America's Daily COVID-19 Death Toll Passes 1,000 Again (politico.com) 296
AleRunner writes: The United States on Tuesday recorded more than 1,000 daily deaths from COVID-19 for the first time since May, according to Politico. This trend continued and actually increased on Wednesday with over 1,200 deaths. Whilst there have been suggestions that the increase in cases in the US was an artifact of greater testing, the new data on deaths makes it starkly clear that these suggestions were wrong and that cases are increasing at a greater rate than testing, meaning that the official death rate is going to continue increasing for some time. Even these shocking numbers are likely an underestimate with reputable researchers having shown that many COVID-19 deaths have been registered under other causes. More than half a million people worldwide are dead and 15 million are infected, however the U.S. remains world leader in coronavirus cases with Brazil still far behind in second place.
Tired of winning, yet? (Score:5, Interesting)
N/A
AMERIA FIRST (Score:2)
America First !!!
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Apparently Ghana handled it better than the U.S. A lot better.
Even at this point, the CDC can't manage to gather and report reliable statistics about test results and cases.
When they should have been preparing, the CDC was working at banning guns and vaping.
What part of "Disease Prevention and Control" did they not understand?
Ghana, people.
Re:Tired of winning, yet? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Tired of winning, yet? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well sure, but that's the difficult bit about being president - hiring the right talent to do the work for you.
And this is why the job was too hard for Trump, because he didn't give a shit about talent and only hired friends, family, and people who agree with on 100% of things and get fired as soon as they don't.
The same is true as you say of running a large business; a good CEO will hire people who run the place for them. A bad one will hire the wrong people and send it under.
Re:Tired of winning, yet? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are about 104 weekend days per year. In Obama's second term—where he played about twice as much golf as his first term—he played 322 rounds over 4 years. That's about 80 rounds a year. It's still a lot of golf, but he can work while on his helicopter or plane, and many presidents have famously done a lot of 'work' with other world leaders on the golf course. (Canadian Prime Ministers and American Presidents have often gotten on very well on the golf course, and real negotiation actually got done.)
You can really tell that the presidency wore on Obama. His hair went grey straight away, and I don't think most people would have accused him of being a slacker. And what's true for the rest of us is true for him: exercise and recreation are good for your productivity.
If anything, the golfing is the least offensive part of Trump's presidency. The problem is that he doesn't do any work when he's OFF the golf course either. I think like a lot of other jobs, the Presidency is easy if you don't care and don't show up. The bureaucracy handles a lot of stuff on its own. And if you've got a Senate that is also absent and won't even LOOK at the legislation coming out of the house, you don't even have to come in to sign anything.
- Dixie_Flatline
Re:Tired of winning, yet? (Score:5, Insightful)
To me it is right up there with the rest of his offenses because he does it at Mar-A-Lago where taxpayer money is going into his pocket directly for the stay of the Secret Service and the rest of his party. A direct violation of the Emoluments clause.
There is nothing that man will do that doesn't profit him personally in some way. Follow the money...
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The issue with Trump golfing is that he famously criticized Obama of golfing instead of working. So it's amazingly hypocritical when he ends up golfing far more than Obama
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Obama golfed 113 times in his first term (4 years). That's not unreasonable. Mostly this was done on the weekend, but he also did things like invite the Republican leadership or world leaders golfing. But, yeah. Averaging golfing every other weekend is totally shirking responsibility.
