Guest “Yogi Berra’ism ” by David Middleton
Predictive models dominate our lives — not always for the better
BY MERRILL MATTHEWS, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 05/06/20The vast majority of Americans are completely unaware of how much models that predict the future of the economy and the climate – and now disease – dominate our lives. There’s no escaping their reach. Those models drive many of our public policy debates and much of the major legislation passed by Congress.
That might not be so bad if the models’ predictions were generally accurate. But they aren’t. Indeed, they are often wildly wrong.
As the late statistician Prof. George E. P. Box warned us: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
[…]
All models are built on a multitude of assumptions, and many of those assumptions increasingly reflect the ideological and political views of the modelers. If the assumptions are skewed, so will be a model’s predictions.
[…]
Environmentalists, the left and most of the media accuse skeptics of being “climate deniers.” But what many on the right are skeptical of isn’t actual scientific data, but some climate models’ predictions of temperatures and sea level rise 50 or 100 years in the future.
And yet the media regularly conflate the two. If you don’t believe the predictions of a climate model then you are denying the science, when what’s actually being questioned is many of the assumptions built into the model.
Here’s an example. Nearly all climate models in the late 1990s and early 2000s greatly overestimated rising temperatures because they didn’t take into account what’s now known as the “warming hiatus” that lasted about 14 years – from about 1998 to 2012 – when global temperatures remained relatively flat.
In other words, the actual data did not match the models’ predictions, which left climate modelers and environmentalists scrambling to explain the discrepancies.
[…]
And yet leftists and environmentalists want us to dramatically alter the economy and our way of life – e.g., through the Green New Deal – based on predictions that might, but probably won’t, be correct.
And speaking of predictions that aren’t correct, can we talk about those coronavirus pandemic models? A new National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper highlights just how influential – and wrong – some of the pandemic models have been.
Both U.S. and UK leaders were advocating a measured response to the coronavirus pandemic until the UK’s Imperial College-London released its model’s results predicting 500,000 deaths in the UK and 2.2 million deaths in the U.S.
[…]
Within a couple of weeks, the Imperial College scaled back its predictions, to no more than 20,000 UK deaths. And most pandemic modelers have been revising their worst-case scenarios.
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Even so, the media have been obsessed with the worst-case numbers. And anyone who raised doubts about those predictions was pilloried by the media and the left as denying the “science.”
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And yet models increasingly control our lives because policymakers use them to justify their actions and their votes.
As Dr. Anthony Fauci, the lead U.S. epidemiologist in this pandemic, recently warned, “I know my modeling colleagues are going to not be happy with me, but models are as good as the assumptions you put into them.” He’s right.
[…]
Merrill Matthews is a resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation in Dallas, Texas. Follow him on Twitter @MerrillMatthews.
The Hill
The IHME (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington) is anther model policymakers have relied upon.
Influential Covid-19 model uses flawed methods and shouldn’t guide U.S. policies, critics say
By SHARON BEGLEY @sxbegleAPRIL 17, 2020A widely followed model for projecting Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. is producing results that have been bouncing up and down like an unpredictable fever, and now epidemiologists are criticizing it as flawed and misleading for both the public and policy makers. In particular, they warn against relying on it as the basis for government decision-making, including on “re-opening America.”
“It’s not a model that most of us in the infectious disease epidemiology field think is well suited” to projecting Covid-19 deaths, epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health told reporters this week, referring to projections by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
Others experts, including some colleagues of the model-makers, are even harsher. “That the IHME model keeps changing is evidence of its lack of reliability as a predictive tool,” said epidemiologist Ruth Etzioni of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, who has served on a search committee for IHME. “That it is being used for policy decisions and its results interpreted wrongly is a travesty unfolding before our eyes.”
[…]
The chief reason the IHME projections worry some experts, Etzioni said, is that “the fact that they overshot will be used to suggest that the government response prevented an even greater catastrophe, when in fact the predictions were shaky in the first place.” IHME initially projected 38,000 to 162,000 U.S. deaths. The White House combined those estimates with others to warn of 100,000 to 240,000 potential deaths.
[…]
IHME uses neither a SEIR nor an agent-based approach. It doesn’t even try to model the transmission of disease, or the incubation period, or other features of Covid-19, as SEIR and agent-based models at Imperial College London and others do. It doesn’t try to account for how many infected people interact with how many others, how many additional cases each earlier case causes, or other facts of disease transmission that have been the foundation of epidemiology models for decades.
