It is a harrowing tale, especially for those who really, truly believe Suits who say, more or less, "We are a data driven organization." The reality is exactly different. The CTP dealt with, they imply, incompetent data creation and collection, yet the real enemy of data is Policy. Policy is driven by power to enforce the wishes of the Suits. Data don't matter; what matters is that Policy supports power and punishes the powerless.
More times then regular readers may want, these missives have pointed to situations where Data was ignored by Policy. It will always be true. Very occasionally Data will support Policy a priori. Rarely.
What is particularly disappointing: even these folks, up to their necks in data, don't offer an explanation for the cliff dive from 6 January. In other words, in the jargon of the stat/data scientist, what was/is the data generation process? WHY, for crying out loud, could so much Covid just disappear in a few weeks. Until someone without an agenda makes a sensible statement, I will continue to believe we have been snookered by Policy.
"What CDC is not accounting for is that we have been flying blind for weeks with essentially no [testing]," Carter Mecher, a medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, wrote to an email list of federal officials on March 13. "The difference between models and real life is that with models we can set the parameters as if they are known. In real life, these parameters are as clear as mud."It was wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024's intent to flick Covid away, as one might a fly from one's desperate coif. In other words, until 20 January 2021, Policy prevented Data from existing. Birx's latter-day confession should not have been a surprise.
I have long found that the mathifacation of economics led to two related Bad Things. - at the micro level, from the individual organization to its aggregation(s), census data is routinely available. all the convoluted math and stat models are the result of believing that reality is really what is measured. - over time, following from Samuelson, macro practitioners succumbed to the pressure to 'mathify' the study, but, naturally, macro is all about Policy, and Data has but one job: to demonstrate that those affilated with Power got what they wanted from change in Policy. Sometimes, when Snowflake Lefties are in power, 'affilation' means most of the country.
The COVID Tracking Project clung to one principle: We told people the truth as we could discern it. We didn't say what we wanted to be true, nor what we hoped would engender a specific public response.
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