Seeing pictures of people out for ice cream in Sweden the same day there are protests with confederate flags and shit here– I’m having trouble reconciling those two images.
We had our lockdown extended while at the same time the number of cases is not going radically up (about 150 a day for weeks now, way, way lower than projected, I mean WAY lower). The department of health here indicated 1500 deaths by April 8th WITH the lockdown. It’s now 4/28 and we may top 600 by mid-May. Everything predicted looks very wrong. Below is another interview from Knut Wittkowski who has taken it on the chin from all over on account of his original interviews. Who was right?
Stuff we know:
Data is bad, popular models, (especially in the media who always publish the HIGHEST number in the presented models) for what will happen are terrible and have led to mass hysteria or total denial. Models that a month ago showed a much lower result were shouted down or ignored. Wisconsin’s model WITH lockdown in place was an order of magnitude off, just like the UK model originally was (500k, then down to 20, with 2 million in the USA: that’s right, 2 MILLION). This has lead to hasty decisions that are very drastic which completely makes sense when bad data makes bad models, not any more.
NYC is terrible but had no lockdown at all until after everyone was infected (March 18th lockdown, March 17th started the drop in the curve of people going to the hospital), and it has an unbelievable population density compared to everywhere else in the USA. However, non dense places in Italy and Spain were hammered as well for reasons not totally understood yet (one city gets hammered, another city down the road does not). There’s a three day difference in NYC and California’s lock down and VAST difference in outcomes so far. Other area’s outcomes and risks are going to be very different from NYC, especially sitting out in say Schiocton or Cuba City. It could be as simple as co-habitation, poverty, access to health care and viral load.
Links to stuff:
Sweden:
New Michael Levitt interview. He cannot go more than 100 feet from his house in Israel.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/audio/player?audio_id=2018743210
Massive under reporting of cases.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v1 Here it is with a selection bias analysis lowering the projection. https://analytica.com/adjusting-the-santa-clara-county-antibody-prevalence-results-for-self-selection-bias/
And in LA County:
http://publichealth.lacounty.gov/phcommon/public/media/mediapubhpdetail.cfm?prid=2328
Obligatory links: https://infekt.ch/2020/04/exitstrategie-lockdown/ (in German, just press the translate button)
A great video by Dr. Katz. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VK0Wtjh3HVA. Look how carefully he is answering some of the questions.
As for contrarians to these contrarians, the panic nightmare is hard to uphold at this point, but I’m seeing a LOT of attacks on people that suggest that this is not even close to as bad as we have been told. Data is coming in.
“It’s more virtue signaling “science”. Start with the conclusion, in this case “we need to lock down” and then work backwards to get that result ignoring all evidence to the contrary. “