“We Know It Works”

How many times have you heard/said those words about the Stay at Home orders, the shutdowns, the business closures? “The projections may have been wrong, but we do know the Stay at Home orders work.”

I was just told that yesterday by my state representative. It’s just accepted as prima facie. Much like “It’s got what plants crave” was the standard paradigmatic response in the movie Idiocracy to anyone who wondered if plants actually need water rather than a power drink.

But is it true? Do we actually have any data that proves that these stay at home orders have been necessary or effective? Where would we start to find such info? Well, we could look at various countries that haven’t enacted state-sanctioned shutdowns. And there the data seems to say there is little difference. We could also consider the handful of states that are still letting their citizens live life and work… Arkansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas. And none of those have experienced an explosion of either cases or deaths due to the Wuhan Virus… despite the experts’ constant claims that it’s going to happen any day now. Or we could look at the timeline of state shutdowns, which shows the early responders currently tend to have the worst situations.

This in-depth analysis is really helpful in making my point.

So maybe we should question the validity of the assumption that the shutdowns are working. The same people who wrongly predicted that the virus was going to explode in this country – even with a mass shut down – are the ones who claim the quarantine is now working. That should make us skeptical.