Hi again Chris. You missed my point about the question.
First, it had just 2 polar choices of response. One side is “open quickly and face increased risk to the health”, the other says “protect health at the expense of the economy”. There is no moderate option offered.
Also, the way the question is stated it offers no upside to opening quickly. For example the answer might be quite different if the question is stated like this: “Which is closest to your view; Open the economy more quickly and save the jobs, livelihoods, homes, businesses and possibly lives of 10’s of millions of Americans or open the economy slowly even if it costs people their homes, jobs, businesses etc?”
The scientific reality of leaving the economy closed for too long is also irrefutable. The longer it is closed the more damage is done and the probability of recovery is diminished. Already businesses and jobs have been lost that will never come back. Because of the way the question is posed the outcome is biased. This is especially true of highly polarized questions. In reality the solution is somewhere in the middle, something the poll did not allow for or not consider meaningful to it’s intended purpose(s).
The idea that the faster we open the economy the faster the disease will spread assumes a lot. That suggests that if we never open there would never be spread. This idea ignores the base line activity. You can not suggest a direct connection that is that absolute. It is unknown what the continued spread rate will be with the economy shut down as it is. (A lot of people did not shelter in place, but rather partied in the streets.) The fact is, even with the economy shut down the disease continued to spread because spread was not as closely tied to the economy as was proposed and rather mostly tied to human behavior. So, we have no idea how much faster it might spread with people able to go back to works or their businesses and practice the safety protocols we all know are needed (distancing, masks, hand washing, etc.). We should not assume that spread will be greater than current baseline. In reality there will likely be some spread no matter which course we pursue. How much more spread opening the economy would represent is unknown and in fact may not be much more than current baseline.
Thus, I don’t deny all polls as meaningless. But I do know that how questions are formed can play to the subconscious risk/benefit analysis of human behavior, and how polls with extremely polar single choice options are the most easy used to manipulate outcomes. That’s why most good polls ask the same question from several different perspectives repeatedly in order to try to get a truly clear picture.
The polls in March of 2015 showed that just about any Democrat, or Republican, could have beat Trump as well. That remained the poll position right up to the last hours of the November election. Shocked a lot of people, including those that spent $ millions for said polls.
Finally, I don’t have a personal issue with Joe, or at least not any more than I have with most politicians. But having spent years studying human biochemistry and behavior, I am pretty good at identifying a stutter from the more circular-thinking episodes of cognitive decline. I watched it in my own father. A very smart nuclear engineer who was not capable of doing his previous job when he was in his late 70’s, and he would have been the first one to admit it. It’s called aging. Take a close look at Joe again when you get a chance. Not at the times of clarity, but at the gaffs. At those times when he twists words, juxtaposes simple thoughts or completely loses track of the thought path. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, but it is a fact of age-related cognitive decline.
I gather you think I’m a Conservative. Well, I was once a Democrat, and I did not vote for Trump in 2016.
As for believing science, I spent a good part of my life amassing and analyzing scientific data. I have watched science walk a very crooked path in search of answers, which is the way it should be. There have been many tightly held “scientific facts” that have fallen by the wayside of exploration and investigation along the way. A good recent example might be Dr. Fauci. A smart and highly respected guys who, in an apparent effort to answer everyone questions and concerns seems to tailor his responses to fit the narrative of the questioner. Masks are good, masks are bad. Social distancing works, it doesn’t work. The CDC is in the same boat. First the SARS CoV 2 virus is highly contagious and easily transmittable human to human, even on inanimate surfaces (having people washing their mail) and then (most recently) it it actually not easily transmitted human to human (without direct contact) and transmission on inanimate surfaces is unlikely.
The thing is science is not an exact science. It is often speculative based on assumptions, presumptions and “intuition” that are often grounded in some bias. The need for two very prestigious scientific journals (The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine) to retract and withdraw two highly visible article publications that caused doctors and medical practitioners to misguide patients and pharmacists about hydroxychloroquine / HCQ (imagine that) being connected to heart problems…which was not true… is an example. HCQ became a politically charged issue when Trump suggested it might make a contribution to Covid 19 patient care. Since that time his political opponents and their believers have done all they can to assail him over it. You might ask how two such prestigious journals, known for their hyper-strict peer-review gauntlets and extensive pre-publication time lines could have allowed this to happen. The answer is that they rushed to judgement and thus publication because the articles in question fit the narrative they had been espousing for some time. They just couldn’t wait to show Trump up. That sort of compromise of their responsibility to the scientific community and the people of the world should not be easily forgiven. Sadly, at least for the Lancet, this was not the first time. I would suggest that everyone would be well served to not assume everything science produces is a scientific fact and not textured by editorial opinion or political bias.
Your closing reference to epidemiology suggest you are perhaps a practitioner or student of that observational science. I agree that epidemiology offers many guide posts in our search for knowing, but unto itself draws no definitive conclusions. You seem a thinker though and that’s good enough for me.
