Yeah, this kind of talk is gonna get bigger and bigger. I've seen a lot of otherwise very smart (and supposedly lefty) people fall for this. I'm surprised we haven't seen more of it here.

And they could very well turn out to be right. The problem is, we don't have good enough data yet to honestly judge these questions. They're not saying it like this, but these guys want us to roll the dice on something that could potentially kill millions of people.

Nobody disputes that the death count will be exponentially correlated with our control measures. And nobody disputes that it takes at least two weeks to find out if we've loosened up too far. So what these guys are really saying is: people are out of work, we don't want the government to have to cover so much unemployment, so let's just forget about the disease and hope for the best.

I'm so fucking tired of hearing people say "we need to follow the science" and then immediately report the preliminary data that they cherry-picked specifically to make the case they wanted to make from the start. (For the record, MDs are not scientists. You should never trust an MD to make a scientific case. Or any individual actual scientist, for that matter.)

A lot of these arguments rest on some measurements of Santa Clara County and LA County that the whole community immediately recognized as fatally flawed.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/experts-demolish-studies-suggesting-covid-19-is-no-worse-than-flu/

By the researchers' OWN estimates, their data was consistent with all their seropositive cases being false-positive. So they basically haven't measured anything at all. This episode will be a textbook example of bad statistics for the next 50 years. And yet we still get to hear how "Stanford scientists have shown that we don't need social distancing!"

The whole thing is a direct echo of the bullshit arguments we've heard against 'climate alarmism' or 'HIV alarmism' for our entire lives.

A little bit of knowledge can do a hell of a lot of harm.