Pictured above is Ghostbusters’ Dr. Peter Venkman who spoke for experts everywhere when he famously warned, “Back off, man. I’m a scientist.”  

I recently had an interesting conversation with a suburban Philadelphia emergency room physician regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. We discussed, among other things, the wide divergence between the theories and predictions of the public health experts and the reality that the physicians and nurses on the frontline are confronting.

Remember how we had to shelter in place in order to “flatten the curve” of infections so that our medical facilities could somehow survive the predicted tsunami of COVID-19 cases? Well, here in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the tidal wave never hit. Not even close. As a matter of fact, our hospitals have been underwhelmed and mostly empty. They are laying off staff and some are facing bankruptcy. This has happened because, until last week, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf and Secretary of Health Rachel Levine had prohibited healthcare providers from rendering so-called “elective” and purportedly “non-life sustaining” medical procedures. You know, things like mammograms, eye surgeries, and diagnostic testing. Why? Because Wolf and Levine decreed that our hospitals had to be ready for the predicted avalanche of COVID-19 cases that, for some weird reason, just never showed up.

So how did we get here? Why did we lock down the country in the first place, and why are large areas of the nation still in lockdown even though we “flattened the curve” many weeks ago?  After all, this is the first time in modern history that the healthy have been quarantined to prevent the spread of disease instead of isolating the sick to protect the healthy. Why did we wind up standing that time-tested quarantine strategy on its head?

The only answer I can figure is that we got stampeded by the “experts” like Neil Ferguson at the Imperial College London who predicted that COVID-19 would kill 2.2 million in the United States. To date we have had 79,000 COVID-19 “related” deaths. So, as you can see, Neil was a bit off the mark.

Yesterday, The Telegraph featured an article titled “Neil Ferguson’s Imperial model could be the most devastating software mistake of all time” by David Richards and Konstantin Boudnik. You can access the complete article by clicking on this link and signing up for a free trial of The Telegraph.

If you would rather not go through the “free trial” hassle, John Hinderaker at Powerline has provided the following excerpts from The Telegraph article:

Since publication of Imperial’s microsimulation model, those of us with a professional and personal interest in software development have studied the code on which policymakers based their fateful decision to mothball our multi-trillion pound economy and plunge millions of people into poverty and hardship. And we were profoundly disturbed at what we discovered. The model appears to be totally unreliable and you wouldn’t stake your life on it.
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Imperial’s model appears to be based on a programming language called Fortran, which was old news 20 years ago and, guess what, was the code used for Mariner 1 [an unmanned spacecraft which crashed on liftoff from Cape Canaveral in 1962 due to a single line of erroneous Fortran code].  This outdated language contains inherent problems with its grammar and the way it assigns values, which can give way to multiple design flaws and numerical inaccuracies. One file alone in the Imperial model contained 15,000 lines of code.

Try unravelling that tangled, buggy mess, which looks more like a bowl of angel hair pasta than a finely tuned piece of programming. Industry best practice would have 500 separate files instead. In our commercial reality, we would fire anyone for developing code like this and any business that relied on it to produce software for sale would likely go bust.

The approach ignores widely accepted computer science principles known as “separation of concerns”, which date back to the early 70s and are essential to the design and architecture of successful software systems. The principles guard against what developers call CACE: Changing Anything Changes Everything.

Without this separation, it is impossible to carry out rigorous testing of individual parts to ensure full working order of the whole. Testing allows for guarantees. It is what you do on a conveyer belt in a car factory. Each and every component is tested for integrity in order to pass strict quality controls.

Only then is the car deemed safe to go on the road. As a result, Imperial’s model is vulnerable to producing wildly different and conflicting outputs based on the same initial set of parameters. Run it on different computers and you would likely get different results. In other words, it is non-deterministic.

As such, it is fundamentally unreliable. It screams the question as to why our Government did not get a second opinion before swallowing Imperial’s prescription.

While the authors ask why the U.K. government didn’t seek a second opinion, the same question applies to the U.S. public health authorities at the federal and state level.

Of course, Ferguson has not been the lone expert to lead us into disaster. U.S. public health authorities have relied heavily and planned their containment strategies on the projections of other purported experts such as the crowd at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. From the start of the pandemic to today, the IHME  has produced wildly and uniformly erroneous estimated COVID-19 caseloads and “related” death projections that have been so far out that they were last seen orbiting Pluto.

The moral of the story is this: when the “experts” reach into their black boxes and predict the future, we and our leaders need to be more skeptical and demand explanations as to how they reached their conclusions.

At the height of the economic downturn in 2009, we were treated to similarly bizarre projections and policies by economic “experts”. The producers of  South Park addressed the issue in an episode titled “Margaritaville.” In one scene, ten year old Stan Marsh, who has been trying to get a refund on his father’s Margaritaville blender, winds up at the Federal Reserve Bank where the economic experts in charge of bailing out the nation’s banks and businesses offer him  90 trillion dollars for the blender. When Stan asks how that could be, the experts are summoned to the inner sanctum to deal with an emergency bail out. And that’s where Stan learns the awful truth about how  experts work.

