Modeling Failure
14th March 2020
ZMan looks at the pandemic so far and is not impressed.
Now, the experts all say these numbers will explode in the near term. Just as the flu or the common cold starts small, person to person contact causes the infected population to grow quickly. Currently, the claim is the infected population will double every five days, with no end in sight. Italy, for example, could have 200,000 cases by the end of the month, if that prediction is correct. By May a little under one third of the population would have the virus and by June everyone is infected.
This is, of course, exactly what did not happen in China. In fact, we have no reason to think this will happen at all. We have examples of prior infections, some very serious like the Spanish Flu. We even have a good sense of the infection rate from the Black Death in the middle ages. As far as we know, there has never been a virus with an infection rate like what is being predicted. Maybe this is different. Maybe modern urban life makes us unusually susceptible to a pandemic. Maybe.
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There’s also the idiot factor. The fact is, America has rounded up most of its imbeciles and put them on government payrolls. Under normal conditions, they do a limited about of harm this way. Under these conditions, they can do a lot of damage. Red Flag laws have already embolden imbeciles on the local police forces to randomly open fire on people in their homes. The staggering incompetence of public safety units must be part of any model predicting what comes next with the lock down.