Streetwise Professor: "Bullshit [COVID-19] Numbers"

So my position on all this is still I don't know. 

I mean--it's the only position I'm entitled to.

But, as is clear, my gut has been leaning farther and farther toward the theory that the plague is being overblown. 

Which doesn't mean that shit won't kill yerass...because it will...

But anyway...

I haven't worked through this carefully, but I find it congenial. It say:

   But again the issue is cost-benefit. Basically what lockdowns do is discount future deaths/cases relative to present deaths/cases (since they accept an approximately equal number of future deaths for each death that does not occur today). And the discount rate is huge. We are losing trillions of dollars in lost output/income to push some deaths into the future. The interest rate is astronomical. Put differently, we are paying an immense price to kick the can down the road.
   I understand the the supply of ICU beds, ventilators, physicians and nurses is pretty inelastic over the short run. But even given pretty substantial inelasticity, it would be far more efficient to throw billions at expanding capacity in the short run than to sacrifice ~25 percent of world income to reallocate the deaths over time. Capacity is not a fate. It is a choice.
   And the fact that well into the crisis the foretold capacity disaster in hospitals has not been realized, the additional capacity required may well be quite small.
   There is also the issue of how much the temporal pattern of deaths will really change. This depends on a variety of factors, including when the virus first spread and its virulence. The more we learn, the more likely it is that the virus has been spreading since late-fall/early-winter 2020. Which means that the lockdowns are reactive, not proactive, and that they have little impact even on the time pattern of deaths let alone the number: they are the proverbial locking the barn door after the horse done bolted.
   In brief: our betters are destroying futures based on bullshit data. It’s as simple as that. And they are vastly increasing their power as a result, so they are destroying freedoms too.

I'm pretty foggy...I think I'm getting sick again...which is weird because we've been basically locked-down for almost a month...I don't think I've been out among the people for...weeks...but anyhoo...I'm pretty foggy. And haven't read that piece carefully. Seems like it's under-rating the value of "flatting the curve"... However. Overall. It seems like it's in the right quadrant-or-so to me.