You can watch the scene by clicking on this picture:

What can I say? It appeals to my hopelessly puerile sense of humor.

Speaking of which, my friends at The American Spectator let me blow off some steam yesterday in the below article.

Hope you enjoy it.

Ruling Pandamerica | The American Spectator

“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve.”
— H.L. Mencken, Minority Report, 1956

As of May 13, 2020, 70 percent of Pennsylvania’s 3,806 COVID-19 “related” deaths have occurred in assisted living facilities. We have known since the onset of the pandemic that persons age 65 or older and/or with comorbidities such as diabetes and heart disease are overwhelmingly at risk of death should they be exposed to the virus. In this regard, Pennsylvania health officials have just reported that 79 is the average age in the Commonwealth for persons suffering COVID-19 “related” deaths and that 11.7 percent of the deceased had four comorbidities, 22.7 percent had three, 27.2 percent had two, 22.6 percent had one, and 11 percent had none.

To reduce the risk of infection, state officials prohibited visits to nursing homes by friends and families. At the same time, Pennsylvania Secretary of Health Rachel Levine issued a witless and ill-conceived directive requiring those facilities to readmit residents who have been hospitalized for COVID-19. This was done regardless of the clear increased risk of harm that this posed to the health and safety of the facilities’ aged and infirm patients.

The nursing home deaths were entirely predictable. So why did Dr. Levine issue her mandate? Was she simply unaware of the risk involved? Apparently not. You see, after requiring the assisted living facilities to admit COVID-19 patients, Levine moved her 95-year-old mother  out of her nursing home to a hotel.

“My mother requested, and my sister and I as her children complied to move her to another location during the COVID-19 outbreak,” Levine said. “My mother is 95 years old. She is very intelligent and more than competent to make her own decisions.”

Well, I’m glad that Levine’s mother is doing well. But the fact that Levine moved her out of the facility certainly indicates that the Secretary of Health well-understood the potentially dangerous ramifications of her order.

So, should Levine resign in disgrace? Should she be fired? Should she be prosecuted on 2,611 counts of negligent homicide? Should she be sued in court for money damages?

Answer: none of the above. She has refused to resign, and Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf has praised her for doing a great job. Criminally charging her for negligent homicide would be a questionable move as a matter of law and for the practical reason that no prosecutor in the state would have the courage to even investigate much less prosecute such a charge against a high government official. And, even if she could be sued in court, the state treasury would undoubtedly indemnify her for any money damages assessed.

No, it definitely pays to be part of the government team. You see, they have the power and you don’t. If you pulled a reckless, boneheaded stunt like Levine, you would be buried under the courthouse. But Madame Secretary? She gets a pat on the back from the Governor and a nod of approval from the fawning media.

The same scenario has played out in New York where media hero Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered nursing homes to take COVID-19 patients despite the desperate warnings, pleas, and protests by the homes’ owners and operators that to do so would risk or cause a disaster. As in Pennsylvania, the result has been mass infections of the old and infirm in assisted living facilities which account for two-thirds of New York’s COVID-19 “related” deaths. And, just like Pennsylvania, when challenged, the government has responded with a shrug of its collective shoulders as it continues to lock down the state, and the media turns up their praise of Cuomo to 11.

In Pandamerica, being a progressive ruling over the freshly hatched serfs means never having to say you’re sorry.

As idiotic, hypocritical, and outrageous as all of that has been, when it comes to pure, wild-eyed, drooling craziness, it pales in comparison to Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s recent announcement that his city will “never be completely open until we have a cure.” Obviously Garcetti doesn’t credit the readily available and inexpensive cure afforded by the use of hydroxychloroquine and other anti-inflammatory drugs. Consequently, it is impossible to know when, if ever, he will allow Los Angeles to return to its pre-pandemic status.

Even though the infection curve has been flattened in California, major elements of its economy remain shut down with a devastating loss of jobs, livelihoods, and businesses. But not to worry. We are assured that the lock down is being sensibly applied according to the dictates of “the science.”

So it is that, being guided by the data, Garcetti the Most Merciful has granted his subjects leave to go to the beach provided — and I am not making this up — that they do not lounge and sun bathe on the dry sand. “But the wet sand area,” Garcetti said, “if you need to get in there to swim, to surf… that is something I hope we can earn again.” (Emphasis added.)

Say what?!

This kind of neurotic megalomania is all too symptomatic of the egocentric, self-declared petty tyrants who have seized power and are imposing their illogical and contradictory patchwork of useless, mindlessly restrictive, and destructive rules, regulations, and decrees across the country.

Garcetti’s wet-sand-versus-dry-sand decree reminds me of a scene from Woody Allen’s comic film Bananas, in which Allen plays a nebbish who gets caught up in a Central American revolution. After Allen and the revolutionaries take over the country, their leader, El Presidente, addresses the people. You can see what happens by clicking on the picture below.

As you watch the scene unfold, I think you will agree that El Presidente gives a prescient portrayal of the irrational, power-mad state and local officials who are using their police and regulatory powers to economically vandalize vast swaths of our suffering nation.

George Parry is a former federal and state prosecutor. He blogs at knowledgeisgood.net and may be reached by email at kignet1@gmail.com.