Instead, IHME starts with data from cities where Covid-19 struck before it hit the U.S., first Wuhan and now 19 cities in Italy and Spain. It then produces a graph showing the number of deaths rising and falling as the epidemic exploded and then dissipated in those cities, resulting in a bell curve. Then (to oversimplify somewhat) it finds where U.S. data fits on that curve. The death curves in cities outside the U.S. are assumed to describe the U.S., too, with no attempt to judge whether countermeasures —lockdowns and other social-distancing strategies — in the U.S. are and will be as effective as elsewhere, especially Wuhan.
[…]
While other epidemiologists disagree on whether IHME’s deaths projections are too high or too low, there is consensus that their volatility has confused policy makers and the public:
— Last week IHME projected that Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. would total about 60,000 by August 4; this week that was revised to 68,000, with 95% certainty that the actual toll would be between 30,188 and 175,965.
— On March 27, it projected that New York would see 10,243 deaths (and that the total had a 95% chance of falling between 5,167 to 26,444) by early August. Three days later, the New York projection was 15,546, and on April 3 it was 16,262, Jewell and her colleagues pointed out in another analysis, published in JAMA on Thursday.
— On April 8, IHME projected 5,625 deaths for Massachusetts by August; on April 13, it was 8,219.
[…]
A different, data-driven model from researchers at the University of Washington predicts “about 1 million cases in the U.S. by the end of the epidemic, around the first week in June, with new cases peaking in mid-April,” said UW applied mathematician Ka-Kit Tung, who led the work. “By the first week of June, we project that the number of new cases will be close to zero if current social distancing policies are maintained.” That model predicted two weeks ago that the number of new daily cases would peak around now, as seems to be the case.
Stat News
One of the major pitfalls in using predictive models to drive policy decisions, is that no matter what happens, it always would have been worse, if we hadn’t followed the model-driven opinions of “experts”…
The chief reason the IHME projections worry some experts, Etzioni said, is that “the fact that they overshot will be used to suggest that the government response prevented an even greater catastrophe, when in fact the predictions were shaky in the first place.”
Stat News
Rarely do we ever have a way to determine whether or not “the government response prevented an even greater catastrophe.” One of the clearest examples of being able to demonstrate that “the predictions were shaky in the first place.” was the 2009 economic stimulus bill.
The Grand Obama Illusion: Major Promises Never Delivered
Kyle SmithSummarizing his wonderful, magisterial book, The Discoverers, in an interview, historian Daniel Boorstin said, “The great obstacle to progress is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge.”
Fast forward to one of the great illusions of our time, the infamous chart that precisely laid out exactly what the unemployment rate would be at each stage of the recovery, with and without the Obama stimulus package. Today the chart is a monument to folly. It is not merely incorrect; it is stunningly off. It might as well have been produced by a witch doctor or by random guessing.
[…]
The chart by Obama economic elves Jared Bernstein and Christina Romer — it would be granting them far too much dignity to call them “economists” — tells us that, were it not for the miracle of the stimulus, we would be stuck with unemployment of about 5.7 percent today, but with the stimulus we were told to expect a jobless rate of about 5.2 percent. Instead, unemployment is at 7.8 percent, and the $800 billion we spent on snake oil stimulus has vanished as the disease it purported to cure continues to ravage us.
There is a direct line between the arrogance of the chart and the personality of the Commander in Chief. Obama is a frightening combination: He possesses both a proudly non-empirical mind — he admitted on The Tonight Show this week that his math skills began to fail him as early as seventh grade and that homework in the subject done by his ninth-grader daughter baffles him — and an absolute faith in those who call themselves scientists. Like the most devout churchgoers, he admits to no understanding of how those he worships works, yet is prepared to defend everything they do. The difference is that people of faith don’t get to redirect hundreds of billions of dollars of other people’s money to their belief system.
[…]
Forbes, October 31, 2012
“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future”… But it’s easy to get away with bogus predictions, if there’s no way determine what would have happened under different conditions. In the case of the worst COVID-19 model, Covid Act Now, they just keep shifting doomsday to the day after people are allowed to go back to work.
