Unsettling ‘Settled Science’

[This commentary was also published here in the 3jun20 edition of The Union.]

George Rebane

None are so certain about science as those outside looking in.

Today, the SARS-CoV-2 (or Covid-19 or simply C19) pandemic ‘science’ in the public square rapidly became a mish-mash of unreliable reports, contending medical views, and ideologically tailored fake news.  One thing you can always take to the bank – people claiming ‘settled science’ is the litmus test for identifying the charlatans, the ignorant, and the ignorant charlatans.  Historically all important scientific advances were met with an overwhelming chorus of opposition from the entrenched establishment.  Their consistent theme was citing how the new was not in accord with the old, or worse, that the new directly contradicted the long and dearly held beliefs.  In our highly polarized and politicized society, it is safe to say that all reports purporting a solid scientific foundation are at a minimum suspect.

The C19 virus has been uniformly mischaracterized in the popular press and politics.  As more and more evidence climbs out from under widespread media (broadcast and internet) censorship, it becomes clear that the national lockdown was and continues to be a horrible mistake of yet to be tallied cost in lives and livelihoods.  And that lockdown was imposed by governments citing ‘science’ when no such science existed to support the mandates to shutdown commerce and impose stay-at-home.  It now turns out that C19 is only a bit more virulent than our seasonal flus, and the cited data claiming otherwise is dreadfully flawed and misreported.

Many reasoned, reasonable, and experienced voices have sought to counsel holding back on the draconian measures our politicians have imposed on the country.  An example of one of the more recent ones is epidemiologist Dr Knut Wittkowski, former head of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at The Rockefeller University’s Center for Clinical and Translational Science (here).  He points out that, far from being settled, the science around C19 is “bitterly contested”, as confirmed by anyone doing an internet search on the topic.  The bottom line that the expanding data on the pandemic now shows is that C19 is NOT significantly more dangerous than our usual infectious diseases (which don’t require forsaking freedoms and destroying economies), unless you have an age-related comorbidity.  And then you are in line to die anyway, either of an unfortunate C19 infection or something else.

Sadly, Americans don’t ‘do numbers’.  We are an overwhelmingly innumerate nation educated in dumbed-down public schools that have a decades-long record of abysmal and declining performance now imposed on the third generation of young people as documented by the National Center for Education Statistics of the Department of Education.  And when it comes to STEM-based knowledge, you can forget it.  As a population, we are at the mercy of the loudest demogauges that rise above the media cacophony, with no way to even reasonably assess alternative viewpoints and opinions.  We have found that the safe and sane way to handle the daily conflicts and conundrums is to adopt a simple set of beliefs, view everything through its lens, and comingle within a cohort of common, confirming, and comfortable minds.

Those who have spent their lives in and with science have an easier time and a natural inclination to say ‘it ain’t necessarily so’, and then use their skills to examine and evaluate alternative explanations.  But not everyone so blessed will voice such doubts if their job, livelihood, and/or reputation depends on swimming with the established school of thought that succors the correctly like-minded with grants, stipends, tenure, endowed chairs, published peer-approved papers, … .  And unfortunately, science is such a multi-variegated field that there is a lot of latitude in the words that can be chosen to support or remain circumspect about any scientific position.

Politicians like Governors Cuomo (NY) and Newsom (CA), and Mayors de Blasio (NYC) and Garcetti (LA) have been quick to tell their flocks that their lockdown and loosening mandates are based on science not politics.  And those carefully taught in their compliant constituencies have no available alternative than believe in the cited ‘science’ dispensed from on high.

At this point your columnist will usually offer a solution to get us out of today’s judiciously fabricated dilemma – ‘profits before people’ or ‘people before profits’.  Unfortunately, those of us having spent our lives in and with science can offer no science-based acceptable solution, because here it is all politics.  Today America’s answer to Keynes’ immortal question, ‘When I get new information, I change my mind.  What do you do?’, is a confidently calcified ‘Nothing.’

[Addendum]  People are now being told of herd immunity thresholds (HITs).  These are percentages of populations immune, at the crossing of which herd immunity kicks in and does the good things variously reputed to it – primarily starts tilting the number of currently infected curve downward.  M. Gomes et al have done a recent study of how individual variation in susceptibility and likelihood of exposure (actually exposure rate) to C19 would lower the herd immunity threshold (here).  It’s a technical paper with squigglies, but also fairly readable graphs, and therefore worth reading by the non-techie by just skipping over the obtuse parts and concentrating on what’s known, and what’s known to be unknown.

