As you probably know, Trump ordered hospitals to stop reporting Covid data to the CDC and instead give it to the dept. of Health and Human Services which is directed by a guy he appointed. What I didn't realize was that this order came into effect July 15th, which is just two days before the all time peak of new cases, on July 17th, after which the new case numbers have been in steady decline. I know this is old news, I just hadn't realized how closely those dates lined up. Kinda scary!
My favorite part of being a leftist is getting outraged, being called a crazed conspiracy theorist, then being vindicated decades later only for the process to repeat on any given issue. We won’t know the full extent of the number fudging until years after this but fuck me if it isn’t obvious it’s happening and double fuck me if I don’t sound like a lunatic trying to talk about it
Fortunately for those on the left outside of America we don't sound like lunatics bringing this up for American numbers.
The problem I have however is that whenever I bring up America fudging their numbers people say "but China" who aren't fudging their numbers at all. It's annoying.
I'd be surprised if they aren't fudging the numbers a little bit also. I doubt there is any country which is completely honest with their Covid numbers.
Seems a bit hard to fudge your numbers when your approach to finding any infection in an area is to lock down the zone and order mandatory 100% testing of the population in order to find the infected and clean it out. Wuhan got 11 new infections discovered and they locked down followed by testing 11million people as a result of it. They consider the area covid-free now and haven't even got social-distancing on it anymore.
Wait until you learn that red states are being under-reported while blue states are continuing to be reported accurately. That way it looks like only red states are declining while blue states are still rising.
This astrophysicist did a good video breaking down the math and the stats but because the data was corrupted by Texas and another state, he took down the video. Here's his correction video, but the base claim that states are being tallied differently based on who voted for Trump in 2016 hold true:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2O5ZG7g77s
I know this is old news
👏 STOP 👏 DEVALUING 👏 INFORMATION 👏 BY 👏 CALLING 👏 IT 👏 OLD 👏 NEWS
You wanna know another word for old news? History. And we need to constantly be rubbing our own noses in the mess we made on the carpet.
There's this god damned mostly-youth-based obsession with just sort of shrugging off anything that's literally over 2 days old at this point, and the window keeps getting shorter and shorter. "Oh yeah I already saw that this morning, don't bring that old fogie news up to me this afternoon."
I'm not targeting you specifically, ned_ludd, but calling out a phenomenon I've seen playing out more and more. People have bought in hook, line and sinker into the 24-7 turbo-trash news cycle, feeling lonely and alone if they aren't up to the god damned minute on largely meaningless fluff headlines. The present is the sum of all parts of history. Live in it like you will be an everlasting part of it, not a god damned fly buzzing around a trash can.
I was going to read this post but then I saw that it's an hour old, I'd rather read something more current :)
You're absolutely right. I mostly meant it in the sense of "I am probably repeating something you have heard 20 times" but I deeply agree with this critique in general.
Overall death rates are way up, well surpassing the covid numbers, so there's gotta be some discrepancy. Epidemiologists already started using death rate % increases in cities to track demographic trends.
there are also second order deaths as a result of not seeking medical attention but there is no way that accounts for the total increases in deaths. I had to explain statistical analysis (not a statistician or epidemiologist but I broadly understand how estimates are made) to my in-laws because they were complaining about the numbers...
UK is underreporting by just under half, official number is 42,000 deaths, while the ONS has recorded 72,000 excess deaths this year.
Indeed. I found these somewhere around here at the beginning of August:
I don't know whether there are updated versions.
I did some digging, and these were posted here by wouldeye and ComradeNagual.
Sure, but individual states are still all doing all their own counting, and in most states things are down these days. It was also around that time that multiple states haulted reopening plans and reclosed indoor bars.
And truthfully, the numbers that are being reported right now don't really matter. Everyone knows there's community spread any which way and is acting accordingly (in that many people really just don't care anymore). We won't be allowed to go abroad until there's a vaccine.
I think it's mostly remarkable (if it's true) because of what a naked and unsubtle lie it would be -- it would mean that institutional legitimacy is way further gone than most people on the left realize in the US.
They're about to start shutting illinois down again and I will have to continue hearing about how pritzker sucks the life out of Illinois small business from people who have never even owned a small business
Is there any validity to the claim that if one person in a household of four has covid, all four will be reported as having Covid?
Recently they reversed the policy, so it will be interesting to see what, if anything, the numbers start to do
Recently they reversed the policy, so it will be interesting to see what, if anything, the numbers start to do
They didn't exactly reverse it. It's back to the CDC, but they're now using some new magic piece of software for the reporting.
I noticed this too and you're the first person I've heard that has said the same thing. I thought it was a little too coincidental because none of these states are really changing anything to make the numbers nosedive like they have.
