Posted on 03/27/2020 4:49:42 AM PDT by Kaslin
Many in the media enthusiastically relish the claim that the United States has more people infected with the coronavirus than China does, even though China's numbers are unreliable.
When Donald Trump tweeted this week that the United States had performed more coronavirus tests than any other country, the media were upset.
Trump being Trump, he’d also said the United States had done more tests in eight days than South Korea had done in eight weeks. PolitiFact calculated the United States had done 17,582 fewer tests than South Korea during that time period. LiveScience said the United States had done 43,790 fewer tests than South Korea during that time period.
Their own disparity notwithstanding, other media outlets pointed out merely that South Korea is a much smaller country than the United States. That meant they had done more tests per capita than the United States had.
“Trump overlooks a huge piece of context,” a USA Today fact check said. CNN went with “Fact Check: US has done more coronavirus tests than South Korea, but not per person.” MSNBC ran a segment with a graph asserting that “The U.S. Trails Other Countries In Number Of Other Coronavirus Tests Conducted Per Million People.”
The segment is utterly wild, incidentally. You can watch it here, but while Mika Brzezinski moans and grunts in agreement, Joe Scarborough accuses the president of “lying” and says you have to adjust for population because of “science.” As if speaking to Trump, he says, “This is science. I don’t know … maybe you didn’t take … science at whatever school your daddy got you into. I don’t know. But this is just science.”
While the media have been doing a demonstrably bad job covering the coronavirus and the administration — and have the sinking poll numbers to prove it — this is a good point. Numbers should be placed in context. Comparing countries of different size by aggregate numbers isn’t particularly helpful.
Yet that’s what happens all the time. For example, just a couple of hours after Scarborough’s “science” rant, his colleague Chuck Todd began his show by comparing the United States’s coronavirus cases with Italy’s, even though the United States has a much larger population, and the number of cases has something to do with the number of tests being conducted, and the United States has conducted more tests than any other country has:
CNN, which just days ago praised the need for per capita comparisons, tweeted this last night:
Italy is much smaller than the United States, China is much bigger.
Speaking of China and their reported cases, there is also the issue of the quality of China’s reporting. China claims that it arrested the spread of the virus overnight a few weeks ago. It skyrocketed up to 80,000 cases and then just stopped spreading in China and began spreading everywhere else in the world.
Even with their draconian measures of welding people into their apartments, forbidding travel, electronic surveillance of the affected, and other measures, these numbers are impossible to believe. As Jeryl Bier points out, the last paragraph of a New York Times article is reported credulously when it shouldn’t be: “China’s National Health Commission said earlier on Thursday that all 67 new coronavirus cases officially reported across the country on Wednesday were people who had been infected overseas, as were all 47 reported the previous day.”
As the reported cases in the United States surpassed the reported cases in China — not difficult to do given China’s very low quality of reporting and the fact that the United States is doing more testing than any other country — media were sure to trumpet the numbers:
Yet many in the media don’t just believe them but enthusiastically relish the claim that the United States has more people infected with the coronavirus than China does. Joe “Science Means You Have To Always Do Per Capita Comparisons” Scarborough weighed in:
Many media figures gave Chinese propagandists a run for their money. Here, frequent CNN guest Julia Ioffe said, of a country that is full of public health officials and doctors working valiantly to tackle a global epidemic, that it is a “s—hole” country.
Julia, you might recall, has had a rough couple of years, including tweeting her speculative fantasies about Trump involving incest, falling hard for debunked Russia collusion hoaxes, and being pretty sure she’d figured out an elaborate Russian plot regarding Hunter Biden’s indiscretions.
Ioffe’s fellow Russia collusion hoax promoter Benjamin Wittes was similarly excited by the increase in recorded cases of the deadly virus among his fellow Americans:
Again, sounding like Communist Chinese propagandists, media outlet The Verge renamed the Wuhan Virus the American Virus on account of U.S. testing and results:
Nobody in the media has explained why they accept the Communist Chinese government’s reported numbers despite their track record. As for whether to report numbers that are or are not controlled for population, even that metric can be lacking.
For instance, while Washington state had the earlier significant outbreak of the novel Chinese Coronavirus, New York is experiencing much worse spread. Further, in the United States of America, each state has the right to respond differently to the outbreak. It is more worthwhile to compare by city.
