Posted on 04/13/2020 9:20:48 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Coronavirus politics is a rare case of populist interests conflicting with Trump’s interests. Normally when that happens, righties side with Trump. When he clashes with Iran, for instance, principled nationalists like Tucker Carlson might scold him for succumbing to the interventionists in his orbit but most Republicans think it’s fine because it shows strength. In the present case, though, populists’ suspicion of experts is leading some to grasp for arguments that the pandemic isn’t as bad as scientists say even though implicitly that’s a knock on Trump for going along with those same experts (for now). Here we have Bennett noting that the projected 60,000 deaths from coronavirus are about how many there are in a bad flu season. Trump let the egghead scientists talk him into shutting down the economy over that? Watch, then read on.
Fox News contributor Bill Bennett compares coronavirus to the flu, claiming that "this was not and is not a pandemic." pic.twitter.com/Q4oBcXKISV
— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) April 13, 2020
I can’t believe we’re a month into this, staring at graphs that look like this, and people like him are still trying to shoehorn COVID-19 into templates for the good ol’ flu. Comparing flu deaths during normal times to coronavirus deaths during a shutdown of the global economy to limit transmission is so glaring a case of comparing apples to oranges that an educated person can’t possibly do it in good faith. It’s like holding a three-point contest where one player shoots from normal range and the other shoots from under his own basket on the other end of the court, and they hit the same number of shots, and coming away thinking, “I guess they’re equally good shooters.”
Let me remind you of what fever rates look like right now in the United States via the Kinsa “health weather” map:
The blue line is the fever rate during normal times, when the flu dominates. The orange line represents the fever rate right now thanks to historic, unprecedented, economy-crushing measures of social distancing aimed at slowing coronavirus. Despite driving that orange line down about as close to zero as it can realistically get, we’re still momentarily seeing 2,000 deaths from COVID-19 per day in the United States from infections that (likely mostly) originated during the red “atypical” period in the graph. I’d be curious to see a model of what would happen to the flu if we shut down the economy and stayed locked indoors for a month or two every winter during flu season. How far would flu deaths fall every year? Ninety percent, maybe?
There’s no way Bennett doesn’t see that flaw in his argument. He has to be pandering willfully to the Fox audience, deliberately misinforming them in order to score a point on experts like Fauci.
Pay attention to the numbers he gives in the clip too. He says at one point that there’s a “two-tenths of one percent chance that you’re going to get” COVID-19. I don’t know where he heard that. Best estimates are that two to five percent of the country has *already* gotten it and fans of the Oxford model of the disease suspect the share is much higher than that (with many more cases being asymptomatic). Is he … calculating based on the number of confirmed cases (551,826) relative to the total U.S. population (330 million)? That’s around 0.2 percent, but everyone understands that the number of confirmed cases is almost meaningless. There are many, many undetected infections out there that aren’t being accounted for in testing, and that rate of 0.2 percent is obviously a moving target, not a constant. The only reason it’s as low as it is right now is because the country has been social distancing for a month. Send everyone back to work tomorrow and everyone’s odds of getting infected will begin to take off.
And by the way, no, it’s not just very old people who are at risk:
Starting at age 45, if you’re sick enough to need to go to the hospital, your odds of dying are around one in 10.
And all of this assumes that the official death toll from COVID-19 accurately captures everyone who’s died from it. We know that it doesn’t. There are many, many more people who’ve dropped dead in their homes in New York City over the last month than there usually are in the months of March and April, and few of them get counted as coronavirus deaths because they haven’t been formally tested before or after death. Even if everything else Bennett said was correct, he’d still be lowballing the threat from the disease.
But it isn’t correct. He’s basically spouting nonsense numbers at the audience. It’s inconceivable that he doesn’t know it.
on FR this kind of talk is blasphemy
Bennett is usually smarter than that. The low death number is because of what we’ve done. Also, flu has a season; this doesn’t. We have to deal with this until we come up with a cure, reach herd immunity, or get an effective vaccine.
“And all of this assumes that the official death toll from COVID-19 accurately captures everyone who’s died from it. We know that it doesn’t. There are many, many more people who’ve dropped dead in their homes in New York City over the last month than there usually are in the months of March and April, and few of them get counted as coronavirus deaths because they haven’t been formally tested before or after death.”
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mmmm. So, all the stories about counting people who have other illnesses in addition to Covid-19, but just happen to have Covid-19 when they die are being counted as dying due to Covid-19, are lies? (Dying while having Covid-19 = dying because of Covid-19...ie Dying while having Covid-19 means Covid-19 was the cause of death)
Please get me straight on this one.
We are grasping for arguments that it’s not the end of the world according to hot air. They haven’t been good for a long time I don’t know what happened.
They’re not awful but not what they were some years back.
The Bookie of Virtue. Wonder where he’s been hiding lately?
Oh you mean like Hydrochloroquine whom the DemonRat politicians, their FAKE NEWS MEDIA AGENTS, doctors, and Hollyweird celebrities constantly CONDEMN because it SAVES LIVES and would END the oppressive lock downs immediately?
The Demonic Deep State agents HATE things like hydrochloroquine because it GETS IN THE WAY OF THEIR HEINOUS PLAN TO UNDERMINE PRESIDENT TRUMP'S PEAK ECONOMY AND UTTERLY DESTROY AMERICA AS WE ONCE KNEW IT (A MERE FEW WEEKS AGO!)
"THIS" = New York City's outsized deaths ONLY.
Well DUH! What do you expect when -- on April 2nd at rush hour New Yorkers were still doing THIS...
They aren't doing that in the rest of America, and the deaths are not any higher than typical flu years.
I believe the current word to describe that belief is 'anecdotal.'
You are WRONG the death tolls predicted were WITH mitigation, Fauci said that the death toll would be 100,000 - 200,000 WITH the mitigation in place the model numbers were total BS!!!
To which people will reply, “See, that’s how good our lock downs and quarantines have been working.”
I’ve already heard that one several times in person.
Don’t get the idea that i’m against hydroxychloroqine. I posted about it on Free Republic about a week before President Trump mentioned it and have been posting about it regularly ever since. I’m inclined to think it will help most people, especially in the hydroxychloroquine + azithromycin(or doxycycline) + zinc triad, but there are likely people it won’t save even if they get it early. It may even save some who have the worst comorbidities but probably not all. That’s why I’d call it a treatment rather than a cure. It may even work as a preventative.
On the economy, i’m optimistic about that. We’re America. We’re Americans. We’ll get things booming again, probably sooner rather than later.
Some of us think it’s complete gobshite, actually.
Chemo doesn’t save all cancer patients, and it kills many, you don’t hear people calling for stopping the use of Chemo, do you?
I know. The 100,000-200,000 was a projection with mitigation, but the modelers had to guess at how effective mitigation might be. That type of model was never set in stone. They weren’t making some sort of prediction like Nostradamus. It was always meant to be revised as new data came in.
I think the anti-hydroxychloroquine people are foolish.
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