Hoover’s Peter Robinson does an excellent job of interviewing Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya on various aspects of the COVID pandemic and lockdown.
I recommend the whole thing: it’s all informative, especially for those who might have forgotten what facts about the pandemic “we” were pretty sure of when.
I want to highlight two things.
First, something Jay said that I don’t quite understand. At about the 3o:00 point, Jay states that the fact that child abuse figures fell is not evidence that child abuse fell. He points out that one of the main ways we know that child abuse occurs is that it is noted at schools and schools, of course, particularly government ones, were shut down. Then Jay goes on to say we had a huge increase in child abuse, unmeasured, that was not dealt with.
My question: If it was unmeasured, how do we know it happened? I see his theoretical point: that when child abuse is not reported, the cost of engaging in it falls, and so more of it is engaged in. That’s the law of demand. But I don’t see how Jay can know it was a huge increase, as opposed to, say, a small increase.
Second, deaths from COVID in Florida, which had less drastic and shorter-lived lockdowns and California, which had extensive, long-lasting lockdowns. At about the 48:00 point, Jay points out that 85-year-olds have had a lower incidence of death from Covid in Florida than in California; 75 to 84-year-olds, ditto; 65 to 74-year-olds, ditto.
Again, watch the whole thing.
READER COMMENTS
Ray
Oct 24 2021 at 7:26pm
Yes, conjecture on Jay’s part. Plausible, but difficult to prove.
This has been an open secret in skeptic circles for some time. Florida has done remarkably well – in the top 15 of states as I recall if you adjust for age.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Oct 24 2021 at 10:40pm
Actually little is know about the effects of measures restricting social interactions because we do not have good measures of actual behavior. A place with “good citizens” might not feel the need for stringent legal restrictions and vice versa so that less restriction would be correlated with les spread of the disease.
robc
Oct 25 2021 at 11:55pm
Florida Man is known for the quality of his citizenship.
Matthias
Oct 26 2021 at 3:17am
‘Florida Man’ is largely a by product of Florida’s transparency about police reports.
So whenever there’s a slow news day, journalist can just go through police reports from Florida and have something to report.
MikeP
Oct 24 2021 at 7:35pm
I agree with the recommendation. I watched the video a couple days ago. It is an excellent one-hour summary of the path we have taken from the perspective of a doctor and economist.
It is astonishing where we are now. If you had presented the characteristics of disease from SARS-CoV-2 at the same conferences and conventions that put out 2019 pandemic response plans across the globe, there is no way they would have changed those plans to what we have experienced over the last 19 months. Public health authorities and governments first reacted out of fear of (a) another Spanish flu and (b) an overwhelmed health care system. But after the general populace ate the restrictions up, seemingly delighted by the excitement and shared struggle, it did not stop. The strategy shifted from the stated and intentional protection of the health care system while the virus runs through the healthy population to the outright eradication of the virus, which was obviously impossible by April 2020.
The best case is that we have sleepwalked into disaster. The worst case is that we have been led into disaster by interests that are taking advantage of a crisis to gain more control over society.
Alan Goldhammer
Oct 25 2021 at 2:38pm
The only way the child abuse increase could be proven would be to collect ER, Urgent Care and doctors reports for poorly explained injuries to children. This is the only possible surrogate to school reporting that I can think of.
steve
Oct 25 2021 at 4:22pm
A lot of problems with he interview. Having him interviewed by someone not knowledgeable about the topic AND had a POV they wanted to push made for a softball interview. Bhattacharya often came across as an academic who does not want to admit he is wrong. He had opportunity to correct himself now that we know more but did not take that opportunity and the interviewer certainly was not going to push him.
To keep it short look at 2 things. In his early study he decided that the fatality rate was 0.2%. We have already had more than 0.2% of the country die and no one thinks 100% of us have been infected. We know that the death rate of hospitalized pts in large hospitals (Where the really sick pts go) is now half of what it was in March/April 2020. We know that the monoclonal antibodies have been fairly effective. So that 0.2% was off, probably by a factor to 3 to 5. And, he had to know this if he was paying attention. The built whole new hospitals in China. That doesnt happen often to treat a new disease. If you think you cant trust China, then when we saw Covid in Italy it was devastating. Same thing in NYC and New Jersey. Hospitals turned med/surg floors and even cafeterias into ICUs. Places needed to rent mortuary/refrigeration trucks. That didnt happen with H1N1 or with flu.
The Great Barrington Declaration, as he acknowledges, is based on the idea of protecting those at risk. However, we didnt know then and still dont know how to do that or we just arent willing to do it. Look at the states that had all of the deaths in the most recent surge. They all at least give lip service to the idea that they believe in the principles of the Barrington Declaration. Yet, knowing that old people are still the primary group at risk they had lots more old people die. Places that have embraced vaccinations and mitigation efforts have not been hit hard with the recent surges. Those that are hesitant about vaccines and minimize mitigation got hit harder.
