George Rebane

[This is the updated transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 11 November 2020.]

‘We follow the science’ has been heard across the land for some months now, mostly from shady politicians, but also from politicians of all shades.  This pompous and gratuitous claim is put out primarily to shut off further debate about whatever issue that is sheltered under the science umbrella.  The politician or media talking head knows that his audience is woefully unprepared to understand, let alone contest, any proposition so couched.

The effectiveness of this kind of communication hinges on the level of numeracy enjoyed by our population at large.  Numeracy is the mathematical partner of literacy.  Numeracy is the analog of literacy – communication by letters and words – in the sense that the numerate person can understand every day issues involving arithmetic calculation, basic logic, chance, utility, elements of finance, graphical presentation of information, the scientific process, and ability to think critically.  As a person does not have to be a professional wordsmith to be literate, then also a person need not be a professional in the mathematically based disciplines to be considered numerate.  Numeracy is just another arrow, albeit a very important one, that an educated person has in his quiver.  Innumeracy, like illiteracy, is the converse of having such tools at your disposal.

Adult innumeracy is the longstanding and silent scourge of our country and of our times as confirmed by longitudinal surveys done by the Dept of Education.  Americans are overwhelmingly innumerate, with about 1 out of 20 of us having the skills of a numerate layman.  In a liberal democracy the importance of voter numeracy is based on a simple truth – ALL social issues in our community and across the land are significant only because of their descriptive numbers.  And without the ability to process those numbers, we really don’t understand the issue and can only emote about it.

Doubly important today, when considering issues such as climate change and the Covid pandemic, is knowing that science does not speak with certitude or with a single voice.  A litmus test for false science is when someone, usually a politician, claims that consensus science supports his agenda, and that the debate is over.  Science always communicates as a chorus of varying opinions, interpretations, and even violent disagreements.  90% of peer reviewed scientific articles subsequently prove to be wrong.  New science, that is suddenly supported by everyone, has almost always turned out to be in error as shown by someone or some small team swimming against the current.  Almost all major scientific breakthroughs have come from single investigators who were roundly criticized and rejected by the consensus scientific community after introducing their results.

Today, most developed countries provide government sponsored adult numeracy courses and seminars.  They do that because most citizens don’t study STEM subjects in school, and that the issues presented to voters have become ever more complex and comprehensive, with numbers that determine and define their importance to society.  For some reason the United States does not do that.  We are the only advanced country wherein a person in a social setting can freely admit without shame or blemish that ‘I don’t do numbers.’  For example, in European countries such an admission would be tantamount to a seemingly educated American confessing that ‘I don’t read.’

So here we are today, having been presented emotional arguments about hundred-year sea levels, temperatures, frequencies of storms and wildfires, role of Covid testing, the efficacy of facemasks and social distancing, the virulence of Covid vs annual flu, likelihood of infection, of mortality, meaning and role of herd immunity, and so on.  Today it would be optimistic to hope that one in a hundred Americans understands or could reasonably address these issues and their salient factors.

Instead, we make do by listening to the most frequent and loudest voices that anchor with our own political leanings, and tell us how to think about what we not only don’t but also cannot understand because we are innumerate.  And then we enter the voting booth to ‘follow the science’.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

[12nov20 update]  Well, that didn’t take long.  Yesterday the WSJ reported that the ‘Case for Mask Mandate Rests on Bad Data’ – “A top scientific journal lowballs the percentage of Americans who are already covering their faces.”  This peer reviewed article appeared in Nature Medicine, and contained numbers on mask wearing that were obviously crap.  The scientific paper claimed that countrywide mask wearing would prevent an additional 130,000 deaths in the recurrent C19 wave.  The model that pumped out this erroneous number was developed by the prestigious Washington University Institute for Health Metrics Evaluation (IMHE) using obsolete data.

What makes the whole thing more egregious is that the entire lamestream media immediately jumped on that as another vindication of Biden’s call for a national mask mandate, while piling on that Trump has mismanaged the nation’s C19 response.  None of it stands up to a cursory examination of the numbers – “Unfortunately, the IHME modelers’ findings contained an error that even minimal scrutiny should have caught.” (but peer reviewers often don't, as I pointed out in my commentary).

