IF YOU LOST YOUR JOB OR LOST MONEY IN THE MARKET BECAUSE OF THE PANIC, THIS IS THE MAN TO BLAME
Here we are. Three weeks (at least, depending upon where you are) into what amounts to house arrest.
Stores are told what products they can and cannot sell.
A father has been handcuffed and arrested for playing with his daughter in a deserted park.
People are being fined for walking on vacant beaches.
Businesses have been shuttered.
The economy has been trashed. Our concept of civil liberties and the permissible use of the state’s police power have been irrevocably moved in the direction of totalitarianism.
There is literally no end in sight.
So it is fair to ask how we got here.
In a word:
models.
The Wuhan virus frenzy really began in earnest when Neil Ferguson published the results of a simulation he’d run on the public health impact of the virus.
In it he predicted that some 2 million Americans would die from the virus.
The impact of this paper can’t be overstated. The British and Dutch governments were stampeded from pursuing what amounted to a “ride it out” strategy (which, in my view, was the only strategy even vaguely related to either science or common sense) into throwing the emergency brake on economic activity.
Once one model was accepted, other proliferated.
Perhaps the most notable one has been that from the Institution for Health Metrics and Evaluation. This one, like the non-factual Imperial College model, has produced Doomsday results that led to panicked governors believing they had to ‘do something’ by shutting down most economic activity.
These models have one unifying feature.
They were all wildly and spectacularly implausible and are all being proven wildly and spectacularly wrong on a daily basis.
They are also all being promoted by a DEMOCRAT-run website (https://covidactnow.org/) that bombards state, county and local governments with scary "data" on a daily basis to prolong the panic for political purposes.
https://www.redstate.com/streiff/2020/04/09/815099/
