RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/15/coronavirus_lessons_fact_and_reason_vs_paranoia_and_fear_.html

Given the most recent mortality rates and modeling, it appears that the death toll in America from coronavirus will end up looking a lot like the annual fatality numbers from the flu. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Washington state is now projecting 68,841 potential deaths in America. It is also estimating lower ranges than that. The flu season of 2017-2018 took 61,099 American lives. For this we have scared the hell out of the American people, shut down the economy, ended over 17 million jobs, taken trillions of dollars out of the economy, closed places of worship, and massively disrupted civic life as we know it. Some of our major public officials tell us, still, that there will be no returning to a status quo, that we will have to get used to a new normal. We strongly disagree with that mindset.

A panic and hysteria over a pandemic that does not look to be what so many frightened us into thinking has radically degraded this country. What should be the major lessons learned here? How did we go from an ethos of “Let’s Roll!” when America was hit by a major attack from outside forces two decades ago to “Let’s roll up in a ball”? 

First, New York City is where the epidemic has struck the hardest. The media is centered in New York City. Although sensationalism is not new, something in the 21st century media landscape is: Reporting the news has been replaced with raising alarms, heightening political tensions, and funneling information through a strictly partisan lens. Lost is the notion that if something is too bad to be true — or too good to be true — it probably is not true. Conspiracy theories and extreme rhetoric have replaced fact and reason, as well as reasonableness. These dark impulses have been aided and abetted by a series of left-wing notions that have come to dominate our politics, giving us a new “paranoid style in American politics.” 

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-problem-with-new-york-citys-covid-19-death-rate-estimates/

More on the continuing saga (see here, here, here and here) of the COVID-19 mortality rate — specifically, on why it is so hard to get accurate statistics, notwithstanding that these statistics are essential to decisions about reopening the economy.

Those of us who have been watching the daily numbers closely could not help but notice the dark cloud that drifted Tuesday over what was otherwise cautiously optimistic news. The number of coronavirus cases seems to be dropping, but deaths are suddenly spiking. Why?

It would overstate the matter to say that the tally of new cases is “plummeting,” but the drop has been noticeable: from a level of over 30,000 new cases per day from April 6 through April 11 (and, on three of those days, over 33,000 new cases), we’ve been down to about 27,000 on each of the three days since Sunday.

Initially, deaths also seemed to be dropping markedly: from around 2,000 per day from April 7 through April 11, down to about 1,500 on Sunday and Monday. Then, suddenly, deaths shot up on Tuesday, to 2,407, by far the highest one-day total yet (surpassing the previous high of 2,035 recorded on April 10).

What gives? Well, the main problem right now is New York. As governor Andrew Cuomo noted yesterday, although daily deaths seemed to be edging downward, below 700 on Monday for the first time in a week, they spiked up over 800 again on Tuesday. (Gov. Cuomo is nevertheless heartened by a decrease in hospitalizations, which will hopefully lead to a trend of declining cases and fatalities.) There were also marked daily death toll increases in New Jersey, Louisiana and Michigan, and less pronounced but noticeable increases in Massachusetts, Illinois, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Texas.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/15/world-health-organization-director-again-parr

While many have noted World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’ effort to deflect criticism of his organization’s response to the Chinese coronavirus by playing the race card, far more revealing was whom he played it against. Under fire for his bias toward communist China, the Beijing-backed director-general, known simply as Tedros, sought to defend himself by slandering Taiwan, the thorn in the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) side.

During an April 8 WHO press conference, Tedros unleashed a seemingly unprovoked tirade at Taiwan. He claimed its people were leveling racist attacks at him, apparently with tacit governmental support. Taiwan’s foreign ministry unequivocally denies this charge. Tedros stated:

[S]ince I don’t have any inferiority complex when I am personally affected or attacked by racial slurs, I don’t care because I am a very proud black person or Negro. I don’t care being called even Negro. I am. That’s what came from some quarters and if you want me to be specific, three months ago this attack came from Taiwan. We need to be honest. I will be straight today, from Taiwan and Taiwan the foreign Ministry they know the campaign they didn’t dissociate themselves. They even started criticizing me in the middle of all that insult and slur but I didn’t care.

In response to Tedros’ remarks, I asked the WHO:

Can you provide any specific examples of the “attacks” to which the director-general was referring?
Can you point to evidence suggesting the attacks came from Taiwan, and clarify whether the director-general was saying that private citizens from Taiwan were engaging in such attacks, or rather that its government was doing so?
Can you point to evidence regarding the assertion that Taiwan’s foreign ministry was aware of this “campaign,” and “didn’t dissociate” itself?

As of this writing, the WHO has not responded to these inquiries.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/new_york_city_adds_4000_to_its_wuhan_virus_dead_by_recategorizing_deaths.html

New York City’s Mayor Bill de Blasio abruptly added 4,000 deaths to the city’s roster of Wuhan virus deaths. He did this even though there are no tests proving that these 4,000 people died because of the virus. The mayor claims he made the change to increase statistical accuracy, but he may have been acting upon baser motives.

One problem with getting a handle on the Wuhan virus is that we have no accurate count telling how many people have become sick with or died from it, whether at home or abroad. Different countries use different tests; different tests have various rates of fake results, both positive and negative; and not everyone is or can be tested. Moreover, in different places, people are classified as Wuhan virus deaths if they tested positive for the virus regardless of what killed them.

We know that there may be people who have the virus but don’t know it, people who are sick with something that may or may not be the virus, and people who die from causes that can be attributed to the virus, although without any real certainty. Antibody tests are useful for providing some mathematical probability about the virus’s prevalence in a given population, but the tests also don’t home in on the exact number of people who are or have been ill.

Put another way, virus counts around the world are subject to a lot of guesswork. The inability to get accurate numbers allows different jurisdictions to adjust the numbers depending on their policy goals.