It is no exaggeration to say that most models that the best and brightest offered the public, from the imported Imperial College in London to those from the University of Washington and many more besides, were not just inaccurate, but quite mistaken in two tragic ways: First, they were accepted as gospel by governments and thus their flawed assumptions became the basis for policies that in many cases may prove counterproductive. Second, the modelers themselves either did not promptly correct their warped inputs, or were not completely forthcoming about their data and methodologies, or blamed their flawed assumptions on others or circumstances beyond imagination, or claimed that their mistakes were in fact salutary—if not sorta, kinda planned—in galvanizing a presumably infantile public to accept draconian measures that it otherwise would not.
On March 12, Governor DeWine of Ohio, flanked by his state health director, told the 11 million residents of Ohio that based on models he knew that 100,000 “had” active cases of the disease. That was a caseload that his experts further warned would double every six days. In other words, at the then roughly 2 percent lethality rate of the known actively infected—his medical team all but frightened the state with the certainty that in 24 days there could be 1.6 million infected Ohioans and an assumed 40,000 dead.
In fact, about a week ago, on April 6, there were fewer than 5,000 known cases and less than 200 Ohioans who had succumbed to COVID-19. Even with far more unknown cases than known and the efficacy of slowing viral transmission via mass sheltering, the data was not just flawed but perhaps even preposterous. State officials could have offered some official explanations for their misinformation other than the subtext that such fright was medicinal in persuading a public to do something they supposed the public did not know was good for it to do.
When California Governor Gavin Newsom warned that 25.5 million Californians “will” get the virus in the eight weeks following March 18, albeit without his shelter-in-place orders, he was also essentially stating that, at a then 2.6 percent lethality rate for Californians known to have the active virus, about 1 million would die. As I write, 24 days out from his prediction and nearing the half-way point to Doomsday, about 23,000 Californians have tested positive, and either are fighting the disease or have recovered. Since late January, about 650 of 40 million Californians have died from the disease, in a state where well over 700 people die from some cause every day.
If 10 times that number of known positive tests are now actively infected, we legitimately could assume at least 222,000 residents are now active or past carriers. Those who advised Newsom to shut down the world’s sixth-largest economy, including universities like Cal Tech, UC Berkeley, and Stanford, Silicon Valley, and the commerce and livelihoods of 40 million residents, apparently did not factor into their models some possible collective immunity among thousands of Californians who, for months, were on the front lines of arriving flights from China.
Nor did modelers seem to factor in the ability of people to social distance even before the shutdown was ordered, or the fact that a virus that does not kill 95.5 percent of those who are infected, but not frontline health workers or over 60 years old, may be deemed by the public manageable in a way that does not require having multigenerational small businesses ruined, or careers destroyed, or retirement savings accounts wrecked, or key appointments with doctors postponed or canceled.
Practical wisdom might warn that one also does not erode the Constitution because of a mysterious virus, in the sense one does not arrest ministers preaching in parking lots, or those walking hand in hand alongside the road.
Given past misadventures in times of crisis from Woodrow Wilson’s wartime de facto suspension of the First Amendment to FDR’s internment of Japanese-Americans, one should not advocate instituting a national register of the infected and recovered, as some sort of super citizenry and then entrust such knowledge to what we know of the civil liberty sensitivities of Silicon Valley—all because a Bill Gates or Anthony Fauci believe their expertise leads them to think it may be a good idea.
Our modelers constantly downsize their bleak prognostications as “data changes” as if one should ever publish such Armageddon scenarios when they had insufficient information. More worrisome, are post facto claims that such mistakes might have been salutary.
Whatever the end result of this crisis, few at the WHO, CDC or the state health directors are going to lose their jobs in a way the small restaurateurs and Uber drivers most certainly will.
That is, elites who make policy do not necessarily immediately need to plug back into a normal economy to survive. An Ezekiel Emanuel—brother of Rahm (of “never let a crisis go to waste” infamy), advisor to Joe Biden, and of greater infamy for his prior callous pronouncements that those over 75 (e.g., like Joe Biden) more or less are society’s unproductive and enfeebled sponges—claims that we might need to be shut down America for up to another 18 months (but then why not two or three years?).
The subtext of Emanuel’s warning is that even after 72 weeks of such exhausting punditry from a university billet, he will emerge more or less financially secure, maybe our national health czar in a new administration, and without much worry that millions of others will not—or in fact will die or sicken trying to remain solvent.
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