It is now obvious that the modeling driving the COVID-19 response was wrong. They caused the nation to overreact, and now that we realize COVID-19 is not the threat we were told it was, what do we do? What the Trump Administration just did, right in front of you, was disappear the models, switch data sets, and start talking recovery. It was awesome to watch, made more so by the fact that not many people realized what they were seeing.
During Thursday’s Coronavirus Task Force press conference, all mentions of modeling were removed, replaced with slides from the US Outpatient Influenza-like Illness Surveillance Network.
The death rate from this virus is expected to be lower than the number of flu deaths from the 2018-2019 flu season. Through antibody testing, we are learning that the China Flu bug arrived earlier than thought and has already passed through a good percentage of the population.
This is fantastic news, but we’re not celebrating, relaxing the lockdown, or restarting the economy.
In Texas, our governor appointed a commission to examine how to reopen the state. When he announced the commission members, he included Ross Perot, who died a year ago, which is suspicious. We are weeks away from spring football practice, and instead of acting on facts, the governor is appointing deceased individuals to commissions. That is not very Texan-like, and I wish we had a better leader like one of the seven governors who were not bullied into economic suicide by hysterical progressive elites.
On the day Governor Abbot announced his strike force, Governor Inslee of Washington State launched a tweetstorm of unhinged ad hominem attacks on the President. He is convinced that Wuhan will mow down millions if we dare break the protocols established to flatten a curve that never came, predicted by models that were never accurate.
The insistence of progressive politicians in believing the obviously flawed models of elite academics is going to, without question, kill Americans. And we don’t need models to know how many. Citizen Journalist Betsy McCaughey points out:
No model or guesswork is required to foresee the deadly impact. Job losses cause extreme suffering. Every 1% hike in the unemployment rate will likely produce a 3.3% increase in drug overdose deaths and a 0.99% increase in suicides according to data provided by the National Bureau of Economic Research and the medical journal Lancet. These are facts based on experience, not models. If unemployment hits 32%, some 77,000 Americans are likely to die from suicide and drug overdoses as a result of layoffs. Scientists call these fatalities deaths of despair.
The impact of layoffs goes beyond suicide, drug overdosing, and drinking. Researcher Michael French from the University of Miami points out that the death rate for an unemployed person is 63% higher than for someone with a job. The unwarranted and unnecessary lockdowns come with a price tag larger than the COVID-19 threat.
Why can’t our leaders see this? Dozens of pieces are coming out daily pointing out the same thing, yet the narrative continues as if the pandemic is performing as predicted.
After the terrorist attacks on 9/11, our country went through a spasm of federal government action to “make us safe”. What came of that was the TSA. The TSA is in the business of ‘Security Theater’; it fails security tests over 95% of the time. They routinely allow weapons and ammunition to be unintentionally carried onto aircraft, something I’ve done myself. No security professional mistakes the TSA as anything other than Kabuki Theater. If you want safe air travel screening, you need to do it like the Israelis do, but we won’t do that because of Muh Racism.
The Kabuki theater will continue to require social distancing and mask-wearing. As Dr John Lee, joining hundreds of other reality-based front-line physicians like Keith Rose and Jonathan Greach, points out, there is no direct evidence that the lockdowns are working. The argument that social distancing and mask wearing slow the spread of the Wuhan virus makes sense, but then again, so does the argument for developing herd immunity.
It is impossible to evaluate scientific data when the credentialed experts working with the data disagree on its meaning. Occam’s Razor is a solid approach, and it was the reason I said at the start of the Pandemic that we were too slow and the bug had long ago escaped into the population. I had no way of knowing it would prove mostly benign, but it did, and here we are.
The truth about the COVID-19 threat is evident. Progressive Democrats’ reluctance to accept that their academics, experts, and pundits were wrong is fascinating to watch, but this isn’t funny. Lives are now in jeopardy due to continued forced unemployment and forced asset loss on the part of local and state governments. If this does not end quickly, we will lose more than the 2020 NCAA football season.