But the most egregious aspect of this whole dustup is that Nature Medicine refuses to correct its erroneous publication. Why?  “Nature Medicine thinks it’s OK for the IHME team to rely on obsolete figures as long as it cited its source. The misleading depiction of U.S. mask use is apparently immaterial.”  Politics rules; it’s OK to base bad public policies on faulty science as long as you support the Left’s larger narrative, a narrative that must never be shown to be in error no matter how disjoint it is with reality.

With this messaging spread over the land, “the refusal to correct the original article serves only to sustain an inflated case for a national mask mandate. Although existing policies and voluntary behavior have already led to major improvement, the IHME paper gives the false impression that Americans continue to lag behind the rest of the world in mask use. As a result, policy makers up to and including the incoming U.S. president are likely basing their case for sweeping new regulations on unsound scientific advice and overstated promises.”  And the sheeple will never know.

To this point we haven’t even discussed the science behind the impact of mask wearing on the spread of C19.  The overarching truth is that there is no settled science on this as claimed by everyone from Dr Fauci on down through all the Democrats.  America’s mask wearing stats compare well with those of leading countries.  Carnegie Mellon University’s study shows that overall US mask usage exceeds 80% (not the IMHE’s bogus 49%), and in some states like California the usage is up to 90%.  In spite of this, we are still having a significant and predicted second (third?) wave of C19 infections.  (Masks don’t work well and see below on asymptomatics.) This will continue until herd immunity is sufficiently built up, which is why we are all excited about the early distribution of the new vaccines led by Pfizer.  Readers should remember, infectious diseases are ultimately and only stopped through herd immunity.

Having ‘followed the science’, let’s now talk about innumeracy.  First, let me point out that the most dangerous innumerates in the land are journalists – how they got out of grade school arithmetic remains a perennial mystery.  Among the many material things they misreport is that “the US has now passed ten million cases of Covid”, “the number of Covid cases is now ten million with 250,000 deaths”, and so on.  Ask the man on the street about that number, and he believes that there are ten million people in the US currently suffering from C19.  The news media (including FN) are too ignorant to correctly report that the 10M number is the total number of diagnosed cases since the pandemic began early in the year (or last year?).

No outlet tells their audiences about C19 that 1) the proportion of undetectable, asymptomatic infectious C19 carriers ranges anywhere from 30% to 50% of the total number infected at any time within a population; 2) that C19 ‘releases’ (that’s epidemiological verbiage) its victims, through death or recovery, within 2 – 4 weeks of the onset of symptoms after a max incubation period of 2 weeks; therefore 3) temperature and interrogation of people at events is not an effective way to influence C19 spread.

The main point the numerate reader immediately picks up is that the most likely number of people having had C19 in the US is around 20M, and rapidly growing since our asymptomatics are the real ‘super spreaders’ boosting us toward herd immunity.  But today there are nowhere near the quoted 10M cases which are currently active.  Overwhelmingly, most of the actual 20M who have had the disease are now ‘released’ (recovered), and contributing to our burgeoning herd immunity.  (Our techies can read this Stanford University report for more depth on asymptomatic proportions.)

Finally, some websites actually do cite the number of recovered in the US today as hovering somewhere around 6.6M.  With 0.25M dead, this implies that around 3M (of the 10M diagnosed) Americans continue to suffer beyond the 2-4 weeks that is takes C19 to release its victims.  Unable to shake the malady, you’d expect most of those people to be currently treated in hospitals.  However, there is no huge surge or population of several million excess C19 patients in America’s hospitals.  So that indicates that the cited number of known recovered patients must be millions higher, so as to tally up to the reported 10M diagnosed cases.  But no one is pointing out these simple arithmetic incongruencies which do not require rocket science to discover.  Again, another of the many important incidents of innumeracy in the public square that affect people’s political beliefs and behaviors.