Recently, President Trump showed the world his novel interpretation of cause and effect when he told the world that more testing for COVID-19 results in more cases:

I don’t kid. Let me just tell you—let me make it clear: We have got the greatest testing program anywhere in the world. We test better than anybody in the world. Our tests are the best in the world, and we have the most of them…

By having more tests, we find more cases. We did 25-plus—25 million tests. Think of that: 25 million. If you look at other countries, they did 1 million, 2 million, 3 million. Big countries. We did 25 million. Way more by double, triple, quadruple any other country. Therefore, with tests, we’re going to have more cases. By having more cases, it sounds bad, but actually what it is, is we’re finding people. Many of those people aren’t sick or very little. You know, they may be young people.

But what’s happened is, because of all of the cases that we find, we have a very low mortality rate, just about the best in the world. So that’s the advantage to the testing, along with other things. But just remember this: The reason we have more cases than other countries is because our testing is so much.

Now it’s understood in physics—not that President Trump is a physicist—that by observing a phenomena we can change the state of phenomena itself. The temperature of a saucepan of water changes, for example, the moment a thermometer is inserted into the pan. Not much to be sure, but changes nevertheless.

But the point of President Trump is different. The President concludes that testing causes cases; ‘The reason we have more cases than other countries is because our testing is so much.’

A similar understanding of cause and effect would have nations solve the problem of global warming by banning thermometers.