Common sense referees science
The science for how to deal with COVID19 is clear, and it clearly goes against all common sense. This may be a time when the best response to scientific recommendation is to dismiss it as ridiculous.
Dark data betrays bright data
The current democratic government is run by politicians, bureaucrats, and electorate who all are gaslighted into distrusting their own observations that disprove the original explanations and projections. We need to ignore what we are seeing and continue on the original plan because it was based on infallible science, science we know is proven because we can replicate the experiments that prove it.
COVID19: KPIs for Dedomenocracy
The absolute and accumulated numbers are only important for political gains for electing parties and politicians. A government by data and urgency has no such politician elections so these numbers are not meaningful as long as the survival rate is sustainable. From an operational perspective, what matters is maintaining sufficient capacity to handle the new cases.
Holding dark data accountable
The biggest failing of science in the current COVID situation is its inability to react to new evidence that its original conclusions were wrongly decided, and the assurances to governments were incompetent. We implicitly accept that any initial science-based decisions attains some law-like status that is automatically presumed to be true until there is overwhelming evidence that it is wrong. In particular, such decision making does not permit a simple apology for making a mistake following new data that clearly disproves the original science.
COVID19: data begins to tell a different story
We are investing a lot of effort in developing and testing a vaccine that we hope can stop the spread of this disease. Realistically, we might find a vaccine that simply reduces the number of vulnerable people. A similar outcome might be achieve more quickly by simply reducing the anxiety and fear about this disease. The disease could become something we do not need to fear by convincing ourselves that it is something that we do not need to fear.
COVID19: assessing our healthcare system
We once had a medical system that can competently manage epidemics. We discarded it to make room for the managed-condition healthcare system we have now. Our system has proved that it cannot tolerate an epidemic, something that history tells us is a fact of nature. As a result, when an epidemic appears, we have to stop everything until a vaccine can make it go away.
COVID19: consumer healthcare appliances
It may be beneficial to reevaluate our approaches for treating contagious diseases especially those associated with epidemics. We have technologies we never had before with automation, communications technologies, and with miniaturization and mass production of highly reliable consumer appliances. We could plan for future epidemics around a near total at-home treatment path instead of following the historic practice of collecting patients into hospitals.
COVID19: Parable of two crops
let’s act in a way so our children can have a prosperous future.
COVID19 and the medical information supply chain
In the case of COVID19, we demand extraordinary evidence before accepting the normalcy of this pandemic. This sets a major precedence for all future novel diseases. From now on, we need to accept that anything new is an existential threat to humanity until evidence conclusively proves otherwise.
The risk of remembering the past
For COVID19 crisis, remembering the relevant past includes remembering the lessons of the 1918 pandemic. What exactly are we supposed to learn from this past? A lot of people lost their lives prematurely due to lack of government shutdown of local commerce. A decade of widespread enjoyment of good living occurred because the government did not interfere with the economy in its response to the pandemic.
