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How many alligators do you see? Okay, how many are there in the world? Give up? You should.
A few decades ago, a wildlife magazine for which I was a contributing editor summoned me with great excitement to send me on a landmark assignment. I was to go to Florida and write a piece on the delisting of the American Alligator from the federal endangered species list. It was the first animal to be delisted, and a rare success for the entire conservation movement. I was an intrepid correspondent, and never declined a chance to go to Florida on an expense account in February, and so off I went. The story would grace the cover of the next issue.
Except the story did not survive the first five minutes of my meeting with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation experts at Lake Okeechobee.
What happened, they explained to me, was that over the decade or so the alligator had been listed as endangered, the ability of wildlife managers to estimate the size of the alligator population had changed dramatically. The emergence of such things as satellite imagery, GPS tracking, remote cameras and computer modelling had drastically improved the quality of their data. Allow me to paraphrase the punch line they then delivered:
“We are highly confident of our estimate of the current alligator population of Florida. And if it is correct, given the reproductive rate of alligators, it is mathematically impossible for the population to have been as low as claimed when it was listed as endangered.” Holy crap. The alligator had not recovered, it had never been endangered.
Which I thought was a pretty interesting story. My editors were not amused. Other publications were trumpeting the triumph of conservation, why could I not get on board? Because, I said, it’s not true. I didn’t write for them very much longer, and while I did I was known as the guy who went out to cover the story of a lifetime and came back with a piece on statistical analysis.
I tell this story now because I hear its echoes in the caterwauling going on about the Coronavirus. Here are some of them:
- We don’t know how many alligators there are in Florida, or how many people have died from COVID-19, or how many people have contracted it. We have estimates that vary with the quality of the people doing the estimating and the equipment they have available, and vary over time as knowledge accumulates.
- News editors often buy into a narrative, then select reporters and stories that fit the narrative, rather than seeking the facts and reporting them. If you want to succeed as a reporter, you have to figure out what narratives your editors like, and play them like violins. Can you beat them? Well, if you Google “alligators endangered species” you will get about 700,000 results, and almost every one touts the miraculous recovery and delisting. That’s their story and they’re sticking to it.
- The current mantra about COVID-19 is that if we can just do enough testing we can get control of it. Yes, and if we could meet personally every alligator in Florida then we would know for sure how many there are, and how they’re doing. There will never be enough testing. And the testing isn’t going to be much help because of the things we don’t know and don’t have: we don’t know if contracting the disease conveys immunity; we don’t have a treatment; and we don’t have a vaccine.
- Trump, and news editors, are not the only ones who spend the majority of their time living in la-la land. Offer the coddled American a nice comfy narrative — “it’s like the flu,” “it’ll be gone by April,” “it only kills people already on their last legs,” and “the cure can’t be worse than the disease, open America back up” — and we’ll buy it, every time.
So I give up. We saved the alligator. You’re welcome.
Your article recalls two universal falsehoods: ‘Freedom of the press’ and ‘Numbers don’t lie’.
Several years ago I wrote for a local liberal rag. In one article I pointed out the emerging problems of an older downtown neighborhood: over-gentrification, traditional establishments being forced out by exorbitant rent increases, bla, bla, bla. It was your standard hip-leftist schpiel. My editor nixed the piece, “we have several advertisers down there”, was her rationale. I rewrote the article. The money wasn’t very good. But it WAS money…to paraphrase the NYT, ‘All the news that’s fit to sell’, I guess.
The numbers thing is a bit more complex. Briefly, numbers DO lie, and routinely so. Anyone who’s been to an automobile dealership will attest to this. But what’s more, people tend to believe what is written more readily than what is spoken. Even Jesus gave gravitas to his preaching by prefacing his sermons with “it is written”.
Likewise, numbers, because of their inherently definitive nature (one is always one, two is always two, etc…) seem to carry additional weight when set down in clay, stone, papyrus, paper or pixels. The first writers, after all, were accountants* not poets, priests or potentates. The written number has enormous power; hence, our visceral fear of the IRS…Why do we manipulate numbers the way we do? – ‘All the numbers that are fit to sell’ I guess.
Your dilemma surrounding the alligator count seems to be the result of an unfortunate confluence of these two great falsehoods.
*Prehistoric hunters carved notches into sticks, antlers, ivory and bones, ostensibly to keep a numerical record of their successes – no doubt an early form of accounting!
I’m amused by the “data” that shows many(!?) people who reportedly died from Covid-19 actually died from some other condition which their C-19 merely “complicated.” Moreover, it’s also darkly humorous that NPR today reported that “perhaps” some of the people who were put on ventilators might have had that process/treatment as a “contributing” factor to their demise. As usual, incompetence and determined obfuscation rule the day in the supremely paramount search for more motherf’kn’ money, all other priorities rescinded.
That reminds me: ran over a morbidly obese woman the other day. Due to her extra girth, she moved far too slowly to avoid my vehicle– not speeding, btw. Turns out, according to her much fleeter-of-foot friend, the woman in question also had diabetes and a heart condition. Needless to say, she died on the spot. When the police showed up, I explained the situation, “But, officer, if she hadn’t been so obese, and hadn’t needed to stop to take a breath 1/3 of the way through, she would have made it across before I killed her. Besides, given her other co-morbidities, she probably would have died soon anyway.” Seeing the infallible logic of my argument, they ascribed the death to complications due to obesity and let me go.
