Professor Michael Levitt is a Professor of Structural Biology at the Stanford School of Medicine, and winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for “the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems.”
He’s a numbers guy.
With a purely statistical perspective, he has been playing close attention to the Covid-19 pandemic since January. He first spoke out in February when he analyzed the numbers of cases and deaths in Hubei province he predicted with remarkable accuracy that the epidemic in that province would top out at around 3,250 deaths.
After examining outbreak after outbreak, he found there is a similar mathematical pattern. The implications are “profound.”
THERE IS NO EXPONENTIAL GROWTH [SORRY CUOMO]
The models assumed exponential growth but that hasn’t happened anywhere, even in countries that were relatively lax in their responses [except maybe New York with the two incompetent hack leaders].
South Korea, Iran, and Italy flattened the curve but the professor couldn’t believe they could do social distancing as well as China. He also observes that the total number of deaths we are seeing, in places as diverse as New York City, parts of England, parts of France, and Northern Italy, all seem to level out at a very similar fraction of the total population.
He doesn’t think they are all practicing good social distancing.
More generally, Levitt complains that epidemiologists only seem to be called wrong if they underestimate deaths, and so there is an intrinsic bias towards caution. “They see their role as scaring people into doing something, and I understand that… but in my work, if I say a number is too small and I’m wrong, or too big and I’m wrong, both of those errors are the same.”
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We’re thinking of Tony, Dr. Fauci, right now.
He describes indiscriminate lockdown measures as “a huge mistake,” and advocates a “smart lockdown” policy, focused on more effective measures, focused on protecting elderly people.
THE POLICY OF HERD IMMUNITY IS THE RIGHT POLICY
I think the policy of herd immunity is the right policy. I think Britain was on exactly the right track before they were fed wrong numbers. And they made a huge mistake. I see the standout winners as Germany and Sweden. They didn’t practice too much lockdown and they got enough people sick to get some herd immunity. I see the standout losers as countries like Austria, Australia, and Israel that had very strict lockdown but didn’t have many cases. They have damaged their economies, caused massive social damage, damaged the educational year of their children, but not obtained any herd immunity.“There is no doubt in my mind, that when we come to look back on this, the damage done by lockdown will exceed any saving of lives by a huge factor.
He sees this mess as a generational mistake.
WATCH:
LET’S KEEP MAKING THE SAME MISTAKES
But by all means, let’s keep schools closed, though kids almost never catch it and don’t spread it —> Coronavirus: No case of a child passing to an adult exists, evidence review shows https://t.co/Kp62Mi17QE
— Brit Hume (@brithume) May 1, 2020
Meanwhile, my local NY paper, Newsday, is promoting social distancing until we get a vaccine. That would be the vaccine that is supposed to take a couple of years or will perhaps never come. It often doesn’t come and hasn’t worked for SARS or HIV.
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