Meanwhile, Trump has spent 266 out of 1251 days golfing. Note the difference in tone. That's because Obama would go to a local golf course (usually at the closest military base), play and return in a few hours. Trump flie
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Actually, if the Trump Presidency has convinced me of one thing, it's that being President is pretty easy. I recall reading an article (too lazy to look for it) round about the start of Obama's second term, which talked about how the Presidency had become too big a job for a single person. And yet I remember thinking to myself, Obama sure golfs a lot for a busy guy. I only get five weeks of vacation, and when I take a week off, I come back to a desk that is swamped, and all of these golf days, presumably vacation days, seemed to number in the hundreds. Look, I disagree with pretty much everything that has been done during the Trump Presidency, but most of that work was done by his toadies in the Senate. He golfs even more than Obama did, and holds (or rather held) rallies continually. The actual day to day work of a President is like an engineering fellow at a large company - stick your nose into things that interest you, but otherwise you're free to fill your time doing your own thing. It took a real crisis of leadership, and it took nearly four years for a serious one to come up, for Trump to actually have to show up for work (which he's not doing, as evidenced by the headline, but that's another discussion). If COVID hadn't come along, the stock market would still be bubbling along on our rising national debt which no one seems to care about anymore and unemployment would be low. Sure, day to day Trump would still be saying and doing embarrassing and in many cases awful things, and there would still be BLM protests and some violence associated with it, but he'd be a shoe in for a second term which he has now all but lost.
The US Presidency is a high level management job, don't do any direct work but supervise everything, and stop underlings from pursuing their own interests at the costs of the larger organization.
It's easy to do poorly, but hard to do well.
Obama didn't have much in the way of scandals in his administration, and the administration policy seemed pretty consistent. Obama made errors for sure, but he seems to have done a good job of running the US government.
Trump really doesn't bother with the whole "Presidenti
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The problem is the Trump administration and his cronies are treating it like the Flu, mostly ignore it, and have the victims go to the hospital.
However...
* Covid-19 is more dangerous than the flu, higher percentage of death, and those who do not die, do have some bad long term problems.
* The Flu has a yearly vaccine where people can either be protected from its effect, or at least it makes the symptoms less.
* It is usually easier to find and isolate carrier of the Flu vs Covid-19 who can be spreading it for
Re:Tired of winning, yet? (Score:4, Insightful)
Umm, covid-19 seems to be "usually only serious for those who are weak or with previous medical conditions" as well. It's more than twice as likely to kill you if you're 80+ (average lifespan is about 82).
We don't know how many people actually have had covid-19, since it's asymptomatic sometimes, but so far we've only had a deathrate from covid-19 that's about twice as high as our normal flu deathrate. Using some of the more pessimistic assumptions on covid-19 rate (75%+ asymptomatic), it's actually running a LOWER deathrate than the flu.
Caveats: because we don't know how many people are asymptomatic, we don't really have much of a clue as to how serious this is compared to the normal flu. Lots of asymptomatic people means it's milder than the flu, though more widespread (remember, a lot of people get flu vaccinations annually). Few asymptomatic cases means it considerably worse than the flu (though still not so bad as the Spanish Flu was back in the day).
In summary, it's not the end of the world, or even the end of civilization, even if we do absolutely NOTHING. Though if the asymptomatic cases are as common as some people think, it's going to be with us for a very long time (think - common cold)....
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And we don't know the true death rate from COVID-19 either. Many have died in their home fearing going to the hospital until it was too late and the death was misdiagnosed (heart failure seems to be the favorite since COVID-19 has a serious effect on the heart).
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And "usually" is a very vague and weasely word. It can mean 99.9% or it can mean 51%, or some people might even use it for less. The problem with saying that is that too many people assume that they're safe. Ie, I'm healthy, I'm young, I work out, i don't have respiratory problems, so it's off Spring Break at a Texas or Florida beach for sun, fun, beer, and inhaling other people's saliva.
Young and healthy people still die from covid-19! They are NOT immune. They are less likely to get serious complicat
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COVID-19 has still caused far fewer deaths in at least a year of being around than seasonal three month flus do, and that's with wide availability of flu vaccines.
You know that people don't usually stay indoors or wear masks to prevent seasonal flu, right?
That might skew your numbers a bit, just sayin'.
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They do get vaccinated against it though. And they have a base immunity due to similarity to other influenza viruses.
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Both of your claims are flat out false.
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The US has a population of about 375 mio, and a life expectancy of 75 years (both numbers rounded for easier calculation). If we disregard the actual age pyramid and expect the age to be evenly distributed, this means that 5 mio people die each year in the US, or about 15,000 each day. Thus CoViD-19 increases the dying rate by about 8-10%. This is just some back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it puts the numbers in perspective.
