Today, it would appear that everyone in the world is making their plans based on data from the China model in dealing with COVID-19. But there are two problems with this universal approach:
1. The Chinese Communist Party is lying and withholding data; and
2. There is therefore little or no reliable Chinese data.
Under these conditions, the world cannot continue to base global and country planning on numbers and timetables that are, at best – if we are to be generous – fictitious.
Business and political leaders, heads of family, and concerned individuals are all currently stymied by a lack of information, and therefore an inability to properly plan.
In short, while all are obsessing over the detailed arguments about R0 (see “SNS: It Isn’t Just the Virus: Financial Impacts of R0,” 2/7/20), mortality rates, and the number of ACE2 sites carried by Asian vs. non-Asian victims, they really just have one overriding question:
What Happens Next?
In this week’s discussion, I’ll do my best to provide objective answers that are useful for planning and based upon limited, but trustworthy, data.
And that brings up the correlative part of our title for the week. I realized long ago that there’s no meaning to the concept of Trust without also defining its context. Trust to do what? As we’ll see in this discussion, one of the primary effects of C-19 on the human world has been a rapid return to the questions of Who do you trust, and to do what? For some indefinable group of people, the result is, literally, deadly serious.