Texas began lifting restrictions on May 1. The Covid Act Now model is particularly useless, because it has two options 1) current trend and 2) no restrictions at all. In the no restrictions scenario, Texas would have had about 25,000-30,000 COVID-19 hospitalizations by now…
As of May 7, Texas has 1,750 COVID-19 hospitalizations…
The latest Covid Act Now model, still shows Texas at the brink of doomsday…
To hammer home, the danger to our liberty and prosperity, that bureaucrats armed with models present… Dallas County government officials have steadfastly relied on the Covid Act Now models in imposing restrictions on Dallas County residents.
They recently extended the shelter in place order to mid-May, defying the state’s decision to end shelter in place at the end of April. Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins (Fire Marshal Gump) and Dallas County Health and Human Services Director Dr. Phillip Huang cited a sudden spike in COVID-19 cases that mysteriously began on May 1, 2020 and claimed this was not due to increased testing… But Dallas County will not release data on the number of tests being performed or recoveries.
Record coronavirus cases for 2nd consecutive day in Dallas County despite no test change
BY STEFAN STEVENSON
MAY 01, 2020Dallas County reported a single-day high for the second consecutive day on Friday with 187 new coronavirus cases and two more deaths.
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“This increase in positive cases has occurred without any significant increase in testing capacity,” Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins said in a release. “We have seen younger people dying from COVID-19 this week and today’s victims add to that list. All this illustrates why we all must make smart decisions and follow the science to flatten the curve.”
[…]
Fort Worth Startlegram
Another COVID-19 Record for Dallas County; Masks Required, Enforcement Unclear
County judge amends county order to make Gov. Greg Abbott’s recommendations for reopened services a requirement in Dallas County
By Frank Heinz • Published May 4, 2020Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins amended his Safer at Home order Monday to make Gov. Greg Abbott’s recommendations for businesses reopening in Dallas County to now be requirements.
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“For instance, when the governor says to the fullest extent possible wear a mask as a recommendation, we would say that’s a requirement,” Jenkins said. “When the governor says in a movie theater, let’s close every other row and put two seats of separation, that’s recommended, we say in Dallas county that’s required.”
He told NBC 5 Monday that the county doesn’t plan to fine individuals, but that code inspectors could fine businesses. The amended order can be seen below.
[…]
Dallas County is now reporting a total of 4,370 positive COVID-19 cases. Dallas County has not been releasing statistics on the number of recoveries in the county saying it’s not a surveillance variable being used nationally by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or state health departments.
[…]
NBC5DFW
Since Dallas County won’t report daily testing data, only reporting positive tests and deaths, the claim that “This increase in positive cases has occurred without any significant increase in testing capacity,” can’t be verified. And the Dallas County claim sticks out like a sore thumb. The State of Texas publishes statewide testing data…
The rate of statewide testing clearly has been increasing, while the rate of positive tests has steadily been decreasing. Yet Dallas County claims that the positive tests spiked right when the state began reopening because the infection rate was still increasing, therefore, restrictions must be tightened. However, Jenkins claims that “the county doesn’t plan to fine individuals”… Except…
Dallas salon owner gets 7 days in jail for reopening in defiance of countywide restrictions
Published 2 days agoDallasDALLAS – A Far North Dallas salon owner will spend 7 days in jail after she refused to apologize for opening her business in defiance of countywide restrictions.
A Dallas County judge offered Shelley Luther, the owner of Salon a la Mode, a deal: apologize for being selfish for having her salon open while everyone else’s were closed, pay a fine, shut down until Friday and she could avoid jail time.
[…]
Fox 4 Texas
Shelley Luther wasn’t jailed for violating “countywide restrictions,” she was jailed for refusing to apologize to Dallas County officials. Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick paid her fine, the Texas Supreme Court ordered her immediate release from jail and Governor Abbott has ensured that this sort of travesty doesn’t happen again.
Throwing Texans in jail whose biz’s shut down through no fault of their own is wrong.
— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) May 7, 2020
I am eliminating jail for violating an order, retroactive to April 2, superseding local orders.
Criminals shouldn’t be released to prevent COVID-19 just to put business owners in their place.
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A model is valuable if it provides something you can use – pretty much every warmist AGW virtual reality I’ve seen pretty much boils down to ‘We don’t know where, we don’t know when – but something AWFUL is going to happen.’
In the IPCC based models the assumption that water provides a positive feedback to the Greenhouse Effect is WRONG . This due to the omission of the thermodynamics of water evaporation which occurs at constant temperature giving a value of zero to the Planck sensitivity coefficient.
