I’m so sick of false equivalency. There is such a thing as a “moral emergency,” and we’re living through it.
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How do you know what a balanced perspective of the actual data is?
Then call me part of the problem, because the overwhelming majority of exaggeration, misstatements, and outright lying about this virus and this pandemic that I’ve seen have come from one ‘side’.
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This thread: “What a dumpster fire!” (BTW - that’s right.)
Me: I don’t know if you’ve noticed but the whole neighborhood is on fire!
@T_aquaticus Stop looking at other fires.
@pevaquark You don’t even care about this dumpster fire.
@Jay313 "moral emergency … "
… My point exactly!
Ok, let’s try again. The whole neighborhood is on fire!
Hi Steve. In the last month six friends on facebook (some from each side) have posted articles that referred to research papers. I have dug out the papers and read them, and every one of those articles excerpted something true from the paper and lied about what it means. Correlation → causation stupidity, or extreme extrapolation, or just blatant lies.
No, because you and I can talk. What I’m saying is that this dumpster fire is a just one episode of a much bigger problem.
There is indeed an overarching problem with respect to the pandemic (and other things), but you need to articulate what you mean by “a much bigger problem” so that we can have a conversation.
Yes, and we shouldn’t absolve the crimes of an arson who starts 10,000 fires by pointing to a person who started 1 fire. It is mainly one political group that is pushing this type of misinformation, and it is extremely irresponsible to play the “everyone is making stuff up card” in the face of such lopsided propaganda.
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Related:
How many people has the coronavirus killed?
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02497-w
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Off topic, but . . . My employer has now performed 1.1 million COVID-19 diagnostic tests and is currently doing ~5% of the tests in the US. So yay for us.
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Mexico has a 50% positivity rate. I’m thinking that is not so good. But great to hear that some other parts of the world are getting their testing in gear.
I know of someone that got in a car accident and died of a heart attack.
It wasn’t the car accident that killed him. It was the heart attack.
So the guy that ran the stop sign and hit him was off the hook.
If the trauma of the accident triggered the heart attack, then both the accident and the heart attack were the cause of death. Hence the option to include multiple contributing factors on a death certificate.
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The Economist has done an analysis on excess deaths that is informative.
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Perhaps it is simply acknowledgements like this that are what raise people’s suspicions…
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Maybe that is outdated and abused by COVID deniers. But you are right on that such things are extremely unhelpful when anyone communicating to the public makes certain statements. Kind of like the WHO discussing asymptomatic spread saying it “rarely” happens which spread around a certain political parties followers like crazy as they once again misunderstood science and never bothered to share the WHO correction continuing in their ignorance that makes things worse for everyone.
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If you think about it for a moment, what are the chances that someone dies from another cause during the only 2 weeks of their life when they have COVID-19? Such cases are going to make up a tiny, tiny fraction of overall deaths associated with COVID-19.
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If we take lung cancer for argument’s sake, of the 2million deaths each year worldwide, 20% die of respiratory problems, i.e., influenza, pneumonia and eventual sepis. That is about 400,000 die of the respiratory problems.
Now what I am seeing is that last year this 400,000 died of lung cancer, who happened to have the flu. This year they are dying of covid 19 and happen to have lung cancer.
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… or their body is simply less able to deal with the COVID-19 because of their other conditions.
The whole thing is disingenuous, though, a bit like insisting that people who were fatally shot through the heart really died of lack of blood / oxygen to the brain (and not from being shot). Well - sure! But it was the bullet that stopped their heart in the first place. Using the faulty logic, wouldn’t it also be correct to say that aids never killed anybody either then?
Huh, that sort of calls into question the covid-19 death counts.
I am also curious about the flu numbers, it’s making me a bit skeptical about those death counts as well.
How exactly can they definitively distinguish whether something, say flu or lung cancer, is the cause of death? If someone just dies because they have a whole lot of bad things happening to them, it seems quite difficult to narrow cause of death down to just one bad thing, unless it happened to be the baddest of the lot by a large margin, and the others did not make it the baddest of the lot. Lung cancer clearly seems to be such a thing. Flu and covid-19 less so.
Sigh, just a lot of questions, I think the experts would serve us better by not claiming such strong confidence on the matter and being more forthright about the uncertainty surrounding all of this.
Do you have hard numbers on any of this, or is it more imagination science?
I would like to hear a “margin of error” statement. If the CDC were to say for example that COVID-19 mortalities are 190k plus or minus 20k, that would quantify the uncertainty. A lower bound of 170k is still a ferocious toll on the American public.
Chris
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I don’t know if this counts, but excess death analysis is one way of defending the bounds.
It doesn’t take a sophisticated statistical model to see that the coronavirus pandemic is causing substantially more deaths than would have otherwise occurred.
The number of deaths the CDC officially attributed to COVID-19 in the United States exceeded 148,754 by Aug. 1. Some people who are skeptical about aspects of the coronavirus suggest these are deaths that would have occurred anyway, perhaps because COVID-19 is particularly deadly for the elderly. Others believe that, because the pandemic has changed life so drastically, the increase in COVID-19-related deaths is probably offset by decreases from other causes. But neither of these possibilities is true.
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