are it's more serious than that.
Snedcat,
It is a shame to hear about Ellis Marsalis.
Thank you for the rest of your comment. I think that in addition to panic, many local politicians are looking to others for how to take "tough" action (second-handedness) in order to "stop the spread" (ignorance: this is impossible).
At best, the current measures are emergency measures that can hold off a complete inundation of our hospitals while we find ways to manage the disease, which isn't going away any time soon.
On top of the problems you mention, it is possible that immunity will be partial or incomplete, making our best hope, a vaccine, something that will require boosters.
The current measures may save us by buying time, but they will kill us all if they go on for too long.
Gus
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