Why are mainstream broadcast and print news operations looking for excuses to back out of Trump’s COVID news conferences?
Oh.
Yeah, dumb question.
39 thoughts on “All The Narrative That’s Fit To Print”
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All major news organizations should temporarily replace their White House reporters with medical reporters so that the daily briefing is primarily about public safety.
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Anyone think it’s weird how Walz has said it’s already too late to flatten the curve, the peak will be late June, our preparedness should be sufficient mid June, but shelter in place is only set to last until April 11? Granted I have only glanced at the news sparingly because I have 2 kids under 3 and your new ‘quarantine’ has been my life for a few years already and the news in general is overblown and depressing to watch.
“Primarily about public safety.” That’s exactly the wrong approach to public policy questions.
Liberals refuse to acknowledge that every public policy has trade-offs. Public Safety is not an absolute good, it has costs and consequences. Stop-and-frisk increased public safety by taking guns off the streets, but at a cost to innocent Black men of dignity and respect. Was the benefit worth the cost?
Medical experts are just one of the mix of experts who should be consulted on public policy questions.
Trump is right to ask the question, but with his past performance dismissing the consequences of Covid-19 as fake news and then 2 weeks later declaring a national emergency, is anything he says believable?
When he says “trust me it’s safe, we can reopen”, will he be trusted?
“I have 2 kids under 3”
Well done, sir. Very well done.
As with all flu virus strains, bat flu will wane. This will happen soon and the final tallies will be up for all to see, and they will not differ substantially from the ’09 swine flu.
Then, people will start wondering why the degenerate media was claiming this is the end. Drumpf can say “I told you so”….again.
I wonder how much of this massive new debt China will buy.
All of it, probably.
Now, we’re part of their belt and road program…just like Africa.
Remember when our currency was backed by gold, physically in a vault?
Real money…ah, those were the days, eh Lads?
Now, the Fed Reserve just farts out decorative IOU’s.
“You can call it a germ. You can call it a flu. You can call it a virus. You can call it many different names. I’m not sure anybody even knows what it is.” ~ Donald Trump 3/27/20
Since World War 2 the world, especially the free world has not faced a real crisis — the kind which puts the population to misery. People’s memories have faded and they have forgotten what it means to be in pain.
Its because of this reason they ended up supporting leaders like Trump, Boris Johnson Erdogan, and the likes — lets just hope this pandemic teaches us our responsibilities as free people (yes free people have responsibilities, another thing which we forgot) rather than have something much more horrifying teach us at a later stage.
So now that Trump got his zero interest rate from the FED, he can finally demonstrate his full array of skills in economic management.
I know that most people who read this blog already know about Powerline, but for those that don’t or haven’t read it, this post is particularly good and it involves (if I’m not mistaken) one of the Fraters Libertas. The comments there are very good too.
Despite what the media would like everyone to believe, this past week continues to bring good news for Americans.
Of course, one of the comments predicted the Emery response:
Statistics? We don’t need no stinkin’ statistics! OrangeManBad!!! Stay on message!!! Good news is bad news, and vice versa!!!
More than 1,000 Americans have died from Covid-19 in a few weeks and the rate is increasing exponentially. Think about the math for a minute.
Panic bunny Emery wrote:
“Think about the math for a minute.”
Most growth curves start out beinng exponential. Then they stop being exponential when they run into barriers to growth. Works from bacteria in petri dishes to public libraries per capita.
There is no greater gap in the world than the one between Woolly’s self- regard and his actual abilities
It’s hard to believe that just one month ago, on February 26, Trump said this was no big deal and he would have the 15 cases down to 0 in one week.
A totally unnecessary, totally preventable tragedy is about to unfold.
Negligence or willful ignorance?
Been a long time since math class. I seem to remember the exponent was the little raised number at the end. Like 10 to the 1st power is 10, and 10 to the 2nd power is a hundred, which you would know by the raised 2 behind the 10.
Pray tell, Emery, what IS the exponent in that exponential growth? Because if it’s 1, I’m thinking we’re good to go.
Also, does that “died” number include “died FROM” or “died WITH” the virus, and how do you know? Because that’s the scam what the Italians were pulling – a guy who was dying of cancer or emphysema and also had the virus, was counted as a virus death (I suspect because pandemic deaths receive better reimbursement rates – always follow the money). Upon scrutiny, only 12% of the Italian “died from” patients actually Died From the virus. Where’d you get your numbers? Are your sources pulling the same stunt?
Finally, nobody really cares about the gross number of deaths. Hundreds of people die in gang wars every day. Doesn’t affect me, I don’t live in the ghetto, don’t care what ghetto-rats do to each other. But let four kids get shot in a school – that’s a problem. That hits close to home.
