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| My letter published today in the South China Morning Post Click to enlarge and clarify |
Same day, today, front page is about how our HK Marathon has been cancelled! As well as the November Trailwalker. Oh dear. This is indeed depressing — even last year the Marathon went ahead. As I report in my letter above, Oz has been playing football in front of crowds up to 100,000 for months with no superspreader events. Here and scroll down.
Commenters are aghast. Some say that it’s Xi Jinping laying down the law to us. I’m not so sure, given that we’re already hermetically sealed off from the mainland. Our bureaucrats are quite capable themselves of making this lily-livered decision. Pusillanimous jerks.
BTW, there’s debate in government between (a) top officials and (b) their nominated “experts”: about whether Omicron is much more deadly than influenza, the views of (a) or only as deadly as the flu, the views of (b).
Top official Secretary of Health Lo Chung-mau: claims Covid is way more deadly than the flu — and therefore we need to “remain cautious”, etc. He comes to this conclusion by measuring the total deaths during the whole pandemic by the total infections. The experts note that Omicron death rates are way lower and that it’s more relevant to look at recent deaths vs recent infections.
Lo retorts: this is the fallacy of “range selection”. Which is often true: you can manipulate range, for example, to make it look like global temperatures are going up, down or sideways, depending on which range you choose. Agreed. [*] But this is a pandemic, not a long-term temperature series; infection rates and death rates have dropped sharply, and I think the argument is with (b) the experts. They say, given recent lower numbers, the death rates — the Infection Fatality Rate — is more like 0.098%. Which makes it more like the flu at 0.1%. That’s infectious disease experts talking, not me.
Given all that, it’s clear that the likes of Lo et.al. with their super-cautious mindsets are able, all on their own, to keep us locked down. We don’t need a Xi to put us in jail.
Meantime, a rather different headline in today’s paper: “Singapore is roaring back, with a series of high-profile events”.
[*] ADDED. Range fallacy example. (A) is long-term trend, which is UP. (B) is choosing a different range, trend DOWN. Not all cases are so obvious. Range choice can be put to all sorts of mischief.