The inclusion of this in the models would result in a net negative feedback situation.
Non minuscule positive feedback was also quite unlikely to exist in a system that is empirically not unstable toward warmth over very long time.
Positive ice feedback is another thing…
I don’t pay too much attention to numbers quoted on BBC News programs, but in one report that interrupted music it was stated that 40% of “normal” presumably non ICU, Non Isolation ward beds were empty in NHS hospitals. If true that is a worrying statistic, it means one of two things either there are a lot of very sick people at home, or in normal times nearly half hospital beds are filled with people who don’t need to be there. The continual scare messages designed to keep people at home will probably end up killing many thousands.
I wonder how many people will die of preventable things because they missed annual appointments, screenings, etc. Nobody ever talks about that, and indeed, even quantifying them will be difficult if not impossible. So we’ll probably never know the true cost of the shutdowns, nor how many were saved. That’s a huge gamble made on very shaky data.
Both can be true: many people get a lot of health care that never needed any (thanks costly medical insurance, thanks Medicare…) and many other people that really needed treatments don’t get it.
Either way, the solution is rationality in medicine. Not slogans like “EBM”.
Are the models themselves at fault?
Or is it the evaluation of the models that is the real problem.
All of us who programmed or tried to programme learned G.I.G.O and the sure knowledge a programme will carry out it the instructions given,no matter how wrongheaded.
The ignorance of politicians and bureaucrats is legend,Garbage In garbage Out has evolved into Garbage In Gospel Out amongst our effete elites,who proudly boast of their numerical illiteracy..
Kind of frightening,can’t add,subtract ,multiply nor divide but they control our budget and billions of stolen tax dollars.
And now this willful ignorance has devolved into policy based evidence manufacturing,where the desired panic has “evidence” created to serve the desired ends.
This current pandemic has those earmarks.
Logically we should now have real world evidence of worst case.
Where has this virus spread unchecked and untreated?
How do the pandemic models compare?
And where did it meet complete lockdown,with minimal spread and maximum treatment.?
In the long run the pernicious refusal to think,endangers civilization far more than bad models.
The magical thinking of deferring to a computer, is a boon to the fool and bandit
Leadership has become a vanity project and those who might be capable do not want the job.
John
One of the mystifying things about this pandemic is the wide variation in deaths per capita. They range from absolutely terrifying, such as in Lombardy and NYC, to few if any deaths in some countries. It is easy to claim that early and stringent lockdowns are responsible for the low infection rates in NZ and Oz, but much more difficult to explain why countries that has done little out of the ordinary are doing about as well. So far, India seems to be doing better than most countries that have employed lockdowns, when it appeared to be “an accident waiting to happen” with the population density and poverty.
The even greater problem with Ferguson “model” is even if the conflicting data that represents our knowledge of the disease was input as “gospel” into his model, we would still get garbage out.
With a slide rule or back of envelope,the first question of ones assumptions had to be “Is it reasonable”.
With “Simm World” the colours are so “lifelike” all reason flees?
“Sheltering” at home is the best way to get infected :
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/06/ny-gov-cuomo-says-its-shocking-most-new-coronavirus-hospitalizations-are-people-staying-home.html
The fact is that the best way to suppress a virus like the SARS-COV2, the best strategy to adopt, is to do nothing except, washing your hands, going to work, to a restaurant, outside in a park, in the woods, running, jogging, biking, etc.
Applying a strict lockdown, staying at home and closing most of the stores and restaurants has been the best way to increase the infection and the death toll.
Those apocalyptic bullshit models are complete nonsense laid by a bunch of dangerous crooks :
– they have to be exposed and held accountable for this tragedy and the economical and social disaster they caused.
The common seasonal flues were present long before we had the ability to characterize them at a genetic-code level. Our response to these traditional viruses, which we have come to know and ‘love,’ has been to try to guess what the next season’s strain will be, and make a vaccine that addresses it. Sometimes the guess is good, sometimes it is not. My perception is that some samples are taken randomly to understand why more people are getting sick than expected. The novel COVID-19 flu is different in that, world-wide, the testing is more extensive than ever before and, as poor as the data are, we know more about the prevalence of antibodies and asymptomatic carriers than ever before.
