Lockdown Theater Brings Hoopla and Amateur Epidemiologists

An acquaintance of mine made what I think is an astute observation when he wrote that “Politicians and bureaucracies tend to respond to crises with theater. After 9/11 it was airport security theater. Following Corona it was lockdown theater. There’s some utility to it, but only some, there is much more hoopla.”

I agree, except for the “there’s some utility to it” bit. In my view, the TSA is 100 percent “airport security theater.” If we really wanted to be secure airline travel, we’d allow passengers to carry concealed weapons. A baddie pops up with a box cutter, pow, Mr. Smith in 11D puts his Beretta M9 to good use. No more baddie and the nice lady next to him gets to keep the box cutter as a souvenir.

How about lockdown theater? What good has it done? The main current of opinion favors the process if not necessarily the theater. In a particularly nauseating piece, even for The New York Times, our former paper of record notes today that the situation on the ground seems to be improving, but asserts that “The gains to date were achieved only by shutting down the country.”

Since part of Lockdown Theater is that everyone has to play being an expert epidemiologist and talk knowingly about William Farr, R0, “patient zero,” and the like. It’s a bit like playing Ben Casey, if you remember him, or Dr. House if you’re a young ’un. You just bone up on a bit of the jargon, then mobilize it to heap contempt on anyone with whom you disagree politically. ..

This story should be all you need.

I suspect that many here have never heard of William Farr & Farr's Law.

Below are two charts plotting predictions using his >150 year-old method - without any computer models whatsoever - demonstrating a level of accuracy in projecting curves for Spanish Flu and the U.S. drug overdose mortality that it raises definitive questions about the GIGO Bias being used at Imperial College, Covid Act Now & Murray/IHME (and yeah, I got my 3rd-rate Epidemiology degree online from learned research /s). Interesting linked article; search the page for Farr's law and read the comments. Obviously there are outliers (South Korea has me scratching my head, too). Numbers-wise, I focus on deaths-per-million, the only reliable statistic, fwiw.

Farr's law.

"However, as our daily graphs here are demonstrating, the lockdowns are working. Of course, some countries – notably Sweden – have not introduced strict lockdowns, and yet the daily case growth rate is falling there too. That is one of the chief reasons why the passivists argue that if we too had not introduced lockdowns the numbers would have fallen just as fast and just as far."

I am watching Sweden with great interest - as are others - much to the chagrin of globalists and progressives keen to usurp the Constitution with the greatest manufactured crisis in history.

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