End of an Era?
There
are studies in the US that suggest that the coronavirus has spread much, much
more than the official numbers indicate. A Stanford study, for example,
suggested that the infection rate in a California county is 50 to 85 times
higher than reported! Balaji Srinivasan questions that study:
“It would be wonderful news as it would
imply we were much closer to herd immunity at a lower cost than people
thought.”
Don’t
believe something just because that’s what you want to hear, he warns. He then
analyzes the study, its methodology, and asks many valid questions.
It’s
one thing for individual studies to be wrong, but the US government has to use
some model to decide on its course of action. Unfortunately, as Sharon Begley
wrote, the model they picked seems totally wrong. You’d think the US would use a
tried-and-tested epidemic model. Like the model with the long track record:
“The most established, dating back a
century, calculates how many people are susceptible to a virus (in the case of
the new coronavirus, everyone), how many become exposed, how many of those
become infected, and how many recover and therefore have immunity (at least for
a while).”
Or the
model that relies on the power of computers:
“Newer, “agent-based models” are like the
video game SimCity, but with a rampaging pathogen: using computing power
unimagined even a decade ago, they simulate the interactions of millions of
individuals as they work, play, travel, and otherwise go about their lives.”
But no,
the US government went with the IHME model. The IHME model takes data/trends of
other countries and cities, from Wuhan to Italy:
“Then (to oversimplify somewhat) it finds
where U.S. data fits on that curve. The death curves in cities outside the
U.S. are assumed to describe the U.S., too, with no attempt to judge
whether countermeasures —lockdowns and other social-distancing strategies — in
the U.S. are and will be as effective as elsewhere, especially Wuhan.”
The
IHME predictions aren’t even close on daily death rates, and yet that’s the
model the US government is using for the big picture plan.
Wondering
why the US is sticking with the IHME model? Well, it reduced the expected death
toll down from 2,40,000 deaths to 70,000. Yes, they have decreased
the expected death count, at a time when nothing in the daily trends shows
signs of a slowdown in new cases per day… It makes you wonder whether people so
desperate for good news, that the worst is over, that things aren’t as bad as
they seemed, that they’ll jump at any model that says so?
“The White House either has no strategy or
has chosen not to disclose it. Without a unifying vision, governors and mayors
have been forced to handle the pandemic themselves.”
Isn’t
it almost surreal to see Indian politicians so united on the coronavirus front?
“Every Western institution was unprepared
for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental
failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the
decade… The harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state,
or city was prepared… So the problem runs deeper than your favorite political
opponent or your home nation.”
He
points at America’s inability to “build” rapidly, even in response to the
crisis:
“We don’t have enough coronavirus tests, or
test materials… We also don’t have therapies or a vaccine.”
See the
contrast that with how quickly China built hospitals in Wuhan? But why can’t
the West build anything now? Because all manufacturing was outsourced to China,
and now the West cannot become a production powerhouse overnight. And that’s
without even getting into the other, related problem that the West faces: the
medical supply chain traces back to China and India, both of which halted or
reduced exports.
If
lockdowns are necessary, you need to transfer money to the needy during that
period. For America, the problem isn’t the lack of money:
“Is the problem money? That seems hard to believe
when we have the money to wage endless wars in the Middle East and repeatedly
bail out incumbent banks, airlines, and carmakers. The federal government just
passed a $2 trillion coronavirus rescue package in two weeks!”
Rather,
the problem is in the lack of a system to transfer money to people:
“In the U.S., we don’t even have the
ability to get federal bailout money to the people and businesses that need it.
Tens of millions of laid off workers and their families, and many millions of
small businesses, are in serious trouble *right now*, and we have no direct
method to transfer them money without potentially disastrous delays.”
While
India has such a system based on Aadhar. That was the one usage of Aadhar that
all political parties were OK with!
All of
which is why I wonder more and more… World War II was the event that marked the
end of European hegemony and the beginning of the dominance of America and
USSR. Will coronavirus be the event that marks the end of American hegemony,
and since nature abhors a vacuum, the beginning of China’s dominance?
Comments
Post a Comment