Chapter 7 in the R.M. Dolin book, “Truth and Trust in Crisis.” 2021
May 7, 2020: Sometimes on a quite evening over Cuban contraband and homemade bourbon, I wonder how radicals like Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky were able to overthrow the Russian monarchy and install one of the most repressive regimes in history, a regime that even today vies for control of their once vast empire. With equal fascination I’ve never understood how Hitler and Mussolini subdued entire nations with dictatorial fascism, and no one has ever adequately explained to me how Mao Zedong and his Chinese communist cohorts got away with murdering over 50 million people? My list of unexplained mysteries now also includes how fifty state governors gained authoritarian control over the greatest nation in world history without firing a single shot. If you’ve spent your life proudly believing such a radical takeover can never happen in America because we’re too strong and too independent, then I invite you to more closely examine the unraveling of your delusion as you assess how easily it happened and how easily it can happen again.
My unresolved questions don’t end there, something that’s bothered me from the start of COVID is how the list of “essential” businesses is established? Why is it okay for you to go to Walmart to buy shoes, but Bob’s Boot Barn is forced to shut down? Why can I stroll through the Home Depot garden section but my local nursery is banned from business? I wager a quick look at political donor lists confirms that every business in every state deemed “essential” made strategic campaign contributions. Why can’t Bob assume the same risk in being open as a Walmart worker? Logically, it’s safer to shop at Bob’s Boot Barn with his twenty customers per day, rather than funneling into Walmart where thousands are infecting the store. Whoever’s mandating on our health and safety is a useful pawn of political manipulation. As profound as all this is, it’s secondary to the quintessential question you and I must resolve; namely, what’s left for us to trust and where do we go for truth in a crisis?
It’s difficult to wrap your mind around the fact that on average, 7,825 Americans are expected to die each day in 2020, with an average 85 deaths per day due to pneumonia and influenza with COVID piling on top of that. It’s logical to assume given all the pandemic hysteria that this year the daily death rates would soar way above average, but in fact, the year-to-date number of American deaths is down 1,457 from expected levels. Raise your hand if you find that both odd and hard to explain. This seems like one more thing we can add to our list of unresolved questions, only for this one, we at least have the magic of math to help us find an answer.
Is there a COVID crisis? Absolutely. Are people dying from this horrible virus? Yes. Was the government’s response appropriate? Yes; at least initially when we didn’t know what we were dealing with. Are we still in crisis? The media says yes, politicians say yes, academics say yes, the dismissed demographic (i.e., you and I) initially said yes, but are now starting to have second thoughts. But all of that is conjecture and what should interest us is what the evidence indicates. That is, after all, the last bastion of truth and trust for our beleaguered nation.
America increasingly finds itself in a polarizing purgatory where politicians have too much personal prestige invested in hysteria to prematurely end the crisis without calling their leadership into question. Governors can’t collectively resolve how to balance the risk their careers can absorb against what their subjects are compliantly willing to endure. Risk aversion is a common consideration in most engineering applications. The expression, “safety factor” is a form of risk aversion addressing the additional features added to a design to mitigate known and potential hazards. Risk aversion can be viewed as a means for making decisions under uncertainty. One famous example of this is the Saint Petersburg Paradox, first posed by Daniel Bernoulli in 1738, which today is a core component in how financial institutions set insurance premiums and interest rates.
Bernoulli’s work led to the mathematical field of “Expected Utility Theory,” which he explained as
“The determination of the value of an item must not be based on the price, but rather on the utility it yields. There is no doubt that a gain of one thousand ducats [dollars] is more significant to the pauper than to a rich man though both gain the same amount.”
Expected Utility Theory is central to how COVID eventually ends. For that, we must first accept that the COVID genie is out of the bottle and with us forever. Second, since virus vaccines are never 100% effective, people will continue to die from COVID long after a vaccine has been developed and distributed, at least until the virus is fully attenuated. Finally, our society accepts a certain level of risk, for example, 85 people dying each day from pneumonia and influenza.
