The Other McCain

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

COVID-19: The Democrat Disease

Posted on | April 12, 2020 | 3 Comments

 

Part of the developing liberal media narrative about COVID-19 pandemic is that black people are disproportionately impacted by the disease. The usual explanation for this is that black people have more “underlying conditions” — heart disease, Type II diabetes, etc. — that so often make the difference between having a mild case of coronavirus and having a serious case that might kill you. What goes unmentioned in such explanations is that black people are also disproportionately likely to live in high-density urban areas and to use public transportation. Why do you think New York City became such a death trap in this pandemic? Millions of people ride the subway there every day, and the city’s population density is the highest in America. Because urban life is also highly correlated with voting Democrat, the Chinese virus also has a partisan bias. Republican voters tend to live in suburbs, small towns and rural areas, regions where the COVID-19 infection rate is lower. A “stay-at-home” order will help reduce the spread of a contagious disease far more effectively if you live in a single-family home than if you live in a crowded apartment complex, and so the residential patterns of Democrats are part of the risk patterns that have political consequences.

Consider the case of Maryland. The state has long been deep “blue,” with two Democratic senators, seven of eight House seats controlled by Democrats (“one of the most gerrymandered states in the country”), and Democrats dominating the state legislature by a 2-to-1 margin. Nevertheless, in 2014, Maryland elected Republican Larry Hogan as governor and he has been so successful that, in 2018 — a terrible mid-term election for the GOP — Hogan was re-elected by a 12-point margin over former NAACP president Ben Jealous. If you look at the map of that 2018 election, you’ll see that the county with the largest margin for Jealous was Prince George’s. This is a D.C. suburb where the population is 65% black, the population density is 1,700 per square mile, and the Democrat got 71%, with 225,889 votes to Hogan’s 89,925. Compare that to Washington County, in the state’s western panhandle, where the population is about 10% black, the population density is 320 per square mile, and Hogan got 77%, with 38,765 votes to Jealous’s 10,894.

Based on what we know about the pattern of COVID-19 infections, what would you deduce about its impact in these two counties? As of Saturday, these were the county coronavirus numbers for Maryland:

 

As you can see, Prince George’s County had the most coronavirus cases (1,923) and the most deaths (50) of any jurisdiction in Maryland, while Washington County was near the low end, with only 72 known COVID-19 cases, and only one death. Here is a further analysis:

Prince George’s County
Population 909,327
COVID-19 cases (as of 4/11) ………………… 1,923
COVID-19 cases (per 100,000 residents) …. 211
COVID-19 deaths (as of 4/11) …………………. 50
COVID-19 cases (per 100,000 residents) …. 5.5

Washington County
Population 151,049
COVID-19 cases (as of 4/11) ……………………. 72
COVID-19 cases (per 100,000 residents) …. 48
COVID-19 deaths (as of 4/11) ………………….. 1
COVID-19 cases (per 100,000 residents) …. 0.7

So, the per-capita rate of COVID-19 cases in Prince George’s County is roughly 4.4 times higher than in Washington County, and death rate in Prince George’s County is nearly eight times higher. This remarkable differential is not a result of politics, nor can it be blamed on racism. Rather, the coronavirus infection rate reflects differences in lifestyle — e.g., urban vs. rural — that are also reflected in the partisan preferences of communities. This data is subject to misinterpretation, of course. The liberal media want to blame the disproportionate impact on the black community on racism and poverty, even though Prince George’s County “is the wealthiest African American-majority county in the United States,” and has a substantially higher median household income ($71,696) than majority-white Washington County ($52,994).

Let’s be clear: Nobody is “safe” from COVID-19. Being white or living in a rural area doesn’t make you immune to this disease, and the virus doesn’t care which party you vote for. However, risk is always a matter of statistical probability, and because the Democratic coalition is so heavily skewed toward urban voters, the outbreak of a contagious disease that spreads most rapidly in high-density communities with public transportation means that Democratic voters are most at risk.

(Thanks to John Hoge for help with statistical calculation.)