The takeaway is that at best today’s C19 HITs lie somewhere between 10% and 70% of target populations.  The authors also go into some detail on what is required to nail down a HIT, and doing it doesn’t look promising for any time soon.  The good news from the analysis is another corroboration that lockdowns do little to reduce morbidity or mortality.  Sooner or later the susceptibles have to come out, become the exposed, and get infected.  Depending on how many were hunkered down and now out-and-about, the next wave will be big or small.

So we come full circle on the argument presented here and elsewhere – do away with the lockdowns, and let people prudently go about their business knowing that there’s a bug out there that is likely to kill the elderly with comorbidities, against which there still is no vaccine, but for which the likelihood of your getting a debilitating infection starts out low and diminishes with every passing day as herd immunity increases.

Comments

[Walt]

We have the NEW expert on the Kung Flu.
https://www.breitbart.com/health/2020/05/13/greta-thunberg-will-headline-cnns-town-hall-coronavirus-facts-and-fears/
"Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg will headline CNN’s weekly town hall event on the coronavirus, which will also feature two Obama administration appointees."

[Bill Tozer]

If the experts can’t agree on masks, what’s a poor boy to do? Help Mr. Wizard.

TO MASK OR NOT TO MASK?

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/05/to-mask-or-not-to-mask.php

[The Estonian Fox]

Article from Forbes, May 13:
How Low-Dose Radiation Could Be The Trick For Treating COVID-19, by James Conca
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2020/05/13/researchers-explore-low-doses-of-radiation-to-treat-severe-coronavirus-cases/#15693c9a1454

Suggests using very low-dose radiation to alleviate Wuhan virus symptoms. Note- it just SUGGESTS how it COULD work on Wuhan virus. Haven't seen this mentioned before for treating cases.

[scenes]

E. Fox@1:34PM

Thanks, one of the few rare articles that has information in it. A rarity in the modern magazine.

I've been spending time poking through early 20th C. medical papers, mostly just trying to get a handle on the development of statistical methods in epidemiology, but ran into this sort of thing.

https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/abs/10.1148/38.3.281
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022347643802560
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/279665
many &c. I'd never heard of it and to be fair they were probably looking for things to do with radiation at the time.

[Walt]

Well look who is trying to to cover his ass.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/05/18/andrew-cuomo-nobody-should-be-prosecuted-for-ny-virus-deaths/

Never mind his blanket DNR policy issued from his own hand,
The nursing home deaths as a result of hs orders.

[scenes]

GR: "We are an overwhelmingly innumerate nation..."

Your cries in the wilderness are starting to be answered. With the War On Standardized Testing taking full form and increasingly invigorated with our temporary difficulties, we can expect an increasingly fuzzy set of entrance requirements for college. Over time, we can simply remove the need for numbers in the various fields of study. Problem solved.

It might just appear that the incoming freshman class will be increasingly chosen by SJWs picking their special friends, but the additional diversity will be of value. After all, barring the stupid kids from Harvard is so 20th century.

Seriously, if a person had an urge to seriously study humanities or social scienes, where in the heck do you go and still avoid all the crazy people? So far as I can tell, every anthropology department in the US has been converted into an asylum and the classics departments are disappearing. It could be that the only answer is to learn an Eastern European language (or Russian) and go overseas.

[George Rebane]

scenes 1018am - Yes, but it's not exactly the answer I have been looking for - e.g. Napolitano and the UC system (my alma mater) :(

[scenes]

GeorgeR: Just think of it as a profit opportunity.

Perhaps a new series of childrens texts, with titles like:

One..Two...Many. My First Counting Book.

[George Rebane]

scenes 1248pm - Actually that would be delightful, and warm the cockles of many a progressive heart - a return to a more 'natural' world. Anthropologists have told us for years about the counting systems of primitive tribes (including our pre-European Indians), many still among. Their counting systems were exactly that - 'one, two, three, many'. Today we have provided the same numeracy skills to millions of Americans. The only concern our woke educators have about such a state of affairs is that we are not seen to do unwarranted appropriations from other cultures. That aside, see what we can accomplish when we all work together?

[Bill Tozer]

The question not posed is when is it too late to reopen the economy?

[scenes]

"when is it too late to reopen the economy?"

I'd say that economies have the tendency to open themselves. Money and 'stuff' have the sort of romantic relationship where it's hard to keep them apart. If not money, you get to swap what the Soviets called 'blat' (a peculiar term, but it's like the Russians have a different word for everything).

