Nobody will argue your virus math

They will argue your virus assumptions.

To err is human; to really foul things up you need a computer.

- Unknown, from the 1960s

This is the problem with the virus models (as with all models).  The math is the easiest part, and modeling software libraries are pretty thoroughly debugged.  The crank and the gears that turn are doing what they're supposed to do.

But if the input data is wonky, then the output will never be accurate.  Some of the inaccuracies are unescapable, for example delays in reporting deaths.  Different countries have different reporting policies and cadences, and there's really not much that can be done about that.  After all, the data are the data.  But some really important data are poorly known, or not known at all:

• True infection rate can only be known with mass testing of the population.  You don't need to test everyone, but you do need to test a statistically significant sample.  For the US, we're talking about hundreds of thousands or even millions of people.  Nobody is working on this, so we simply can't know what the infection rate really is.  several small scale studies strongly suggest that it is much higher - perhaps ten times or more higher - than is being reported.
• The recovery rate can only be known with mass testing of the population.  We are seeing that many people who catch the virus are asymptomatic; since they don't feel (or act) sick, they don't get care and so are not included in the total number of infected.  Again. small scale studies suggest pretty strongly that the recovery rate is much higher than is being reported.
• The number of deaths includes a wide range of victims, some of which almost certainly were not killed by the virus - rather, they were killed by other ailments ("co-morbidities") but also had the virus along for the ride.  Right now, all of these are included in the virus death rate, overstating its lethality by an unknown amount.
• Since lockdowns vary by geography and by what is allowed or prohibited, tracking the result of the lockdowns is fiendishly hard, and I haven't seen anything that is even trying.  We're told that "we're all in this together" and "we're making a difference" but there's no data about how much - if at all.

Put all of these together and it's simply impossible to provide good inputs into any model.  This is basically a game of guessing, and the result has been a series of model re-works that dropped the projected death toll from 6+M to 500,000 to 120,000 to now (maybe) 60,000.

Which is about what the death toll from seasonal flu is.  I'm not saying that this new virus is no more lethal than the flu; I'm saying that the people running the models are saying that maybe this is the case.  Those models have been wildly inaccurate repeatedly in the past, so take the latest model results with a huge grain of salt.

But governments are sitting on top of increasingly restive populations.  The populations have very good reason to be restive - the world economy has taken probably a $10T (that's Trillion) hit.  That hit has been very unevenly distributed.  In economic terms this is a very regressive tax targeting the poor and working classes.  Ask Louis XVI or Czar Nicholas II how that turned out.

And so very interesting things are happening to the data.  Very interesting things indeed:

Last week we saw that we went from dying from, to dying with, to just plain dying. Even people who haven’t been tested are now classed as dying from coronavirus. This is juicing the numbers in the direction of the models. Whether this was intentional, to avoid confessing to the most colossal and costly blown forecast of all time, or this is more panicked over-reaction, I’ll let you decide. Either way, they did get a boost in the numbers from the re-definitions, which we’ll see below.  

We saw yesterday that counting who dies of flu or any virus is not so straightforward, that it’s always the result of a statistical model. Every single flu death is not trumpeted from every media organ for months on end, but if they were, then we’d have counts similar to the way we have counts for coronavirus.  

Something else strange in the numbers. Remember how every week I’d cut and paste the CDC’s update flu hospitalization and death estimates? Can’t do it anymore, because why? Because the CDC stopped reporting on them. This could be because of over-burdened government workers, or because flu deaths aren’t as sexy as coronavirus deaths (even though the totals are similar), or because something else is going on.

And it's not just here in the New World:

It isn’t only in the US where the numbers are looking funny. France, too: 

It’s already happening – France has stopped publishing the weekly mortality report in mid March – where (the lack of) excess mortality could readily be seen. Instead they created a new publication focused only on covid deaths.

Is this all political ass covering by the health services?  Beats me.  Certainly it looks like the motivation exists.  Remember, the reason for all this government-imposed misery was to protect the health care services from becoming overwhelmed.  Well, we're seeing hospital ships with no patients and Army field hospitals being demobilized because there are no patients and the Javits Center (which had been turned into a makeshift hospital) empty and there are doctors and nurses being laid off all over the country.  And there are very odd things happening to the data.

But juicing the numbers can only go so far:

The temptation to juice coronavirus deaths must be overwhelming! The models promised unimaginably huge numbers. We haven’t come anywhere close to them. Millions and millions and millions of lives the world over have been ruined, with more ruin on the way, as the result of trusting expert models. They have to find a way to bring actual numbers in line with models. 

They’re running out of options, though. Dying with from dying from was a good move, and we saw it immediately pop up in the death counts. Dying with suspicion from dying with was also clever enough, and we saw that, too. 

What else is left, though? Only one thing. 

If “dying from” is defined as dying with presence of COVID-19 antibodies, then once we reach herd immunity, which it seems is close in many places, then about 80% of all deaths can be classified as coronavirus deaths.

So where is the crisis?  It's entirely fair to ask this question when literally everything we were told about this "pandemic" has turned out to be somewhere between overblown and flat out wrong.  And quite frankly, not unusual in recent historical terms:

As with the Global Warming hysteria, if the science were as settled as we're being told there would be data falling off of trees confirming everything.  Instead, everywhere we look we see data that calls the projections into question.  If we want science-based public policy then its reasonable to ask for, well, science-based public policy.

Two days ago I posted that we need to re-open the economy.  We're seeing a million people a day lose their jobs, so that's 2 Million more people without a paycheck, just since Sunday.  It may be for nothing: there's actual data that suggests that the lockdown doesn't do much, if anything: Sweden hasn't implemented a lockdown at all and their death curve looks basically identical to the USA's:

The caveat about the problems with the data is a good one, and echoes what I wrote here.  But the data are what we have, and if the lockdown - and the 25M newly unemployed - were actually effective you'd think you'd see something.  You don't.

Enough, all ready.  There is simply no rational, science-based justification to keep the lockdowns in place anymore.  We see this recognized by Governors (who are starting to end the lockdown) and by the population in general (who are starting to willfully violate the lockdown).  Everybody but the "experts" is starting to recognize this, and the "experts" may be refusing to recognize it so that they don't get blamed