Science

Science Immunology

The Windy Pundit is talking about science and the road it follows to get to you and me:

. . . the accuracy of understanding of scientific information tends to drop off as we get further and further from the source, and in the worst case can get pretty bad.

• The scientists who actually performed the study usually have a good grasp of its limitations.

• The big-shot scientist whose name is first on the paper might overstate the importance a bit.

• The university or corporate press release will probably get the basic idea right, but they’ll overstate the importance of the result and ignore the nuances and limitations.

• The press will focus on the most sensational aspects of the press release.

• Pundits and politicians will use the press accounts to support their prior beliefs and policies.

• Fringe bloggers and tweeters and political hacks on social media will take the resulting nonsense and pile more nonsense on top.

Mark's post is about the models used to predict how bad this pandemic is going to get. I don't really care about the predictions or the models. In my book, all of the available information is suspect. It:

• could be because the organization producing it has a political agenda they are trying to promote, 
• or it could be that the model they are using to generate their data is wrong, 
• or the way they are classifying their data is either suspect or wrong. 

It doesn't matter. Either what we do will be enough to keep us from dying, or it won't, and because we haven't been here before, nobody knows what will happen. Basically, it's like we are on the starship Enterprise, boldly going where no man has gone before. Okay, some of us are a little more bold than others, and some are cowering in their corners, but we are all going into the future, like it or not.

I am afraid the COVID-19 shutdown is going to have severe economic repercussions. I don't know what that is going to look like. Perhaps we should start setting up refugee camps.

I haven't noticed much change in my life. There are more pedestrians out walking around. Cashiers at the few businesses I visit all have sneeze guards. The traffic on the freeways has been noticeably lighter, which was pretty nice, but it seems to have picked up a bit in the last week or so.

On the other hand, there are some really nasty diseases out there, so maybe learning how to exist without mingling with a thousand people every day is something we should learn how to do. The next pandemic might be a really vicious one.