 

Category: Democrats, Health Care, Maryland, Racism

The Apocalypse Will Be Blogged

Posted on | April 11, 2020 | Comments Off on The Apocalypse Will Be Blogged

 

Let’s see: Deadly pandemic escapes from a Chinese bioweaponry research lab, swarms of locusts cover Africa and, meanwhile, a volcano erupts:

The Indonesian volcano Anak Krakatau erupted Friday, spewing a large plume of ash 9 miles into the air.
At approximately 11 p.m. local time, the volcano’s loud eruption was reportedly heard by people in Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, located more than 90 miles away. Images taken from a webcam near the area show lava flowing from the volcano.
The strong eruption is believed to be the most forceful since December 2018, when it produced a deadly tsunami that killed over 400 people on the coasts of southeastern Sumatra and western Java.
Anak Krakatau, which translates to “the child of Krakatoa,” was formed after Krakatoa erupted in 1883 with a massive explosion 10,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The eruption killed approximately 36,000 people, destroyed hundreds of villages, and ash traveled as far as Europe. Later studies show that eruption likely lowered global temperatures for years.

Not saying it’s a sign of the Apocalypse but . . . OF COURSE it’s a sign of the Apocalypse. Repent, sinners. The end is nigh upon us.




 

Category: Fear. Loathing., Indonesia

The Video You MUST Watch: Origins of the Chinese Communist Virus

Posted on | April 11, 2020 | 1 Comment

Joshua Philipp of the Epoch Times has spent weeks reporting on the pandemic of COVID-19, and this video — nearly an hour long — is full of facts about the case I hadn’t known until I watched it. The official explanation, that the disease originated in a “wet market,” looks very dubious when you consider evidence indicating (not proving, but indicating) its origin in a government research laboratory. This not a conspiracy theory, and Philipp is not saying that China’s Communist Party intentionally inflicted this pandemic on the world. What he is saying is that you shouldn’t trust anything Beijing says about it.

 

Watch it and share it widely with your friends.




 

Category: China

In The Mailbox: 04.10.20

Posted on | April 10, 2020 | 3 Comments

– compiled by Wombat-socho

Happy birthday to Mandy Moore!

When she was much younger.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Just Give Them What They Want
Red Pilled Jew: Must Watch/Must Share – “The Islamization Of Europe”
EBL: Gregorian Chants For Good Friday
Twitchy: PBS Reporter At Coronavirus Briefing Asks Stupidest Question Ever Asked Of Surgeon General
Louder With Crowder: Remember All The Times The Media Downplayed The Coronavirus? We Do.
According To Hoyt: When Insanity Bites, also, Attention Citizens
Monster Hunter Nation: There’s an MHI Story In The Overruled Anthology, also, A Murder Of Manatees, Free This Month
Vox Popoli: Secret King Wins Again! also, Deglobalization Begins

