“Until I know this sure uncertainty, I’ll entertain the offered fallacy.” (William Shakespeare, “The Comedy of Errors”)
I can’t leave the subject of the coronavirus alone; riots and “defunding” the police be damned. Everything about the virus says so much about ourselves and our current state of affairs.
“COVID-19 Is Not the Flu”, so stipulates the title of John McCormack’s piece in the May 18 edition of National Review. It’s the primary assumption that drives most everything that has been written and said on the subject of our current contagion, the coronavirus. Hugh Hewitt, another of the center/right commentariat, is fond of prefacing some of his remarks on his radio show with “in the year of plague”. Is the sickness a “plague” and is it “not the flu”? Honestly, I don’t know, and neither do they, and neither does much of the army of others who have contributed to the widely publicized tale about the virus. They claim a confidence that is unwarranted.
The storyline on the contagion is its proclaimed near-apocalyptic threat to civilization, so much so that we have come close to ending society. Thus, we are required to live a life of imitation and strangeness: an ersatz sociability through a mask, distance, digitization, and no touching; a dangerous fiddling with people’s livelihoods through arbitrary edicts of “essential” and “nonessential”; and the unwitting deputization of a horde of unthinking scolds.
I stand corrected. The unthinking scolds are thinking, but they could be reasoning from a host of unexamined assumptions.
One unexamined assumption occurred to me as I was reading McCormack’s essay. His comments were composed at a time of what could be referred to, in hindsight, as high hysteria. While in this public state-of-mind, nothing, as far as I am aware, has been written or said on the possibility of the distorting effects of focusing so many resources on this virus that comparisons with other pestilences are impossible. The distorting effects contribute to an emotional and socio-political environment that then corrupts the raw data. The rationale becomes the equivalent of a house of cards but is sold as rock solid.
The field of physics presents an excellent illustration. Scientists have long been aware of the possible impact of their detection methods on the object of their interest. The mere act of observation can alter the nature of it and distort their findings. As a result, they must be constantly conscious of this “observer effect”. Are our public policy experts, political leaders, and punditry class mindful of it in areas beyond science? Given what I’ve seen, heard, and read, I kinda doubt it.
I’ll use McCormack’s piece to lay out the conventional explanation for the gravity of this virus. His argument that it isn’t the flu, and shouldn’t be treated like it is, relies on an analysis that probably suffers from the observer effect. The observer in this case would be the public and private entities with a singular laser focus on this thing. No sickness has ever drawn this much attention in recent times. The final public and private bill for our reaction to this contagion hasn’t been finalized. As of today, the federal government has pumped trillions upon trillions of dollars into relief and treatments. The Federal Reserve will inject $1.5 trillion to finance the response. How quaint for Sen. Everett Dirksen to opine in 1933, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” We have to add a zero to keep up with the numbers rolling out of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
A few trillion dollars of observer makes for one mammoth potential for distortion.
In addition, the states have thrown another billions, if not trillions, into the kitty. California’s governor Gavin Newson estimated in April that the initial drain on the state’s treasury will amount to $7 billion (We’re still in Dirksen land), with more billions by the end of the year. Many states have seen their fiscal ledgers tip into the red, maybe way into the red. The word “bankruptcy” now applies to more than the businesses that they have driven into insolvency with their loose labeling of “nonessential”.
The upshot: all this activity has generated more data on this contagion than any other. To make the case that this candidate for mayhem is worse than prior ones, McCormack trots out the numbers for H1N1 of 61 million infections and 12,500 deaths over 12 months. The death toll for the flu season of 2018-19 runs about 34,200, he says. How do we know that these numbers were a product of a run-of-the-mill “good enough” as opposed to the frantic hyperactivity for corona? The difference in response between the culprits colors the numbers to such an extent that they could become incomparable.
In the earlier instances, the beginning and end dates for the infection might be more casually agreed upon. In quite another, contact tracing is conducted with all the intensity of Nazis ferreting out those with the “poisoned” blood of the Jews. The start/finish is pushed further and further out as more and more attention is devoted to it. The difference in the intensity of scrutiny creates a classic apples and oranges fallacy. Like isn’t compared with like.
Then, overreaction feeds more overreaction. Borrowing from science once again, we have now created a system feedback loop of frenzy feeding into more frenzy. Our collection and analysis of feverishly acquired data doesn’t occur in a vacuum. It occurs in an atmosphere of fear and doom.
It’s likely that the overhanging sense of dread will stampede governments into monumental actions that will culminate in subsidizing moral hazard in the realm of data collection. The money for defraying the costs of the epidemic will reward the promiscuous assignment of cases to the coronavirus category. The numbers are corrupted. The situation produces grossly uneven numbers depending on an official’s susceptibility to the corruption.
Macomb County, Mich., Chief Medical Examiner Daniel Spitz in April was quoted as saying, “I think a lot of clinicians are putting that condition (COVID-19) on death certificates when it might not be accurate because they died with coronavirus and not of coronavirus.” In addition, “Are they [the coronavirus death numbers] entirely accurate? No. Are people dying of it? Absolutely. Are people dying of other things and coronavirus is maybe getting credit? Yeah, probably.” Numbers get inflated in a surrounding climate of subsidized frenzy.
The shear volume and intensity of observation warps our perception of reality. It makes more difficult the useful the sort of comparisons which are critical for ascertaining the magnitude of the threat. The more we peer into a contagion, the more we make those numbers incomparably unique.
All of us are observers who have been made more obsessive about this disease by a world of extraordinary connectivity. We know in an instant what is happening anywhere. If our government is drawn to a particular happenstance, it’s ferocity of activity will combine with our own to disfigure our judgment. I can only wish that our chattering classes were as aware of this humbling aspect of our nature.
RogerG