Wednesday, March 11, 2020

Steve Sailer: How to Stop the Coronavirus Epidemic

In TAKIMAG Steve Sailer calls upon the Trump Administration to replace a containment strategy with a victory strategy:

Physicist and evolutionary theorist Gregory Cochran changed his mind on this subject in a conversation with me on Monday. Cochran had long been advocating flattening the curve as the proper target, but he realized:
But this is the wrong idea. You have to get R0 down close to 1.0 (from around 3.0) in order to really slow the growth—ordinary influenza has an R0 of around 1.3 and it grows way too rapidly.
Don’t aim at getting close to 1.0: aim at getting below. Basically, the region of parameter space that would correspond to “flattening the curve” is tiny, and 90% of the way to a clear win.

In other words, the effort it takes to flatten the curve is almost as great as it takes to win outright.
No longer should the goal be a well-played defeat. As Cochran sums up by quoting Douglas MacArthur:
There is no substitute for victory.
This would require massive sacrifice, although perhaps not quite on the scale of the Chinese lockdown because we have more square feet in our homes, more private cars, and less reliance on public transportation. But, at least there’s now a worthy goal for what all the pain would be for: victory.
The new goal is not to lose more slowly to the virus, but to conquer it.
Which of the 2020 candidates will embrace winning?
Read the whole thing at: https://www.takimag.com/article/crushing-the-coronavirus-curve/