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Friday Hawt Chicks & Links – The Great Cleanout Edition
American Conservative: Are We Entering A New Era Of State Nullification?
American Greatness: WHO, Red China Under Fire For China Virus Shenanigans, also, Pandemic Waste In Higher Education
American Thinker: Will The Coronavirus Pandemic Derail China’s Global Ambitions?
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Tax Scam Friday
Babalu Blog: Good Friday Blessings To All
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For April 10
Cafe Hayek: “We” Should Leave Us Alone
CDR Salamander: What The Navy Knew About COVID-19 on 19 MAR 2020, also, No Rush On SECNAV Hearings
Da Tech Guy: A Question For All Our Democrat Friends Who Support Mail-In Voting With No Voter ID – Why Do You Trust Donald Trump So Much?
Don Surber: Gavin Newsom, The New Democrat Heartthrob
First Street Journal: Paul Krugman Warns Of Trump Becoming Dictator While Ignoring Democrat Governors Doing Just That
The Geller Report: Red China Has Had COVID-19 In Its Wuhan Labs For Seven Years, also, Senate Democrats Demand $10 Million For Media But Not One Cent For Small Businesses
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, Modeling Versus Real-World Data
Hollywood In Toto: Trolls World Tour Sings A Song Hollywood Should Heed
Legal Insurrection: Government Gone Wild – Wuhan Virus Has Led To Massive Overreach, also, Trump To Block Iran’s $5 Billion IMF Loan Request
Megan McArdle: My Dad Has COVID-19. All We Can Do Is Wait.
Michelle Malkin: The Grand Farce Of American Social Distancing
The PanAm Post: WHO’s Irresponsibility Led To Spread Of Coronavirus, also, Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel Has Taken Over A Venezuelan City
Power Line: “Joe Biden Stands Up For China”, also, Coronavirus In One State
Shark Tank: Rick Scott Torches Senate Democrats For Blocking COVID-19 Funding, however, Mucarsel-Powell Claims Otherwise
Shot In The Dark: Appeal To Authority
STUMP: Mortality With Meep – Baseline Mortality Stats For Comparison
The Political Hat: Firing Line Friday – Is There A Case For Private Property?
This Ain’t Hell: Valor Friday, also, Claim of November Pandemic Warning To White House & Military Is False
Victory Girls: Mass Graves In NYC Sparking Media Panic Aren’t New
Volokh Conspiracy: Mississippi City Bans Drive-In Church Services
Weasel Zippers: Biden Forgets Name Of H1N1 Virus Halfway Through Saying Its Name, also, AG Barr Says Evidence From Durham Investigation “Far More Troubling” Than Mistakes Or Sloppiness
Mark Steyn: Easter Sequeastered

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Category: Linkagery

Jan. 30: ‘We Still Believe the Immediate Risk to the American Public Is Low’

Posted on | April 10, 2020 | 1 Comment

CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield.

The first five known cases of COVID-19 in the United States were all patients who had recently traveled to Wuhan, China.

Case No. 1 was in Snohomish County, Washington. Case No. 2 was in Chicago. Cases No. 3 and 4 were in Orange County, California, and Case No. 5 was in Maricopa County, Arizona. However, Case No. 6 was different. It was “the first instance of person-to-person spread with this new virus here,” as the CDC reported:

Previously, all confirmed U.S. cases had been associated with travel to Wuhan, China, where an outbreak of respiratory illness caused by this novel coronavirus has been ongoing since December 2019. However, this latest 2019-nCoV patient has no history of travel to Wuhan, but shared a household with the patient diagnosed with 2019-nCoV infection on January 21, 2020.
Recognizing early on that the 2019-nCoV could potentially spread between people, CDC has been working closely with state and local partners to identify close contacts of confirmed 2019-nCoV cases. Public health officials identified this Illinois resident through contact tracing. Both patients are in stable condition.
“Given what we’ve seen in China and other countries with the novel coronavirus, CDC experts have expected some person-to-person spread in the US,” said CDC Director Robert R. Redfield, M.D. “We understand that this may be concerning, but based on what we know now, we still believe the immediate risk to the American public is low.”

One of the repeated lies of the anti-Trump media is that the president failed to do what was necessary to prevent the spread of this disease. We are told, by Democrats and the media, that President Trump “wasted” six weeks during which he should have been . . . Well, doing something more than what he did, which was actually quite a lot.

On Jan. 29, Trump announced the formation of his Coronavirus Task Force, headed by HHS Secretary Alex Azar, and including the CDC director Dr. Redfield, who retired from the Army medical service with the rank of colonel, and whose medical specialty is viruses. On Jan. 31, Trump announced a ban on travel from China, which was controversial at the time. The same day Trump announced the ban, Joe Biden, campaigning in Iowa, accused the president of “hysterical xenophobia,” saying Trump was leading with “fearmongering . . . instead of science.”

