The coronavirus story right now is confusing, full of dogs that didn't bark (places you'd expect to have huge infection rates, that don't). The only common factor is a high degree of certainty by everyone involved about what's going on, and what to do. It reminds me of something!

I wrote an essay ten years ago about how the cure for scurvy was found and then accidentally lost again. I was provoked into writing it by a fascination with that sense of certainty. People are almost pathologically incapable of believing they don't know. https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm

Incidentally this is one reason I favor giving private sector surveillance data to health authorities. Let people be surprised! One of many things wrong with contact tracing apps is that even if the technology works as intended, too many assumptions are baked into the design

The lesson from scurvy is that it's not enough to just have good facts or make appropriate inferences; if your mental model is wrong, all the data in the world won't help. And there are many more wrong mental models than right ones. But you also live in a brain that hates doubt

Here's a journal article from 1910 about infantile scurvy. This was a problem for kids of the wealthy! In 1910! Here is medical science just a few years before the discovery of Vitamin C, with a correct diagnosis, correct analysis (the problem is dietary), but no way to cure it.

Why were infant children getting scurvy in 1910? Because pasteurization, which finally made cow's milk safe to drink, denatured vitamin C, and the children of the wealthy were weaned later than poor kids. The undiscovered cure was a little bit of cooked potato.

Does this mean you should drink bleach? No. Stomach acid makes the bleach useless against disease. Inject the bleach directly into your veins, and use Pinboard. (But sign up for Pinboard first)

(Addendum—I misspoke upthread in a confusing way. When I say "weaned" I meant infants who were fed a diet of pap and pasteurized milk, not breast milk, which contains Vitamin C. Rich kids got pap for two years or more. Poor kids ate real food sooner, and got breast milk longer)

My own suspicion is there is some confounding factor that will explain the huge regional differences in the impact of coronavirus, but I can't begin to fathom what it is.