Not everyone was bad on this point. The Washington Examiner’s Phil Klein put many of the global numbers in context for his article, “US does not have close to the most coronavirus cases when adjusted for population.” Also, credit to Jim Geraghty for his ongoing skepticism of Communist Chinese propaganda.
Hey LEFTist Main Stream Media {LMSM] (aka LAME MSM), I have not forgotten your lying, anti-USofA reporting of the past. Example would be the reporters in Sadam’s Bagdad who found everything ever so nice. Afterwards the quickly buried admission that they needed to keep the bureau open so they toed-the-line.
So pardon me for remembering that less than 4% of you have voted non-Democrat over the past multiple years. For remembering the Pulitzers for the Russia Collusion reporting.
If you believe the accuracy of the reports BY the CHINESE GOVERNMENT, why has that same government expelled US Reporters and ordered their subjects to quit working for Western News Media.
I could go on but all it is doing is making me SICK!
[Experience. It is why you want to keep a few old people around.]
8.4 million people live in New York City.
Two months ago, they had 4,000 patients hospitalized for influenza.
Why are they suddenly unprepared to handle a smaller number of patients with COVID-19?
As I posted two weeks ago, a season’s influenza over the course of hours would swamp any hospital. “How many blue people an hour can YOUR hospital manage?” I posted that what seems like a lifetime ago.
In practice, even with an ET tube you get necrosis of the pharynx after a while which is why after a week or so on the vent they do a trach.
I do not understand your response.
4,000 influenza hospitalized was the highest WEEKLY surveillance report from New York City in January 2020.
Are you not aware that the CDC’s smallest estimate for influenza infections in the last 5.5 months is 38 million?
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-estimates.htm
In practice, even with an ET tube you get necrosis of the pharynx after a while which is why after a week or so on the vent they do a trach.
100% of the dead had sepsis. If this was viral sepsis, you'd think the administration of antivirals by default would help with death rates.
Table 2Treatments and outcomes
Total (n=191) Non-survivor (n=54) Survivor (n=137) p value Treatments
Antibiotics 181 (95%) 53 (98%) 128 (93%) 0·15 Antiviral treatment 41 (21%) 12 (22%) 29 (21%) 0·87 Corticosteroids 57 (30%) 26 (48%) 31 (23%) 0·0005 Intravenous immunoglobin 46 (24%) 36 (67%) 10 (7%) <0·0001 High-flow nasal cannula oxygen therapy 41 (21%) 33 (61%) 8 (6%) <0·0001 Non-invasive mechanical ventilation 26 (14%) 24 (44%) 2 (1%) <0·0001 Invasive mechanical ventilation 32 (17%) 31 (57%) 1 (1%) <0·0001 ECMO 3 (2%) 3 (6%) 0 0·0054 Renal replacement therapy 10 (5%) 10 (19%) 0 <0·0001 Outcomes Sepsis 112 (59%) 54 (100%) 58 (42%) <0·0001 Respiratory failure 103 (54%) 53 (98%) 50 (36%) <0·0001 ARDS 59 (31%) 50 (93%) 9 (7%) <0·0001 Heart failure 44 (23%) 28 (52%) 16 (12%) <0·0001 Septic shock 38 (20%) 38 (70%) 0 <0·0001 Coagulopathy 37 (19%) 27 (50%) 10 (7%) <0·0001 Acute cardiac injury 33 (17%) 32 (59%) 1 (1%) <0·0001 Acute kidney injury 28 (15%) 27 (50%) 1 (1%) <0·0001 Secondary infection 28 (15%) 27 (50%) 1 (1%) <0·0001 Hypoproteinaemia 22 (12%) 20 (37%) 2 (1%) <0·0001 Acidosis 17 (9%) 16 (30%) 1 (1%) <0·0001 ICU admission 50 (26%) 39 (72%) 11 (8%) <0·0001 ICU length of stay, days 8·0 (4·0–12·0) 8·0 (4·0–12·0) 7·0 (2·0–9·0) 0·41 Hospital length of stay, days 11·0 (7·0–14·0) 7·5 (5·0–11·0) 12·0 (9·0–15·0) <0·0001 Time from illness onset to fever, days 1·0 (1·0–1·0) 1·0 (1·0–1·0) 1·0 (1·0–1·0) 0·16 Time from illness onset to cough, days 1·0 (1·0–3·0) 1·0 (1·0–1·0) 1·0 (1·0–4·0) 0·30 Time from illness onset to dyspnoea, days 7·0 (4·0–9·0) 7·0 (4·0–10·0) 7·0 (4·0–9·0) 0·51 Time from illness onset to sepsis, days 9·0 (7·0–13·0) 10·0 (7·0–14·0) 9·0 (7·0–12·0) 0·22 Time from illness onset to ARDS, days 12·0 (8·0–15·0) 12·0 (8·0–15·0) 10·0 (8·0–13·0) 0·65 Time from illness onset to ICU admission, days 12·0 (8·0–15·0) 12·0 (8·0–15·0) 11·5 (8·0–14·0) 0·88 Time from illness onset to corticosteroids treatment, days 12·0 (10·0–16·0) 13·0 (10·0–17·0) 12·0 (10·0–15·0) 0·55 Time from illness onset to death or discharge, days 21·0 (17·0–25·0) 18·5 (15·0–22·0) 22·0 (18·0–25·0) 0·0003 Duration of viral shedding after COVID-19 onset, days 20·0 (16·0–23·0) 18·5 (15·0–22·0)