The claim that Trump is “anti-science” has become part of the media’s narrative about the COVID-19 outbreak. Supposedly, a bias against science explains why the president didn’t do whatever it was that his critics, with the benefit of hindsight, say he should have done. What he actually did, however, was entirely in keeping with what the medical experts would have advised, given the circumstances. With only six known coronavirus cases in the U.S., five of them were people who had just returned from Wuhan, and the sixth was a household member of one of these travelers. So the first thing to do, obviously, was stop the arrival of more infected people from China, where the pandemic began and at the time had just been recognized as a “global emergency” by the WHO.

OK, so what happened next? As of Feb. 26 — nearly a month after Trump had created the coronavirus task force — there were still only 15 known cases of the disease in the United States. It was on Feb. 28 that Case No. 16 was identified in Santa Clara County, California:

Santa Clara County confirmed the second case of “community spread” of the new coronavirus in the United States, on Friday.
It is also the third novel coronavirus case in the county — and officials said it is not tied to the other two cases.
The individual tested positive for the COVID-19 virus. They had no contact with a known infected person and did not have any relevant travel history. . . .
The first case of community spread was reported just a day prior on Thursday in Solano County. The patient was transferred to the University of California, Davis Medical Center for treatment from NorthBay VacaValley Hospital in Vacaville, California.
Business Insider reported that the UC Davis patient also did not have a relevant travel history or have any contact with known infected people. A leaked internal memo showed that the woman was transferred to UC Davis on February 19, but initial efforts to have her tested for COVID-19 were rejected because she did not meet the previous CDC requirements.

At that point — where the 16th case had just been identified — there was not a single known COVID-19 case in New York or New Jersey. The only known case on the East Coast up to that point, was a man who had recently arrived in Boston from Wuhan, China, in late January. At that time, Boston Public Health Commission director Rita Nieves said, “The risk to the general public remains low.” And this continued to be the case throughout February, so that if you want to cherry-pick quotes by President Trump during that time saying that he believed we had the problem under control, and that the Wuhan coronavirus posed no serious risk to Americans, so what? This was the consensus of the medical community at the time. It was not until the first week of March that the outbreak began to escalate rapidly. New York Times, March 1:

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Sunday confirmed New York State’s first case of the coronavirus, saying that a woman contracted the virus while traveling in Iran and is now in New York City isolated in her home.
“The patient has respiratory symptoms, but is not in serious condition and has been in a controlled situation since arriving to New York,” Governor Cuomo said in a statement.
The 39-year-old-woman is in Manhattan, according to state officials. She returned from Iran last week, and was tested after going to a hospital in the city; she has since been staying at home, officials said.
Early on Monday, the governor said the woman was a “unique case.” Appearing on CBS This Morning, he said she was a health care worker so “she knew to take precautions and stay in a controlled situation.” He added that she had not ridden public transportation since returning to New York.
Later, on CNN, he said he anticipated that “there will be community spread” but that “there’s no reason for concern.”

Andrew Cuomo, March 1: “There’s no reason for concern.”

How is it that Trump is being blamed for supposedly ignoring the danger of this disease, when the governor of New York — whose state now has thousands of residents dead from COVID-19 — described the news of the first case in the state as “no reason for concern”? At that point in time, Cuomo’s confidence seemed justified. There were still but a few dozen known cases of this disease in the country, and almost no one realized that, in a certain percentage of cases, people infected with the disease were asymptomatic, but still transmitting the virus to others.

One thing that did go wrong in the early federal response to the coronavirus pandemic was that the CDC and the FDA bungled the development and approval of testing, hindering identification of people with the virus. That was a bureaucratic snafu, for which Trump was not to blame, but because hindsight is always 20/20, we now know that COVID-19 was already spreading far beyond the known cases in late February and early March. For example, the outbreak in Dougherty County, Georgia, which is now one of the worst per-capita of any in the country, was spread at two funerals that took place on Feb. 29 and March 7.

Here we are, then, on Good Friday, with all the churches empty because of lockdown orders inspired by the pandemic, and the media continues promoting the narrative that Trump is to blame, because he is “anti-science.” Yet we see that many other officials — including the director of the CDC and the Democratic governor of New York — were not expressing fear of a widespread pandemic in January and February. As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, Mayor Bill DeBlasio of New York City was telling residents to go on with life as normal as late as March 11: “If you’re not sick, you should be going about your life.”

