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A quick point about Roger Kimball, Richard Epstein, Bill Bennett and others who destroyed their credibility because their ideologically driven reasoning led them to dramatically underestimate the seriousness of COVID-19. I want the lockdowns ended but you will not convince me by citing any of them.
Were you not alive for bell bottoms and the election of Jimmy Carter?
Seriously it is too early by several decades to know.
Victor Davis Hanson has no credibility? Heather MacDonald has no credibility? And as I understand it, Kimball is an unstinting fan of President Trump so I’m not sure where the “ideologically driven reasoning” argument comes from.. not at all trying to be argumentative, just interested in learning the basis for this statement, as I read Kimball every chance I get both in various sites he publishes on and also the New Criterion, which he edits. I will never claim to have read all of any particular author, but I must have missed this along the way, and would appreciate being enlightened. Thanks, Jim.
Vanity inhibits my telling you how many years I was alive before either of those signal events in American history. But they are measured in decades, not just years.
That’s where the “Will History Judge …” part of the title comes in.
I hope history does not judge “the lockdown” in monolithic terms. As with many things, there are component parts that should be judged individually.
McDonald is a fave of mine, and I read her in American Greatness today. As I see it, she is questioning the extension of the lockdown in some areas beyond the here and now. And it’s a criticism that needs to be made. I view that as different than the concept of lockdowns as initially instituted. I think history will make that distinction as well.
I suspect that it will largely be shielded from distant history’s view the way the massive events of WWII mostly hide (and eclipse) the blunders of the early 1930s from our viewing perspective. Scary stuff ahead…
Perhaps I should have been a little more precise in the title, as I endeavored to be as clear as I could be that I did not question the motives of any of the players involved in the various decision steps along the way, just that the damage inflicted, especially considering the fact that every single model and projection has been wrong, may prove to be vastly out of proportion to the “cure.” However, thanks for pointing that out.
Kimball and Epstein were of the 500 deaths or 2500 deaths no big deal COVID guys and Bennett is a this is just the flu guy. They cherry-picked their data to match what they ideologically wanted to have happen. They’re as bad as the “we’re all gonna die and don’t leave your house”crowd. Epstein did it here on Ricochet – twice! The second time around I was so embarrassed for him I wanted to say “may I please take the shovel from your hands!”.
Yes. Leaders at all levels of government have proven to be driven mostly by fear of making a mistake. Which means they haven’t been leaders at all. It’s not that they don’t want to do the right thing. It’s that they failed to judge whether or not the advice they were given might have second order effects worse than the COVID virus itself, because they were too scared that they might get it wrong.
Maybe. Or maybe it’s more the fear of being blamed for a mistake. When I hear a politician say “I’m leaving that up to the scientific experts,” it translates in my head to “Don’t blame me for any of this. I’m just following orders. It’s not as if I was elected to make these decisions or anything like that.”
Mark, many estimates were off by an order of magnitude in the early days, in both directions. The ad hominem nature of your response suggests that you have no viable counter-arguments to Jim’s points. I think that you may actually have some such arguments, but I’d prefer to hear them, rather than hear a dismissal on the basis of some understandable errors made by people who are quite bright and worth listening to, even if they are not always right.
By the way, if current popular estimates are to be believed, the “this is just the flu” guys will turn out to be basically right. We’re currently seeing IHME and the new UT estimates (here and here) in the 50,000-70,000 range. That’s a somewhat-bad flu season. Even if you double or triple these, it’s not seriously out of the range of a really bad flu season.
I’ve come to believe that these estimates are overly optimistic. We keep getting new data, so my impression has been shifting. I’m getting less optimistic about the possibility of an ultimate IFR of around 0.2%, and am concerned that it will be closer to 0.5%.
An IFR of 0.2% gives us around 400,000-450,000 deaths, while 0.5% gives us around 1.0-1.2 million.
I was somewhat optimistic about the lower figure when the Bendavid/Bhattacharya paper came out. The NY state antibody testing results that just came out seem to suggest the higher figure, though I haven’t yet seen the details.
I doubt that there is anything practical that we can do to avoid this. I think that we can, and have been, doing many impractical things in a vain effort to avoid it. I suspect that the ultimate outcome will be the worst of both worlds — a high death toll, and an economic downturn so significant that we may use the term “depression” rather than “recession” to describe it.
I am responding. The Kimball article linked provides yet another example – he seizes upon the Santa Clara study like Jon Lovitz “yeah, that’s the ticket!” because it conforms with his ideological presets. Many people have made errors about this and I’ve no problem. What I do have a problem with is those on the Left and Right who stick with their ideological presets and ignore any evidence conflicting with those – people like Kimball. They made the mistake of thinking a virus had ideological properties just like they did. All of us, myself included, start with our “priors” including what we would like to happen to best conform with our core beliefs. The challenge in a situation like this is to make sure they do not become a default. You’ve done a good job with that in your posts, going where the evidence takes you. Kimball and others did not. That is the basis for my criticism.
Another example – I’m sick of the Hydroxychloroquine Wars in which Trump haters and Trump lovers felt compelled to stake out their positions on the bona fides which I’m sure made them, as well as the President, happy because it made everything about Trump, obscuring an open-minded scientific question as well as discussions ignoring any other number of possible helpful therapies.
I have one disagreement about this point. I don’t think that decisions were being made on the basis of scientific data. This isn’t even a scientific question, though it can be informed by some science on both sides.
The science on the pro-lockdown side is entirely speculative. The experts don’t appear to know how bad this will be, even within an order of magnitude. I do not blame them for this. It is a difficult thing to figure out.
