outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

i feel like i've lost my mind, watching this hearing. i really do.

all the republicans are 1) making the case that the president did a great job, and/or 2) asking Dr Bright why the drug cocktail that their friend told them totally works against coronavirus isn't the number one drug.

meanwhile, the president is going to pennsylvania to urge everyone to go back to normal, and wisconsin's supreme court is doing the same, against the democratic governor's lockdown order.

it is just a gut blow, day after day. tens of thousands of people unnecessarily dying because of this. and no plan. as the guy testifying keeps saying: there is no comprehensive plan in the federal government. this is fucking madness.

I don't see why no one can explain it to him in four words:

Your voters will die.

They believe the other team's voters are the ones who will day, and in some ways they are right.

Do not underestimate the extent to which the GOP views this as a crude eugenics experiment with the end goal of reducing the voting base of their opponents

It's simple. They rely on voters who rely on FOX News (or even worse) for their information, which for them becomes The Truth About All This. Anyone who deviates from this version of The Truth instantly becomes The Enemy of Freedom. What happened in NYC, and Milan, and Barcelona, and Tehran is beside the point for the voters in Rhinelander, WI and Emporia, Kansas. Until it suddenly becomes The Crisis in the Heartland.

They believe the other team's voters are the ones who will day, and in some ways they are right.

i've seen this argument but i don't buy it. i mean i buy that maybe they believe it's true but i just don't see how the math works out. if the most vulnerable groups are the oldest, and older voters are the strongest and largest constituency for the republicans, then even if a higher percentage of marginalized voters are also at risk the massive numbers of elderly at risk should overwhelm that i'd think? i know someone said that in georgia (or maybe just atlanta?) they thought the numbers actually did work out in the gop's favor but even if that's true (and i'm skeptical) would it be true throughout the US? no area is going to escape coronavirus with the level of not locking down we've done.

I'm not completely convinced it works out either, especially as we continue to see spikes in rural areas. It absolutely could backfire. But then you look at 2016 vote differentials in a place like Michigan and it's clear that it doesn't take much.

I imagine they're hoping not enough of their voter base dies to make a significant electoral difference in November, when balanced against the fact that sensible people (more likely to be Democrats) wouldn't go anywhere near a polling station due to the risk - which will undoubtedly still be high even then.

When all your politics are reactionary and feed exclusively on a sense of crisis, then preventive measures make no sense, except as a thing you are reacting against. As soon as the crisis moves into republican strongholds then the messaging will shift from outrage over tyranny to embracing police state measures to control it.

xposts

i agree with mordy, the "reduce voting base of opponents" angle for the GOP just...makes no sense. anyone with a passing familiarity with covid19 understands that the elderly are particularly vulnerable. he's killing off his own base, not his political enemies.

but also, i think much more important: let's not minimize how COMPLETELY FUCKED UP it is to let political calculations influence the public health response to covid19. i mean, holy shit. this is not hypothetical or abstract or indirect, this is just straight up negligent murder, it really is

we're sitting here thinking about how it might influence the election if trump kills off more of one group vs the other

i mean, that's all we can do, i guess, but seriously. i don't know what else to say, it boggles the mind

It's not just that old people are more vulnerable - it's that Trump's asshole cultists are more likely to go out unmasked and stand too close to other asshole cultists in groups, etc., etc. Their performative rebellion is gonna bite them in the ass; after the protest outside the governor's mansion in Wisconsin, 72 people came down with COVID.

This is exceptionally ugly--going after Bright right now for his salary and questioning the legitimacy of his health issues.

and trump went after him this morning, too! before he even fucking testified!

It's gruesome, but I genuinely think that's a big part of their reasoning, that it is killing off people they do not care about and that it's voter suppression by other means.

But yes, MAGAs are also killing themselves with their greed and stupidity.

xposts

if the most vulnerable groups are the oldest, and older voters are the strongest and largest constituency for the republicans, then even if a higher percentage of marginalized voters are also at risk the massive numbers of elderly at risk should overwhelm that i'd think?

older people are the most at risk from covid, yes, but they're also the ones most likely to hunker down and avoid taking risks. marginalized groups are less financially secure and are more likely to be in situations where they contract the disease. there's also a bit of intersectionality here, as the most likely to contract the disease and die from it are elderly voters from marginalized groups (reliable democratic voters)

are trump voters the ones most likely to hunker down and avoid taking risks?

Republicans are death cultists, and they just like it when anyone dies

are trump voters the ones most likely to hunker down and avoid taking risks?