More than 5,000 residents of New York City have died from COVID-19, and it took less than a month to compile that grisly total. The total number of coronavirus case for New York state, whose governor declared March 1 that there was “no reason for concern,” is 161,807 — more than Spain (157,053), Italy (147,577), France (124,869) or Germany (120,157).

There is plenty of blame to go around, if we want to point fingers, but shouldn’t we start with the Communist regime in Beijing? Oh, wait — didn’t somebody tell us not to worry about China?

President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign released a new ad on Thursday attacking former Vice President Joe Biden for his past support of China.
“During America’s crisis, Biden protected China’s feelings,” the text of the ad reads.
The ad features Biden’s past positive comments about China, as more Americans suffer from the coronavirus that first came from China.
“It is in our self-interest that China continue to prosper,” Biden says in the ad.
The ad also features Biden toasting Xi Jinping at dinner and questions on Biden’s son Hunter’s investments in China.
Dr. Anthony Fauci also has a cameo in the campaign ad, praising the president enacting the China travel ban to help fight the virus.

 

Democrats who want to play politics with this virus are likely to discover, to their regret, that they cannot win that game.




 

Category: China, Health Care, New York

Oregon’s Pointless COVID-19 Lockdown

Posted on | April 10, 2020 | 3 Comments

 

Wednesday, Oregon’s Democratic Gov. Kate Brown announced that the state’s public schools would not re-open this school year, and also extended “indefinitely” an order closing restaurants and bars. That order, issued last month, had been scheduled to end April 15.

A simple question: Why?

Oregon’s schools must be doing a lousy job of teaching arithmetic, to say nothing of basic science. According to CNN, Oregon (population 4.1 million) has had a total of 1,321 reported cases of COVID-19, with 44 deaths. That’s 31 cases per 100,000 population, a known infection rate 96% lower than the rate in New York. Your chances of dying of coronavirus in Oregon are slightly above one-in-a-million, and the vast majority of the cases are in a few cities, but the entire state remains under a stay-at-home order with no end in sight. The question remains: Why?

Jeff Stidham called my attention to a blog that is asking this question, and explains that Oregon is planning on a “surge” of COVID-19 cases, an expectation based on model projections which simply do not reflect the reality of the state’s coronavirus outbreak:

[T]he reason so many Governors locked down their states is because they were presented with data by the IHME that showed extreme death levels if lockdowns didn’t happen. Frankly, if I’d been presented with the IHME’s data I probably would have locked down Oregon, too. Here’s the problem: their data has proven to be disastrously wrong, and has overestimated death and hospitalization rates by 5-10x, which means they have been off by roughly 500-1,000%, which basically means their data has been useless. . . .
[A]ny peak for COVID-19 has not only ALREADY HAPPENED, but it was actually happening before Governor Brown’s lockdown order of March 23rd. Moreover, even if you accept the highly faulty model that Governor Brown is using that has never been right, even on our worst day it shows that our hospitals will barely be stretched with a forecast usage of 8.6% of current capacity.

The local press in Oregon is still relying on these projections, publishing headlines like “Oregon prepares for coronavirus surge,” despite the fact — clearly apparent from data published by Oregon’s health department — that the state’s “surge” in cases is already over.

Think about this: It takes a certain number of days between the time someone becomes infected with COVID-19 and the time they experience symptoms (if they ever do exhibit symptoms, since many cases seem to be asymptomatic). The reason for all the crisis messaging in March was that it was projected that a “surge” in cases would overwhelm the hospital system. Patients who experience only mild symptoms — they experience flu-like symptoms for a few days, then recover — and never require hospitalization are irrelevant to the public-health concerns about a possible shortage of hospital beds, ventilators, medical personnel, etc. Therefore, the important statistic to study is not the cumulative total of known COVID-ID cases, but rather the number of hospitalized patients.

