Thinking like headless chickens regarding COVID-19?

© 2020 Peter Free

 

26 March 2020

 

 

Unscientific approach to COVID-19 pandemic is irritating

 

For instance, at least four months into this zoonotic — no one has seriously attempted to provide statistically valid evidence that would allow us to calculate reasonably accurate infection rates, morbidity and mortality.

 

I discuss what has been done, here.

 

There are explanations for this oversight. These include overwork, under-preparedness, lack of personnel and missing materials.

 

Still, doing this evidence gathering — and its derived rates calculation — are the only ways to come up with reasonably proportionate (in medical and societal costs) countermeasures.

 

Second, Italy is getting positively clobbered. But no one has bothered (to my possibly ignorant knowledge) to sample and investigate the SARS-CoV-2 strains circulating there.

 

Doing this would tell us whether those strains are functionally different (more virulent and deadly) than the ones that are bouncing around Asia and North America.

 

This inquiry matters. Both to Italy and to everywhere else that people traveling from there went.

 

Current explanations for the Italian situation are that it has proportionally more "old people". But that's just a guess.

 

And in that guess, I do not even see any numerically and medically persuasive comparisons of elderly Italians' characteristics, as compared to other nations' elderly groups.

 

 

So — WTF?

 

Is no one, anywhere, thinking like a science professional?

 

Are we all running around like decapitated chickens?

 

Where is the global scientific research community?

 

You know, those extra "science" people who are not already in:

 

 

hospitals and clinics treating people

 

and

 

research labs directly and immediately trying to assist with creating vaccines and medications?

 

 

Is the American biological research sector so weak, that we do not have substitutable research backups?

 

Meaning people, whom we can set loose to find immediately useful answers to key COVID questions?

 

 

The moral? — Is this the United States' vaunted national security and economic clout on display?

 

One would think that we live in a nation substantially populated and exclusively led by uneducated morons.

 

How this effete and muddle-headed culture of ours will survive any genuinely existential threat beats me.