Free Republic

It should be clear by now that most of the world's leaders were stampeded over the lockdown cliff like so many lemmings. What caused the stampede is even more remarkable: a tiny coterie of obscure, soft-spoken epidemiologists in white lab coats playing with numbers. Americans trying to keep up with the torrid pace of new developments over the past few months have been hearing about that work — the data-modeling these people do by feeding selected data and a variety of assumptions into a computer. The computer then disgorges diagrams and charts that attempt to describe the future progress of...

US Army soldiers built a massive to field hospital in SeattleÂ’s CenturyLink Field Events Center in late March to treat coronavirus patients. But the facility was never used and was taken down in April.The US Army Corps of Engineers mobilized in the U.S. in March hiring private contractors to build emergency field hospitals around the country. But most of the facilities never treated a single patient. The cost of the facilities was reportedly $660 million.This is another example of how top US doctors based their decisions using garbage coranavirus models.The field hospitals had capacity to treat 14,817 coronavirus patients...

We are drowning in a sea of suspect statistics, many being used selectively by power-hungry politicians — especially COVID statistics. Suppose an obese alcoholic 80-year-old with hips replaced, diabetes, heart bypass, inflammation, and high blood pressure gets the flu, then pneumonia; tests positive for COVID; and dies. What is recorded as the cause of death? It depends on who wants the figures and why. Too often, politics and economics determine the outcome. Does the hospital or physician get paid more for COVID patients? He will find more. Are politicians pushing their Orwellian tracking devices or industrialists pushing universal compulsory vaccinations?...

In addition to a bevy of state orders, Gov. Andrew Cuomo made desperate overtures to the federal government to step in. In response, and in record time, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers scrambled to erect at least four field hospitals, and the Navy deployed its USNS Comfort hospital ship to Manhattan. However, those efforts – and the many millions of dollars spent on them – have largely been deemed a waste, even as New York has battled a soaring a death toll and is maintaining stay-at-home orders. So what happened? "[The models] have been extremely inaccurate," Dr. David Samadi,...

The decisions that are being made during this crisis are far too important and complex to be based on such imprecise data and with such unreliable results. There’s been a lot of armchair analysis about various models being used to predict outcomes of COVID-19. For those of us who have built spatial and statistical models, all of this discussion brings to mind George Box’s dictum, “All models are wrong, but some are useful”—or useless, as the case may be.The problem with data-driven models, especially when data is lacking, can be easily explained. First of all, in terms of helping decision...

The University of Washington’s IHME COVID-19 model is the one most widely cited by policymakers and journalists. Superficially, that model has been relatively stable, with its total projected fatalities nationwide from the Wuhan virus declining from the mid-80,000 range to its current faux precise level of 67,641, which is probably a pretty good guess–one that you or I might have made–based on experience to date.But if we look at the IHME model’s projections for individual states, we see capricious changes that cast serious doubt on whether the model is based on any coherent scientific principles at all. I have...

There is simply no other way to state this. Nearly everything we’ve been told about models, rates of infection, deaths, and recoveries was inaccurate. I’m not here to argue that it was malfeasance or ignorance — both are unacceptable. But the one thing that Governor Andrew Cuomo’s stunning announcement made clear on Thursday is that there are some pretty shocking — and what should be — reassuring truths. Cuomo announced that antibody testing in New York state, which only began four days previous, was already demonstrating that at minimum 13.9% of New Yorkers, had COVID-19 late stage antibodies. The implication...

Everyone who has been paying attention knows that the epidemiological models on which the current shutdown mania is based have been proved to be wrong, wrong, wrong. Yet, zombie-like, they continue to influence our ill-informed policymakers. A reader who prefers to remain anonymous despite her apparent qualifications writes:I just want to follow up yet again on how extraordinarily wrong the projections for hospital demand have been, along with some detail about what’s going on in hospitals. In a number of states they’re about to reopen for nonemergency procedures. But over the past month they’ve been so empty that they’ve...

Every crisis has a self-reflection point. Six weeks into the coronavirus pandemic, we now have data and information available. We have seen the face of the enemy. Tragically, lives have been lost to the virus, but many victims have survived, and even more Americans have remained healthy through it all. It is time to begin examining what we have done and whether, with the benefit of hindsight, we were right to do it. As I reflect, I come to an inescapable conclusion: Someone must be held accountable. Who could have ever imagined that, in a shockingly brief period, our economic...

Currently our economy is being decimated, not by a disease but by a series of governmental shutdown orders that have closed most businesses and resulted in millions of layoffs. These orders were based not on experience, but on models that we now know were wrong. It is critical to remember that the shutdown strategy was never intended to stop people from getting sick. When we all emerge from hibernation, the virus will still be there, and some of us (more or less the same number) will still get sick. The idea was to “flatten the curve” by prolonging the...

