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.
Every person infected with COVID-19 who dies is classified as a COVID-19 death.
All COVID-19 co-morbidities are completely ignored.
The exact opposite is true for seasonal flu deaths.
For instance, the CDC has confirmed 7,000 influenza deaths in the last 25 weeks and confirmed almost 90,000 pneumonia deaths.
Although influenza is present in about 40% of pneumonia cases each flu season, it is obvious that the CDC assigns the cause of almost all pneumonia deaths to - pneumonia - and not to influenza.
The number of COVID-19 deaths is based on fraudulent bookkeeping.
If we applied that same funky math to influenza and heart disease, cancer, stroke, and diabetes, the annual death toll for influenza would be at least 250,000.
How do you know this bug doesn't have a season? You don't and neither does the CDC. Only time will tell.
Vaccine? LOL! Do you realize how many deadly viruses there are where no vaccine is available? From the common cold to Ebola, the vast majority of viruses have no vaccine. There is little to no reason to believe this virus will be any different.
The Doom and Gloomers have gone into hiding since they were swearing there would be well over 100K dead by now.
I don’t like that method of counting COVID-19 deaths. It’s probably a matter of expediency that will be sorted out later rather than some deep, dark conspiracy.
In a follow up post I said the lack of a season was my opinion based on everything i’ve read.
You know there is an Ebola vaccine, right?
What a load of pure BS. You are trying to split hairs to make an irrelevant point.
Any death of a person with the virus is a virus death. Your attempt to deny that fact is ridiculous.
Well, sort of. It brings the mortality rate from 96% down to about 60%. Having spent a hell of a lot of time working in the 3rd world I wouldn't hang my hat on that if I had to work in a region where ebola was present (and I have)
Bill Bennett talking about “beating the odds”
LOL
Unless the virus happens to be influenza, in which case the cause of death is usually (and subjectively) assigned to a co-morbidity.
So we had our freedom taken and economy destroyed for the sake of “guesses” by “experts”. And somehow, this makes sense to people?
Yes, I have to get my mind straight. Can’t be blasphemous toward flu based religion.
re: “on FR this kind of talk is blasphemy”
We had a bunch of panicky types on here during the ‘bird flu’ epidemic too ...
“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......”
I wonder about that too. I was short of breath through much of January and February. Started the first week of January well before Covid hit the news.
I mentioned it to my doc when I saw him in March for some other matter. My lungs were clear, he said it may have been mild asthma- but to me it didn’t feel like any other asthma I’ve ever had. And it didn’t respond to my asthma meds. It eventually went away all on its own.
I’ll be interested in taking the Covid antibody test when it’s available, see if I’m positive. But who knows. Maybe it was mild flu. Or the asthma that my doc suspects.
I imagine their model is somewhat similar to technical analysis of a stock. They are refining their curve every time that they get new, hard data.
The big difference would be that they are projecting their curve into the future based on an iffy R-naught number, that being the basic reproduction number of the virus; how many people each carrier can be expected to infect. That R-naught number is guesswork on a virus with no previous record to build on.
Here’s a good short video giving an idea of the difference that various R-naught numbers make:
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