My guess is that the forced closure of the marketplace, particularly the one for labor, is more scary for it's ability to topple over things that were always sketchy. In some ways maybe the economy was like the Wile E. Coyote hanging in mid-air right before he looks down. An awful lot of the 'economy' is either unuseful or subject to automation or artificially inflated in importance and value. Not everybody is going to get back on the bicycle once the CCP-19 stick is removed from the spokes

[Bill Tozer]

Why Sweden’s COVID-19 Strategy Is Quietly Becoming the World’s Strategy

“We don’t need to have a national debate about whether the economic costs of lockdowns outweigh their public health benefits, because lockdowns do not provide public health benefits,” wrote economist Lyman Stone, an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, in a widely read Public Discourse article.

Although Stone is not the only scholar to make such a claim, it’s fair to see this position as an outlier. But the degree to which the lockdowns were or were not beneficial is a subject for another day. What matters is that presently nations and states are acting, not waiting around in the hope that someone develops a vaccine or “cure” (which typically take years to develop).

To glean true preferences one doesn’t listen to what someone says. One watches what they do. Behavior is what reveals true human preferences, economists point out, not their words.

“Action is a real thing. What counts is a man’s total behavior, and not his talk about planned but not realized acts,” the famed economist Ludwig von Mises observed in Human Action. “Neither is value in words and doctrines. It is reflected in human conduct. It is not what a man or groups of men say about value that counts, but how they act.”

And what are people doing?

Right now, the world is quietly moving toward Sweden’s laissez-faire approach. For those weary of state-enforced economic lockdowns that have caused vast economic harm and resulted in unprecedented violations of civil liberties, that’s an encouraging sign.“

https://fee.org/articles/why-sweden-s-covid-19-strategy-is-quietly-becoming-the-world-s-strategy/

[George Rebane]

Re “… to late to reopen the economy” – We know economies work in a number of different ways, and therefore can ‘reopen’ to various ways of working. The natural state (or universal attractant in systems speak) of an economy is a free market environment in which anything can be traded by willing parties for anything else at all times. In social orders the state always puts its heavy hand on markets, defining and regulating their operation – but like gravity, the natural attractant is always there. Today we have a greatly proscribed market that defines our economy. If ‘reopen’ means returning to its former rate of growth and regulatory environment, then ‘too late’ implies the existence of a tipping point beyond which the former state can no longer be achieved, no matter what public policies we implement. From that point of view, it is never too late, and the only variable is the length of time required to recover an original state. I gave some detailed particulars on that here – https://rebaneruminations.typepad.com/rebanes_ruminations/2014/06/the-recovery-rigmarole.html

However, if the tipping point involves the fundamental transformation of the type of governance executed by the state that dictates an economy in which the government is the major player (e.g. like in communist and heavily socialist countries), then the natural attractant will immediately give rise to a black market that is always tolerated by the state to a certain degree, since it knows its de jure market does not work and will ultimately lead to revolution. (The USSR and Red China continued to propagandize collectivized economies for decades while tolerating their brisk black markets; Cuba and other totalitarian countries still do. Even the US has its own black markets, some of which our government tolerates, others it prosecutes under our tax code.) So the bottom line, it’s never too late to reopen; it all depends how deep an economic hole you want to first dig from which you’re willing to suffer the long pain of climbing out.

America’s problem is that our Left views the present economic destruction as the required preamble to creating their new post-capitalist state-dominated society. Their proximal public policies, proposals, and pronouncements are all predicated on and successfully predicted by maximizing the utility functions I have described in these pages.

[Bill Tozer]

Hump Day, COVID-19 Edition.

I liked this one for Dr. Rebane’s attention.

https://i2.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2020/05/Screen-Shot-2020-05-17-at-11.38.50-AM.png?w=1160&ssl=1

And the rest for Mr. Fish’s consideration.

https://i2.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2020/05/IMG_2984.jpeg?w=706&ssl=1

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/05/midweek-in-pictures-hump-day-edition.php

[George Rebane]

BillT 1243pm - Very good Mr Tozer.

[Arthur Krugler]

George:
There are lots of examples of "settled science" - Gravity, which we use with confidence but don't know why it exists, arithmetic, algebra, mechanics - like levers, & chemistry.
Climate change is not one; yesterday I received TIME MAGAZINE and a round hundred pages of "settled doomsday forecasts". Of note I only found the words "polar bears" once.
Maybe a growing population of healthy bears, now over 25,000, had something to do with the alarmists abandoning their predictions of gloom and doom.
As far as I can tell, the entire world, both alarmists and deniers are playing with less than a full deck. All are missing the humungous energy from ore bodies of uranium that were visioning after 1980 and have stopped - sunspots are at a very low level - and NOAA's global weather map shows all the hot spots are gone, except the spot in Siberia.
My Chemical/Mechanical education and registration in 6 states help understand climate, energy and hydrocarbon fields.