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Flu compared with Covid-19: (Score:5, Informative)
CDC estimates that from
October 1, 2019 through April 4, 2020 [186 days, a little over 1/2 year]
there have been:
39,000,000 - 56,000,000 flu illnesses,
18,000,000 - 26,000,000 flu medical visits,
410,000 - 740,000 flu hospitalizations,
24,000 - 62,000 flu deaths.
Coronavirus Covid-19 cases in the U.S., Updated July 23, 2020 [cdc.gov]:
Total Cases 3,952,273,
Total Deaths 142,755.
When comparing, it is important to realize that there is a vaccine for the flu.
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Note, the flu numbers are high end estimates, with actual reported deaths being much lower. The covid-19 numbers are more accurate and based upon numbers reported to the CDC. If you count flu deaths the same way that covid-19 deaths are counted, you'd have around 15,500 flu deaths last season.
The vaccine is important, because even if you do get the flu after the vaccine it will greatly lower your chances of getting acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) which can lead to long term health issues. Covi
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When comparing, it is important to realize that there is a vaccine for the flu.
And that the flu had run its entire course of a season with statistics spread out for the full year. COVID-19 hasn't even seen a "flu" season yet in the USA and hasn't gotten close to providing us a full year of figures.
Re:Tired of winning, yet? (Score:5, Insightful)
Untrue. In three months there were as many covid-19 deaths as the high estimate for a full year of flu deaths, in the US. Flu death numbers reported by CDC are based upon a formula based upon assumptions about a percentage of deaths that are unreported. That's why these numbers are estimates. But covid-19 deaths are counted ony if they are diagnosed as such, and the numbers do not include estimates of unreported deaths or those assumed to have been from other reasons. This comparison, which already shows covid-19 is more deadly, is still comparing actual numbers to a mathematical estimate.
As of July, over 144,000 in the US have died from covid-19, as reported by Johns Hopkins. The CDC estimates for the flu season (october to april) showed up to 62 thousand; remember these flu deaths are not reported to the CDC and this number is an upper limit of an estimated range. If we count the flu deaths the same way we count covid-19 deaths, maybe there were 16,000 flu deaths last season.
See: https://www.news-medical.net/n... [news-medical.net]
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.or... [hopkinsmedicine.org]
Declaring that covid-19 is like the flu is dangerously misleading. Maybe it's naivete, maybe it's just typical slashdot trolling, however this myth is being actively used for political purposes. Is Anonymous Coward really a poltiical operative, or just an unwitting stooge?
Re: Tired of winning, yet? (Score:3)
Actually I just read that because of all the covid precautions; masks, distancing, handwashing, etc; that the flu virus has all but been eliminated in the southern hemisphere. Thats 1 silver lining.
I would also point out that unlike the flu, those that survive covid suffer lasting physical damage to their lungs and heart muscles. This appears to be a direct fuck-you to Nietzsche. What does not kill you, still fucks you over and destroys tissues that take 7-10 years to repair, for non-smokers.
Re: Tired of winning, yet? (Score:3)
Autopsies. Yes i know they are a small number. But nobody is autopsying healthy people. Those that get -Mild Symptoms- meaning they show symptoms that feel like they are dying, but otherwise dont need a ventilator, have shown scarring and heart irregularities. But identifying necrotic tissue in a live patient requires invasive surgery. Xray and echo are what we got to work with. Then there is the issue that we just now realized its attacking the heart and spleen, not just the lungs. The spleen being where
That's still 3rd place (Score:4, Informative)
Re:That's still 3rd place (Score:4, Funny)
Behind heart disease and cancer. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
Don't worry, Trump is working on destroying the EPA, and rolling back healthy food standards for kids. Your other means of pointless death are not being neglected.
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Well, if we get other causes of death to pick up, at least Covid won't be considered the leading cause of death in the US. So far, only fat ass related heart failure and cancer beat Covid, gotta work on that!
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No way! I heard deaths were going down while cases were up, how do you explain that?!
Excess deaths (Score:4, Informative)
In before idiots start saying they are counting deaths from other conditions as Covid .. the fact is we have been seeing a large number of excess deaths according to CDC statistics. Either by some wonky coincidence people re dying more or there is some virus out there bumping people off.
