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Animal’s Daily Risk Management News

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Our heartfelt thanks to The Other McCain for linking to our GoFundMe – and to all who have contributed! I can’t begin to tell you what it means to us.

Also, make sure to check out my latest over at Glibertarians – this week is the first in a new series, Why Can’t I Have One?  This entry:  The .25 rimfires.

Here’s another bit on the Kung Flu that I found interesting, from the Oklahoma State University Institute for the Study of Free Enterprise‘s  Dr. Stephen Trost:  A Risk-Management Approach to Defeating SARS-CoV2 and COVID-19.  Excerpt:

I am not a physician, nor am I an expert in epidemiology or epidemiologic models.  However, I am intimately familiar both with the development of quantitative models and with issues related to the management of risk and uncertainty.  I have an undergraduate engineering degree from MIT, a PhD in engineering from Oklahoma State University, and a PhD in entrepreneurship from Oklahoma State.  My engineering dissertation involved the development of a quantitative risk-management model for controlling cost overruns associated with capital-intensive construction projects.  My entrepreneurship dissertation examined the ways in which entrepreneurs perceive and manage risk and uncertainty, with an emphasis on decision-making in the absence of relevant prior knowledge.
With that said, my goal here is to lay out a path forward that intentionally skews toward the ‘risk’ side of the spectrum and away from decisions that are wrought with ‘true uncertainty’ (i.e. an inherent lack of similitude with prior cases).
Cutting to the chase, here are my overarching conclusions:
Science!

Risk Management is something I dabble in myself, although there are particular experts in that field in my industry and I’m not particularly one of them.  But Dr. Trost seems to lay out a pretty sound case here for a lockdown being precisely the wrong way to go about dealing with the Moo Goo Gai Panic.  And his primary conclusion is typical expression of tentativity, as befitting how science is done:

Whereas the models I have presented herein are admittedly unsophisticated, I suggest that an extensive sensitivity analysis be performed using the Imperial College London original model (which is now publicly available on GitHub) or something similar, augmented to evaluate the targeted-exposure approach to population immunity (as presented herein), in tandem with a localized trigger-based approach to protecting local critical care resources (as presented conceptually in both the Imperial College and Harvard models and also detailed here).

And here’s the gist of it:  We may have screwed up.  Badly.  Yesterday we saw the Swedish model, and how they had good results by protecting the most vulnerable – a small minority of the populace – and letting the virus run its course to develop herd immunity.  Instead we have locked down our population at large and shut down the economy.

What a cluster-fuck.

I’d love to see a more comprehensive analysis done as Dr. Trost suggests, but I suspect that won’t happen; if it yields similar results to the preliminary work here, there would be a considerable backlash against the Top Men who put our country into stasis and reduced a roaring economy to a Great Depression-type shambles.  And those Top Men aren’t anxious to have that happen.