George Rebane

Today is HD63 in the Rebane household, and we are beginning to see little stirrings of sanity across California with even timid Nevada County showing signs of developing a C19 resistant backbone.  Now we are starting to see appeals from various late comers for letter writing campaigns to our electeds to exhort them to end our county’s lockdown.  In response, our Supes are now meeting in secret with the county health officer and others to develop plans to return to some semblance of normalcy, having taken the first baby step to loosen things to the level dictated from Sacramento (really a cop out, here).  Many other counties have more courageously and correctly led the state in returning their communities to prudent post-C19 environments of business, commerce, and social interaction.  That one-size-fits-all policies are wrong can be seen from the data on the disparate impact that the virus has had on our country. (here)

The upshot of it all, one that escapes many people and all progressives, is that we will sooner than later end the lockdown no matter what our command/control governments tell us.  This is an easy deduction, and one that RR (along with other conservatives) has attempted to communicate for the last two months.  We can open up quickly and purposefully with a set of broadly agreed prudent behaviors that are integrated into our new social contract, thereby saving the substantial part of our economy that remains and can launch into rapid recovery.  Or we can continue hunkering down toward a complete destruction of our economy so that unemployment rates go north of 50%, and result in a wholesale grassroots rebellion of a paupered citizenry with unpredictable results.

You can bet the ranch that no population of destitute humans will continue to follow the insane dictates of their government to quietly starve and die in isolation from countless physical and psychological maladies which will then afflict them in the same manner as we have seen afflict the citizens of shithole countries around the world.  Such countries have in common the objective of our Left – they are command and control countries in which wealth is miniscule and held by the small government elites who have the guns.  Our Left thinks it can be the first in history to institute an authoritarian government that is the major player in America’s economy while providing a tolerable quality of life to those who behave and follow its dictates.

Such an aim is now openly described by our socialists and echoed daily in the lamestream.  On the local level we have leftwing thought leaders (e.g. our Darrel Berkheimer in The Union) who do their part to advocate the government’s direction of C19 funds away from ‘big businesses’ (those with >100 employees) and to individuals and small businesses (<25 employees).  Along with the Bolsheviks of long ago, such worthies have no clue that almost all workers and small businesses sell and service stuff made by big businesses that can employ scale make things affordable to all.  Ideologies that don’t recognize this consign their people to eternal poverty trying to eek out a living using pre-industrial age locally operated, feel-good commercial enterprises.

Until very recently, human societies grew and prospered in environments in which contagious diseases came and went, and some even hung around perpetually.  As recently as twenty years ago, no one had the bright idea of shutting down the economy in the attempt to save a miniscule number of lives on the scale of what is important to our species.  The Left’s pernicious ‘people before profits’ mantra destroys both profits and people.  The principle lost to our massively under-educated is that human life is NOT of infinite worth; it has never been of infinite worth, and it never will be.  Only the command/control demogauges tout this message to audiences of light-thinkers who then willingly give up their freedoms for false promises of near-term succor and safety.

On a more concrete level, we look at the numbers of mortality and testing.  C19 mortality is now a firmly politicized statistic that can be concocted ten ways from Sunday depending on your agenda.  To me, the best approximation of ‘truth’ comes from data published by the National Center for Health Statistics, and even their numbers are all over the place (e.g. see ‘Where is the Covid Deaths Bump?’).  An update in 9may20 WSJ by Jo Craven McGinty (here) shows a higher number of C19 deaths as of today.  It is still small in the larger scheme of things and still contains unknown number of deaths from other causes gratuitously attributed to C19, and, of course, some also undercounted from last year when C19 was yet unrecognized on these shores.  But the bottom line is that C19 deaths don’t even make it into the top ten of leading causes as seen in the nearby graphic from NCHS.

The testing story is a bit more complex for the innumerate to wrap their brains around, but just as important in assessing and accepting governments’ attempts to substantiate or establish a firm basis for their hunker down policies.  A good place to start is this piece on tests and testing by Elizabeth Cairns (here).  The punchline again involves the reliability of the C19 tests for infection and immunity.  In these pages I have taken readers through the details of how ‘test accuracies’ affect the conclusions that can be drawn from testing, and what kind of large scale testing programs are required to inform sane response policy making.

The thought I want to leave readers with today is that test reliability numbers are hard to come by and very dubious at best when they are quoted by test manufacturers.  Ms Cairns makes this point clear in her piece.  To end with a thought-provoking number, consider that even using an excellent test with 90% sensitivity and 90% specificity (see here for definitions), at today’s prevalence levels of the epidemic (about 5%), that test will yield almost 70% false positives – i.e. wrong results – when applied to scientifically random-sampled US target populations.  Now tell me again why we’ve been hell-bent on destroying the lives and businesses of tens of millions of Americans.