So, you are not at all curious about the motives of people supplying fake statistics during a pandemic where businesses are being destroyed by policies based on those fake stats?
Investigate away! I’m all for it! Is 80k a game changer vs 90k?
Where are you getting 80K from?
Right now there are about 90k deaths. Colorado revised their count about 10% down after a closer look. If we apply that 10% overcount to the national 90k we get about 80k.
Does that reduction suddenly change your outlook?
You’re not using that word correctly. The recorded data is a claim about the state of affairs of the world, meaning that it’s either objectively true or objectively false, NOT objectively true or subjectively true.
That belongs to the study of political philosophy, not the natural sciences.
I see your point and agree that there is some room for error in the death count.
If we use the Colorado relook at their data as a guide, that would imply that we could be overcounting by 10%. Does 80k deaths vs 90k deaths change your course of action substantively?
I don’t think this is indicative of the entire problem. I would suspect that there are quite a few of these being wrongly classified. The litmus test for the CDC is deaths “with” Covid, rather than caused by Covid. The same standard isn’t applied to the Flu. If you die of a heart attack when you have the flu, the cause of death is heart attack. If you die of a heart attack when you have Covid, the official cause of death is Covid. Hospitals are more than willing to accommodate this, due to the fact that there is funding packed into the relief bills targeted specifically at Covid deaths.
So the game changer to me is more complex. Right now, we have confirmed cases/deaths = mortality rate. Even the flu isn’t categorized that way, it’s estimated cases/deaths = mortality rate which is the proper way of calculating it. Why is that important? CDC estimates that there were 39MM to 56MM flu illnesses from Oct 1, 2019 to Apr 4, 2020. They estimate 26,000 to 62,000 deaths. Assume the low end of both: That’s a 0.06% mortality rate for those sick. Assume the high cases and low deaths and it’s now a 0.05% mortality rate.
So looking at a few stats, we’ve tested 11MM people in the US and come up with 1.45MM cases. Since we know that the majority of Covid cases exhibit minor or no symptoms, let’s assume 330,000,000 tests and use the same ratio of a 13% infection rate. That leaves us with 42.9MM cases in the US. According to a few studies, including THIS one, that may be very low. 1/3 of the people tested at random in Chelsea MA were positive. If that holds true nation wide, there would be 110MM cases but let’s just assume the 42.9MM for now. That gives us a current mortality rate of 0.2%, higher than the flu but not so dramatic as to necessitate the closing of our economy and the destruction that results. If you take the studies like the one done in MA, it would net a mortality rate of 0.08%, barely higher than the Flu. We know it takes a heavy toll on elderly, similar to the Flu and Pneumonia so the focus should be on keeping THEM safe and keeping our economy rolling, plus working on herd immunity. That has served us well fighting the Flu and treatments are better today than they’ve ever been but the sad truth is that if you’re already sick, there’s a high likelihood of you dying from Pneumonia or the Flu. No one lives forever and this incessant fear of a disease that can kill people with diminished immune systems is misplaced in my view.
My dad is 82 and my mother is 79. I went to great lengths to protect them and rented an RV to get them back to Nebraska to ensure their safety. Now that it’s my wife, my daughter and I at the house, we’re far less careful and we all go to work every day. While we take reasonable precautions because we would rather not get Covid, we’re not being so paranoid as to completely alter our lives. The chances of dying on the road here in Houston are probably higher than the chances of dying from Covid so we make sure we keep our perspective straight.
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I think the point here is that the course of action is far too draconian and has been from the start. Let’s not forget, this response was based on a flawed model that suggested 1.2MM deaths in the USA. To me, the results in Colorado and other stats show that the rate is being deliberately inflated so the politicians don’t look as stupid but that’s just my opinion. Maybe it’s not that deliberate.
I like your use of math here and it makes a compelling case for Covid being less worse than originally thought. I too am for a cautious opening of the economy at this time.
I’ve been tracking Houston area coronavirus cases and we are still on a strong upswing. A few weeks back it looked like it was breaking over from a parabolic increase to linear but it recently went linear at a higher rate which is a bit worrisome. It seems we will have to cross our fingers and move forward.
Dude, give up. Seriously. 
I don’t attribute it to deliberate inflation, I attribute it to learning as we go along. You could be right but I hope not.
The 10% difference in the Colorado link hardly seems worth changing direction imo.
I think the best case for changing direction is the original estimate of 1.2MM deaths projected which caused us to close down and kill our economy. We’re also hearing that possibly over 40% of the new cases are people in quarantine. That kind of makes sense since they still need food and it’s very easy to transmit it on a piece of plastic. Guy at store has Covid, packs your groceries, they get delivered to your house and you get Covid from it, thinking you’re perfectly safe. Quarantine doesn’t work unless you’re completely isolated IMO. Quarantine typically isn’t supposed to keep diseases OUT, it’s supposed to keep disease IN. It’s to keep society safe from you. Now, there are certainly exceptions but you have to go to great lengths to sterilize stuff coming in and out of your quarantine zone and the typical person in self isolation doesn’t do that, nor are they aware that they need to. Again, JMO but I personally believe if we opened everything up today and went back to life as normal, I think we would end up with the same number of deaths at the end of the day. Even listening to the language from the government, this was always designed to flatten the curve rather than to prevent deaths. They didn’t want to overwhelm the hospitals. I just think we WAY overreacted and it’s caused more harm than it’s helped us. JMO again.
You don’t know what those words mean.
Samm
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It doesn’t matter to me, but the better question you should ask is why does a panel on COVID-19 require a media star in the first place? What possible purpose does it serve except to attract frivolous attention and unnecessary controversy? IMO all it does is dilute the credibility they may otherwise have.
Samm
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Don’t know, and don’t care (about the number.) it simply does not mater with regards to this discussion. AIDS is just one of many serious underlying maladies that a person could have. It is only common sense though to consider that an individual with an incurable disease (such as AIDS … or cancer, or lung disease, or heart disease, etc.) who may have a year or less to live, died of that disease with complications to COVID, rather than of COVID with complications due to their existing disease.
Yeah, you’re the smart one, I’m just an idiot.
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It doesn’t mean you’re stupid, just too wrapped up in this to use a dictionary.
“The sky is brown.”
Is that a subjective claim? Or is it a false, objective one?
Here’s a hint. We were talking about the data being objective data… i.e… factual. If it’s false, it cannot be Objective data. For instance, objective data would be there are 10 recorded cases of Covid. It is NOT objective data to suggest there are 10 deaths caused by Covid when 5 of those weren’t even tested for Covid. That’s now SUBJECTIVE data. This ain’t rocket surgery Samson. As I said, give up.
