Nobelist: The Economy Will Roar Back
Writing in The Wall Street Journal, 2002 economics Nobel laureate Vernon L. Smith argues that US growth will resume solidly after the coronavirus crisis. Even now, “Consumers have emptied the shelves of the supermarkets and drug stores. That means these and related industries are prospering.” Yes, quarantines “will hasten the decline of companies and products that are already under competitive pressure, like brick-and-mortar department stores and movie theaters.” But that “will be more than matched by the growth of mail order, delivery, takeout and related services.” As “vaccines and treatments appear, people will be ready again to spend on services, travel and hotels.” And: “The current anxiety of economic doom will surely pass along with the pandemic.”
Conservative: Nursing Homes = Petri Dishes
The coronavirus has hit nursing homes hard, notes City Journal’s Steven Malanga, in part because many are terrible at containing even normal threats like the flu. They see “tens of thousands of deaths from infectious diseases” each year, with no “public demand, for instance, that workers in these facilities be vaccinated.” Half the states don’t require such vaccinations, in part thanks to “worker opposition” led by the likes of New York’s own 1199 SEIU. Many homes also fail to train staff in basic safety measures, like identifying and isolating infected residents. Now the COVID-19 threat has many “demanding the protective gear that they once ignored or rarely used” and “finally understanding the price of failing to train staff in infectious-disease protocols.”
Culture beat: Rogan’s Telling Disdain for Biden
The Democratic National Committee should take podcast host Joe Rogan’s vow to vote for President Trump over Joe Biden as a “warning,” advises Becket Adams at The Washington Examiner. If someone like Rogan — “who has a massive audience” and is largely apolitical, though he endorsed Bernie Sanders — won’t back Biden and might even support Trump, then Democrats “may be in for a world of hurt.” The party has “essentially made us all morons with the Joe Biden thing,” sighed Rogan. “I can’t vote for that guy . . . I’d rather vote for Trump.” A YouTube video of Rogan’s comments posted April 3 quickly drew 2.2 million hits. If Dems aren’t worried about a “lack of enthusiasm” for Biden, “Rogan’s flip should change that.”
Pandemic watch: How Models Make Mayhem
“In three decades of using computer models, seldom have I seen them accurately project ultimate outcomes,” reports international banker Alan Beard in The Hill. That’s not the point: “Their real value is determining” how “possible changes in the inputs” can affect outcomes. Unfortunately, coronavirus “hysteria” has been fed by “similar sophisticated healthcare computer models, most notably the Imperial College’s doomsday predictions” of up to 500,000 British and over 2 million US deaths. In response to government action, “the projections were abruptly revised down” to fewer than 20,000 and 200,000 deaths. A “superficial, agenda-driven press, which universally reports on outcomes from these imperfect tools as ‘settled science,’ inevitably does a disservice” in its “effort to generate news and affect government policy.” Lesson to be learned: “Coronavirus forecasting is a cautionary tale to reporters who easily confuse what is science and what is conjecture.”
Iconoclast: The Real Mask Madness
“If nothing else,” coronavirus has given do-it-yourself addicts something else to be self-satisfied about: homemade face masks, snarks Matthew Walther at The Week. But: “No one cares how quaint and interesting you think the piece of cloth meant to protect you from a disease is, okay?” What, he asks, about the experts’ flip-flop? Until April 1, “it was universally acknowledged that wearing masks would not protect you or anyone else from the coronavirus pandemic” — now we’re told the reverse. “This propaganda campaign should never have been conducted in the first place. It is one thing to debate what should be empirical questions, such as the efficacy of wearing protective equipment in an attempt to forestall the spread of viral infections; it is another for people to bang on about whatever the latest current corona wisdom is.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
