His is a DC GOP think tank (sinecured) economist who has generally paid no professional or reputational price for being wrong about virtually everything for decades. The decision to put such a person in charge of creating a predictive epidemiological model in the midst of a national crisis based on no professional or academic expertise whatsoever defies all logic. But then, who are we kidding? The President put his son-in-law, who’s only professional accomplishment was nearly bankrupting his real estate family after he took the reins after his father went to prison, in charge of epidemic crisis response.
Put a dubious economist who knows how to find the ‘make a graph’ assistant in MS Excel in charge of crafting the crisis response to the worst pandemic in a hundred years. Yeah, that’ll work out just dandy.
Wendy’s promotes that they use only fresh beef, not frozen, for their burgers. McDonalds felt enough pressure from that to change their standards and made the Quarter pounder fresh-only. I wonder if Mickey D’s is short of Quarter Pounders?
My library starts “curb-side” pick-up today, actually from a table set up out front that you get out of your car to reach. Personally I’m sticking with the digital collection.
That was the assumption at the time, and is still probably the best guess; for sure there was flu going around then. Nevertheless, as cases like this continue to crop up, it raises the likelihood of the infection having shown up earlier. That’s how science works: you have a working hypothesis, as evidence piles up it eventually it gives way to a better hypothesis.
If it does turn out that it came earlier to Europe, then cities with massive global traffic like London, Paris, and Milan would be obvious sites for it to have appeared first.
The “cubic” model mentioned in the article is worrying - it sounds like they simply extrapolated currently available data with third degree polynomial. If that’s true I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
While I don’t know much about models used in epidemiology, I’m nearly sure that even the simplest ones are based on differential equations, and not trying to extrapolate data with polynomial.
In this space I am parking my short description of the de facto plan the Trump government has for getting the United States out of the public health emergency caused by the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This is my read on what the government’s guidance and actions amount to. I will revise the text and add new links as more information flows in. My purpose in posting it is to challenge the American press to be a lot clearer in its descriptions.
The plan is to have no plan, to let daily deaths between one and three thousand become a normal thing, and then to create massive confusion about who is responsible— by telling the governors they’re in charge without doing what only the federal government can do, by fighting with the press when it shows up to be briefed, by fixing blame for the virus on China or some other foreign element, and by “flooding the zone with shit,” Steve Bannon’s phrase for overwhelming the system with disinformation, distraction, and denial, which boosts what economists call “search costs” for reliable intelligence.
Using a model put together by economists instead of epidemiologists should be worrying enough without getting into the details of how they used the math to support their pre-existing biases.
