Sunday, May 17, 2020

Standing firm …

The Lockdown Skeptic They Couldn’t Silence. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Yet if Medium meant to stifle debate, its action backfired. Mr. Ginn has since become an informal organizer of a small battalion of well-credentialed dissenters. They include Michael Levitt (a Stanford biologist and the 2013 Nobel laureate in chemistry), John Ioannidis and Jay Bhattacharya (both Stanford professors of medicine), Joel Hay (a University of Southern California professor of pharmacy and health economics) and Neeraj Sood (a USC health economist). They and other researchers have been advising state and local governments on easing their lockdowns. On Thursday Dr. Bhattacharya and Messrs. Hay and Sood fielded questions from the Arizona Legislature about how to reopen the state’s economy.

8 comments:

  1. There are issues with this article and the people it refers to, of course. Ginn the technologist is not qualified to decide who should be dying.

    There's so much that is not left or right, but common sense. Everyone knows that if everyone just kept going to work as if nothing was happening, the death toll would be even more horrific, but the economy would be doing fine.

    Of course, if you open your restaurant and pretend there is no pandemic ongoing, you will lose customers. But hey, you'd lose more money if you close up and tried to do all delivery sales. So kill a few people, and be an American success. Glory Glory.

    It's not liberal to be less sociopathic, and conservative to be more. Once you start going broke, you're pushed to consider the value of killing people so that you can keep making at least nearly as much money as you used to.

    Hey, my farmer friend is making out, though. So many more people are getting home delivery, he cannot handle all the business. And I know that the extra business he is getting from me, the local supermarkets are not getting.

    No one should be congratulating Sweden on how many of them have died from the virus. Why give a medal to the country that hits herd immunity first? That's what we are trying not to do. We are trying to improve treatments, learn about the virus, develop vaccines, and such to bring herd immunity down, so less of us die if we get that far, or stop the virus in its tracks with a vaccine -- either that or develop a seasonal vaccine so that we can all go to work, stores, and restaurants, take the train and such without killing each other.

    The question is, "How much of a sociopathic investment to you have in the status quo?" Less sociopathic people do not want so many people to die. Sweden and America are horror shows. America is at 90,000 counted dead -- and the excess dead is about double that.

    What the studies are showing is what makes common sense. If you keep your distance, wear masks, assume that you got contaminated if you went outside and then washed up, you have much less of a chance of getting this deadly virus. That's the goal.

    You don't want to get this virus. You don't want anyone to catch it from you. You don't want other people to die either -- unless of course you are a sociopath and you want your hair salon to generate income no matter.

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  2. Who is supposed to be qualified to decide who should be dying? Andrew Cuomo? Tom Wolf? 4,000 people have died of COVID-19 here in Pennsylvania. Seventy percent of those were in nursing homes, where Gov. Wolf ordered they be taken. Cuomo did much the same thing in New York. The numbers regarding the lockdowns have been inconsistent and contradictory. But for some reason we dare not supposed to question the policy even though some highly qualified people have indeed questioned it and even though Niall Ferguson, Britain's recently disgraced Professor Lockdown, has been shown to have been spectacularly wrong on a thoroughly consistent basis.
    I'm supposed to toe the line because some political hacks and journalistic shills tell me to? No thanks.
    And by the way, where did you hide in the summer of '69?

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  3. Who exactly is qualified to decide who should be dying? Andrew Cuomo? Tom Wolf? 4,000 people have died of COVID-19 here in Pennsylvania. Seventy percent of those were in nursing homes, where Gov. Wolf ordered they be taken. Cuomo did much the same thing in New York. The numbers regarding the lockdowns have been inconsistent and contradictory. But for some reason we are not supposed to question the policy even though some highly qualified people have indeed questioned it and even though, to give just one example, Niall Ferguson, Britain's recently disgraced Professor Lockdown, has been shown to have been spectacularly wrong on a thoroughly consistent basis.
    I'm supposed to toe the line because some political hacks and journalistic shills tell me to? No thanks.
    And by the way, where did you hide in the summer of '69?

