On a 2 ½ hour trip to Missoula (Mt.) to pickup a gun that I ordered – oh how that might send some cosmopolitan types to the safe space of their prejudices – I was listening to Fox News on XM Radio. It was wall-to-wall coverage of the coronavirus … and how many different ways to spin dread. No matter where you go, CNN or MSNBC or the legacy networks, it’s the same ridiculously excessive treatment. Is there any serious audit of the proof to justify either the over-the-top monopoly of airtime or the extraordinary step of shutting down American society? From where I sit, I haven’t heard much questioning of the base reasons. So, I slashed my watching and listening to news channels and turned to entertainment offerings. I’m happier.
What do you get for all the coverage? You get a Freddy Krueger script from dusk to dusk. Mind you, The Nightmare on Elm Street was fiction, but so might be much of the newsroom chatter that makes its way to our tv screens. Horror is manufactured with numbers from a process similar to the one at Bingo Night at the senior center and plugged into predictions of a resurgence of the 14th-century Black Death, only later within the blink of an eye having to ratchet down the apocalypse from DEFCON 5 to DEFCON 1. The whipsaw has become so routine that a person is left in a constant state of bewilderment. I’m skeptical about anyone claiming to know the state of play.
The possibility that much of the coverage could be facetious might be due to the distortions from geographic isolation by our top-drawer media organizations. Many of their denizens look outside their New York City, or Acela corridor, offices and see coronavirus hell. No doubt, the situation has developed as an urban – more than that, cosmopolitan – phenomena. Yet, it is through these highly susceptible locations for pandemics that we receive our window to the world.
Conversely, people in the rest of the country look around and see restaurants shuttered, workers at home without work, their hospitals not teeming with the sick and dying but veritable ghost towns, people who venture out wearing N95 masks or looking like bank robbers, and eerily empty streets. Everyone is made to be spooked by a view of the world from New York. Should, though, everyone be scared to that degree in that manner? I am beginning to doubt it. To borrow from a Las Vegas ad, what happens in New York should stay in New York.
These purveyors in the concentrated epicenters of the epidemic have at their disposal the new bane of rational thought: statistical modeling. Not that statistical modeling isn’t useful. The problem lies in the raw data that’s shoved into them and the conclusions without profound qualifications that will accompany them. Back in 1979, I took a data processing class – yes, such a thing existed in 1979 – and was introduced to the acronym GIGO, garbage in and garbage out. Models are formulas put in lines of computer code. Sometimes the models are cracked, but more times than not it’s the numbers that are fed into them. Math doesn’t have a mind. It just does what we tell it do, and if we ask it to crunch bad numbers, it will do it. Models don’t peer into the mind of God. They are a reflection of our imperfect mind.
Mental garbage (in and out) is driving our public conversations. The embroidering that surrounds the talk on climate change is fed by the rubbish. The mangled logic goes forward in time as well as backwards. Either the barkers are captives of recent and present temp readings to put future global temperatures on an exponential rocket trajectory, or they’re soothsayers reading the entrails of ice cores, tree rings, or rock strata going back millennia to defend their preconceived future rocket trajectory. Probably both. Models don’t correct for the flaw; they exacerbate it. It’s done all the time now that we are powered by “Intel inside”. It’s still the same though: garbage goes into the chip and garbage comes out. The pronouncements are accepted by the mathematically illiterate as God speaking through the burning bush.
The virus from China breeds quickly in particular conditions, and so does loosey-goosey modeling during pandemics. In the case of the current illness, we have cases and deaths. What qualifies as a “case” and “death” varies from place to place. It varies according to the honesty in official places and the availability of honest-to-God and modern clinics in every village. Do you think both exist in adequate quantities everywhere on the globe? We shouldn’t take to heart any “global” numbers.
We shouldn’t take to heart Germany’s, Italy’s, especially China’s, and many numbers coming out of the US. Disaggregating the cause of death from a patient with multiple life-threatening conditions can be as complicated as unraveling the Gordian Knot. I don’t know if all nations even conduct a COVID-19 test upon death. I suspect many don’t. Some nations might be just plain promiscuous in assigning deaths to the virus. Some places test more people as others assess only those who walk into the hospital; therefore, morbidity rates bounce around like flubber (“The Absent-Minded Professor”, 1961). Then, the “experts” average the flubber and plug it into the “model”. Out of the formula comes the ski slope on graph paper at press conferences. And we have a shutdown of world society and an end to respect for the concept of livelihoods.
The professionals in white smocks then tell us that livelihoods must take a back seat to an all-out effort to prevent us from getting sick, as if nothing else matters. It’s another sign of the myopia of the professional. The “expert” may be a great doctor of medicine but understandably more limited in passing judgment in the social and economic realms. Doc may be great at treating your fever but don’t ask him or her about advice on adjusting your investment portfolio. Nonetheless, for the medical master, it’s a siren call to stop the virus at all costs, with one of those costs being our livelihoods.
The professional has a mental reflex to ignore the recognition of different levels of risk that accrue to people according to their varying personal circumstances. The self-employed plumber needs to generate income each week and is willing to take more risk. No, he mustn’t be allowed, the medical pro tells us. A single all-encompassing risk of zero is imposed on everyone, everywhere. Of course, the salaried, the whizzes with degrees, and jet-set crowd are much more financially secure and occupationally situated to handle zero-risk at little loss. Not true of anyone else. Yet, it’s the blinkered and biased view of the medical poohbah that counts.
Okay, okay, a health crisis demands the centrality of the medical professional. It’s not the importance of the doctor in a situation like this in question here. It’s the tendency not to temper their counsel with other voices. An epidemic has many implications and their acknowledgement should also have a role in the sausage-making of a government response. We should balance the concern about the spread of the disease with the quality of life after it. Yeah, we will have our life after the contagion, but will it be a life worth admiring?
Should an epidemic – one in which we don’t have an accurate picture of its extent and severity – be an excuse to destroy your job, your ability to make your way in the world? Is everything reduced to a risk level compatible to a person comfortable with zero, and with the outsized influence to impose it? Is it proper to stampede the populace with erroneous numbers, models, and projections, only to destroy occupations that made life worth living for millions? Surely, the pile of lost livelihoods will mightily surpass the body count the longer the Great American Shutdown persists. There are alternatives.
What should be done? Open up American life now, with caveats. Implement the measures of testing, masks, social distancing where practical, while recognizing locational differences. Start by loosening the shackles in geographical areas less affected and in critical industries. From there, phase in the opening of society as the severity warrants. The goal should be a resumption of life, sooner rather than later, even as we acknowledge that doing so involves risk. “Bending the curve” should apply to livelihoods as well as the infected.
Risk is part of life. Zero risk is utopian, and “utopia” is translated from the Greek to mean “no-place”. In other words, zero risk in unattainable. And when it is pursued, catastrophe is the result. Keep this in mind as you watch the parade of color commentators of the medical profession in the wall-to-wall coverage on COVID-19.
RogerG