10% of the people tested got the virus. 1.5% of those who got the virus, needed hospitalization. One-half of one percent of those who got the virus, died from it. 80% of the deaths are in nursing homes. No child has died from it.The computer model estimates from the press conference in March, when the Governor imposed the lock down, were that 2.5 million Minnesotans would get it, of all ages, from 6 months to 91 years; that 15% of those who get it would require hospitalization; 5% of them would require ICU care; 1% would die.Testing proves the computer model was wrong. Can we abandon the model, now? Focus our efforts on those who need them, liberate the rest to go back to work so we can pay for it all?Joe Doakes
I’m not going to say “nothing about Govenor Walz’s response has anything to do with public health.
But nearly every part of the response – especially last week’s luke-warm reopening announcement – is driven by political expedience.
In this case, most notably, as defiance of the state of emergency burgeons, the expedience of appearing to still be in charge.
All models are wrong, though some are useful. It’s an old saying,
But the state’s Covid model, just like climate models, is always wrong in the same direction.
It’s like.
Monday: The weather guy says, “It’s gonna rain.” But not a drop falls.
Tuesday: The weather guy says, “It’s gonna rain.” But not a drop falls.
Wednesday: The weather guy says, “It’s gonna rain.” But not a drop falls.
Thursday: The weather guy says, “It’s gonna rain.” But not a drop falls.
Friday: The weather guy says, “It’s gonna rain.” But not a drop falls.
Saturday: The weather guy says, “It’s gonna rain.” But not a drop falls.
Sunday: The weather guy says, “It’s gonna rain.” But not a drop falls.
So you say, maybe you should adjust your model.
And he says, “I can’t, it’s science.”
The CDC adjusts its estimate of flu-related deaths after each ‘flu season’ in an attempt to account for the inevitable undercount that ‘documented cases’ will represent. That adjustment has not been and cannot be done with covid-19, in the midst of an ongoing and in some places accelerating pandemic. Add to that months without anything approaching adequate testing, and you’ve got inevitable undercounting.
Despite what the right-wing blogosphere, Trump’s shills and Fox will tell you, this is nothing like ‘a bad flu season.’ Nor are deaths the only relevant statistic. While younger people afflicted with the virus may survive it, many will become seriously ill, require hospitalization, and emerge from lengthy illness with compromised respiratory and cardiovascular systems, damaged kidneys and other chronic conditions that will affect their quality of life for years and likely shorten their lives.
It is utterly unimaginable and incomprehensible to me that a substantial number of Americans persist in the effort to downplay the magnitude of the health crisis we now face, for purely partisan political purposes. How on Earth did ‘only 100,000 deaths’ become ‘no big deal,’ much less ‘a victory’?
Downplaying the magnitude of the health crisis we now face is not being done for purely partisan political purposes. It’s being done as the result of elementary Public Policy Analysis, the sort of thing colleges are supposed to teach Government majors but rarely do.
100,000 -:- 331,000,000 = .0003. Expressed as a percentage: 0.03% Rounded to the nearest whole number: zero percent.
100,000 dead is a big number. But for a nation, zero percent dead is not a big problem, certainly not a problem that threatens the existence of the entire nation. We shouldn’t pretend it is, lest we cause an even greater danger to even more people by shutting down the economic engine that supports us all.
Math is hard. Trade-offs are hard. But that’s how grown-ups make hard choices.
You’d never know a thousand Americans are dying every day of a rampaging virus with no cure..
I don’t remember Emery saying a word about the 45,000 to 90,000 Americans who died from the H1N1B virus 2017-2018.
That is because it had no political dimension.
The dire, permanent organ damage Emery claims harms young people with covid-19 is actually a result of ARDS, the Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome that is the leading cause of death from covid-19. Young people do not get ARDS from covid-19, old people get ARDS from covid-19.
Emery is wrong. Again.
Stop spreading panic, Emery.
As the number of infections and deaths inevitably rise because people stop practicing social distancing, it is equally inevitable that Trump and his enablers will engage in further misinformation and disinformation, questioning or trying to suppress official statistics or public health experts that run counter to Trump’s sales pitch.
The point isn’t to create “alternate statistics.” It’s to create confusion, so that people say, “Yeah, maybe there aren’t as many infections and deaths as those so-called experts like Dr. Fauci say. Who knows what’s real or not.” We’re already seeing this kind of rhetoric coming from Fox News and other alt-right propaganda sources, and it will get progressively worse over the summer and fall. It’s exactly the kind of misinformation tactic used in repressive, authoritarian countries, and it will cost American lives all because Trump wants to get reelected.
Yet you are the only person on this thread who has been proven to lie about statistics, Emery.
