The COVID Data Makes No Sense

We've entered a season in which governors and local health authorites are reimposing COVID controls, with Michigan in near-complete lockdown, while most other states are falling into line with curfews, typically stay-at-home orders with the usual exceptions between 10 PM and 5 AM or whenever. I haven't heard any clear explanation for why people should not move around after 10, with a lot of questions about whether the authorities think if people just don't go out to bars, the cases will drop.

The problem is that public health authorities don't actually know how COVID is transmitted, and when it's transmitted, why so many cases are asymptomatic. An article in the Wall Street Journal is behind a paywall, but Instapundit has an excerpt: "Western nations face a big challenge in fighting the Covid-19 pandemic: Ten months into the health crisis, they still know little about where people are catching the virus. . . . Jay Varma, senior adviser for public health in the New York City mayor’s office, said 10% of the city’s infections are due to travel, 5% from gatherings, and another 5% from institutional settings such as nursing homes."

“The vast majority of the remainder—somewhere probably around 50% or more [isn't this 80%?] -- we don’t have a way to directly attribute their source of infection,” Mr. Varma said. “And that’s a concern.” So by shutting down synagogues nnd churches, New York is by its own numbers addressing 5% of the problem. By New York's estimate, curfews intended to limit people going to bars address the same 5%. The same applies to banning Thanksgiving.

At this point,, the COVID virus has been out-and-about for roughly a year, but despite legions of highly-paid health experts on the case, we know little more about it than we did a year ago, and the remedies proposed are the same as those imposed early this year -- basically, masks and lockdowns. But at this point it's received knowledge that the states with the strictest regimes, like New York, Illinois, and Califonrnia, also have the biggest increases in cases.

But by imposing restrictions on behavior that by New York's informed estimate causes only 5% of the problem, those restrictions are guaranteed to have almost no effect -- and this is what we're seeing. For that matter, the empirical evidence we see is that the California megachurches that have defied restrictions there and continue to worship as before have had negligible infections. Why isn't anyone asking these quesstions?

On top of that, although infections have increased in recent weeks, many of these are asymptomatic, snd COVID death rates actually continue to decrease. For those hospitalized, treatments have become steadily more effective, and public figures who report infections, including President Trump, recover with mild symptoms.

It's hard to avoid thinking that the whole strategy of masks, capacity limits, social distance, and lockdowns is there to give an impression that government is doing something, but the frenzy is having little actual effect. The curfews are an attempt to appear to be doing something without causing outright social unrest, which is what reimposing full lockdowns is likely to do. The curfews themselves have resulted in viral videos emerging from incidents across the country like the one below in Buffalo:

The problem is that the public is increasingly aware that curfews do nothing to limit COVID, and the increasing cases will result in reimposed full lockdowns, right around Christmas. The authorites already have gotten plenty of messages that the result will not be good.