The time delay between a person contracting the virus and being hospitalized is one factor to keep in mind when examining trends in the pandemic. Another factor is the time-lag between onset of symptoms and death, in those cases that prove to be fatal. In Italy, for example, their number of new cases peaked about six days before the daily number of deaths. The most recent Oregon coronavirus deaths:

Oregon’s 39th COVID-19 death is a 74-year-old man in Linn County, who tested positive on March 22 and died on April 3 at his residence. He had underlying medical conditions.
Oregon’s 40th COVID-19 death is a 97-year-old man in Linn County, who tested positive on March 15 and died on April 4 at his residence. He had underlying medical conditions.
Oregon’s 41st COVID-19 death is an 87-year-old woman in Multnomah County, who tested positive on March 28 and died on April 6 at her residence. She had underlying medical conditions.
Oregon’s 42nd COVID-19 death is a 41-year-old woman in Multnomah County, who tested positive on April 5 and died on April 8 at Oregon Health and Sciences University. She had underlying medical conditions.
Oregon’s 43rd COVID-19 death is a 66-year-old man in Multnomah County, who tested positive on March 31 and died on April 5 at his residence. He had underlying medical conditions.
Oregon’s 44th COVID-19 death is a 74-year-old man in Benton County, who tested positive on March 26 and died on April 8 at Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center in Corvallis. He had underlying medical conditions.

So, these six patients tested positive between March 15 and April 5, and died between April 3 and April 8. The time between positive and death ranged from three days (patient #42) to 21 days (patient #40). All but one of these six deaths involved patients who had tested positive in March. And the number of new cases has been decreasing since the third week in March. Given that Oregon’s current case numbers are far from placing any strain on the state’s hospital capacity, that the known infection rate in Oregon is barely 3 in 10,000 residents, and that the state’s death rate of known cases is 3.3%, why is the entire state still locked down? Because the governor is a Democrat?




 

Category: Health Care, Oregon

In The Mailbox: 04.09.20

Posted on | April 9, 2020 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 04.09.20

– compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: UN Warns Of Disaster – In 2000 – Due To Global Warming
EBL: 4/9/20 Coronavirus Task Force Briefing
Twitchy: Engineer/Entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan Absolutely Torches Vox For “Helping Cause The Greatest Crisis In Modern US History” (And He’s Got Receipts)
Louder With Crowder: WHO Director Says Politicizing COVID-19 Just Leads To More Body Bags

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: Bernie Got A Lot of Love, But Failed To Grow
American Greatness: What Democratic Party Rule Will Do To America, also, What Is The Coronavirus Endgame?
American Thinker: CDC Confesses To Lying About COVID-19 Death Numbers
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Coronalection News
Babalu Blog: “Perfect Storm” Brewing As Cuba Runs Out Of Food During Coronavirus Plague
BattleSwarm: Grandpa Commie Has Left The Building
Cafe Hayek: What Not To Do
CDR Salamander: The Sound Of Silence
Da Tech Guy: Red China Buying Journalists Is Their Last Gasp In An International Game Of Chicken, also, The Great TP Shortage Was Caused By Laws That Prevent Price Gouging
Don Surber: Not Listening To Experts Saved Lives, also, Japan Will Pay Companies To Leave Red China
First Street Journal: If Liberals Actually Understood Economics…
The Geller Report: Muslim Migrants Vent Anger Over Being Denied Entry To Western Europe By Chopping Down 5000 Olive Trees, also, Overwhelming Majority Of Americans Hold Red China Responsible For COVID-19
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, I’m Not Making This Up, You Know
Hollywood In Toto: Samantha Bee Slams Trump For Giving Us Hope, also, Why Waldo On Weed May Open Your Eyes & Heart
JustOneMinute: We Can Blame Red China!
Legal Insurrection: Democrats Block Expansion Of Payroll Protection Plan, Demand More Unrelated Spending, also, Trump Speculates On Why Obama Hasn’t Endorsed Biden
The PanAm Post: Coronavirus Lockdown Forces Venezuelans To Return Home
Power Line: How Honest Is The COVID-19 Death Count? also, WaPo Praises Senator Cotton To Bash Trump
Shark Tank: DeSantis Wants International Travelers Screened For COVID-19
Shot In The Dark: The New Stasi
The Political Hat: Killing Medicine – Mandatory Killing Of The Mentally Ill, Whither Medical Conscience, and Euthanasia Via Organ Harvesting
This Ain’t Hell: Texas Democrat Party Sues To Expand Mail-In Votes, also, Best Handle This Much Better
Victory Girls: Trump Wasn’t Warned About COVID-19 In November
Volokh Conspiracy: Law School Honor Code Violation Is Basis For Denying Bar Admission
Weasel Zippers: CNN’s Dr. Gupta Gets Busted For Misreading Chris Cuomo’s X-Ray, also, Unhinged James Carville Claims Republicans “Will Kill People To Stay In Power”
Mark Steyn: The World Is Flattened, also, Tripp Wire