Young people do not get permanent organ damage from a covid-19 infection. You claimed that they did, and when you were called out on it, you didn’t even bother to defend your lie.
1,000 people a day dying from a cause which has no cure? Emery, you’re looking at the wrong chart. That’s abortions and there’s an easy cure for them.
Oh, wait, my bad. 1,000 a day – that’s heart disease, for which there is no cure.
Oops, sorry, heart disease is 2,000 a day. I’m so bad at this. 1,000 a day die from cancer, for which there is no cure.
And oddly, with all those tragic deaths, no governor has shut down their state economy. It’s almost as if they were doing some sort of balancing test, weighing the Seen against the Unseen, making a decision on the overall cost-benefit ratio. Wow, what heartless villains, huh?
Think about it: An ailment we hadn’t heard of six months ago is now the No. 1 killer in America, and people are scoffing?
My Youtube feed delivers me covid-19 news from google approved sources like CNN and MSNBC.
They don’t talk about deaths (which are declining almost everywhere in the US and around the globe), they talk about the increasing number of people testing positive for covid-19. This is a natural result of doing more testing. If not one person died of covid-19 ever again, the number of people who tested positive for the virus would continue to increase every day.
Of course the lockdowners at CNN and MSNBC don’t mention this.
Trumpism is a helluva drug….
It is NOT the number one killer in America, even with the phony numbers. And the numbers are phony.
You’re posting on the wrong website. We’re not the idiots you’re looking for.
Regarding COVID diagnoses, those are down a third, deaths slightly more. So the trend is good.
Regarding #1 killer, that’s the “Standard American diet” and lack of exercise–basically metabolic syndrome–with about 690,000 deaths per year. #2 is tobacco, at about 580,000 deaths per year. So if we had our current death rate unabated, sure, COVID could end up there, but that’s not our current trend.
Other good news; CDC says that transmission from surfaces is more difficult than from airborne spit globs and such. So just like we figured out that it was unlikely to get HIV from toilet seats back in the 1980s, we’re starting to refine how COVID is transmitted.
Most Confirmed Cases 2020 was not a campaign slogan I’d expected.
Trump says the US having the most confirmed cases in the world is a “badge of honor”: “When we have a lot of cases, I don’t look at that as a bad thing, I look at that as, in a certain respect, as being a good thing. Because it means our testing is much better.”
“Coming from Fox News and other alt-right propaganda sources…”. You mean as opposed to NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, MSDNC, the NYT, the Washington Post, ect, and other far left propaganda sources? I thought so…
The nation with the most confirmed deaths to Covid-19 per capita is Belgium.
Who would have guessed that the Sofie Wilmes, the female, half Jewish prime minister of Belgium is three times worse than Trump?
The US is ninth on the list of most deaths per capita due to covid-19, between Ireland and Switzerland.
If you leave out the deaths in the locked-down liberal NE states (NY, Mass, New Jersey & Connecticut), we’d be down there with Canada and Portugal.
Emery’s delusions are growing more powerful.
MP, have you seen the Minister of Health in Belgium?
Yow! Grossly obese and suffering from obesity-related diabetes. As health minister, she does not set a good example.
From Loren’s CDC link. It’s brutal. I hope you all are enjoying coronavirus theater:
Face Masks
In our systematic review, we identified 10 RCTs that reported estimates of the effectiveness of face masks in reducing laboratory-confirmed influenza virus infections in the community from literature published during 1946–July 27, 2018. In pooled analysis, we found no significant reduction in influenza transmission with the use of face masks (RR 0.78, 95% CI 0.51–1.20; I2 = 30%, p = 0.25) (Figure 2). One study evaluated the use of masks among pilgrims from Australia during the Hajj pilgrimage and reported no major difference in the risk for laboratory-confirmed influenza virus infection in the control or mask group (33). Two studies in university settings assessed the effectiveness of face masks for primary protection by monitoring the incidence of laboratory-confirmed influenza among student hall residents for 5 months (9,10). The overall reduction in ILI or laboratory-confirmed influenza cases in the face mask group was not significant in either studies (9,10).
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0994_article
Regarding Belgium, it’s worth noting they’re one of the most obese nations in Europe. That’s something in common with the U.S. The minister of health is not the only person in significant personal danger.
I wonder whether the biggest thing we can do to stop the epidemic would be to encourage Americans to drop a few pounds, shifting millions out of the cross hairs of this particular virus. Given that the average American is at 25% fat plus, and you only need about 5% to be healthy, it would seem that there’s a lot of gain to be had by losing, so to speak. Bumping BMI down by 2 a few years back appeared to kick my glucose out of the problem range, for example–it was about a 20% reduction. Am going to try to repeat this summer.