HEALTH ADVICE CAN'T SHIFT WITH POLITICS.

At The American Conservative, Anthony DiMauro laments politicized public health advice.

One rightly wonders how, within a span of weeks, we went from shaming people for being out in the streets to shaming those who won’t join the crowd.

What’s more, contact with infected animals and surfaces is unlikely to cause COVID-19 to spread, and chlorine kills the virus upon contact, so clean pools are also safe. But of course, many schools, playgrounds, pools, and businesses were forced to close.

Livelihoods have been destroyed, children are paying a high price through a loss of time and key social-educational development, and mental health across the country is on the decline.

And now some journalists from prominent publications—the same ones that have been demanding oh-so-extreme caution—are performing breathtaking gymnastics in an effort to backtrack, explaining that there’s no evidence of outdoor coronavirus spread. Now, it’s “prolonged indoor close contact” that we have to worry about.

The virus still has a lot of potential hosts to find, and there is still a long way to go for effective treatments, let alone vaccinations.  The experts have made a hash of things.  Mr DiMauro advises a bet on emergence.  "If a second wave does appear, it will be cautious individuals and community innovation that provides the solutions—not those who have done nothing to earn our trust."

How badly have the experts fared?  Badly enough that economists are dunking on them.

Economists know something about the incredible failure of forecasting models. They have been deployed often in the postwar period. They came under heavy fire from economists of the Austrian and classical schools. They don’t grapple with certain facts of reality: second and third tier responses to policies, unpredictabilities of human choice, and the uncertainties of the future. There are too many variables operating in a complex system like a socio-economic order for any mechanistic model to capture them all, especially when dealing with an unknown and unknowable future.

The same forecasting failures afflicted the models that panicked politicians into locking down. They are too aggregated. They don’t consider population diversity and how novel viruses affect different groups in different ways. They presume that planners can know things that they cannot know, such as disease severity in the midst of an epidemic. Slogans like “flatten the curve” massively oversimplify social processes and human choices, and presume to know far too much about cause and effect.

It's like everything else in attempting to codify procedures: the rules are written in blood.  "Now the modelers in the epidemiological profession need to learn what the economists figured out long ago. Human life is too complex to be accurately modeled, much less predicted. This certainly pertains to a novel virus."  Indeed.