Check the following for statistics. Note: IT TAKES ABOUT 8 WEEKS FOR ALL THE DEATH REPORTS TO GET INTO THE STATISTICS!
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/... [cdc.gov]
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I wouldn't know the UK figures but he UK has seen 50% more excess deaths this year than confirmed COVID cases.
And that's with a lot of the traditionally dangerous activities banned or curtailed eg - Driving.
So there's no chance the UK is over-reporting and the one US figure I did see (Florida "flu" deaths) suggests absolutely the opposite.
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In before idiots start saying they are counting deaths from other conditions as Covid .. the fact is we have been seeing a large number of excess deaths according to CDC statistics. Either by some wonky coincidence people re dying more or there is some virus out there bumping people off.
Obviously they are killed by the face masks! (That they are not wearing....)
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I mean, it's both! COVID makes it harder to get medical care for non-COVID reasons. You might have a heart attack, get to the hospital, and all the beds are taken up by people who thing that virus is a hoax and so went to a giant party.
"See, we overreacted" (Score:5, Informative)
Nobody seriously thought it was testing rates (Score:4, Insightful)
Whilst there have been suggestions that the increase in cases in the US was an artifact of greater testing...
It was quite plain those "suggestions" were from people looking for any way to discount the blinding obviousness of the facts. The US and Canada have similar populations, are geographically close, and have similar testing rates. Here's the US data [cdc.gov] (scroll down to New Cases by Day) and here's the Canadian data [canada.ca] (scroll down to figure 2). Even if you multiply Canada's numbers by 10 because the population is about 10 times smaller, the difference is still stark. And yes, the US is starting to flatten out a bit (fingers crossed) and yes, Canada is seeing an "uptick" in new cases recently, because the provinces have been opening up again in the last month.
I live in Canada. Our business never closed (manufacturing was considered an essential service). However, one side of our business (about 50% of our work) dropped to almost zero demand for about 6 to 8 weeks, but now it's back to about 80% of pre-COVID demand. During those lull weeks we had everyone implementing process and efficiency improvements throughout the plant, upgrading equipment, installing new automation, repainting, etc. We installed plexiglass barriers where appropriate, and implemented physical distancing policies. We're ready to go and stronger than ever.
I'm sorry to have to say this, but the US needs to do a proper country-wide lockdown for 6 to 8 weeks, and get the level of new cases down to the point where contact tracing teams can deal with the trickle of new cases. Then you'll be ready to re-open in a phased way. It starts with admitting that what you're doing right now isn't working, and taking a serious look at how other developed nations have successfully dealt with it. Back in March nobody really knew what the right answer was, but there's no excuse anymore.
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Minorities WORK during lock downs... because poor lives don't matter; they have to do essential pork processing etc. as ordered by the president.
Minorities have worse healthcare, if they have any at all; it should be well known that they don't even get fair treatment for their money. Minorities often live in food desserts with worse diets.
Plus I keep hearing about and read a study on how low vitamin D is likely a factor, which darker skinned people tend to be lower on in northern latitudes. You can find an
Ah, yes, the "deaths are not raising" ... (Score:2)
Sure, they are raising with a longer delay compared to infections and the overall rate has dropped. Both are due to better understanding how to treat this thing. But nobody with a few working brain cells is surprised by strongly raising infection rates causing significantly raising death rates. This is entirely expected behavior with absolutely no surprise value. And it was already visible, for example here https://www.covidbyregion.com/... [covidbyregion.com] about 10 days ago.
Deaths mask another, maybe bigger issue (Score:4, Interesting)
Also in 10-15 years expect a large uptick in comorbidity (read: death) as the long term side effects of COVID-19 catch up with people. Strokes that would've been minor or heart conditions that would have been managed with meds will put people in the ground.
Re:a "case" means it was diagnosed (Score:5, Insightful)
There are also countries with a functioning medical system like, well, most of Europe that have a lot of diagnosed infections and STILL a lower infection rate than the USA.
Your turn.
