No one so blind as those who choose not to see

From California Has Lost Control by Whet Moser in The Atlantic.  

My refrain from the beginning of Covid has been that we don't what is going on.  Globally, our response has been more or less laissez faire but results have tended to be quite independent of whatever policy controls are in place.  There are countries with hard lockdowns and draconian restrictions which have high case loads and there are countries with few restrictions and few cases and every permutation in between.

We don't know what is going on.

Yet the dominant reporting has been entirely of a score keeping nature.  And not even using the right score keeping, Excess All Causes deaths and Excess years of life lost are the two most pertinent measures and hardly anyone is using those.  Instead the media, including in this article, rely on data is relatively easily available (such as ICU capacity) but not particularly useful.

New York State badly managed their spring killing fields, substantially because they were one of the first states to have widespread exposure but also because they housed infected Covid patients in elder care facilities despite the science and health experts advising against it.  The media has been fawning of New York's performance even though it has been the second worst in the nation.

California, for unknown reasons, pretty much escaped a spring outbreak which the mainstream media ascribed to lockdown measures which have remained in place and tightened since then.  Now they are having what is essentially their first wave despite the economically ruinous restrictions already in place.

California is on the verge of breaking a pandemic record from the darkest days of the spring: With 17,750 COVID-19 patients hospitalized yesterday, the state is closing in on New York’s single-day high of 18,825, set on April 13. It’s a shocking turn of events for California, a huge state that, not long ago, had better control of—or luck with—the virus than much of the country.

In October, as the pandemic’s winter surge was beginning to take shape across the U.S., California’s public-health researchers and officials expressed measured optimism that the nation’s most populous state could avoid a disastrous rise in cases. During a press conference on October 19, Governor Gavin Newsom pointed to declining hospitalization rates as a sign of the state’s success, but also warned that the decline was slowing. “We’re beginning to flatten out, plateau, as relates to hospitalizations,” he said.

For a moment, such a plateau seemed like the most likely outcome. A week after Newsom’s press conference, the state had 2,991 people hospitalized with COVID-19, its lowest number since April 10. But the trend quickly reversed, and by November 23, the state’s hospitalizations had doubled to more than 6,000. 

What’s happened since is a worst-case scenario. While California’s per capita hospitalization rate is nowhere near New York at its worst—with 39.5 million people, the Golden State is about twice as populous as New York—the sheer number of patients in the hospital is still a sign of how badly California is doing right now.

Worse yet is how quickly the state reached nearly 18,000 hospitalizations during its current surge. When New York reached its record, it represented a 12 percent increase over the week prior. In California, by contrast, hospitalizations are up 27 percent over last week. With cases in California continuing to rise, more hospitalizations will follow. 

Moser is unable to process that we don't what is going on.  

Why California—a state that had been an example of a reasonably effective response—and why now? Some officials have pointed to lockdown fatigue. Thanksgiving alone is not the culprit, as cases were clearly rising in early November. The state’s reversal of fortunes is so sharp and sudden that the reasons remain unclear, but its time as a big and relatively bright spot in a dark winter has definitively come to an end. 

The mainstream media has been a sucker for blue states with draconian lockdowns which massively harm the bottom 50% of the economic strata while at the same time massively criticizing the far better performing red states with comparatively low death rates.  The mainstream media not only doesn't understand what is going on but also doesn't even know how to report it.  Possibly it is a function of partisan politics, possibly it is simple ideological affinity, possibly it is their sustained innumeracy.

Moser can't let go of the idea that California's good fortune to miss the spring wave was a product of public policy.  It wasn't.  It was good luck.  California was not an example of a reasonably effective response; California was an example of a political class who wanted to be seen to be doing something, regardless of whether it was beneficial to be done.

Astonishingly, Moser is making it clear that we don't yet know much about Covid and yet still pretending this a good governance versus bad governance issue.  As he mentions, the experts thought Thanksgiving gatherings would drive a new wave of infections.  It did not.  

What will it take for journalists to abandon Covid policies as a partisan cudgel to wield against right leaning states and simply acknowledge what is indisputably true.  After nearly a year, we still do not understand the spread and relative lethality of this virus and few of our coercive restrictive policies appear to have had much real causal impact.