Or history and facts are forever…
The 2006 Origins of the Lockdown Idea comes from a high school student’s science project, HERE. Sigh…
And an interesting and current graphic…
And then there is this one… Apparently Lena Dunham flunked history…
Move that paper forward a year or so and Britain was being bombed too…
The AIER article is well-written; that does not mean its conclusion is correct. It says let the chips fall where they may (at-risk folks may object to that attitude), ignoring the possibility of the medical system collapsing. Whoops, no care for you. It says to close elementary schools for a few weeks and send the kids to grandma’s house if the parents get sick. This ignores the apparently-hughly-variable period of latency of our new virus which means Junior might very well kill off Grandma. Lastly, does “no evidence of quarantine’s effectiveness” mean smallpox quarantines were a waste? If you’re sick and staying home, you might kill off your family, but you ain’t spreading the bug in town.
FWIW, I have some inside knowledge of a local nursing home which has instituted a strict lockdown policy with PPE for all. They’ve had two cases so far. I compare that to NYC’s appalling nursing home body count and think draconian measures ain’t all bad.
“…think draconian measures ain’t all bad.” Just Wow! Don’t get me wrong, I am glad the nursing home Robert refers to has done so well. But I’ll disagree strongly with his conclusion.
My wife, my son and my best friend are all docs, and they all agree that while the initial reaction (based on dire predictions from models which had no real data) were understandable, the data now shows that those efforts were way off base and could have been eased quite a while ago. Pay attention to those very at risk (immunocompromised of any age, people above 65 who also have underlying pulmonary medical conditions, esp. those in nursing homes), have the rest of the population wash hands well and frequently, cover coughs/sneezes, don’t lick doorknobs, etc. Oh yeah, and if in big dense areas, shut down the subway, don’t tell people to go on about their business, and don’t mandate that infected people must be placed in vulnerable populations such as nursing homes.
The lockdown was supposed to be just until “the curve was flattened” to not overwhelm hospital capacity. Well, hospitals and “experts” swung the pendulum so far the other way by kicking out all but the most severely ill, they still have excess capacity. Even in NYC, the extra beds in field hospitals and Navy ship were not really utilized. And ER personnel are being furloughed or hours reduced because no one wants to come to hospitals unless they are victims of real trauma. Shows how many folks use the ER for their primary medical care.
Don’t get me started on the role of the press/MSM/politicians in creating the fear and panic that led to a lot of this, all for political purposes.
We deal with risk of various sorts every day – removing too much risk paralyzes us, as we have dramatically seen. And the removal of risk in one area increases it in others – hence the rise in suicides and death from delayed medical procedures when people avoid medical care. And maybe most insidious is so many people meekly accepting the abridgment of their civil rights by elected officials and bureaucrats. (It has been useful for those folks to take off the mask and self identify as budding tyrants!) Glad to see the people more publicly objecting to that and basically telling those people to “F-off!”
“draconian” should read “comprehensive, limited-term”. I was pre-coffee 🙂
Just came from an essential trip to Farm & Fleet. Everyone was wearing state-mandated masks with a disturbing number worn incorrectly. Sigh.
Like Tom said.
Now I’ve got to put the ball gag back in because the governess says it keeps the virus from entering though the mouth.
Please respect our Glorious public servants…Their demands are NOT silly or “nonsense”…They are “for our own good”…How would we ever survive if they didn’t inform us that we must wear masks, how far apart we are allowed to stand, when we can come out of our cells er I mean homes, when we can eat, how many people are allowed to be around us as we eat, when we can go to the gym, barber, small business, or anything we used to do when we were free people. Without our Glorious public servants how will we ever be able to survive? Please give our public servants the respect that they deserve for living our lives so safely for us all.
*This comment got me banned from the NAS JRB Fort Worth page for a week…
***Actually I think what actually got me kicked off was my response asking for them to quote what I said that was “rude” after they accused me of being “rude”.
How “rude”.
MSG Grumpy
I am neither elf nor reindeer, but this tune comes to mind…
All- Thanks for the comments. If nothing else, there is now, and will always be a divide about the ‘best’ practices… Sigh MSG- A grumpy senior enlisted??? How rude! 😉
Posted from my iPhone.
I resemble that remark…
The, “Never let a good crisis go to waste”, live and in color, IMO
Hey Old NFO;
Was driving down from Tennessee today and half of the cars on the interstate were from the northern states that were under some form of lockdown headed south to the southern states that are not under lockdown. Funny how that works…….
I didn’t sleep well, and have been having a week conducive to confusion. I linked to the AIER article at ATH, and provided a long comment. (I thought I found it on redstate, otherwise I might have realized that here might have been better.)
I am not necessarily endorsing the conclusions of the AIER paper, but that Glass is a modeler and may understand what a Kalman filter is contrasts with some of the critiques made at ATH of Fauci and the ICL adulterer.
Gotta disagree with the other Robert here. The current lockdown is not necessarily a quarantine, and appeals to effectiveness of historical quarantines are only valid if proposing policy is largely similar to those quarantines.
Plus, the trade offs involve three areas that may be quite challenging to model accurately. a) the spread of infection b) the economic impact c) compliance with policy direction. It is easiest to show that a given position is wrong if you can quickly and efficiently evaluate for those three areas.
There are definitely positions that are obviously and certainly wrong. AIER is not in the category of accurately and fully describes everything, complete with actionable remedies. I see a number of ambiguous topics here, so I’m inclined to see it as having part of the truth, as opposed to none of the truth.
That said, I would not trust my thinking today for real work, so why should any of us trust it for this?
WSF- Yep… sigh
Bob- Not surprised.
Bob2- Concur! And we shouldn’t, IMHO.
Two things are obvious.
1, We do not know for certain, what effective behavior, isolation or lack thereof is the correct or best way to deal with this coronacrap.
2, Clearly the inner Gestapo of the the left has emerged and is out there for all to see.
Roger- Exactly!
At first I thought this was a “Black Swan”, but now it’s looking more like a “False Flag”.
We’re at war, and people don’t get it…..
Agent-based modeling only works well if you 1) understand what you are modeling, 2) understand decision space and options can happen, and 3) understand WTF you are trying to do. Wouldn’t trust PhD daddy, let alone HS girl turning the crank. I got called on the carpet bt mgt for asking those questions about the ABM work they thought was the future. It was five monkeys with three manual typewriters, who just copied Beckett’s plays.
drjim- Good point!
PK- Oh yeah… modeling is all smoke and mirrors…