In the virus context, it’s the healthy 31 year old joggers struck down in their prime that concern me. Even the sedentary 61 year old non-smokers with Type II diabetes. People who didn’t have one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. The significant deaths, the excess deaths, those are the ones we care about, not the old man with lung cancer in the nursing home who was going to be dead in six months anyway.
How many of those 1,000 are excess deaths?
Until you have some useful numbers, numbers that we trust and care about, you’re wasting your time and ours.
I make claims, Emery, other than to state obvious facts. Self-regard is not something I am troubled with. I am a poor sinner, like everyone else. I think that you will look in vain for any sign that I have made any predictions about the course of this pandemic, or the course of the economy, other than optimistic generalities. I can’t help it, I am an optimist.
It is trivial to point out that things with an exponential growth curve against time eventually return to equilibrium or achieve a new equilibrium.
So exponential growth rates mean change, and people always find change interesting.
The failure to test and track is on Trump and his administration.
How many tests could $2 trillion have purchased 6 weeks ago? The magnitude of the failure is hard to really get your head around.
We’ll be paying for this mistake for generations.
Woolly here is your exponential growth via CDC:
US coronavirus deaths:
3/1: 2
3/2: 6
3/3: 9
3/4: 11
3/5: 12
3/6: 17
3/7: 19
3/8: 21
3/9: 26
3/10: 31
3/11: 38
3/12: 41
3/13: 49
3/14: 58
3/15: 65
3/16: 87
3/17: 111
3/18: 149
3/19: 195
3/20: 263
3/21: 323
3/22: 413
3/23: 541
3/24: 704
3/25: 938
3/26: 1,195
3/27: 1,588
Now: 2,043
Notice how it doubles over the last few days.
That definitely went from 15 to zero “very quickly” — just like Trump said it would.
“Testing must continue to be expanded until the percent positive declines to 5% or lower. This is based on results from South Korea.”
Emery is moving his lips again.
I usually skip reading his posts, due to them being almost 100% lies, but I read a sentence or two now and then, I won’t repeat them here, but the first was an out and out lie, and he knows it, and the second, the 2 trillion? Why don’t you talk to your friend Nazi palsy Pelosi about that emetic.
Ol’ Emery has been driven ’round the bend by Trump+covid-19.
He’ll have to change his nic when this is over.
“Notice how it doubles over the past few days”
A lesson in Prof Dunning Kruger’s advanced math class.
938 x 2 = 1,195
1195 x 2 = 1,588
1588 x 2= 2,043
If you lose 25% of your marbles, you need to buy 50% more to have the amount you had to begin with.
Emery,
You must truly have a miserable life and have now gone from pathetic to pitiful.
The first question you should ask yourself is how reliable are these numbers? Is it a representative sample?
How many people in the US have had the virus, are now immune, and have never been tested?
We don’t know.
How many now have it and have not been tested because their symptoms are mild or absent?
We don’t know.
How many have been killed by covid-19 alone?
We don’t know.
How many people have died with flu-like symptoms & have tested positive for covid-19?
That number we know, and it is not the most important number.
Larry Kudlow on ABC today, illustrating what happens when you lose all credibility.
Raddatz: “It was just a month ago you told CNBC that you thought the virus was contained in the country even though doctors were warning otherwise. You also downplayed the threat of a long-lasting economic tragedy . . . Why should people trust you?”
Kudlow: “I’m as good as the facts are . . . and at the time I made the statement, the facts were [that the virus was] contained, the president had just put the travel restrictions on China. And a lot of people agreed with me. A lot of people felt that the flu was worse than this virus . . . but as soon as the facts changed, we changed our whole posture.”
“The facts changed”. Just think about that manipulation of language.
The usual “many people say” BS. In fact, the people who actually knew what they were talking about had been warning us and Trump otherwise for some time.
One thing is for sure.
Trump: The Musical is going to be nuts.
My concern with Trump is that he has repeatedly lulled people into complacency by comparing Covid-19 to the flu, by saying that it’s totally under control, by saying that the number of cases is dropping, and so on. All those comments from him were false, and they may be one reason that the US bungled testing so badly, as well as a reason our hospitals are so poorly prepared with protective equipment. It’s unimaginable to me that the richest country in the history of the world can’t provide masks to all doctors and nurses, but makes them reuse them.
I’m complacent because two new studies affirm the number of likely excess deaths from COVID-19 to be in the range of years of a bad flu, i.e. 80,000. That sounds like a lot but in a nation of 325,000,000 it’s really not. It’s a bad flu season.