Re: a "case" means it was diagnosed (Score:3)
From what I saw last week in England, theyll be right up there with us. Packing yourselves nut-to-butt into bars, hollering in a state of drunken debauchery like a frat party on Ecstasy, thats a really good way to rapidly re-spread a virus with a 14-25 day incubation period.
The biggest mistake was a total lockdown. It destroyed the economies, and it created a preaches daughter response from everyone. The faster a state zipped to phase4, the faster the resurgence. We should have simply mandated masks from da
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We elected politicians that care more about blaming the other party and using the crisis as a vehicle to get (re)elected than to fight it.
It doesn't even matter anymore what party someone is from, they both obviously don't give a shit about their constituents and only care about how to spin this into something to make the other party look bad.
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Like I always say it doesn't matter if your name has a D or R in front of it. Their paychecks all comes from the same place with the same signature.
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Sure Democrats and Republican's both suck, but where we sit today one sucks a significant amount more. The idea of sitting on the top of fence and feeling like a superior "centrist" is over this year.
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Yes, they keep people alive longer then countries with shitty medical care. So when the virus shows up, there's all these stroke, heart attack, cancer, etc survivors who are just hanging in. They catch the virus and die.
It's a paradox, better medical systems result in more Corona deaths.
Re:a "case" means it was diagnosed (Score:5, Insightful)
Would you say New Zealand has a functioning health system? How come they can have less than 2,000 cases and 22 deaths with careful identification os all cases, and they can eliminate the virus? They are isolated islands you say. Well, what about Vietnam with 300 odd cases and zero deaths from a population of almost 100 million and a border with four other countries (two more than the US) including China?
The fact is that the US handling of the pandemic has been an absolute fiasco
It is worth mentioning that, after initially mishandling the outbreak in Wuhan, China has successfully controlled Covid-19. I know many want to disbelieve this, and the way China counts some infections and deaths is dubious, but there is no way major hotspots could be concealed in most of China. Their data is far, far more reliable than the US numbers which undercount infections by a factor of at least five, as well as significantly underestimating deaths.
.
Re:a "case" means it was diagnosed (Score:5, Informative)
You're forgetting South Korea. They have just under 14,000 total cases (at the moment) for their entire country whereas Florida, whose population is half that of South Korea, is reporting more cases per day than South Korea has. South Korea has 300 dead whereas Florida has 5,500 dead, and counting.
Re: a "case" means it was diagnosed (Score:2)
I like the Reuters sick map. It gives the per 100K rates in addition to total numbers. I mean if your town population is 5000 and you yell Hurray we only had 500 deaths, thats way more significant than 5000 deaths with a population of 10 million.
The best indications of how well an area does is its per capita values for infections and deaths. When you rank them that way, NY and NJ are _still_ at the too despite TX and FL spiking the way they are. NY had the absolute highest death to infection ratio Ive seen.
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Re:a "case" means it was diagnosed (Score:5, Interesting)
Iran is not Afghanistan, it has had a great respect for academic professions long before the current government took over. What you see of Iran is the crazy proclamations of the government, but that's like judging US industry on Trump tweets.
Healthcare in Iran is actually better than the US. I'm serious. The top end of the system is far better in the US, maybe the best in the world, but that just isn't available to the average person with 'normal' health insurance anyway. Doctors are highly trained and respected in Iran, they are available to all, and the costs of treatment are very reasonable compared to the western world and compared to what professionals there make. The whole range of surgical and cosmetic treatments that you see in the western world are all available there and carried to to the same standards.
You may have noticed that even though the Iranian government messed up with covid-19 extremely badly at the beginning their death rate is still far lower than the US. Don't think that population dispersal is helping them, they have roughly the same population density setup as the US does. Tehran has 15 million people living in fairly close proximity.
I know little about Brazil except it is a tourist destination for cheap cosmetic surgery. That implies some level of functioning medical industry.
Re: a "case" means it was diagnosed (Score:3, Insightful)
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Twice the reason to act like it if you want to pretend to be it.