Monte
Oct 25 2021 at 6:29pm
One might suspect that by criticizing the GBD authors and policy recommendations because we didn’t know then and still don’t know how to do that, or we just aren’t willing to do it, you are defending the Draconian lock-down policies and mandates and all of their accompanying negative externalities that we experienced through 2020 because we knew how to do that.
Also, would you agree that Fauci, Ghebreyesus, Walensky, and Collins made mistakes and had ample time and opportunity to correct themselves?
steve
Oct 26 2021 at 12:06pm
I am criticizing them because they offered a solution that was essentially magic. Assume a can opener if you will. This seems to be accepted in economics. Cut taxes and everything will be great. Or, on the other team, spend more money and everything will be great. Magic. Doesnt work so well in medicine.
I supported the early lockdowns. We didnt understand the disease and looking at what happened in Italy and was happening in NYC, worse than most people want to admit, it was the proper course. However, if I were in charge, after the initial lockdowns I would have used lockdowns sparingly and used other mitigation efforts like no large groups, masking and testing. Lockdowns only if local medical resources were overwhelmed. While I think DeSantis, just to pick one politician whose name was mentioned in interview, made a lot of mistakes, I think he was correct in letting people go outside without masks. Data has always suggested low risk of outdoors transmission.
Did those people make mistakes? Sure. I made mistakes. We all did. However, we learned from them. I am a bit more forgiving of people who have to make decisions in real time. I am bit less forgiving of those who criticize after the fact like this guy who never admitted, that I can find, that his early fatality estimates were wrong and then his proffered solution was magical. Just my bias.
Steve
Michael Byrnes
Oct 25 2021 at 4:49pm
Covid deaths per capita in the US is 221 per 100K
California: 179 per 100K.
Florida: 273 per 100K.
Florida is 10th among states in per capita Covid death rate, California 35th.
I know which state I’d rather live in.
MikeP
Oct 25 2021 at 5:29pm
Agreed.
If you’re old, you’d rather live in Florida. The probability of death from COVID of the old is lower in Florida.
If you’re young, you’d rather live in Florida. The probability of death from COVID of the young is extremely low wherever you are and you will be less oppressed in Florida.
Michael Byrnes
Oct 26 2021 at 6:48am
I think one could have given Florida more credit 6 months ago, after DeSantis had imposed lesser restrictions then other states, than today, after he’s spent the entirety of the delta wave openly flouting them and prohibiting companies (other than Disney) and local governments from imposing their own restrictions.
Florida is not the state with the oldest population in the US – that would be Maine, which has had about 30% of the deaths per capita, less than half of the cases per capita, and a lower case fatality rate.
nobody.really
Oct 29 2021 at 4:08pm
Well, sure. Disneyland is cool, but Disneyworld is cooler. (This is true if you’re old, too.)
Henri Hein
Oct 25 2021 at 11:24pm
Yes, but that is because Florida’s population is much older than California’s. He pointed that out explicitly. If you adjust for age, they are comparable.
robc
Oct 26 2021 at 12:01am
Simpson’s Paradox.
Monte
Oct 26 2021 at 5:04pm
Overly optimistic, perhaps, but I wouldn’t exactly use the word “magic” to describe the scientifically sound principle of achieving herd immunity through infection and recovery with special provisions made for the most vulnerable. The GBD was a rational alternative to the excruciatingly painful and destructive lockdown policies that remained in place for far too long and from which the collateral damage proved devastating.
I would agree that we were prudent to err on the side of caution by imposing the lockdowns initially. But they remained in place well past any real or perceived benefit to the general public, in spite of evidence to the contrary.
Given what we now know, I’m just of the opinion that the John Snow Memorandum and it’s signatories are deserving of as much criticism as was directed at the GBD. The following is an excerpt from a paper that, IMO, basically reaffirms the GBD position:
Public health policies—and particularly those aimed at the containment of a highly infectious disease such as COVID-19—revolve around a compass of moral values, which are often implicitly given different weights by both policymakers and scientific advisors. Both the understanding of these values, and the normative weighing of the values will always necessarily be context dependent, and dynamic. Public health policies should aim to consider to what degree the proposed measures aimed to preserve the public good are socio-culturally acceptable in restricting individual freedom, in what way they disproportionately affect certain groups of the population, according to what aspect of vulnerability is most relevant. An approach of situated policy is therefore most salient, which promotes policymaking that is attuned with idiosyncrasies that are both spatial (the socio-cultural and socio-economic local context) and temporal (given the rapid evolution of COVID-related scientific evidence). A situated approach to policymaking in the context of wicked problems reflects that there cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach to COVID-19 public health policies.
Nature: Humanities and Social Sciences Communications Published: 6/30/21
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-021-00839-1.epdf
Monte
Oct 26 2021 at 5:05pm
This was meant in reply to Steve rebuttal above.
Monte
Oct 26 2021 at 5:06pm
Steve, see my response below.
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