Readers may remember my post on economist and Discovery Institute co-founder George Gilder and his silly statement on the Covid-19 outbreak:
So let’s stop pretending that our policies have been rational and need to be phased out, as if they once had a purpose. They should be reversed summarily and acknowledged to be a mistake, perpetrated by statisticians with erroneous computer models.
Perhaps then we can learn from this experience with the flaws of expertise not to shut down the economy again for the totally bogus “crisis” of climate change. [RealClearMarkets]
WaPo rebuts, if not by name, with this article on how epidemics are evaluated, and a quite lovely graph:
As Faust describes it, the issue boils down to this: The annual flu mortality figures published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are estimates produced by plugging laboratory-confirmed deaths into a mathematical model that attempts to correct for undercounting. Covid-19 death figures represent a literal count of people who have either tested positive for the virus or whose diagnosis was based on meeting certain clinical and epidemiological criteria.
What to make of that graph? Glad you asked:
Using an apples-to-apples comparison, we can say that the coronavirus and the disease it causes, covid-19, have already killed eight times as many people as the flu. By the time we get data for the entire season, the difference appears likely to be at least tenfold, or a full order of magnitude.
The coronavirus, Faust writes, “is not anything like the flu: It is much, much worse.”
Too many unknowns, still, but that graph makes it clear that this is not the flu, but something much worse.
