Day 148: The Unknown Knowns

The worldwide case count has reached 10 million, with 500,000 deaths. The US contributed significantly, as did India, which is still on the rise. Columbia recently passed the China mark, which only gets it to #21 these days. In the US, California surpassed New Jersey almost a week ago now, and Texas jumped past Illinois sometime yesterday. Massachusetts continues to rest on our antibodies at #7, with a third of a percentage point rise in cases today.

The governor of Florida wins Zinger of the Year with his response to the tri-state area's resolution to quarantine Floridians: he requests that Governor Cuomo "not quarantine any Floridians in nursing homes."

PlagueBlog readers may recall this famous Donald Rumsfeld quote:

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.

But there's a fourth category, which Rumsfeld also addressed:

At the beginning of the documentary, Rumsfeld argues that a major purpose of the Department of Defense is to evaluate "unknown knowns," or "the things you think you know, that it turns out you did not," to anticipate hostile actions before they take place. Illustrating his point, Rumsfeld suggests that the failure of the United States to anticipate the attack on Pearl Harbor was a failure of imagination.

The history of coronavirus seems to PlagueBlog to be an ongoing tragedy of unknown knowns. Though the science tells us we don't know whether masks, or even lockdowns, work at all, the general public is absolutely certain they do, to the point of blaming the victim (today I think it's Florida) for allegedly not doing those things, or doing them but not doing them religiously enough.

Scientifically, we don't know how many people have been infected or when it happened. (It may have all peaked well before the lockdowns and the months of enforced inactivity.) But people are so certain that coronavirus happens in lockstep with testing numbers, that things are still not back to normal even in New York City—probably the most immune place on the face of the earth after Wuhan and Lombardy. It's like a society-wide Dunning-Kruger effect.

Josh Ketter has a couple of articles on Medium chock full of unknown knowns. But we're not so good with the known knowns, either. People go on ignoring some fairly hoary science about viral respiratory diseases, in favor of paranoia about marathon-running virus particles (usually hallucinated by physicists) that have never been known to infect anyone. We know the math of a fraction of ongoing infection in the Northeast making it even more unlikely that that passing jogger could possibly infect you even if he stopped and spoke to you for 15 minutes, never mind just through the already-unproven route of exhaling outdoors. We know it's summer and going to a sunny, humid beach is not going to produce any significant level of respiratory illness, but Florida is still shutting down beaches like they're the problem.