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  4. The Nazi doctors were good at it. They were highly qualified to decide who should die. Mayan priests were good at it too. They were highly qualified. At least it was openly their jobs, whether the citizenry liked it or not. Now we have technologists, who are qualified in technology and nothing else, and economists, who are qualified in economics, and nothing else, trying to tell us who should die -- and why, because of their political persuasion? Political persuasions in America are about how to serve us, not kill us. Let's all stay clear of that slippery slope -- how the people get sucked into deadly tyranny.

    When a pandemic comes, we save lives. In America, it's how we would be prideful and know we are civilized. When people get sick, we treat them, and we are prepared for pandemics, because it happens. Some governors can be smart, and some stupid. That's how it always is. We can all be smart and keep our distance. No matter at what level, president, governor, mayor, or self, when it's a pandemic, carelessness, callousness and stupidity are deadly. We can all take care and not become walking serial killers ourselves -- just like we don't drive on the wrong side of the road either.

    The domino effect was extraordinary with the ineptness of this administration. We go from funnelling 90,000 people into the death chute, feeding the Moloch of stupidity, and now the Moloch of economics, to now dealing with suicides, beccause we are not even close to being as advanced socially as other countries.

    At all times, we should be questioning Trump, who questions the experts he left around him, what a screwball getting rid of the pandemic team, who did not take the warnings from January seriously when epistemologists and virologists did, who did nothing all of February, and so forth, and so forth. This is what we are dealing with.

    It has nothing to do with "opening" anything. Everyone who is smart and compassionate, is trying to get people back to work without killing them. This isn't left or right either.

    Private nursing home owners have turned out to be some of the worst serial killers in our day. It was that way during Katrina, and now during Covid-19. The nursing home where my father was just last year, is the one that became famnous at least around here as the one keeping the extent of the virus secret, killing not only residents, but employees.

    Check out the death curve, and note it is algorithmic: . everyone, everyone, ought to be learning as much as they can, and getting the word out, on how to get that death curve down. Business as usual sends it up -- until we have a vaccine.

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  5. By the way, Frank. And I thought you would have replied, and I would just let it be.

    But it bugged me. It seemed odd, that 70% of the deaths in PA would be in nursing homes, when this isn't the case in general. This gets sorted out with this report: Kristof: America’s true COVID-19 death toll already exceeds 100,000.

    I'm in Massachusetts a "meticulous" state versus Pennsylvania a "dubious" state. In my county of Middlesex alone, we have had over 1500 people die of Covid-19. We know these numbers are low everywhere, have to be.

    And I have been curious about there being different strains being more deadly than others. How else do you explain that PA is so different from MA? How could my little county have over 1/3 the deaths that the entire big state of PA has?

    We in MA are clear that we are walking serial killers. Why aren't you? Well you've been fed "dubious" death tolls, as the article states. You've got to be closer to a rate of death that NY, NJ, and MA are experiencing. Have to.

    Turns out, the nursing home tally that is the ridiculous number of 70% belies the truth. PA reporting is horribly low, and misleading to everyone in your state. You have the same strain and rate of death as the rest of us. It would be better to ignore your state's numbers, and just look around.

    I was reading a pre-print this past week that puts the excess deaths during the covid-19 period at double the deaths attributed to the virus. This article in the Mercury News is much kinder to states such as PA. It's figuring a 50% fudge factor to get close to the real number.

    The article also note that states like MA are more meticulous, and so we are not as far off when it comes to knowing our covid-19 deaths. This means, that states like PA are making up the dubious difference. If we don't have the 50% fudge factor, then PA has a higher one -- is what figures.

    Your state estimates of dead are way off. Your nursing home covid deaths are probably near accurate. That figures. Anyine banking on state stats has no good idea what is going on around them. There's a real deadly pandemic on.

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  6. Rus, I've decided to 'just let it be' here. There's no good-faith discussion possible when Frank sneers at dissenters with

    'And by the way, where did you hide in the summer of '69?'

    and interprets such dissent as 'toe[ing] the line because some political hacks and journalistic shills tell [us] to'.

    But I hope you keep commenting, because your comments are consistently well informed, polite, reasonable, and compasssionate. I don't have to always agree to appreciate them.

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  7. I'm going to break my own rule and link to the original Ginn post for those who wish to follow up:

    https://www.zerohedge.com/health/covid-19-evidence-over-hysteria

    Also relevant: Carl T. Bergstrom's rebuttal (the Twitter thread at the top)

    Please note: a link indicates neither agreement nor disagreement on my part.

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