You must not be a stats guy.
First, your article blatantly confuses correlation with causation. It refers to NY, NJ, MA, DC and MI to imply that lockdowns cause outbreaks. It seems more likely that the states with the worst March outbreaks adopted the harshest April lowdowns.
Second, the claim that CA had the biggest summer flare up is only valid if you ignore population size. What kind of analyst doesn’t immediately correct for population size before saying anything?
What your stats prove is that a significant portion of the variance is caused by something other than date of opening. Well, yes. We knew that. A significant portion of the variance was caused by re-introduction of sick patients into nursing homes, among other things.
Now remove the March outliers and adjust for population size like a good little mathmatician and redo your homework.
Yeesh. Next you’re going to accuse someone else of being bad with numbers.
Oh, this is going to be fun.
Don’t omit that the “scientist”/author is actually a hedge-funder and charlatan.
In 2008, Luskin claimed in an op-ed article that the economy was doing super awesome, and that the Obama campaign was lying about problems in the economy to discredit John McCain. It was intended to be Luskin’s big piece de resistance, and to expose his (in his own mind) mortal enemy as a sham, nobel laureate in economics Paul Krugman. The title of the op ed was “Quit Doling Out That Bad Economy Line.”
Literally one day later, however, Lehman Brothers filed for the largest bankruptcy in US history and, two days after that, the stock markets imploded “thus discrediting every prediction he made in his editorial”, including the part where he said "…anyone who says we're in a recession, or heading into one—especially the worst one since the Great Depression—is making up his own private definition of recession.” Oops.
Foreign Policy named Luskin's prediction in its list of "The 10 Worst Predictions for 2008" He has also been singled out for "some of the worst, money losing commentary of the past few years” and frequently referred to by Brad DeLongas as "the Stupidest Man Alive".
It makes you wonder what a hedge funder, whose livelihood depends on people believing everything is great, might stand to gain by repeatedly claiming that everything is perfectly fine and everyone should just get back to work. Any thoughts? Any real science?
