Leaky Arguments

 Everyone else has a take on the lab leak hypothesis (not yet a theory!) so here's mine:

1.  Nobody has proof about anything as of today (6/18/21).

2.  In this highly polarized and highly online era, it is nearly impossible to have a rational conversation about anything without it being turned into a partisan issue.

3.  Given this environment, it is important to question the motivations of anyone pushing the issue without substantial new information arising.  The hypothesis is currently being pushed by a combination of right-wingers and contrarians.  It is indirectly supported by other parts of the media who know a good controversy attracts eyeballs, which most of the media is in the business of selling.

4.  In several ways China has acted suspiciously regarding the origins of the pandemic.  Whether this is because the first instinct of any authoritarian government is to restrict information during a crisis, or because there was actually an incident to cover up, is unknown.

5.  The lab leak hypothesis, in some - but not all - of its forms, is not implausible.  But the question is whether the hypothesis is directly supported or has very strong circumstantial evidence.

6.  A natural origin has not been ruled out.  In fact, zoonosis is the origin of most communicable viral diseases, included but not limited to chicken pox, avian flu, swine flu, ebola, SARS, and MERS.  That means absent any strong evidence to the contrary, zoonosis via direct animal-human contact is still the most likely origin.

7.  The issue certainly won't be resolved by amateurs arguing online.  The investigation will take several years of real-world work by professionals.

8.  Even in the absence of any proof of a leak, labs doing research on highly communicable viruses should re-evaluate their containment procedures.

GIGO vs MR

So, my last two posts were clearly pretty poor predictions. Biden won exactly 306 EVs, as I predicted, but I was overly optimistic on the other counts. Biden won 7 million more votes instead of 14, the Senate is 50-50 instead of 52-48, and Democrats lost 13 seats in the House instead of gaining 8 seats. Back in March of 2020, I said I expected the death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic to be between 25,000 and 30,000. But as of this writing (5/10/21) the official toll is around 600,000, and the total number of excess deaths is approaching 1,000,000. So why was I so far off on each?

In the case of the election, I think the issue was garbage in, garbage out. Polling was off, and since I am not a professional pundit with my own polling firm, my predictions were mostly reflecting the information I saw around me, which was garbage. In the case of the pandemic, I think the issue was motivated reasoning. I just could not bring myself to type in larger numbers, since I found the idea too horrible and too improbable. How could my country, a technically advanced democracy, screw up 50-year old public health protocols that bad? I was motivated by national pride to alter my prediction from what some simple calcualations gave.

 Anyway, hopefully I will learn two lessons.

Can you live this fantasy life?

Still having a hard time getting my brain to fully accept what is going on. I have no problem with the self-isolation, but it is creepy to see streets that are 4/5 empty at rush hour. (I have an essential job, so I get out of the house five days a week.)

Lessons That Could Be Learned

What are the lessons to be learned? The easy ones are:

1) Keep the pandemic experts employed.
2) Listen to the experts' advice.
3) Cooperate with international agencies and foreign governments.
4) Be prepared to implement screening at ports of entry.
5) Onshore critical PPE manufacturing or require a sufficiently large rotating stock at distributors that a surge in demand can be handled.
6) Ditto for testing supplies.
7) Make sure states coordinate as necessary.

The hard one is:

8) Don't elect people who don't believe in expertise.

The last lesson will be extremely hard for America to learn because 40-45% of the electorate has complete disdain for expertise, and about 5-10% has no idea what expertise looks like beyond Judge Judy.

Let's Crunch the Dead

330 million x 40% infection rate x 1% death rate = 1,320,000 dead.

330 million x 30% infection rate x 0.5% death rate = 495,000 dead.

One is more optimistic than the other, but is either realistic?

We just don't have enough data to know. Testing is ramping up, but so are deaths, and we don't know how far behind testing is to the spread of the virus among the population of the US. We know that "social isolation" has worked to-date in other countries, but we don't know how effective social isolation is in the US. And there's no hard cutoff date for the beginning of social isolation because different states have done different things, and the states that have acted the most still acted in stages over a couple of weeks.

My guess (on 2020-03-25) is the total directly attributable deaths in the US will be in the range of 20,000-30,000 - if the social isolation holds instead of being short-circuited by the stock-pumper-in-chief. But that is completely a guess.

For now, we should treat all estimates - high or low - with skepticism.

The craziest timeline, or the stupidest timeline?

I woke up yesterday afternoon from a nap and had to check the news before I believed my memories.