We are basing our epidemiological response on how we think previous epidemics behaved. What if that mental model is wrong? What if it is common for past flues to have a large percentage of asymptomatic carriers, and the typical observation of a rapid ramp up of cases peaking in late-Winter, because of rapid establishment of ‘herd immunity,’ shapes the curve and it starts to drop off even before people start building up their natural vitamin D levels? This infection-curve behavior seems to be present whether the vaccine is considered effective or not.
The point of my musing is that there are unstated assumptions built into the epidemiological models that we are working under, which may not be justified. Just as with climate models, there appears to be a lack of transparency in what the foundational assumptions are.
We know the flu vaccine has zero visible macro effect all the time, but does create antibodies for most people and does match the virus some of the time. Why is that?
One possibility is that the vaccine protects the healthy individuals that aren’t too old (very weakly, with extreme risks for some people, so that it’s crazy to vaccinate healthy individuals that aren’t too old and the vaccine doesn’t work on old people either), weakens some people so they are at risk of the flu when they are vaccinated, and increases the rate of propagation, because there will be a lot more carriers with a mild “flu” (“rhume” like, some coronavirus-like) and not with “la grippe” feeling (strong influenza syndrome).
IOW, when you vaccinate yourself, you might put the community at risk while protecting yourself if you are in the group that tolerates the vaccine well.
A real public health campaign would empower the citizenry.
What we have now is a regime of ordering us where to stand, where we can move, where we can go.
That’s not a public health campaign.
Literally, beyond the orders to social distance, wear masks, and stay inside, what have we been told?
WAIT for a vaccine… wait… just be like sitting ducks.
That’s not America.
We, Americans control our destiny… Americans can successfully build our health. Health science has given us the knowledge to do so.
A real public health campaign would tell us to take our vitamins & minerals:
Vitamin A, C, D, and minerals zinc and magnesium.
Serious discussion of improving & building peoples’s immune system would take center stage from the White House, each governor’s executive office, and the front page of every newspaper.
How long have we been at it with the shutdown? Two months?
How much could each citizen build their immune system in that amount of time?
But no, nothing like that has happened, even easy, available drugs have been discouraged by the media and many in government. And no discussion of the power of vitamins & minerals to build the immune system… to build our health.
Have you heard one governor talk “vitamins & minerals”?
Something about this whole situation stinks.
People who will die from this flu will, those who won’t, well, won’t. Shutting people in and suppressing their immune systems is stupid, that is why Democrats are all for it. Blocking DRs from prescribing pharma that works against Chinese Disease is stupid, that is why,,,,,well, you get it by now.
👍👍
James
Speaking for Americans, we have a history of wanting to take a pill to do something. Everything from losing weight, to helping with sex, comes out of a bottle. Instead of focusing on having a healthy diet, getting adequate exercise, and getting sunshine and fresh air, we want to take a pill; it is like paying indulgences to be allowed to sin. Humans evolved without access to vitamin pills and mineral supplements. If one truly believes that evolution fine tunes a species for survival, then it should be obvious that only under unusual circumstances should a person need medicine or supplemental vitamins and minerals, such as with the manifestation of a deficiency such as scurvy.
The problem with recommending a regimen of vitamins and minerals for whatever ails you is that there are as many opinions on the right combinations and dose as there are people offering them. The permutations are mind boggling. It is not unlike religion where even those in the same sect have differences of opinions, let alone between sects or religions!
Nature figured out that if one had a diverse diet, offering up opportunities for all the things that are necessary, such as trace elements, that the body would absorb what it needed, and excrete what it didn’t. Funny how that works! There have been instances where a place, such as in Australia, has soils that are deficient in cobalt, and thus the entire food chain was deficient in an essential trace element. But, those situations are rather rare, especially now that most people, who aren’t subsistence farmers, get food from all over the world.
Do we eat foods that are over-processed? Possibly. But, instead of trying to compensate by buying a bottle of pills, one could change their diet or cooking habits. Humans are interesting creatures! They are only capable of rational behavior for short periods of time in order to achieve their irrational goals.
Modelers should at least know what they are modeling. I strongly suspect that COVID-19 modelers don’t know. Please model what happens when an infection occurs in
a) a cruise ship, with a crew of 1500 in a good health, and 2000 mostly elderly passengers
b) an aircraft carrier, with a crew of 4500 in a good health.
How many deaths do models predict for each?
masks
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/masks-covid-19-infections-would-plummet-new-study-says
Mosher
With a hat-tip to John Conway for his game of Life, does the simulation remove a dot when a person dies, or becomes green?