Re: a "case" means it was diagnosed (Score:3)
Thank you. As an American, I hate it when people make this assumption. Yes, in the past, the US was at the forefront of the global Cold War. But thats more or less where that expression came from. Other nations did look to the US for ideas etc. But that was also when congress functioned. It has not functioned since the late 80s regardless of which party held the majority. In fact since the 80s the SEC has completely looked the other way in all the massive insider trading they do on a regular basis. It pisse
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Nah, it's more because Americans are more concerned with muh freedumz than the health of the people around them.
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Yes, it appears that liberty has now morphed into sociopathy.
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You wrote that emotively but you are essentially right.
Diabetes does reduce immune response. People can live with diabetes for many years without getting diagnosed.
Re: a "case" means it was diagnosed (Score:2)
Uncontrolled diabetes eventually does. And sadly, most people are taking medication that gradually makes the problem worse. Diabetic tissue heals much slower.
The other issue with high glucose blood levels is the thickening of the blood. And covid, even if you live, starts lighting up clots throughout your lungs and elsewhere. Thick blood + clots is a bad combination. Damaged heart tissue, another recent realization, will also heal much slower for someone treating diabetes with medication.
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Nobody on the right or left takes the 'experts' seriously anymore and maybe rightly so.
Seriously, what perverse reasoning is that? "uh yeah I'm being a moron the other political side is too so it's OK." No! How about not being a moron in the first place? Why do you have to drag politics into every single line of reasoning? Be better.
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Because it's comfortable. If everyone else is a moron and everyone else simply selects the alternative facts they prefer to believe in it means you don't have to feel guilty for doing the same.
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Excuse me, but refusing to wear a mask because of "muh freedumz" and a conspiracy about how this is a symbolic muzzle, when everyone who has even half a clue about what's going on tells you that these things are at least somewhat capable of slowing infection rates down, and protesting in droves of people, even if the cause would be sensible but with the internet and everything we have WAY safer means to voice our protest against injustice... care to point out what other word but "moron" would reasonably des
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No I agree, they are morons. I'm not sure what you think I said that you are disagreeing with... I'm saying that because they assume everyone else is being a moron and substituting their own alternative facts for sound medical advice they can do it too.
It's like religion. If you believe in little green men coming to probe your anus you have a few screws loose, but if you believe in an invisible, undetectable omnipotent being who pulls all the strings that's fine because lots of people believe in that.
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Yup, sorry, misread what you said there. We seem to agree after all. :)
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The cats out of the bag. The virus is going to spread no matter what unless you want to lock down for a year its just too contangious.
You can really, really slow it down by wearing masks and not making big crowds of unprotected people. No need for lockdown.
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With a hint of luck the insane left and right wipe themselves out and the sane middle ground has a chance to rebuild afterwards.
Hey, one may dream.
Re:Statistical relevance (Score:5, Informative)
It's statistically relevant and significant because it's an easily detectable excess deaths difference between the typical number (or rate) of deaths for the same date in prior years.
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No, last time I checked 1000/300-something was 3-something. Over one year it's 1000 in one million. That's 0.1% of the entire (country's) population which certainly isn't negligible, also there's no guarantee that it'll stay like that. It can easily be 3 times that or 10 times that in some months. Or not.
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Isn't that like 0.3 per million people?
No. 0.3 per million people would be 100, not 1150. And it's an epidemic. It is very important whether the numbers go up or down.
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1000 a day means about 360,000 a year. In 2017, 2,813,503 [cdc.gov] people died in the US.
Yes, I'd consider an increase of deaths by about 10% (let's assume that some of these people would have died anyway) "relevant". I'm fairly sure all of those 360,000 will, too.
To put it into perspective, the leading causes for death in the US [nsc.org] are cardiovascular problems (750k/year) and cancer (600k/year). The only "leading" cause of death by infeciton are influenza and pneumonia, which are responsible for about 60k/year.
Covid pa
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Yeah. Drug ODs. That's the reason the death rates spike. People take a lot more illegal drugs during a pandemic because of ... umm ... reasons.
My excuses rolodex would have said "sunspot activity", but then again, it's for network outages, not pandemics.
