In the second installment of his white paper on the Coronavirus pandemic, Al Brooks looks that the struggle between individual rights and battling a pandemic and the inherent political struggles.
In the first installment of this Coronavirus analysis, Al Brooks established his credentials and tied the outcome of how we handle the crisis to the economy and markets.
Americans cherish their rights, but as time goes on, we get more information. That allows us to develop higher probability opinions about what lies ahead. Too many Americans are unwilling to do what is necessary to stop the spread, especially when our leaders are telling them to not bother. They prefer to resume their normal lives and they accept the risk of getting infected. Because of our system of government and the freedoms we enjoy, that is their right.
The problem is that when they exercise their right, it infringes on the right of those who choose to minimize the risk of infection. If 30% of the population ignores all precautions, the virus will spread unchecked. I have been saying that it was likely to infect 100 to 200 million Americans. That is still true.
No one is safe when 30% of the population ignores precautions
The Coronavirus will also infect many people who are doing everything possible to avoid infection. The indifferent person does not have to kiss a cancer patient to kill him. But if he gives the infection to someone who gives the infection to others, eventually it will get to vulnerable people who will die.
Many of these people who are doing everything possible to avoid the infection have medical issues that greatly increase the risk of them dying. A father with a five-year-old daughter receiving chemotherapy now has an increased risk of losing his child. Three times more people over 65 years old will die if they get infected than people under 50 years old. That 30% who do not care if they themselves get sick are saying, “Too bad for you, but I am unwilling to give up my freedom any longer to save your life.”
This is like smoking back in the 1960’s. We just accepted that one person could decide to smoke in a crowded room, or on an airplane and everyone else had to tolerate it. Eventually we decided that this was ridiculous and politicians passed laws to stop the tyranny of the minority.
Misleading comments from government medical experts
Why are my numbers so much higher than those of Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci?
I continue to say that once the pandemic has ended, 500,000 to 1 million Americans will have died. But the White House said in March that 60,000 deaths were going to be the worst case (before that the President said the 15 U.S. cases would soon shrink to zero). At the time, I said that its worst case was much better than my best case. Since then, they have continued to ratchet up their estimates. It was going to be 80,000, then 100,000, then 160,000, then 200,000, and now they say 240,000 is the worst case.
Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci
They have access to great medical experts. Why are their numbers always so wrong? Because you have to listen carefully to what they sometimes add to the end of their sentence. For example, instead of saying, “The pandemic will take 200,000 lives,” they say sometimes add, “by Aug. 1.”
They are not talking about the final total. It’s like saying in May of 1942 that 200,000 American soldiers would be dead by August of 1942. Who cares? People want an estimate of the final total at the conclusion of the war, which ended in 1945, and not a number that they will have to increase every month.
Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx are doing a very difficult job
Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx are national treasures. They are doing the very difficult job of trying to bend the administration in the direction of science when it is much more interested in politics ahead of an election.
They know that they have said many things that, while largely true, are misleading. This is because they have to be afraid that the political wing of the White House will be quick to fire them if they go too far from the White House’s message.
If that were to happen, whoever replaces them might not provide a strong enough scientific voice. They are trading some of their integrity and lifelong, hard-earned respect to help the rest of us.
Knowing the number of deaths by an arbitrary date is useless
Why are the endless bad estimates important? Because they are meant to deceive the American people.
The vaccine will not be available until the beginning of 2021 at the earliest. Let’s say they begin to vaccinate people in February 2021. That is 250 days from now. In the absence of a vaccine, it is reasonable to assume that we will continue to lose at least 1,000 people a day. The average might be 2,000. That will add 250,000 to 500,000 deaths to the 100,000 that we already have had.
It will take months to vaccinate the 70% of the population who will want to be vaccinated. Maybe another 100,000 to 200,000 more people will die before the infection is under control.
Also, the number of deaths is much more accurate than the number of infected. Many infected people do not have symptoms and most never get tested. But research indicates that 0.5% to 1% of infected people die. Since we already have 100,000 dead, that would indicate that we currently have 10 to 20 million people who have been infected, not the 1.8 million that Johns Hopkins and the government are reporting.