There appears to be no science whatsoever being considered on the anti-lockdown side. Even the President doesn’t appear to have taken into consideration the extreme costs of this economic catastrophe, either in terms of dollars, or health, or lives, or well-being generally.
I think that panic is driving the decision-making, but not the President’s panic. I think that the President has been doing the best that can be expected, in the face of public panic.
There’s always the possibility of additional information changing our minds, but at the moment, I am close to agreeing with you. I think that this error will probably be in the top 5 or so. The others that I have in mind are:
I’ve respected your efforts here a lot, but let’s get real. Please check my math, but, from 3/20-4/20, my take is that the death toll has gone from under 300 to over 40,000. And obviously that’s with a good deal of social distancing. That’s a “somewhat bad” flu season?
I wish I’d said this, but it’s been there in my mind.
Flu season peaks between December and February. I couldn’t find a monthly death chart (that sounds grisly), but I’d assume most flu deaths occur in a 3-4 month period. 61,000 deaths were estimated for the 2017-18 season.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/season/flu-season.htm
I’m open to .opposing viewpoints.
The average flu deaths over the past few years is something like 37,000. 2017-2018 was freakishly high year at 61k.
Covid-19 is far outpacing the flu. Nearly 50,000 in the last month, and that’s with the social distancing. Imagine the flu killed 50,000 in October. That would cause a panic, too.
The flu comparison isn’t perfect, but I think it’s pretty useful to give an idea of the background risk of death from a fairly similar disease. I think that 40,000 would be a fairly moderate flu season, from the figures that I’ve seen on the flu.
The COVID-19 deaths have occurred over a shorter period of time than a typical flu season. But if the final figure is in the 50,000-70,000 range, then the flu comparison will be pretty close. You seem to be making the assumption that the 40,000 deaths over the past month will continue (it’s actually closer to 50,000 now, and may have surpassed this — I haven’t checked today’s figures yet).
As I pointed out in the rest of my comment, I think that these low estimates are overly optimistic. But I suspect that it’s still pretty comparable to the flu, except that it’s a new disease, so it’s like getting 10 years or so of flu deaths all at once. We don’t know for certain about immunity, but I think that immunity develops to most diseases of this sort, so once this is passed, the population will probably be largely immune.
The risk of a healthy, non-elderly person dying of this disease is extremely small. The risks are greater for those over 65. 65 is not a magic cutoff, of course — the risks are higher for folks in their 50s than for folks in their 40s, and so on. I’m planning a separate post about this, and about a new projection that I’ve done.
Yes
If it disconnects the world from China then it won’t have been a total loss
I agree with what you say, but I don’t blame most of those in authority so far because I wouldn’t have wanted to make those decisions myself. I think the next (very few) weeks will begin to show more directly which are failing in their responsibility. I sense that the virus is going to be much less a threat than many of the projections indicated it would be. Only time will tell, not the experts.
I’m not making that assumption. My point was to point out the rate of growth over the last month (unanswered above), and to ask whether that=any flu at any time. I’d say “no.”
Also note that any modeling, no matter how flawed, has been geared to the first wave of infections/deaths. Let’s see what’s down the line. We already know about past flus. and the end result. We haven’t come close to the end of this virus.
It’s too soon to pronounce us dead. We will recover yet.
You know, guys, as I read some of the exchanges in comments on this post I can’t help that cheering sections may be forming, with one side rooting for the “virus wins” side and the other side rooting for “virus loses.” I know that’s not the case, but it does sometimes sound like it.
I think there’s a decent chance history will look favorably on the response to the virus. This is especially true if the governors, the president, and so on, are examined fairly – i.e. acknowledging the limited information they had when the crisis hit.
I know I’ve said this on a couple of threads over the past couple of weeks, so my apologies for the repetition, but this disease has gone from being virtually non-existent in this country 2 1/2 months ago, to being the leading cause of death. And that’s with a month of lockdowns. That is an extreme challenge to leadership. The notion I see so often on this website that national leadership, the governors, or the health administrators didn’t give any thought to the economic damage is simply false. They all recognized the economic harm that was coming and that was heavily discussed from the early days of the crisis. A lot of that economic harm was coming regardless of what they did, of course, because people were going to change their behavior anyway, but it’s not like they ignored that side of things. Congress passed a 2 trillion effort to shore up the economy, for God’s sake. From what I can tell the governors of most every state are desperately trying to figure out how to get their economies opened back up without causing an uncontrollable spike in cases. That’s an immense challenge. To throw your hands up at this early stage and say, “They blew it. This is history’s greatest blunder” is ridiculous.
But what is the relevance of your point?
Of course it’s not the flu, technically. The flu is a different kind of virus. But if the ultimate effect is about the same as the flu, it’s a reasonable comparison.
I would expect that the 40,000 deaths in a month is much lower than the 1918 flu. According to this History.com site, 195,000 Americans died in October 1918. The total was 675,000 through 1920. Proportional to population, it was even worse that this indicates, as the population was around 103 million, less than a third of current population.
The 1957-58 Asian flu killed 116,000 in the US, per the CDC, out of a population about half of the current population (about 175 million). The 1968 Hong Kong flu killed 100,000 in the US, per the CDC, out of a population of about 200 million (including little me!).
I feel like I’m beating a dead horse here. It’s not really productive to get bogged down in flu comparisons. It is productive to counter the narrative that I see sometimes — not from you, Hoyacon, I don’t think — that anyone who ever compared COVID-19 to the flu is some sort of idiot, and we should never listen to such a person again about anything, ever. I don’t think that such an attitude is helpful at all.