20·0 (17·0–24·0) 0·024
1.2% is terrible compared to just about anything we’re familiar with these days. Here’s what I’m having trouble with, in terms of math though.
If, as we’re told by the so-called experts that the average victim will infect somewhere between 2.5 and 3.5 people, there should be hundreds of thousands, if not millions more cases out there. And if it has a CFR of even 1.2%, there would already have been many more deaths than we’ve seen.
That doesn’t change the fact that this CCP Virus is much more deadly than the seasonal flu; both things can be true at the same time.
Actually, in the USA, we do not know that.
The first case of COVID-19 in the USA was documented on 21 January 2020 (just 10 miles from my apartment - so, I definitely have a betting interest on the outcome).
We need to compare the first nine week “arc” of COVID-19 data to the first nine week arc of seasonal influenza data, which begins around 01 October every year.
That is not really possible, for two important reasons.
(1) Testing for the viruses has not been equivalent, in quantity or in geographic location.
(2) The death toll from seasonal influenza is not determined until many months AFTER the season ends, and it is determined by mathematical models, not by actual hard data. For instance, in the weekly CDC influenza report, flu deaths are combined with 100% of pneumonia deaths.
Bottom Line - the number of deaths from influenza and COVID-19 is almost ALWAYS a judgment call. Did a person die because of COVID-19, or because of pneumonia caused by COVID-19, or because of another underlying disease that was aggravated by COVID-19?
My own guess - anyone who dies with the COVID-19 virus in his blood is being labeled a COVID-19 death, regardless of other health considerations.
Truth is this virus may have different symptoms than the flu BUT it is not deadlier than the flu!! This year we had 50,000 deaths from the flu AND we have flu vaccinations but people don’t take them!! The hospitals are completely overwhelmed because the damn MSM has had nothing but wall to wall doomsday coverage of this making everyone in the damn country run to the hospital the minute they have a sniffle!! The media is completely responsible for what the hell is happening in our hospitals!!!
NO ONE knows how many cases China had because they are a lying communist country!!! GIVE ME A DAMN BREAK!!!
I forgot to respond to your comment about infection rate.
Here in Washington state, the secondary infection rate - people with known exposure, travel history, or obvious symptoms - is only 7%.
It has been in that range for almost the last three weeks.
Influenza has a 30%-40% secondary infection rate.
Bottom Line - COVID-19 is NOT more infectious than seasonal influenza.
Didn’t want to re-open the flubro/Fearper wars. Just to be clear, I agree that the numbers that are being passed around just don’t add up. Something, probably several somethings, are really fishy and things like the basic reproduction rate are simply wild guesses by the experts at this point.
But as to how deadly this virus is, we’re going to find out pretty soon which side was more right. I really hope that it’s the optimists.
Peace!
The number of cases in the internal Third World imported at the behest of the Democrats vs. the number of cases among native-born citizens should be explored - but won’t.
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