― Mordy, Thursday, May 14, 2020 11:36 AM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

older ones more likely than younger ones, i would say.

you've seen the "kill me to save the economy" people, lots of them are excited to die themselves

there are quite a few nursing homes full of hunkered down, risk-averse, consistent voters that are nonetheless afflicted with covid19

personally, i hope my death is so seismic that it craters the economy for years on end

It isn't a sensible political calculation, it's genocidal flailing backed up by the faulty belief that COVID only kills people that aren't on their side.

you've seen the "kill me to save the economy" people, lots of them are excited to die themselves

Catherine Mayer, Andy Gill from Gang of Four's widow, has a post up discussing the strong possibility he was an early victim of COVID-19 and some of what that might have meant (and could still mean)

https://www.catherinemayer.co.uk/post/2020-vision-14-may-16-00

at this very moment, congressmen billy long of missouri ("William Hollis Long II is an American auctioneer and politician serving as the U.S. Representative for Missouri's 7th congressional district since 2011" is spending his 5 minutes trying to trick Dr Bright into inferring that Dr Fauci can't be trusted. i'm not even joking.

Crazy how a tiny group of paid morons is driving us toward mass death.
https://kottke.org/plus/misc/images/xkcd-polling.jpg

Strangely, it's also a tiny group that owns the means of production

i personally know at least a handful of idiots that own very little but are still gung ho to reopen society

There are certainly some credulous people out there

the worst are the ppl who are like "why do we unquestioningly accept what the experts say this is too much overkill" and then when you ask "how much do you want to reopen society how many deaths do you foresee from that reopening and how much do you think is tolerable" they retreat to "i'm just asking questions we need to have a discussion" they don't have a fucking clue they're just mad and too emotionally immature to deal with their anger at god and the virus.

a handful of idiots that own very little but are still gung ho to reopen society

I'd class them more as the driven than the drivers, but they occupy the figurative space of the dogs hanging out the window and loving the breeze as they are taken to the death shelter.

otm

it's like with anti-vaxxers. the ppl who make free speech "stop insulting ppl who disagree with you" arguments are secret anti-vaxxers but are embarrassed to come out and say it.

If we are going to be ghoulish about the demographics of who lives/who dies/who votes... (and apparently we are), then we should perhaps also look at the electoral-college distribution.

Trump would have to kill a LOT of New Yorkers and Californians to make a difference in how New York or California, as a whole, votes. This is the flip side of the red-state advantage in the Senate and EC: New York and California will still be Democratic strongholds. Because in those states, even the white people mostly vote blue.

And oh god, after typing that I need to go wash my hands several times and rock quietly, hugging myself, in the corner, out of the sheer disgust about even appearing to regard human lives oas elements of political calculus.

they don't have a fucking clue they're just mad and too emotionally immature to deal with their anger at god and the virus.

otm. and if you replaced "at god and the virus" with "life" or "globalism" or "the cold, uncaring universe" etc, you'd sum up conservatives.

It's definitely gross, but it seems foolish to me to assume Republicans don't look at it this way. Voter suppression is pretty much the only card they have left to play, and the more desperate they get, the more likely that suppression and murder become one and the same. I'd say that protesters storming a state capitol with assault rifles is part of the same phenomenon.

xp

I know nothing about this blog (just followed a link) and am trying to ignore the bollocks in the text, but this post about the recording of COVID19 as cause of death in the UK seems like the death stats are incredibly dodgy? Can anyone on here put this into context/have any background and/or is this largely true?

https://off-guardian.org/2020/05/05/covid-19-is-a-statistical-nonsense/

'this is nonsense' vs. 'this is a nonsense'

i am having a really hard time getting past this intro paragraph: "The mortality statistics for COVID 19 have been incessantly hammered into our heads by the mainstream media (MSM). Every day they report these hardest of facts to justify the lockdown (house arrest) and to prove to us that living in abject fear of the COVID 19 syndrome is the only sensible reaction.

Apparently, only the most lucrative vaccine ever devised can possibly save us."

this may be bad reading skills on my part, but i usually choose not to ignore the bollocks in the text. i have no idea what they're going to say about the death stats, but they came from the mind that wrote that intro paragraph, so

(xxp) Oh, you mean they've got COVID19 in places other than the US?

karl, yeah, I carried on reading through my massive side-eye, cos I wanted to see what the person who linked to it was talking about. on the face of it a fair concern hence why I want to know more.

the death statistics for the flu every year are fairly unreliable and I feel like there is a good chance the official numbers are off by some magnitude but it's almost certainly in the other direction. for every recorded covid death that actually was something else (??) there are probably 10 in which someone dies in their home and isn't recorded. not to mention the thousands of deaths in Jan & Feb that were recorded as pneumonia or whatever

But how reliable are these statistics?