What did the models predict about shelter in place?
https://www.nydailynews.com/coronavirus/ny-coronavirus-cuomo-coronavirus-stats-20200506-eyqui4b5lfdn7g6cqswkf6otly-story.html
David
I have asked Christopher Monckton (in a different post) why he defends strict lockdowns so strongly when Cuomo has evidence that two-thirds of NY’s new hospitalizations are people who aren’t impacted by the ‘Cease Non-Essential Work’ decree. He hasn’t responded.
I suspect that keeping people under ‘house arrest’ may be counterproductive by keeping family members close together with uncirculating air — like the conditions found in nursing and retirement homes! The very worst hot spots (and the first in the country) have been these closed quarters. But, when someone gets an idea in their head that they think right, it takes a crowbar up alongside of the head to dislodge it. That was one of the points that Chamberlain made in defending his Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses. Unfortunately, few but geologists have ever read the paper.
Social distancing measures probably saved lives… The lockdowns will probably cause more harm than good.
If you actively tear down your immune system by isolating yourself a mask is going to be your only defence, and it will fail.
From the article: “The White House combined those estimates with others to warn of 100,000 to 240,000 potential deaths.”
Incorrect. The White House uses the figures of 100,000 to 140,000 deaths if mitigation is practiced. Sowing confusion.
From the article: “While other epidemiologists disagree on whether IHME’s deaths projections are too high or too low, there is consensus that their volatility has confused policy makers and the public”
So there’s no agreement on whether this model is too high or too low. Sowing confusion. I can understand why there is a consensus about confusion because confusion is everywhere as we get all sorts of opinions about these models. Most of which are wrong. So yes, there is confusion about the models but it’s not because the models are confusing, it is because people are confused about the models. Including the so-called experts. They are confused and they spread confusion as they go. Kind of like this article.
From the article: “Last week IHME projected that Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. would total about 60,000 by August 4; this week that was revised to 68,000, with 95% certainty that the actual toll would be between 30,188 and 175,965.”
Incorrect. Last week the actual death count was 60,000, and this week the death toll was up to 68,000. These are not predictions they are facts. Look at the numbers quoted in the above paragraph and then compare them to the actual numbers predicted by IHME (talk about confusion): The IHME initial prediction (without any information on the Wuhan virus) for mitigated deaths from the Wuhan virus was between 100,000 and 140,000. Last week they revised their number up to 134,000 deaths by Aug. 4, 2020 (after three months of Wuhan virus data). Note that the 134,000 figure falls between the two initlal estimates of the number of mitigated deaths. It looks to me like this IHME model is right on the money so far.
From the article: “The chief reason the IHME projections worry some experts, Etzioni said, is that “the fact that they overshot will be used to suggest that the government response prevented an even greater catastrophe, when in fact the predictions were shaky in the first place.”
Overshot? According to whom? How do they calculate this “overshot”? Are they using the mitigated deaths as an example? The mitigated death count seems to be tracking reality. How is this an overshot?
Are they talking about the 2.2 million unmitigated deaths? How can they calculate this figure since we do not have a situation where no mitigation is taking place? This is all BS. Unsubstantiated BS, and as far as the unmitigated numbers are concerned, they don’t know the numbers are wrong. The only time we will know these numbers is after we figure out just how infectious and deadly this Wuhan virus is, and we don’t know that yet, so claiming you got it all down pat, and the unmitigated numbers are wrong, is just blowing smoke and causing more confusion among the public.
I certainly hope that after this Wuhan virus model scientfic debacle (a debacle because of all the misinformation being put out), that the virus model criticizers turn their attention to the Human-caused climate change models and go after them with even half the vigor they are going after the virus models. And hopefully, a little more accurately.
From the article: “Shelley Luther wasn’t jailed for violating “countywide restrictions,” she was jailed for refusing to apologize to Dallas County officials. Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick paid her fine, the Texas Supreme Court ordered her immediate release from jail and Governor Abbott has ensured that this sort of travesty doesn’t happen again.
Throwing Texans in jail whose biz’s shut down through no fault of their own is wrong.”
She was jailed for defying an order that applied to everyone in her profession, although I agree jailing her was not necessary.
Shelley Luther claimed she was defying the order because she could not feed her children. I don’t believe her.