This leads us to the question of how many COVID deaths are acceptable for the economy to turn back on and for us to resume our normal lives? In our political purgatory governors assert the answer is zero, which means we never resume our normal lives. The problem with their beguiled belief is that a zero-death level is unobtainable. At a minimal, the threshold should be 85 deaths per day, the currently acceptable rate of flu deaths, and we mostly lived normal lives with that expected utility.
In resolving the Saint Petersburg Paradox, Bernoulli recognized the psychology behind personal risk aversion. An iron worker may walk along 8” wide beams hundreds of feet in the air but have a fear of water. In poker, one person may go all-in on a pair of Jacks, while another folds. Each of us has different measures for perceiving and averting risk. When it comes to declaring the COVID crisis over, each of us will have a different threshold that is reached only after our personal expected utility is realized. An elderly person who’s overweight and on high blood pressure medication has a higher threshold than a healthy teenager. This is what governors can’t grasp, insisting instead that their unobtainable thresholds be applied uniformly to all individuals and demographics. The purgatory our once proudly independent nation finds itself in is that we’ve compliantly decided that fifty governors, fifty individuals declaring themselves rulers over 328 million subjects, can autocratically dictate a collective expected utility.
As we approach June 7th, Brix/Fauci decide to make another dire prediction. However, given that they’ve been 100% wrong 100% of the time thus far, their credibility is suspect. Even with their dismal performance record, the media reiterates their every word unable to distinguish hard scientific evidence from inadequately informed opinion. For Brix/Fauci, the rate of infection is a credible predictor of future deaths, but it’s a false flag. There are multiple issues with the CDC infection numbers. For example, the people who get tested tend to have symptoms, which skews the sample population away from a random representation of the general population and in statistics, a skewed sample leads to skewed inferences.
Additionally, the people currently being tested are concentrated in urban areas experiencing the highest death rates, which again means they don’t represent a cross-section of the country. Finally, the more you test the more you find, which means as more tests are performed more cases are found but that has no correlation on whether the rate of infection is increasing or decreasing. Long story short, infection rate data provides no credible evidence about COVID’s performance.
Adding to the Brix/Fauci fallacy that infection data is a precursor to future deaths, the CDC admits they botched multiple batches of tests but are unable to quantify the impact, making any projection, inference, or conclusion based on infection data scientifically meaningless. The only value tracking the number of COVID cases provides is as a measure of how close the country is to achieving herd immunity. I keep waiting for a study that samples a random cross-section of the country by region and demographics containing a sufficient sample size so credible inferences can be made for the number of Americans likely infected, but no such study seems forthcoming, and it leaves me wondering why when it should be priority one.
Dr. Fauci believes the CDC is under-reporting deaths by 25%, while his counterpart, Dr. Brix believes the CDC is over-reporting deaths by 25%. New York and Pennsylvania admit to over-counting by as much as 50%. This means even our COVID “experts” don’t know how many Americans have died from COVID, which calls into question the viability of CDC data. Once the government incentivized doctors and hospitals to inflate COVID deaths, the Pavlovian practice of reporting any death as COVID began. Given the ethical ambiguity of the health care industry, raise your hand if you believe CDC data has not been corrupted.
As of May 13, the CDC reports 81,805 COVID deaths to date. With estimated over/under counting, the actual number of COVID deaths is likely somewhere in the range of 42k to 102k. Deductive logic suggests we need to subtract out the probable pneumonia and influenza deaths, resulting in a likely range of 6k-66k. When you factor in the financial incentive to falsify COVID deaths, the actual number is likely skewed toward the lower end of the range. To avoid argument, let’s settle on 26,000 COVID deaths to date, which is less than half of the flu deaths in 2017. To refresh your memory, in 2017, schools remained open, the World Series was played in packed stadiums, and you could buy shoes at Bob’s Boot Barn. The next big gate in our assessment is assessing when the crisis is over, I say on June 7th, the experts won’t say, and the politicians say never; what does your expected utility say?
