Day 163: Don't Be the Pigeon

Florida has responded to Texas' lead with a record day of 15,000 cases, but PlagueBlog believes Texas can catch up, at least temporarily. Here in Massachusetts, cases are up a fifth of a percentage point.

An essay on Medium, "Superstition in the Pigeon": Can Lockdowns Really Stop Death? has an unusually clear analysis of the shift from the reasonable and limited goal of flattening the curve for the sake of hospital capacity to our current superstitious health-theater effort at full-on coronavirus suppression.

The high point of Stacey Rudin's analysis for most people may be the story of a 1969 Antarctic expedition that had been effectively quarantined for 17 weeks when one of the researchers came down with a cold and spread it to seven others.

With outcomes like this, one would assume that every single human would accept his lack of perfect control over invisible biological agents, and refuse to order his brethren to wear flimsy pieces of paper over their faces to “protect others.” When even a 17-week Antarctic quarantine cannot do the job of stopping viruses, clearly isolating all children inside a six-foot bubble is counterproductive and silly.

The paper discusses the phenomenon of viral persistence in animals and humans (where it was previously known in children but not adults), and suggests the revival was possibly triggered by a cold snap. Unfortunately, the actual virus or other agent could not be isolated from the preserved samples.

Rudin has some less than nice things to say about Neil Ferguson, though she's far from the first, and only praise for Sweden, which she describes as our persecuted control group in the great experiment of running around like superstitious pigeons in masks. Most notable among her observations, though, are the perverse incentives for politicians to exacerbate their health theater efforts with no regard for the ultimate consequences.