On last night’s CSL, Bill addressed the Dr. Erickson video, and I brought up the Peak Prosperity guy’s counter argument. While I don’t subscribe to A LOT of what the latter says because I find him to be very “Chicken Little-ish”, he has been ahead of the curve on this thing, so I at least listen to what he has to say.
Here’s the full video of the CA doctors talking about the lock down that has been in the news lately.
Cutting to the chase, according to Dr. Erickson, at first, when everything about the Wuhan Flu was unknown, and the theoretical models predicted devastating outcomes, lock down made sense for a few weeks.
But now that the actual data is coming in, the continued house arrest of the healthy (for our own good, of course) not only ignores the counter balancing the dire economic and therefore public health consequences of such Draconian measures, but it’s causing hospitals across the country to shut down at the worst possible time. As they say, repeatedly, “it doesn’t make sense…there’s something else going on here.”
Dr. Chris Martenson at Peak Prosperity ripped these guys for presenting a shoddy statistical analysis,
and there’s definitely some truth to that, but there’s no doubt that hospitals are shutting down,
and the economic devastation we’re just beginning to see, is undeniable.
And we’ve all seen how would-be tyrants Newsome, Whitmer, Cuomo, etc., are enjoying wielding their newly found authority to trample our rights by banning whatever they don’t like and deem “non-essential.”
If this thing doesn’t end soon, it’s going to blow – we’re already seeing the signs.
One reply on “Dr Erickson vs. Dr Martenson”
I wondered a bit about Dr. Erickson’s extrapolation of how many people he thinks are infected, because the control group (the number of people he has tested in his practice) is not randomized, because we have been focusing on testing people with symptoms. But then I realized that the basic extrapolation would also account for all the asymptomatic carriers. Probably Dr. Erickson’s extrapolation is a bit exaggerated, but we won’t know by how much for several months (after the antibody tests are conducted widely and validated, which takes time). In the meantime, Dr. Erickson’s and others’ argument that the draconian lockdowns are having a marginal (though positive) effect seems to me to be the correct one.
Also, the press has shifted the goalposts again about the reason for the shutdown. Flattening the curve was only ever supposed to be about keeping any surge below our hospital capacity. Even in NYC we achieved that.
In Texas, we have had 663 fatalities as of today, out of a population of almost 29 million. Meanwhile, as of April 3rd, we had 2,107 ICU beds and 8,741 ventilators. This is after some ramping up of capacity, but with much more capacity planned if needed to handle a surge.
Meanwhile, as of April 25th, Texas has almost 1.8 million unemployment claims since Feb. 22nd.