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.
We have seen very little evidence to suggest the health care system would be overwhelmed anywhere. It sounded like Italy may have had a little problem with capacity. But all developed countries have the ability to expand capacity with just a little lead time. It’s been done in the U.S. now. Stadiums have been set up for capacity and so forth. So we don’t need a lockdown for that reason anymore.
No one even knows why flu has a season. Many suggest it’s because people stay indoors more in the winter where flu finds it much easier to spread compared to the outdoors. Which suggests stay-at-home policies are going to cause more deaths in the long run, especially if people are told to do it during the warm months when they’d normally be out.
“No one even knows why flu has a season. Many suggest it’s because people stay indoors more in the winter where flu finds it much easier to spread compared to the outdoors.”
That’s strange. If true, then the current shelter-in-place (”stay indoors”) dictate is the exact opposite of what we should do.
http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2014/the-reason-for-the-season-why-flu-strikes-in-winter/
Here are the most popular theories about why the flu strikes in winter:
1) During the winter, people spend more time indoors with the windows sealed, so they are more likely to breathe the same air as someone who has the flu and thus contract the virus (3).
2) Days are shorter during the winter, and lack of sunlight leads to low levels of vitamin D and melatonin, both of which require sunlight for their generation. This compromises our immune systems, which in turn decreases ability to fight the virus (3).
3) The influenza virus may survive better in colder, drier climates, and therefore be able to infect more people (3).
The alleged FReeper psychos (we know who they are) will go completely suicidal, as early as today, it appears.
All of those make sense. The vitamin D thing is a big deal, I think.
“Bennett is usually smarter than that.”
I’m really disturbed by his stupidity. He says the virus is “on track” to kill fewere than the flu did in 2017-18. But that was the worst flu season in about 20 years. And Covid19 is on top of the regular flu, the normal flu virus is still there. And we have drastically reduced the number of people getting Covid19 through shutting down the economy. We didn’t do that in 2017-18. Bennett is not considering the infection fatality rate which is 6 times worse than the flu. And the graph of deaths in NYC
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/10/upshot/coronavirus-deaths-new-york-city.html
Imagine if Bill Bennett were President and he just said everything was normal. Just ignore the risk, a few hundred thousand dead, get over it.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30243-7/fulltext
...and the”Go ahead and prove a negative” crowd chimes in by post #3.
Did we shut down the economy and freedom of movement for the “worst flu season in 20 years?” Did people live in terror at it?
Whether we have “drastically reduced” anything or not is about as scientifically proven as a global warming hockey stick.
For younger people, coronavirus is statistically LESS deadly than the flu.
For elderly people, it is more deadly in practice, but that is almost certainly due to older people getting vaccinated against the flu.
This disease is an uncommon crisis for the elderly but not for others. The public policy should not be written and implemented exactly as if it was an equal crisis for all ages, but that is exactly the policy we’re being given.
After all his great conservatism and his works and his contributions to American life, he turns out to be a damned “flu bro.”
The messaging is so bad on how low-risk the virus is to young people that you still routinely see in articles and media coverage, common people expressing fear that they’ll “bring it home to their kids.”
It seems like the media and anyone with a bully pulpit are very happy to keep the country thinking this virus is deadlier than it is. They are certainly not making any effort to communicate facts that show the virus to be less harmful than people think it is.
“Bill Bennett: Why Are We Panicking? This Virus Is On Track To Kill Fewer People Than The Flu”
I guess by his rationale one can ask why did we ever panic over Pearl Harbor? After all, history now shows that neither the Japanese nor the Germans ever attacked the US Mainland.
You mean the first IDENTIFIED case after the virus was named.......
I suspect the virus was creeping into this country as early as November, maybe even October and all the people who thought they had colds or pneumonia actually had the virus......
It should be easy enough to find out, just test the individuals who were sick back in October, November and December for the virus antibodies........
Was it always like this? No. We were innovative, courageous and independent.
Then marijuana was legalized. Now we're stupid.
I think it was too new and we couldn’t take the chance. I wouldn’t be surprised if that is some part of the plan to reopen the country. Maybe try to get to herd immunity but slowly. Open up then pull back if it looks like it’s getting out of control, reopen again, etc., etc., probably in a more piecemeal way by locations. Even that would be unpleasant but I expect they’ll try to manage the damage to peoples’ health and to the economy.
“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!!!”
Yep. Keep sayin’ it loud and proud.
“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.”
Really? The projections were meant to scare us to death so we’d abandon our livelihoods and go along with these draconian measures. You tell me: if the projections (which you’ve just admitted were worthless) had shown the reality, would the masses have been so willing to cower in their homes?
You think I’ve admitted the models are worthless? I think they are very worthwhile and not for scaring people though they may have done that. I figure they were used to try to decide where to allocate scarce resources, to decide when and where to put mitigation measures into place, to give advice to the various states. Probably many more things, too.
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