i want to be clear....

my skepticism about the virus, and criticism towards public health measures, isn't rooted in a political persuasion. i'm not sitting here hoping that people get sick, and if i thought we could have stamped the virus out, i would have supported it.

but, my analysis of the situation was that the virus would not be suppressed. this was based on what i was able to gather about the contagiousness of the virus, combined with what kind of measures could be realistically put in place; i pointed out that the social distancing thing was really just a ridiculous joke in terms of keeping people apart from each other, and that the laboratory assumptions put in place in these studies around mask use did not reflect the realities of people fidgeting with masks, putting them in their pockets, accepting them from centralized locations that are touched and breathed on by dozens or hundreds of people, etc.

i legitimately expected these measures to fail - not because i wanted them to, but because a sober analysis concluded that they just would. and, if you listen to the public health experts, it was clear that they all knew that, they were just reacting out of desperation, to try to solve something they didn't know how to deal with.

see, here is where i maybe get political, but i'd challenge somebody to negate this phrase and argue it: i don't think it's the role of government to take wild guesses on policy and hope it works, but rather that it is the role of government to look at the data through sober, critical filters and make the clearest deductions from it possible. if government had done that, if it had truly followed the science rather than base it's policy on faith and hope, then it would have concluded that it should have brought in policies to mitigate the eventual spread, rather than policies to stop it from spreading.

and, then, what does mitigation mean? it means protecting the elderly and weak, and trying to keep the spread within communities that have the highest chances of fighting it off. something we've learned is that the spread of the virus comes down substantively at around 20% exposure. while the measurements we've observed around that magic number of 20% represent a broad cross-section of the population that is at least partly demographically representative of the population as a whole, the lesson from that observation is that the contagiousness of the virus decreases to a manageable level when you can provide immunity to as little as one out of five possible spreaders. policy should then be shaped around building in immunity in the much greater than 20% of the population that is at least risk of mortality.

at this stage in the pandemic, opening the universities is probably the best thing they can do.

but, if you're old, stay inside and away from students during september, please.