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 viru...