A sorry tale:

With the latest reports of plummeting death rates from all causes, this crisis is over. The pandemic of doom erupted as a panic of pols . . .

The crisis now will hit the politicians and political Doctor Faucis who gullibly accepted and trumpeted what statistician William Briggs calls “the most colossal and costly blown forecast of all time.”

An egregious statistical horror story of millions of projected deaths, suffused with incense and lugubrious accents from Imperial College of London to Harvard School of Public Health, prompted the pols to impose a vandalistic lockdown on the economy. It would have been an outrage even if the assumptions were not wildly astronomically wrong.

More:

The latest figures on overall death rates from all causes show no increase at all. Deaths are lower than in 2019, 2018, 2017 and 2015, slightly higher than in 2016. Any upward bias is imparted by population growth.

As in: the more people there are, the more people die, based on the powerful, fact-laden assumption that everyone does.

As usual every year, deaths began trending downward in January. It’s an annual pattern. Look it up. Since the lockdown began in mid-March, the politicians cannot claim that their policies had anything to do with the declining death rate.

They have thrashed about to no avail:

A global study published in Israel by Professor Isaac Ben-Israel, chairman of the Israeli Space Agency and Council on Research and Development, shows that “the spread of the coronavirus declines to almost zero after 70 days—no matter where it strikes, and no matter what measures governments impose to try to thwart it.”

“In fact . . .

. . .  by impeding herd immunity, particularly among students and other non-susceptible young people, the lockdown in the U.S. has prolonged and exacerbated the medical problem. As Briggs concludes, “People need to get out into virus-killing sunshine and germicidal air.”

So take a walk. In Illinois, however, have your handy non-Halloween mask in your pocket in case you are stopped. Officer Friendly has bosses to pacify. Policeman’s lot is not a happy one even without a lockdown . . .

more more more in this iconoclastic vein here via AIER

A priceless keepsake is in the making:

One of the quarters the governor flips before announcing a new restriction.

They will be auctioned off later to shore up the pension funds.

via  Chicago Tribune

Jerk!

via Block Club Chicago

Elon Musk to the barricades:

The rant began after Musk said, “We are a bit worried about not being able to resume production in the Bay Area, and that should be identified as a serious risk.” Six Bay Area counties jointly extended the shelter-in-place orders affecting San Francisco, Fremont, and other cities through May 31st, with only some minor relaxing of restrictions.

“The expansion of shelter-in-place, or as we call it, forcibly imprisoning people in their homes, against all their constitutional rights, is, in my opinion, breaking people’s freedoms in ways that are horrible and wrong, and not why people came to America and built this country,” Musk said. “What the fuck!”

“If somebody wants to stay in the house that’s great,” Musk continued. “They should be allowed to stay in the house and they should not be compelled to leave. But to say that they cannot leave their house and they will be arrested if they do… this is fascist. This is not democratic. This is not freedom. Give people back their goddamn freedom.”

Thou shalt multiply thy output, says the state. The state can’t do that, says the capitalist.

via HotAir

. . . But “never . . . as tense and nervous as during that interview” that launched a thousand lockdowns, said the Swedish man Johan Giesecke. He “modified quite a few of the straightforward statements [from his report], but still seems to think that the lethality is somewhere at just under one percent, while I think it is actually much lower, perhaps as low as 0.1%.”

And the model he used, and models in general?

I think it’s not very good, and the thing that they miss a little is that any models for infectious diseases —they’re very popular, many people do them — they’re good for teaching, they seldom tell you the truth because — I make a small parenthesis — which model could have assumed that the outbreak would start in northern Italy, in Europe, Difficult to model that one.

And any such model — it looks complicated, there are strange mathematical formulae, and integral signs and stuff, but it rests on the assumptions. And the assumptions in that article will be heavily criticized for — I won’t go through that, it would take the rest of your day if I went through them all.

The paper was never published scientifically; it’s not peer-reviewed, which a scientific paper should be; it’s just an internal departmental report from Imperial [College]. And it’s fascinating; I don’t think any other scientific endeavor has made such an impression on the world as that rather debatable paper.

If it was right to shut down when the Brit said so, it’s right to pay attention to the top man in Sweden, who’s skeptical.

via The Daily Wire

Look, most mass media cover Dems largely by covering up their sins.

Make Pope Francis look like a tattle-tale about clergy abuse — even now as to long promised report on the infamous McCarrick.

Ignorant do-gooders.

Flying blind.

We have loads of modeling estimates of various interventions:

Quarantines
Stay-at-home orders
School closings
Social distancing
Mask wearing
Bans on large gatherings
Closure of restaurants
Closure of non-essential businesses
Mass testing and contact tracing

However,

For practical purposes . . . we have no reliable empirical data at all on any of these measures. It makes sense that some or all of them have an effect—and it’s probably safe to say that all of them put together have an effect—but we have no idea which particular ones have a large effect vs. which ones have a small effect.

And given the vast range of assumptions used in various models, it’s not clear to me that we can trust models to tell us anything useful at the level of specific interventions.

Flying blind.

via Mother Jones

Infections?

COVID-19: Approximately 2,994,640 cases worldwide; 965,933 cases in the U.S. as of Apr. 27, 2020.*

Flu: Estimated 1 billion cases worldwide; 9.3 million to 45 million cases in the U.S. per year.

Deaths?

COVID-19: Approximately 206,811 deaths reported worldwide; 54,877 deaths in the U.S., as of Apr. 27, 2020.*

Flu: 291,000 to 646,000 deaths worldwide; 12,000 to 61,000 deaths in the U.S. per year.

Wrinkle in our time?

The COVID-19 situation is changing rapidly. Since this disease is caused by a new virus, people do not have immunity to it, and a vaccine may be many months away. Doctors and scientists are working on estimating the mortality rate of COVID-19, but at present, it is thought to be higher than that of most strains of the flu.

Who says?

*This information comes from the Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases map developed by the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering.

via Johns Hopkins Medicine