Pushing Back on Lars

Lars Larson is a great resource to the Pacific Northwest. He does good and very helpful work on a regular basis. But it is important for us to push back some on his recent comments on the corona virus. A few weeks back, he was saying the CV is 30 to 50 times more deadly than the flu. Now he is saying it is at least ten times more deadly. He was wrong about the 30-50 number, and he may well be wrong about the 10x figure as well.

Two medical doctors from Stanford University co-authored a piece in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, March 25. Because it is behind a pay wall, you can’t read it in full unless you are a subscriber. In Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say? they present evidence that CV might actually be ten times LESS deadly than the flu. There are other studies that seem to be pointing in the same direction.

The reality is that we won’t know the mortality rate until we know how many people have been infected. Testing that will show the rate of infection will be available soon.

Lars seems to be using worst case scenarios in his reporting on CV’s mortality rate. He should be reporting on all the various mortality rate estimates. We think this would produce a bit more balance to Lars’ repeated efforts to get the State to reduce our liberties.

There are real world consequences to this. We live in a state governed by people who are dedicated to more and more control over our lives. We rely on people like Lars to help us push back on this, not to encourage it. Liberty exists in community, and the state has definite responsibilities in the midst of a public health crisis. But we need to know the actual magnitude of the crisis as we determine the legitimacy of ceding over control.

We are not calling for less data from Lars, but for more.