She doesn’t look like she has missed many meals to me. Why don’t those who are praising her like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham ask her if she received her $1200 check from President Trump, and since she has two kids, that would total $2,200 from the president. She and the two kids ought to be able to eat on that. And she has what looks like a big, strong boyfriend who got $1200, too, so I don’t believe that her kids are going hungry.
Of course, she, like me, might have been suffering from the two week delay Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats imposed on all the payments, and hasn’t gotten a payment yet (I actually recieved mine yesterday). But if that is the case, she has relatives and State food stamp programs and many charitable organizations who are giving food away to anyone who shows up.
I’m sure Shelley could walk into any Salvation Army facility with her two kids and tell them she was hungry and they would give her more food than she could eat. I don’t buy the “feed my children” line. It was said to gain sympathy. It worked.
Sean, and Tucker and Laura and all the other righwing talking heads who are praising Shelley, should ask her if she got paid by the president, and what about the Paycheck Protection Plan?
Isn’t Shelley Luther a small business owner and doesn’t the government pay small business owners and give them money so they can keep their employees paid? Why hasn’t Sean and Tucker and Laura asked Shelley Luther about these things? Answer: Because that doesn’t fit the narrative. They want to lionize her not undermine her.
The Right suddenly wants to promote insurrection. But what about in the future when we really need people to socially isolate because we have a very deadly virus on the loose, yet we are setting this kind of an example where we put doubts in people’s heads about the government and how the situation is handled and promote people who go against the grain.
Shelley gets let out of jail over the Wuhan virus. If the Wuhan virus were as deadly as the Ebola virus, Shelley would be thrown in jail and the key would be thrown away, and no rightwing host would be praising her, they would be condeming her for being so reckless. It’s just a matter of degree. But in the meantime these actions cast doubt during a crisis and are teaching bad lessons.
Shelley Luther should have done what sll the other people in her profession did: Wait one more week for her business to be allowed to open. Instead she has to grandstand, and act like she is special, and claim her kids won’t eat if she doens’t work, and people eat it up.
She’s lucky I’m not interviewing her. I would ask her how long she has not worked (I think she said 40 days). And I would ask her all about her finances, especially since she has apparently benefited greatly on a Go Fund Me page. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think she is a fraud, I think she just said her kids were hunger as a convenient, very plausible excuse, probably the first thing that entered her mind, and I certainly don’t think she was aiming for a Go Fund Me bonanza.
Some people are easily fooled, especially when they want to be fooled because of emotions or an agenda. I think that is the case here.
If its OK for Shelley to defy the rules meant to make society safe, then everyone should be able to defy the rules. Anarchy anyone? That’s what is being promoted in some quarters.
So, all that blahblah simply to cast your vote nazism in America. Could have done that in a single sentence and moved on. Oh, and to be perfectly clear NONE of this bullsh*t was needed, its just the flu.
Here’s all you need to know about the Wuhan virus models with regard to the United States:
The IHME (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington)
Initial estimate of unmitigated deaths from Wuhan virus: 1 million to 2.2 million.
Initial estimate of mitigated deaths from Wuhan virus: 100,000 to 140,000.
Today, after three months of evaluating data on the Wuhan virus crisis, the number of unmitigated deaths is unchanged at 1 million to 2.2 million, whereas the lastest estimate for mitigated deaths is now at 134,000.
Initial estimate: 100,000 to 140,000. Current updated estimate: 134,000
It looks pretty consistent to me. It looks like the people doing this model made a good initial estimate, considering they had very little data to work with at the time, and were relying mainly on past experience of how previous infections unfolded.
People trashing this virus model have an agenda, but the facts don’t back them up, at least so far. They have no error they can point to. As time goes along, it favors the model, as the latest estimate appears to affirm the initial estimate. Not easy to debunk. Just the opposite of the climate models.
In the absence of verified data, the accuracy of any prediction has a probability of zero of being correct. We do not know for certain: a) how the virus is transmitted from person to person [is it aerosols, clumps of water vapor, fog, other}; b) what standard is being used to label the death as due to CV-19 [many fatalities had other major illnesses]; c) what the overall infection rate in the population in general is [there still are not enough tests for 100% coverage].; d) what the most effective treatment is [see elsewhere on this blog concerning remesdivir versus hydroquinone].
Not knowing either the numerator or the denominator, the likelihood of death given infection is not computable.
We have public policy being made by fear, not science. That is bad.