https://mailchi.mp/tomwoods/distancing?e=06bc172bc3
I find it hard to believe myself.
But on Twitter I saw what the data looks like graphically, and, well, it's not what they're telling us on TV.
We have Google mobility data now, so we can see if people's mobility levels have any connection to COVID deaths per million.
So why not plot these numbers for all 50 states and look at them?
Do you see a relationship between mobility (social contact score) and deaths per million in that chart? Are the dots not rather all over the place?
Let's look now at the shelter-in-place policy. Does increased time at home correlate with fewer deaths per million?
If anything, this chart shows the opposite.
We all know that correlation doesn't prove causation. But is it plausible to have causation without correlation?
Now could it be a case of harder-hit places having more extreme social-distancing responses? The person who plotted the numbers considered this:
"Many have posited that this inverse relationship is driven by worse outbreaks driving stronger distancing reactions. I suspected this, too. so I tested it. I ran US state case counts to see if higher counts drove stricter policy.
"Nope."
"This result," he adds, "holds all over the world and in every component data series there as well."
If we had to choose a date, social distancing can be said to have begun in earnest on March 15, when the "social interaction score" went negative for the first time.
Two weeks later, March 29, was when peak distancing response was reached, and it continued fairly consistently at that level for about four weeks.
Average the social-distancing response on March 29 for the states that got worse and the states that got better, and....
...the result is exactly the same. You have to go down to four decimal places to detect any difference at all.
The CDC itself admitted earlier that "the effectiveness of pandemic mitigation strategies will erode rapidly as the cumulative illness rate prior to implementation climbs above 1 percent of the population in an affected area."
Since we were surely past that level of disease prevalence in major American cities by then, could this all have been a huge exercise in political theater, accomplishing nothing?
If we had real reporters asking real questions, maybe we'd be getting somewhere.
What we most certainly do have, however, are a bunch of smart, genial people who can discuss important topics without accusing anyone of being a grandma murderer.
Be honest with yourself: that sounds like paradise right about now, does it not?
It's the Tom Woods Show Elite, and I look forward to welcoming you there via this link:
http://www.SupportingListeners.com
Tom Woods