It is clear Washington is trying to mislead the public. They always say whatever is to their benefit, especially in an election year.
Election year politics
There will be many new laws over the next 10 years in response to the current pandemic. Most people now realize that there will always be another pandemic. They therefore want new laws.
We need to see the data before we decide how restrictive the laws will be. I mentioned in an earlier report that we could reduce the speed limit to 10 miles an hour. That would save 50,000 lives a year. But the vast majority of Americans prefer to drive 60 miles an hour and have 50,000 strangers die.
Ten million Americans will not die from this pandemic, but if that were to happen, or if there was a second serious pandemic in the next 10 years, public opinion would force politicians to pass strict laws.
ore people would be eager to give up freedom to save lives.
If “only” 500,000 people die (more than in World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined), which I think is likely, the new laws will probably be minimally restrictive. That is only 10 years’ worth of car deaths. The laws will have more to do with insuring that there are enough masks, gowns, and ventilators in a government storage facility and that we have a more rapid response. They will have less to do with restricting our behavior.
Restrictive laws are excellent at saving lives
Americans have dozens of times more deaths per 1 million people than South Korea, China and Taiwan. Dozens of times!
This is the greatest blunder in America’s history. Even when we stopped flights from China, 36 other countries beat us to it. Even China banned flights from China. We were late and we stupidly allowed 40,000 people to come from China as exceptions. We waited forever to ban travel from Europe. Yet, most of the infected people coming into the U.S. came from Europe, not China.
Chinese officials dragging a person out of his home. The man and his family were suspected of being either infected or exposed to the Coronavirus.
And where were the Democrats? They did nothing either. We did not have any leadership in Washington from either party. Three years from now, studies will show that we will have lost hundreds of thousands of people needlessly.
The citizens of those other countries where the governments saved so many lives were not given a choice. The governments imposed strict containment policies that Americans would only accept if we had strong leadership telling us how important this was. We needed a Lincoln, a Roosevelt, or a Kennedy.
Strict policies include totally shutting cities down, monitoring everyone’s location and contacts, testing aggressively to find contagious people, security cameras and drones everywhere, and giving people different color codes on a phone app that shows their risk level. All we would have to do is test, test, and test to find infected people and then isolate them for two weeks. That’s it. Intrusive, but relatively simple and it would allow restrictions to be lessened sooner.
We would not have to resort to the brutal extremes that China used. For example, if they decided that someone was probably infected, police went to person’s home and dragged him and his family out as they kicked and screamed. Infected people were then forcibly kept in huge make-shift confinement facilities for two to three weeks.
Inherent flaw in our political system
The Federal Reserve has tremendous ability to protect our economy. It is free to make important economic decisions without worrying about public opinion or an unhappy president. Yes, the president can always replace the Fed Chair, but the backlash would be severe. The result is that the Fed is as independent as it needs to be.
What many may not know is that the Fed was created by an act of Congress in 1913. There is nothing about it in the Constitution. Congress has the power to write similar laws that would protect us from other things, like pandemics.
Suppose there was a health care commission that made all decisions about our healthcare, including responses to pandemics and running a universal health care system, and it was independent of the president. I bet our results would be like those in South Korea instead of among the worst on the planet. It would be nice if there also was a balanced budget commission that prevented us from passing a huge debt onto our kids and grandkids.
The flaw in our system of government is that those making decisions are only concerned about what happens up to the next election. Politicians focus on very short-term solutions to every problem. The ignore the obvious reality that the best solution to many problems requires a much longer perspective.
But if you are in Congress or the White House, you lied your way to the top over many years to get as much power and control as possible. People like that are not going to be thinking about ways to give any of their power away.
In the next installment, we will discuss out best option going forward.
Editor’s note: Al Brooks has written extensively on the Coronavirus pandemic. He has done a deep dive into the crisis and reaction to it. This the second installment of a White Paper of Al’s analysis of the Covid-19 crisis.
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