The Two Mistakes That Led to a National Lockdown
How did America get to this point? Two critical CCP Virus response mistakes stand out: Relying too heavily on flawed statistical models and failing to target resources primarily to protect the most vulnerable Americans.
I don’t think this is correct, or it’s only partly correct. Our biggest mistake was not using big *enough* models. We asked public health docs for their expert opinions and got them. But public health people as everyone should know tend to weigh too exclusively the ‘public health’ consequences of policy. Everything looks like a nail, or at least nail-like, to them. What you really need is a sort of super-model that looks at everything. Sure, you can keep kids from spreading the disease by keeping them out of school, but what are the costs, really all the costs, of doing this? Is there something more tailored you can do? You don’t need a PhD to figure out that probably the best response to the virus is not going to be just shutting down everything, everywhere until the virus just kind of goes away.
When our response to this pandemic is looked at coolly many years from now, we will see, I betcha, that far more lives and quality of life were lost by driving our economy into the ditch, hard, than would have been lost by something like a more nuanced response.
Our pandemic response has been like our 9/11 response on steroids. Launching a multi-trillion dollar war against terrorists actually responsible for 9/11, plus all sorts of costly security measures that don’t work, turn out to have been bad ideas. Who knew.