The US bungled testing because the CDC was unprepared, having wasted too much time and money preaching about guns and video games instead of tending to its core mission of controlling disease. When private industry stepped up with tests, the FDA stopped private testing, insisting only they could do the tests. Bureaucracy and so-called experts protecting their turf – that’s who bungled testing. The President has been doing his best to override those experts, and you complained about that, too.
The gross number of cases isn’t dropping and we hope it doesn’t drop. The gross number of cases should be increasing until every single American has the antibodies for the virus, at which point we acquire herd immunity. What’s dropping is the excess death rate – the number of people per capita who died solely From the virus, and not merely With the virus as well as a host of other pre-existing problems. And that rate IS dropping, here and abroad, as more people are tested and found to have mild symptoms, not deadly ones. Even the guy who published the Imperial College model admits it.
The fact the richest country on earth doesn’t have a massive stockpile of every imaginable product that might one day be in demand because of a hoax-driving public panic, is due to decades of globalists who assured us that just-in-time delivery from China was not only cheaper and smarter, it was mandatory, lest we be racist and isolationist. It’s the same reason you don’t have a 30-year supply of Dial soap in your bathroom, next to the 30-year supply of Colgate toothpaste. Excess inventory ties up capital and thereby imposes a lost opportunity cost. We buy what we need when we need it, including masks.
It’s simply not possible that a person as intelligent as you could make so many idiotic statements in such a short paragraph, by accident. I conclude it must be intentional. What I can’t figure out is: WHY do you want to sound like an idiot?
Somewhat apropos — there have been two dark ages in the West. We all know about the dark age that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. There was an earlier dark age around 1200 BC, in the late bronze age. European civilization in 1200 BC was basically Mediterranean civilization. Although Mediterranean civilization prior to 1200 BC had no central political authority (c.f. Roman civilization), it did have widespread trade & political & military arrangements. Curiously, the two founding myths of Western Civilization (the Trojan War & Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt) both are said to happened about 1200 BC. The collapse of Greek civilization was so complete that when it was revived & literacy restored three centuries later, the Greeks borrowed the Phoenecian alphabet rather than reviving linear B, which originated in Greece. In 800 BC, Greeks could not read linear B any more than they could read Chinese.
But I digress.
No one knows for certain what “caused” either the late bronze age collapse or the collapse of the Roman Empire, but disease was definitely not the culprit in either. Nor was climate change, or famine, or war, or natural disaster.
Similar civilizational collapses have been seen in the New World. These collapses also cannot be attributed to disease, climate change, famine, war, or natural disaster.
I understand that “systemic” issues (basically complexity) have also been ruled out in civilizational collapse in both the Old World and the New.
So be of good cheer!
And yet, Emery ignores the fact that now two left wing moron Governors have outlawed doctors in their states from prescribing chloroquine to COVID-19 patients. Despite the fact that some doctors are continuing to try it, so far with good results, the stupid one in Michigan, has even outlawed pharmacists from filling any prescriptions for it, threatening legal action against anyone that violates it and asking others to narc on violators. And people like Emery wailed that there would be no death panels under Obamacare, yet here are two Democrats that are using their positions to play God and decide who lives or dies.
It’s too bad that Michigan never learns a lesson, despite the failures of the Democrats that they elect to do anything but make their lives more miserable, they keep electing them.The definition of insanity.
Hoss, just saw this:
”FDA SAYS HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE AND CHLOROQUINE CAN BE USED TO TREAT CORONAVIRUS“
Degenerate governors have banned them, because Drumpf has supported their use. There is no other explanation.
How much farther can they push, I wonder?
🎶 I see the bad moon rising
I see trouble on the way
I see earthquakes and lightnin’
I see bad times today.🎶
It’s too bad that Michigan never learns a lesson
Just think of all those UofMichigan grads in The Big Chill and it all makes sense.
Also, there’s an awful lot of urbanization there – urbanites vote Democrat without much thought.
Policy response is not driven by the death rate, but by the national health system’s capacity.
I’m ready to bet COVID-19’s death rate will be confirmed at well below 1%. But that does not matter: if the number of people requiring intensive care or hospitalization exceeds capacity, drastic action is required — or you end up inflating the death rate because of insufficient care.
Emery;
WTF, dude?! For Christ’s sake, will you get off of this never ending meme of death tolls that you’re on? Do you realize that Johns Hopkins estimates that over 250,000 people die in hospitals every year due to medical mistakes?! In fact, it may be more than that. Your estimates of death by COVID-19 are meaningless.
Put in perspective, 4,000 people die in car accidents daily, due to just texting while driving and last year, over 43,000 people committed suicide. COVID-19 will, most likely, pale by comparison.
And, don’t forget the statistic that 67,367 people died from drug overdoses last year, or
21 per 100,000 people.
