Corona, The Eeyore Syndrome

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-pandemic-modelers-pessimists-need-dose-of-humility/#slide-1

An excellent analysis, as nearly everything by VDH tends to be.

I especially liked this trenchant observation:

The sunnier prognosticators suffer a lose-lose dilemma rather than the pessimist’s win-win chances. If one doubts these original nightmarish Imperial College worst-case predications of 2 million-plus deaths in the United States, and is proven correct, it matters little. The pessimist argues that it was only his bleak forecasts that changed behaviors and that, without such changes, the optimist’s obviously faulty data and poor reasoning would have led policymakers over a cliff.

If the optimist is wrong and the situation becomes far grimmer than he initially predicted, he is not just wrong but culpable, with, to quote the Boston Globe, “blood on his hands.”

In the Deep State / MSM ruled present, we are always in a "Heads I win, tails you lose" dynamic relative to the elites. Sadly, in even the medium run, that is precisely why civilizations fall -- learning requires accepting and learning from failure.

Why have we been increasingly failing to learn since FDR? 

The punchline ...

Given the media’s horrific prognostications of mass death, and given the Left’s insistence that Donald Trump owns the nation’s reaction to the virus, if the U.S. dodges the viral bullet and ends up by midsummer with far less death, infection, hospitalizations, and economic damage than predicted, then we know what follows: a boomerang that paints Trump as also owning a miraculous recovery from what was once forecast as some sort of 1918-type wipeout. 

So what is called for from our modelers and pessimists is a little humility. The Eeyores simply do not have enough information — yet — to issue the sort of dire warnings that have now become characteristic and determinative in setting policies of life and death for hundreds of millions. 

Finally, because of the new role of the electric lynch mob of social media, the polarized red–blue divide, the murky continuing role of China, the 2020 election year, the novelty of the coronavirus and the reaction to it, and the sensationalism and institutional bias of an often reckless media, be prepared for an impending Armageddon of blame and hindsight.