Another just-so article that works back from different outcomes to assign causality (and blame) to a policy response. But we know coronavirus was spreading in California by January, and it just didn't catch fire like it did in New York City.https://www.propublica.org/article/two-coasts-one-virus-how-new-york-suffered-nearly-10-times-the-number-of-deaths-as-california …
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The problem with these articles is not that they praise good policies, and politicians who acted quickly on limited data, but that they create the illusion of understanding where we don't have it. We don't know why New York was hit unusually hard, and why other places were spared
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On March 14, weeks into California's state of emergency, the governor of Oklahoma took a notorious selfie in a crowded restaurant. But the virus lacks the moralizing tendency of those who write about it. Oklahoma saw a rise in cases and then they flattened, like almost everywherepic.twitter.com/4rFvqLLRbx
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The assumption that, absent intervention, every major city will end up like Lombardy, New York or London made sense back in March, but does not fit the evidence we have in May. The problem is that journalists have not revisited this assumption and continue to write morality tales
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Replying to @Pinboard
I strongly agree with what I take to be your basic point: that we still don’t know anywhere near enough about how this virus spreads to be able to say why it hits one place hard and another not at all. Also agree that the inevitability thesis is therefore unsupportable. But!
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Replying to @bobbybaird @Pinboard
In defense of what you’re calling “morality tales”: say only 1 in 100 cities get hit hard by COVID. Even if we don’t know enough to say why certain cities are unlucky, isn’t it fair to criticize government officials for not preparing for that slim but devastating possibility?
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Replying to @bobbybaird @Pinboard
Especially when we know, or seem to know, that the interventions worked to turn around the epidemic in Wuhan, South Korea, and places where the disease had already hit?
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Yeah, I think it's definitely fair to criticize along those lines. The response to this stuff is always going to be made with fragmentary information, and there was irresponsibility and incompetence all the way up. The one thing I object to is comparisons that imply causation
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Replying to @Pinboard
Got it. And do I think you’re right to criticize the inevitability thesis. Thinking this was going to spread more or less uniformly without interventions or other obvious differentia is (I hope!) one of the biggest things I’ve gotten wrong in all this.
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