It is very difficult to estimate death rates even for the seasonal flu, because the number of people who are affected can only be estimated, and because the recorded causes of death are not always systematic. The CDC estimates that the 2018– 2019 season included an estimated 35.5 million people getting sick with influenza, 16.5 million people going to a health care provider for their illness, 490,600 hospitalizations, and 34,200 deaths from influenza. Perhaps the only reasonable comparison, given the partial data we have for the current pandemic, is to compute the ratio of death/ hospitalizations. For the flu, this will result in about 7%. We still don’t know what the current virus’ true rate is, as the data is “right censored” —!that means, people in the hospital may still die — but nothing in the information we have suggests a mortality rate of more than 7% of the hospitalized people.
In Singapore, whose health care system has not been so far overwhelmed and the government has kept track of most all cases with clear symptoms so far, the rate patients who are in a critical stage (and thus potentially at risk of dying) is 3% of all hospitalizations, including people with mild symptoms (whom the government isolates anyway). Even assuming that all people in critical condition will eventually die (which is, of course, a very pessimistic assumption), we are still below the mortality of the flu among hospitalized cases. Proper planning and protection of the healthcare workers have largely prevented infection among healthcare providers.
So the biggest problem is hospital capacity and lack of planning. This, of course, is likely to create panic in countries where they are a serious issue. but to put things in perspective, there are 37,000 deaths from traffic accidents in the US alone, and 8,000 of those are in the 16-20 years old group. Let’s not talk about death causes associated with obesity, which is rampant in the country. Yes, the pandemic is a serious crisis and we cannot be relaxed about it, especially if you are in a risky category. I am in my mid-50’s but have none of the conditions that put older people at risk, such as high blood pressure, diabetes, a history of smoking, or the like, but I am still careful. But the pansteria is worse than the pandemics.
Proper planning and protection of the healthcare workers have largely prevented infection among healthcare providers.
You stupid motherf*cker. How do you know? Ever been to Singapore? Of course you haven’t.
I have. In fact, I was there long enough in 1995 to not have to pay US income taxes. Singapore is a dictatorship; the People’s Action Party is a benevolent dictatorship, but a dictatorship none the less; cross them, and they’ll hang you.
Here’s a little story.
I was working at a semi conductor wafer fab. When you entered the construction site, there was a big sign that proudly proclaimed “0 fatal accidents”.
Bamboo is the material of choice for scaffolding everywhere in Asia, because it’s strong and it’s free. The building was surrounded with scaffolds, and imported Ethiopian laborers working on them. One day, a big scaffold collapsed, sending several laborers to the debris below them. The superintendent was Johnny on the spot; directing guys to get the wounded on to trucks and off “to the hospital”.
Next day, we heard that they had been taken to a clinic, not a hospital, and that 3 had died. I mentioned to the super that he’d have to get a new safety sign, and he said, and I quote; “Why? No one died here? They were all alive when they left the site.”
I’ve got plenty more horror stories (no secondary containment or leak detectors on the 80% HF or 90% H2SO4 piping that ran atop populated hallways…too expensive).
They also have very impressive AIDS statistics. It’s virtually unknown because being a homo will get you tossed into Changi (prison) zippy quick.
*That’s* Singapore asshole. The health care workers are protected from infected peasants simply because they never see them. And the hospitals never get overwhelmed because 1/3 the population has never been near one.
Concentrate on:
1. The number of Doctors and Nurses being exposed because they don’t have basic PPE
2. The available space in ICUs
Dying is the easy bit
As far as I can tell, there is no universal definition of an ICU bed.
In simple terms, Intensive Care means a patient who needs specialized equipment and staff, such as a ventilator and nurse to monitor it. Different jurisdictions impose additional requirements for licensing, advertising and billing, but those are not medical terms and do nothing to cure patients.
ANY hospital bed can be an ICU bed, just wheel in the machine and its operator. A moment’s thought confirms it. If Minnesota has 235 licensed ICU beds when the 236th patient is brought in, what will the doctors do with her? Wheel her out to the parking lot to die? “Sorry, lady, no ICU bed for you.”
No, of course not. They’ll stick her in a regular hospital bed and MacGyver some contraption to keep her breathing until a better solution comes along. She needs intensive care, she’s in a bed, boom, it’s an intensive care bed.
Pretending a hard ceiling on ICU beds requires nation-wide house arrest is flat wrong and plain stupid.
February 24, 2020:
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi toured San Francisco’s Chinatown Monday to send a message. She said there’s no reason tourists or locals should be staying away from the area because of coronavirus concerns.
“That’s what we’re trying to do today is to say everything is fine here,” Pelosi said. “Come because precautions have been taken. The city is on top of the situation.”
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/nancy-pelosi-visits-san-franciscos-chinatown/2240247/