At this early stage of a global pandemic, the statistics have never been very reliable. This is endemic to pandemics.

What do they really tell us about what is happening outside the confines of our incarceration?

They tell us enough to piece together a fairly consistent, but still sketchy, story of a virus which is contagious enough to create exponential growth in new cases, if allowed to circulate freely, and is at least 5x and quite likely 10x more deadly than influenza. Beyond this generally accurate picture, the details are still to fragmentary to acquire statistical certainty.

Do they reveal the harsh reality of an unprecedented deadly virus sweeping the nation

No reputable source in the medical community has ever claimed this pandemic is unprecedented. Not in its reach or its deadliness. The people who actually study pandemics know most of what they know by looking at precedents, and unlike you, they know what they are looking at now, you fool.

xposts

skimming through the rest of it, they spend most of the essay arguing that there are a lot of difficulties with defining what a "covid19 death" is, which is very true. besides the inherent difficulties of assigning a single cause of death to people who die of complications related to covid19, there aren't enough tests available to confirm the presence of covid19 in the first place.

all of that is very well known, i think.

at the very end, they finally get to the common method that is used to overcome these difficulties: comparing total deaths, year over year. in other words, excess mortality. the reasoning is that while it may be impossible to confirm every covid19 case right now, we can still do a reasonably good job in counting overall deaths, regardless of cause. the year-over-year mortality rates are pretty consistent, especially when adjusted for seasonality.

here's what excess mortality looks like for the UK:

https://i.imgur.com/6LT2izb.png

ok, so far so good, i think everything i've summarized so far is pretty much widely accepted. so what is the shocking point that the Off-Guardian essay is trying to make? it all comes at the very end, when they argue that the excess mortality is actually not that unusual compared to other years. here's how they make the argument:

However we do know, thanks to the ONS, the total all cause mortality as a percentage of population in England and Wales over recent decades. This analysis shows us, while excess mortality this year is high, it is by no means unprecedented. In fact, as a percentage of population, it is notably lower to the comparable years of 1995, 1996, 1998 and 1999. Yet none of these years necessitated the shut down of the economy nor the dire health consequences of closing the NHS to all but a few patients.

https://i.imgur.com/AfrNtDr.png

the use of one chart alone is enough to invalidate the author's entire career as a purveyor of opinions, imo. it makes me angry when people knowingly abuse statistics in this way, tbh. what is the problem? one big problem is that the year-over-year time period he's examining is "per extended flu season, weeks 49-16". that roughly corresponds with October - April 17th of each year. that's a big problem! Why is he including the last 3 months of the year, when covid19 didn't start significantly affecting UK populations until February and March? doing so results in a lower value for excess mortality, which was exactly what he wanted. but it makes no sense. it's apples and oranges.

if you compare excess mortality during a time period that's actually relevant (like the FT graphic above), things look pretty different!

and of course, there's also the fact that the analysis cuts off at Week 16 (April 17th). i understand why - if he's trying to compare flu season excess mortality, he shouldn't include a time period that extends past the flu season, for the very same reasons he shouldn't include a time period that preceded coronavirus - but he should at least note the very obvious fact that many, many deaths happened after April 17th and will continue for the foreseeable future.

anyway, sorry for the long post, and i don't even think i made my point very well, it's just clearly not a good faith argument from that writer.

*there are probably 10 in which someone dies in their home and isn't recorded.*
Idk, I would've thought most people would either assume covid and if the stuff in the blog is true there is at least some small incentive to test/assume it is? Otherwise further investigation is necessary. I realise I don't know anything about how deaths are recorded normally and would expect there is a lot of wooliness in any given stats but this seems fairly specific.
OTOH of course there are thousands of excess deaths which happened at the same time as a global pandemic, so I imagine the question they pose is really trying to unpick what is a direct covid death and what are the indirect deaths (bearing in mind there are fewer car accidents etc).

xps hang on let me read your posts :)

it makes me mad, because whoever the author is, they clearly understand how they're manipulating the reader. you don't just accidentally make a chart that is misleading (at best) in that way. they know what they're doing. knowing this, i would never trust anything from that author, or the website they published it on.

Plus add in all the deaths of people with other health issues who can't or won't be seen by a doctor for fear of either contracting the virus in a medical facility or fear of adding to the load of an overwhelmed health system. Unquestionably, there are more non-covid cause of deaths occurring during the pandemic than there would be sans pandemic.