Governor DeWine announced today that school will be out starting Monday — I guess I understand the need for some logistical wrangling, but it seems a bit odd to say “there’s a public health emergency that requires us to close down all of the schools …. next week”. I wonder how many people will be absent for the rest of the week. It seems like — if there’s enough spread to require schools to be closed, we shouldn’t be going in tomorrow.
I used to want to work in the military intelligence field — data analysis, creating response playbooks. As a result, I learned the importance of taking the context of a report into consideration. Some counties have independent media — something bad happens in the USA, someone is bound to write about it. Now there are avenues for suppressing information — some content that will compromise national security is going to have more trouble getting out there than speculation on corporate fraud committed by a president. But other countries don’t. When I was studying history and poli sci, it was Russia that was a concern. And Russian media publications are going to provide state approved news. For something really bad to hit the Russian news, it’s going to be impossible to hide. Think Chernobyl — they’re measuring fallout in Finland. Everyone knows something happened.
And that’s why I get a bad feeling when China reporting “a cluster of pneumonia cases” — a stock the pantry, batten your hatches bad feeling.
