The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

COVID-19: Numbers That Really Matter

Posted on | April 27, 2020 | 1 Comment

Among the dishonest games that the media have played with coronavirus is their habit of reporting cumulative totals of reported cases and deaths as if this is the only metric of the pandemic. Anyone with a functional brain, however, must realize that this is misleading and nearly useless in terms of understanding how the outbreak is actually progressing. The cumulative total always goes up, and periodically crosses certain thresholds which can be treated as “news,” for example when the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 passed 2,996, the death toll of the 9/11 attacks: DISEASE KILLS MORE THAN AL-QAEDA!

This is a game, I say, and a dishonest one, because this disease is a worldwide pandemic, and not an isolated event. What matters, if our goal is to comprehend the disease as a public health concern, is whether it’s getting worse or better, and how rapidly this change is happening. As I mentioned in my column today, epidemics tend to follow a certain bell-curve pattern, ascending to a peak and then declining. If we can accurately track new cases and deaths on a daily basis, these numbers will give us an idea of which direction we’re heading and how fast we’re going. Without that kind of measurement, we’re lost, and merely reporting cumulative totals doesn’t help us. So why is the media addicted to this? Because the useless number is effective as anti-Trump propaganda, especially when presented without appropriate perspective.

Consider, for example, that the U.S. coronavirus death toll is, as far as we know (because China is lying) the largest in the world. Yes, but our population (about 327 million) is much larger than any European country. America has more people than the combined total population of Germany (81 million), France (66 million), the United Kingdom (65 million), Italy (61 million) and Spain (46 million). Calculating COVID-19 statistics on a per-capita basis is the only reasonable measurement. Here are the 10 countries with the highest coronavirus death rates, expressed in deaths per million population, with the number in parenthesis showing the “confirmed case fatality rate”:

Belgium ………………………. 631.0 (15.44%)
Spain ………………………….. 503.4 (10.25%)
Italy ……………………………. 446.4 (13.53%)
France …………………………. 341.2 (14.10%)
United Kingdom …………… 311.8 (13.56%)
Netherlands …………………. 262.2 (11.81%)
Ireland ………………………… 227.1 (5.61%)
Sweden ………………………. 223.3 (12.02%)
Switzerland …………………. 192.6 (5.62%)
United States ………………. 171.6 (5.62%)

You see that in terms of the per-capita death rate, nine European countries are worse than the United States, with four countries at least twice as bad as us, and yet our media won’t mention this, because all they care about is blaming Trump. What has Trump done that was worse than what has been done by the leaders of Belgium, Spain, etc?

The people at CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times and other major media establishments don’t want Americans to ponder that question, because these “news” organizations are actually political organizations, devoted to a partisan project of electing Democrats and enacting a liberal agenda.

Another question the media don’t want Americans to think about: Exactly how dangerous is COVID-19? You might think, given that more than 50,000 Americans are already reported to have died from this disease, that the answer to that question is self-evident. But if we don’t know how many people are actually infected with this virus — and we don’t, because many infected people are asymptomatic — then we don’t know what percentage of those infected eventually die from the disease.

This is important, because our economy has been devastated by lockdown orders which are continuing because it is feared that easing restrictions on business activity would result in untold thousands of unnecessary deaths. We cannot even begin to estimate the risk, however, if we don’t know how deadly the virus really is, as a percentage of all infections. Five physicians, led by Tennessee anesthesiologist Dr. Jonathan Geach, have written an article about this problem and you should read it.




 

Category: Health Care, Media Bias, Science

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One Response to “COVID-19: Numbers That Really Matter”

  1. Wednesday Linkage « Bacon Time !!!!!!
    April 29th, 2020 @ 2:39 am

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