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Well, here in BC, we had almost as many drug poisonings in one month as the total number of Covid deaths. Seems to be a combination of even more toxic drugs and people using alone. Even the cops are calling for decriminalization and a safe supply, but the government is scared of giving the right any ammo as the right likes to see people die it seems.
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We're seeing a decline is deaths attributed to a variety of common killers. The reason is fairly simple: the cause of death is being reassigned.
This claim doesn't pass the smell test, because if deaths were just being reassigned, you'd expect to see about the same number of deaths as in a normal year, with perhaps small perturbations due to lockdowns. What we actually see is much higher total deaths than in normal years, and the increase is even larger than can be explained by the deaths attributed to COVID. Deaths that exceed the normal death rate plus the COVID death count are called "excess deaths", and the excess deaths are largest in the area
AMERICA FIRST ! (Score:2)
AMERICA FIRST !
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https://www.mediaite.com/tv/wa... [mediaite.com]
Lol. May 11th. "We have met the moment, and we have prevailed". That's too wordy, and not catchy enough. He should've gone with something like "Mission accomplished"
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Curious, then, that when you look at excess-deaths data, while there CERTAINLY was a covid peak, in fact, in terms of total numbers, it's really not all that significant in the US - in fact, if you remove the states of New York, NJ, MA, CT (you know, all famously controlled by those reality-adverse Republicans?) the US is in ASTONISHINGLY better position than say, Europe.
https://www.economist.com/grap... [economist.com]
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Well that's clearly not true. Obama brought in Obamacare, which for the US is a huge leap forward and provided healthcare to millions who previously couldn't afford it.
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When there are 2 robbers at the corner, do I really care which one will fleece me?
Sustainability
Politicians are supposed to make an effort not to run the country into the ground while they're fleecing you. Trump hasn't managed that, he's been handing out taxpayer money to all the already-rich people while borrowing trillions per year to pay for all those "jobs".
I kinda hope he wins again, let's see how bad it can get.
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Voting can change things, voting for the president rarely does. If you want change, put up your candidates and vote for them. Vote where it matters, and it matters the most in this order.
1. City officials
2. State Officials
3. Congress Senate
4. President
Yet many voters don't even know who their state representatives are. They complain about their governor. Same with the senate. Real change comes from changing the people who can actual make laws. The president is a wicker man we burn for the faults of the cong
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Everything IS the same. If you could kindly point out what changed, especially for these people, between Bush and Obama and Trump, I'd be happy to hear it.
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Off the bat, Obama allowed ~24 million Americans to access healthcare through the ACA. Fuck off.
Re:who'da thunk (Score:4, Insightful)
Healthcare is used loosely here. If you mean a health plan with a $10,000 deductible then yes. That really doesn't help poor people.
Re: who'da thunk (Score:2)
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No, not really. You're as much without a real choice at the 2020 election as you didn't have one already 2016.
I can make the same joke I made back then. If someone pressed a gun against my head and said "Hillary or Trump?" my answer would have been "fuck it, shoot".
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In the UK, we watched in horror as our numbers became 'world beating' - despite all the warnings, despite having seen that clear and present danger in Europe weeks before it swept across us.
And the USA said, we can't let some European country beat us, hold my beer.
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"Hold my cold beer."
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USA numba won!
Re:Stay safe over the pond! (Score:5, Insightful)
Populist leaders tie their fate to being able to tell the people what they want to hear. And people want to hear that they are awesome and that everything that doesn't work out for them is the blame of someone else and most importantly, that they're not responsible for anything and anything bad is someone else's fault. That's basically all populist politicians have to do, and that's basically also all they can do. There is no contingency plan for when the people that vote for them actually had to do something uncomfortable. Like, say, slightly changing their way of life for a moment to avoid a catastrophe. Because people don't want to hear that and this is where the populist would start losing support because their voters would suddenly be responsible for something.
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We'll probably get to see it at the end of the year when the death numbers are published. Compare it to last year and we'll know what's real and what's fudged.
Only problem with this strategy is that it will be too late to do anything about it. So maybe, just maybe, it might be sane to consider this a problem?