Anyway, moral of the story, obviously I could not agree with you more!
The 2 big down-playing memes I see are,”it’s no worse than the flu” & “it mostly kills the old & those with preexisting conditions”.
Fine, but if you want to subtract the deaths of old & those with preexisting conditions from the Covid death toll then you need to subtract the deaths of old & those with preexisting conditions from the seasonal flu death toll for an accurate comparison. None of the down-players have done this. Why not? Because none of them are interested in an accurate comparison of Covid vs seasonal flu. Conflating writ large.
A bit of good here and a bit there. Actually everyone seems to have a bit of the puzzle. The RT-PCR so called test that the developer was adamant was never a diagnostic ‘test’, but a research tool, is not even required to call a death as due Covis19.Read the WHO guidlines and then the country ones and the data is instantly bogus. So if that data is bogus, How many allegators are there…? We the unsuspecting public are being played for fools.So look behind the magician’s curtain and see if you can see the long game.
So there may be a virus that is called Covid19, it may be killing some but will we all die from it? No so why the complete collapse of a society, worldwide? Worse than seasonal Flu? No so why are we isolating and playing the game of the masters? Maybe we should wake up and see the reality.
Here are some of the ways I understand COVID-19 (the name for the disease, not the virus) differs from seasonal flu: it is at least 10 and perhaps 20 times more lethal; because it is new, no one on earth has any immunity to it, possibly including people who have been infected and recovered (we don’t know that yet) whereas a great majority of people have either acquired immunity to, or vaccination for, the flu; a dismaying number of people infected with COVID-19 have no symptoms for up to 15 days, during which time they unknowingly transmit the infection to friends and relatives; many patients with advanced symptoms, who are actually hospitalized, have no fever, making the most commonly used screening method ineffective; many recovered patients have permanent damage to lungs, brain, kidneys and other organs; and a significant number of younger people with the disease suffer fatal strokes just as they seem to be recovering. We have been played for fools by a lot of powerful people and institutions, but perhaps not in this case.
Worse than the seasonal flu?
Oh hell ya. Look at the total deaths from all causes by week i.e. excess mortality.
https://www.ft.com/graphics
or
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJVXwzF93Qc
at about the 6:50 minute mark
Some people who die of sars2 are free of the virus. Some people who have the virus are free of symptoms.
Something else is going on here. There is a virus, but putting aside that many of the deaths are iatrogenic, there also seems to be a blood-related disorder that is disabling or fatal, and quite rare. Coronaviruses are respiratory diseases. There must be a co-factor.
Possible co-factors are:
Contamination: meds, shots, water, air, foodstuffs, exogenous chemicals, etc.
Another as yet unnamed disease.
Deliberate infection (think Twelve Monkeys), Aum Shinrikyo in Japan. (yeah, I know it’s far out there)
Greed-induced, power-hungry, panic-mongering public relations campaigns.
Nocebo effect.
Others?
I agree people don’t want to see the real numbers, and many are doing a bang-up job of making sure they don’t emerge. The testing situation is a tragedy of errors.
I’m not sure about your comparison with alligators- I suspect when this is all over (if it ever ends, of course; we have set in motion a future which would dismay even the darkest dystopian) we will see there were so many uncounted cases (alligators) that the collective WE were never truly endangered.
Our worldwide focus is on death. If preventing death is all we care about, we are going to fail miserably, and we will be miserable as we fail.
In the meantime, sweet life is a wistful memory many can only see outside a grimy window.
If I told you you could live to be a hundred, but you would never touch another person, be touched only by someone in a hazmat suit, see people only on a tiny screen, and never be free to move about without permission…would you take that offer?
The times have mandated that we all become Howard Hughes without the $$$.
Some cultures will emerge from this and look back on it all and say it was the Age of Fear.
This pandemic is a spit in the ocean compared to plagues of the past. I guess that’s why it was called “a live exercise”.
Just to be clear: I did not compare coronavirus to alligators, I compared COUNTING coronavirus patients to counting alligators.
You are right on!
Okay- …(“like uncounted alligators”)
“…the collective WE (like the collective of all alligators) were never really endangered.
What I see is a mega-industrial-sized worldwide response to a common human condition- contagious disease. The waste product is fear.
It would have been nice to think that the raw materials for this new medical/political industry- data- would have been better refined.
When this industry dies, the rusting, toxic, decrepit machinery will haunt the landscape for a very long time.
By the way, I am always delighted to see when you have a new post.
OK, apparently I’m the only one contributing to the comments section who has actually had Covid-19.
So this is the deal: I caught it in early March from a friend who had been ill for several weeks. He had been misdiagnosed as having emphysema, and had even been prescribed a portable oxygen set-up. He vacated to Florida for three weeks and returned fit as a fiddle…too late for me; I already had the bug.
The First thig to go was my digestion – alternating mild bouts of diarrhea and constipation – followed by joint pain and low-grade fever. Weakness and fatigue were more or less ever-present. The real problem, though, was in the lungs. Tightness much of the time accented by horrifying episodes of a phenomenon akin to sleep apnea…Imagine waking up in the middle of the night unable to breath!
The worst symptoms lasted for a couple of weeks. But even as I seemed to recover, they returned periodically – even to this day – but not in their initial severity.
This Covid shit is not like the flu. It’s scary as hell – like something from outer space.
Wow. I am thankful you got through that. Thanks for sharing the information.
Reality. Thanks for showing up.