Schrödinger’s Virus: Is It Possible that Everybody is Right - and Wrong - About This Thing?
Article by Bryan Preston in "PJMedia":
We’re all talking about science
models and what they say about what to do about the coronavirus. Models
are only as good as the data you put into them and the assumptions you
use when you build them. Both of those are core reasons why no
coronavirus or other science model is perfect. They are all ultimately
subject to human limitations and biases.
Which
is a slightly pretentious way of saying that we don’t really know what
we’re talking about because our machines are going to be dumber than we
are. But whatever position we take on the ‘rona, we can grab a model off
the shelf and justify it. If you think it’s a massive threat, there’s a
model for you. If you think we’ve become a police state for little
reason, there’s a model for you too.
Brit Hume tweeted this earlier Tuesday. It looks like really good news for New York.
Wow. And the drop is even more impressive compared to what the widely followed computer models were forecasting.
That there curve appears to have been bent. Gov. Cuomo and his plausibly pierced nipples have been haranguing New Yorkers to just stay home for a while. Most of them surely have.
But a whole lot of them obviously haven’t. The city's subways, which ought to be viral free-for-alls, are still packed.
It looks like a majority in the photo at the link are wearing masks,
but there are also some bare faces. Yet New York’s curve looks flattened
and one of the main national models, the IHME, has been revised downward. The virus may not kill nearly as many of us as feared. That’s good news. But it’s still likely to kill a lot, which is not good news.
It’s
true that we’ve taken extreme and unprecedented actions to tame this
virus. It’s true that these actions have gravely harmed us and the
economy. It’s true that many in positions of leadership have said and
done things about the virus that have turned out to be untrue or
extreme, and those statements now let different sides use them as
gotchas.
Here’s one of those. Back in January, Dr. Anthony Fauci declared the virus was “not a major threat” to Americans. That’s obviously wrong now. Dr. Fauci leads the coronavirus task force and now says we never get back to a pre-virus normal.
But
was he wrong when he said that back in January? This is how science
works. You operate on the best information you have until better
information is available. Then you adjust your thinking. Rinse. Repeat.
I’d say he wasn’t
wrong. Was he a little arrogant? Maybe. Aren’t we all? He was speaking
from the best information he had, which was not a lot. Whatever you say
about the virus, odds are you’re speaking from even less knowledge than
he has. New viruses come and go every year. At that point in January, he
was working off what he knows of viral infections, which is a lot, and
what the Chinese government and the World Health Organization were
saying. They were presenting a facade of calm. Should Dr. Fauci and
everyone else have known they were lying? Suspicion of communist China
is always in order. That’s a government founded by murdering millions
upon millions of its own people and it operates heinous concentration
camps now. Beijing’s rulers are evil. But even if one comes at
statements from China with due skepticism, how could Dr. Fauci or anyone
else have known this virus would turn out to be this bad? That was an
unlikely scenario, a “black swan” event. We’ve seen a flock of those
lately.
Now,
there are those out there who think the virus isn’t really that bad,
and the downward revisions of the models and the bent New York curve are
proof. They’re not. Social distancing and shutting things down were
supposed to flatten the curve and reduce the caseload. It looks like
that’s working. That’s good news. It’s also evidence that the police
state we now live in isn’t permanent. We will never know, or have
“closure,” that we absolutely had to shut everything down. We only have
the one world to experiment on, and even shutdown outliers like Sweden
may prove less
than we want them to. It’s a spin on the Schrödinger’s cat thought
experiment, only we can’t really open the box to find out who’s right or
wrong. Science can be heartlessly annoying like that.
Is
Dr. Fauci wrong to say we may never get back to normal? I hope he is.
He probably does too. And he probably is. We’ve gotten good at
sequencing DNA and devising vaccines and defenses to keep ourselves
alive. But he may also be right about that, and the death toll may
already be higher - or lower - than we know.
We
had it pretty good before this bug swept out from Wuhan across the
world. We had achieved a rare state when the economy was strong but not
overheating, jobs were plentiful and we had time to argue over silly
things like the color of a dress in a photo. We debated the most tedious
timewasters but weren’t fighting a major war against anyone. By
historic standards, when you’re not at war and your society is
relatively prosperous and stable, your life is not the “nasty, brutish, and short” existence that most humans have endured throughout the ages.
That
life seems like a distant memory. Things are unraveling little by
little. There’s a growing unease. We’re still in our homes for now, but
millions really don’t know where their next real paycheck will come
from. They’re worried and probably getting a little more concerned as
the days pass and they’re about to become dependent on an increasingly
insolvent government for the first time in their lives. There’s a
failure cascade just waiting to happen. We do need to get back to work.
We do need businesses and schools and parks and everything else to
reopen soon, and we need a plan to do that. We do need for every
official who has turned out to be a closet tinpot to be taken down a few
pegs.
And we also need to beat this deadly virus.
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