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a supposed coronavirus victim in his 20s died in a motorcycle crash
Statistically, there are relatively few deaths in motorcycle crashes. And there are very, very few people infected with Covid who die in motorcycle crashes. Even if it happened (and if Paul Rino is actually a doctor and an Orange County health officer and has the correct information), it's so rare, it doesn't affect statistics in any meaningful way.
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a supposed coronavirus victim in his 20s died in a motorcycle crash
Statistically, there are relatively few deaths in motorcycle crashes. And there are very, very few people infected with Covid who die in motorcycle crashes. Even if it happened (and if Paul Rino is actually a doctor and an Orange County health officer and has the correct information), it's so rare, it doesn't affect statistics in any meaningful way.
This one event doesn't affect the statistics in a meaning ful way. But it could be indicative of a general problem
From cbs12 news: https://cbs12.com/news/local/m... [cbs12.com]
According to the report, Orange County Health Officer Dr. Raul Pino was asked whether two coronavirus victims in their 20s had any underlying medical conditions that could have potentially made them more susceptible to the virus.
Pino's answer was that one of the two people who was listed as a COVID death actually died in a motorcycle crash. Desp
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How is that gonna work when a red headline screetching massive increases in cases ommmmg, severed from any analysis of better testing coverage, gets way more clicks?
Re:Case positivity statistics (Score:4, Informative)
States are reporting test positive rates.
If you do a linear regression since the beginning of June, the overall US positive rate hasn't changed much, but if you look at *individual states* that stability has been produced by some states' positive rates going down quite strongly (e.g. NJ, NY, CT, DE, and MD) while other states positive rates going up quite strongly (AZ, SC FL, TX, ID).
The changes in state positive rates don't correlate much with testing volume, which has increased in *every* state since the beginning of June.
The fact that test volumes are increasing even in states with declining cases suggests that test availability has, in fact, increased. This no doubt contributes *somewhat* to increased case numbers. But it also suggests that test availability is not *sufficient* to produce the increased case numbers we're seeing.
You have to look at a variety of data -- hospitalizations, deaths, mobility tracking data etc. -- and how they vary by state. The whole picture that emerges is the case numbers being *primarily* driven by increases in community transmission in states with low levels of voluntary social distancing compliance and governments that ignore public health expert guidance.
Re:Case positivity statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
States and the CDC have intentionally obfuscated data.
There's the excuse we've been waiting for. Funny how you didn't include deliberate undercounting of both cases and deaths in states such as Florida, Georgia [maproomblog.com], and Iowa [go.com].
A case is an infection. Stop trying to play semantics. Whether you have an active infection or test positive for antibodies, you're a positive case. You were exposed to covid-19, that's what they want to know.
And nice attempt at, "Oh, the White House isn't quite as bad" trolling. The White House IS the shit show. If we had a real leader, someone who was interested in the well being of this country instead of trying to see how much money they can steal from taxpayers, this would have been over months ago.
If we had a real leader, they would be more interested in using the full force of the government to slow or stop over 1,000 people dying every day from this virus rather than wasting tens of millions of taxpayer dollars sending in unmarked, unidentified thugs to beat and attack a 53 year-old veteran [thehill.com] who was peacefully exercising his First Amendment Rights.
If we had a real leader, they wouldn't have gone around for months saying it's no big deal, it's only 15 people, the numbers will definitely be going down, it will be over soon and taking absolutely no action and in fact, going out of their way to ignore a 69-page document prepared specifically for a situation like this because it came from his predecessor who was black.
If we had a real leader, they wouldn't have been stealing medical supplies and equipment [newsweek.com] from states who had bought the items to try and protect their citizens.
If we had a real leader, they wouldn't be following the tenets of fascism [imgur.com].
If we had a real leader [9cache.com].
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Less than if they took a medicine that has been proven not to work.
https://www.usatoday.com/story... [usatoday.com]
Perhaps look at scientific data, not Trumps twitter feed? How many lives have been lost to political disinformation and outright lies?
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Every day doctors and scientists are discovering new ways that Covid damages your body. https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com] Trust me you don't want it.