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Category: Linkagery

IMHE Lowers COVID-19 U.S. Death Projection Again, Now Down to 60,000

Posted on | April 9, 2020 | Comments Off on IMHE Lowers COVID-19 U.S. Death Projection Again, Now Down to 60,000

 

While MSNBC hosts were busy spreading conspiracy theories, the doomsday forecasters were revising their numbers again:

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) model cited by the White House Coronavirus Task Force lowered its projections for coronavirus deaths in the U.S. by 25 percent from 81,766 to 60,415 early Wednesday morning.
The IHME model has come under withering criticism for vastly overstating projections of regular and ICU hospital beds needed, but its death projections to date have closely tracked with actual data.
Wednesday’s dramatic reverse in the model’s projection of U.S. deaths was made without a press release from IHME explaining the reasons for the reduction. It marks the second reduction in the model’s U.S. deaths projections since April 1, when it forecast 93,765 U.S. fatalities.
On April 5, the death projections were lowered to 81,766. . . .
The April 8 iteration of the IHME model has reduced the projections of coronavirus deaths in New York State to 13,307, down from the April 6 projection of more than 15,000.
It persists, however, in claiming there will be a shortage of regular hospital beds in New York State on the peak day of Wednesday April 8, despite Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s statement at Tuesday’s press conference the state has “more than enough beds available.”

So, in one week, the forecast has been reduced more than 30% and the IHME’s scary predictions of a crisis caused by a shortage of hospital beds has been proven false. Now, we have Chris Hayes suggesting to his Twitter audience of 2 million followers that somehow the IHME — an institute funded by Bill Gates, who handpicked a Harvard professor (Chris Murray) to lead it — was in cahoots with the Trump administration. Alex Jones is banned from Twitter for promoting “conspiracy theories,” but paranoia is OK when MSNBC hosts do it.

Also, it is important to note that “social distancing” cannot explain the failures of the IHME model projections, as Sean Davis points out:

“The IHME models assumed ‘full social distancing,’ including school closures, business shutdowns, and stay-at-home lockdowns from the beginning. It requires abject stupidity or outright dishonesty to claim ‘social distancing’ caused the model revisions.”

Nobody likes to admit they were wrong, but when you are as wrong as badly as Chris Hayes was wrong — and as I’ve pointed out, he was speaking in terms of “millions of lives” just three weeks ago — it’s sociopathic to double-down and blame others for your own errors.

UPDATE: Great minds think alike and, while I was writing this post, Ace of Spades was about a half-hour ahead of me:

One month ago, Chris Hayes accused Trump of “personally pressuring” health officials to “manipulate the numbers downwards.” . . .
Now he says Trump has manipulated the numbers upward.
So which is it, Chris? It can’t be both.
The media and the social media monopolists conspire to control the public discourse by deplatforming and censoring anyone who utters a “conspiracy theory,” the true definition of which is any speculation that the leftwing corporate media disapproves of.

Beware of angry ewoks.




 

Category: Health Care, Media Bias
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