State leaders are relying on a hodgepodge of statistical models with wide-ranging numbers to guide their paths through the deadly coronavirus emergency and make critical decisions, such as shutting down businesses and filling their inventory of medical supplies. During hurricane season, coastal states can trust the same set of computer models to warn of a storm’s track. During this pandemic, there is no uniform consensus to predict the toll and direction of the virus that is tearing through communities around the country. With little agreed-upon information, governors and local officials are basically creating do-it-yourself sources of information with their own...

This guy is sketchy. Sometimes within a 24 hour period Fauci will make a statement, then contradict the initial assertion, then attempt to cloud his own conflict with obtuse and wordy explanations. After watching for several weeks, we called it out HERE. In an interview Friday night with Martha MacCallum Dr. Fauci now claims the now collapsing coronavirus prediction models never influenced national health policy. It’s a rather disingenuous claim given everything that has taken place. There’s been a debate about possible political motives surrounding the panic he has created; the massive economic damage he has inflicted; and the conflicting...

SEATTLE - A statistical model cited by the White House generated a slightly less grim figure Monday for a first wave of deaths from the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. - a projection designed to help officials plan for the worst, including having enough hospital staff, beds and ventilators. The only problem with this bit of relatively good news? It’s almost certainly wrong. All models are wrong. Some are just less wrong than others - and those are the ones that public health officials rely on. Welcome to the grimace-and-bear-it world of modeling. “The key thing is that you want...

Donald Trump's top advisors have expressed doubts about the accuracy of the White House's apocalyptic forecast that 240,000 Americans will die from the coronavirus pandemic, sources have said. As the US death reached 6,056 Thursday and the nation's healthcare system buckles under the crisis, administration officials said the stark forecasts could have been a tactic to warn the president he needs to act now. The White House made the shock prediction Tuesday that there will be between 100,000 and 240,000 deaths in the US if the nation continues on its trajectory and current social distancing guidelines are maintained. Trump said...

The Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort docked in in New York City on Monday, March 30, 2020. The ship was expected to bolster a besieged New York City health care system by treating non-coronavirus patients while hospitals treat people with COVID-19.But after three days in the harbor only three patients have been transferred to the hospital ship.The ship has 1,000 beds.Another Navy hospital ship, the U.S. Naval Ship Mercy, docked in Los Angeles, has had a total of 15 patients, officials said.You can thank the CDC officials and doctors for pushing fake models on the American public and Trump administration!The CDC used the...

For the first time in decades, Americans who hear the word "model" are more likely to visualize a graph than a woman on a runway. Now, in the era of the coronavirus, we all are morbidly fixated on the projections that the experts are making regarding the number of people who will contract the virus and the number of them who can be expected to die. On March 31 at the daily White House briefing, we heard from Drs. Fauci and Birx that the most credible model anticipates a final outcome of 100,000–200,000 American deaths due to the virus. Subsequent...

The United States, as a whole, is roughly two weeks away from reaching the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, but the peaks for individual states will vary, with most occurring over the next four weeks, according to projections from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). When it comes to the arrival of the coronavirus, not all states are facing the same timeline. Some states, like New York and Louisiana, have quickly become epicenters of the virus in the United States and, as a result, will reach a resource peak weeks sooner than states like Kentucky...

The famously germaphobic supermodel, whose YouTube video detailing her extensive airplane routine went viral last year, was snapped by a spy while boarding a flight from LA to NYC on Tuesday, wearing a full hazmat suit beneath her chic camel cape. The 49-year-old covered her face with an N95 mask, and protected her hands with a pair of pink latex gloves. SNIP “I mean, as much as I travel, I should get sick so much more with colds and stuff and I’m blessed that I don’t, and I really think that this helps me, my little routine,” she said.

Al-Qaida had extensive contacts with Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security, as well as with an elite military unit which helped the terrorists train and plot attacks against Americans, according to a former intelligence officer who recently fled Iran. Hamid Reza Zakeri, a former inspector and director of Iran's Revolutionary Guards and Ministry of Intelligence, or MOIS, member said models of the World Trade Center, the White House, Pentagon and other United States government buildings "were in our headquarters." In an explosive interview with a London-based Arabic newspaper last week, Zakeri stated that al-Qaida leader and Egyptian terrorist Ayman al-Zawahiri,...

A doctor in Florida burned to death because the battery in his Tesla burst into flames and the car's futuristic door handles wouldn't allow a police officer to rescue him, according to a legal complaint. Dr Omar Awan died in February after his Tesla hit a palm tree. ...part of the design of the Tesla Model S is to retract the door handles into the car and they then "auto-present" and pop out when the car's key fob is detected nearby. However, the handles malfunctioned and people were not able to open the doors Dr Awan had no broken bones...