Distortion and fear: the MSM won’t quit doing this, because they think (know?) it works
I think the public is scared enough. But apparently the press doesn’t think so.
They play with the statistics, picking and choosing the most alarming measure among them in order to further panic the people and the better to criticize Trump. It is no challenge at all to find such MSM articles; they are legion, and using Google to research almost any aspect of COVID will conjure up reams of them.
Right now, of course, the favored number is confirmed cases, particularly in NYC. They are “soaring” or “skyrocketing” – and yes, they certainly are. But as anyone who’s been following this should know, it is obvious that as testing has become more ubiquitous and comprehensive (although it still has a way to go), the number of diagnoses will go way up.
This means that we are doing more testing. It doesn’t mean that the change in the number of confirmed cases before and after this burst in testing reflects the actual rate of change in the incidence of COVID in the population. It’s been going up for quite some time, of course, but we really don’t know how much or how many people have been infected or when they became infected.
And yet now all we hear about is how bad the US is, because we now have the highest number of confirmed cases in the world (see this). What’s left out of these reports? Almost everything else. Just a sampler:
—China is probably lying about its number of cases.
—The US is nowhere near having the highest number of cases per capita. Comparing absolute numbers in different countries without correcting for population means nothing, and one doesn’t need advanced math to realize that. Look at the cases per million numbers here, and you’ll see that the US has one of the world’s lowest rates (at the moment, anyway), not the highest at all. That will change and go up, of course, as testing continues. But it’s the more important statistic than sheer number of cases, although neither tells us very much right now.
—Then there’s deaths per million. It’s a figure that means more, because it’s less dependent on the vagaries of mass testing (although it still does rely on proper testing of the very ill and dying, of course). On that measure, the current figure for the US is extremely low, similar to Germany which is considered to be doing very well. But this is not a number in which the media is especially interested because it’s nowhere near as effective for its uses.
—The number of serious and critical cases, which is another important measure, is more difficult to compare because I’ve noticed that these numbers change very slowly and I think countries update them at a snail’s pace. So I don’t rely on them much. But for what it’s worth, right now the US has 2463. You can look at the chart and crunch the numbers yourself; as I said, the figures are very unreliable because for many countries they don’t seem to change for weeks. Take Germany, for example, a country that is reported to have only 23 serious or critical patients but which had 37 new deaths today and 61 the day before, and yet for both days the number of serious or critical patients has been stuck at 23. Clearly, that last figure has no relation to reality.
In the last couple of days, I’ve been talking on the phone more than usual. A couple of people I’ve spoken to have made casual references to the “fact” that Trump hasn’t done much of anything – or didn’t do much of anything for a long long time – to stop the coronavirus from taking hold. I don’t usually talk politics with these people unless they bring it up, but since they brought it up, I said “Actually, he did.” And then I mentioned a few things, mostly the China travel restrictions back in late January, and the naming of the task force at the same time.
What I say to them doesn’t make much of a dent. I am almost certain most of them got these ideas from the relentless hammering of the MSM with the theme that whatever Trump has done it’s not enough, or wrong, or too much. And the press does this because most people don’t have the time (and/or the inclination) to find out whether it’s true or not.
I’ll just take one example of this coverage and let it stand for the whole. My selection is purely arbitrary: this “analysis” by Stephen Collinson of CNN entitled “Trump touts great success as US becomes world’s worst virus epicenter.” Really, you don’t have to read much more than the headline to conclude “What a dummy Trump is, and a dangerous one at that, not only stupid but dangerously stupid.” In addition, of course: “The US is the nation on earth most afflicted with this pestilence.”
And plenty of people probably read only the headline, as CNN knows full well.
Who is Stephen Collinson? Well, he’s a White House reporter who specializes in opinion pieces about how awful Trump is. He appears to be a Brit in his late forties who went to university in Scotland, and his academic background is in English and English lit. He then went straight into reporting.
The piece starts this way:
As America became the epicenter of the global coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump downplayed the escalating national crisis.
[ADDENDUM: Please see this Twitter thread for another example, this one from the NY Times about about ventilators. At one point in the thread, you can read this:
5/ Here's a link to the paper (thoughtfully provided by the Times) so you can read and judge it for yourself. https://t.co/gt9dsTU56e
I don't understand the point of trying to drive panic with stories that are so misleading – and, frankly, so easily checked.
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) March 26, 2020
It’s not hard to understand “the point of trying to drive panic with stories that are so misleading – and, frankly, so easily checked” if one keeps the following in mind: they are writers of propaganda, and they believe they can fool many of the people much of the time. A lot more people read the Times than ever see the fact checks of the Times, and the writers and editors on the paper are well aware of that fact.
Also, many people have weak math skills, and even if they see the fact-checks, the corrected numbers don’t have nearly as much meaning as the original emotional descriptions from the propagandists of the MSM.]
Julia Ioffe, an unhinged leftist (with a severe case of TDS), tweeted about this “news” concerning the latest figures by writing “Who’s the s-hole country now?”, eliciting some criticism (see the article on Twitchy), and proving beyond doubt that she is not only ungrateful to the country which took her in as a refugee, but completely innumerate as well.
I agree with your analysis. What other administration has has the president doing daily briefings like this? It’s crisis communication and I can’t recall any president doing it better.
Reporters falsely report statistics because they have a narrative to push… and they don’t understand statistics. If they did, they probably wouldn’t be journalists.
I worked in that profession for several years, so I can tell disingenuous work when I see it. And they’re almost all guilty as charged. It’s not responsible reporting anymore, it’s being mouthpieces for the DNC/CCP propaganda machine. I absolutely loathe the ones peddling that garbage.
The two points the media is hammering right now, mostly by cherry-picking selectively-edited stories are:
America’s hospitals are dangerously overcrowded
and
Young people are frequently dying horrible deaths from the virus
Every single person under the age of 50 who has succumbed to this virus in this country has received a front page headline on one or several media outlets. At the same time, any comorbid conditions these people may have had are not mentioned and they are depicted as being in the greatest of health before this hit, usually accompanied by a years- or decades-old picture of them in happier times. I was just reading a story about a 44-year old “on Law and Order SVU” who spontaneously passed away. Turns out it wasn’t an actor but with some googling turned out to be a morbidly obese worker on the set of the show.
From talking with several people I know working in major hospitals around the country (including in NYC), the “overcrowding” phenomenon is right now a creation of the media. Hospitals and hospital personnel are bracing for this impending “overcrowding”, but whether it materializes remains to be seen.
The two-pronged media messaging likely is to serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy, as younger people with sniffles, now worried that they are vulnerable to bad complications, run to the hospital. This rush does lead to overcrowding and the virus inherently floating around in the hospital infects all those who erroneously run to it, people who were previously suffering from allergies or the like.
“They play with the statistics, picking and choosing the most alarming measure among them in order to further panic the people and the better to criticize Trump.” [Neo]
“I don’t understand the point of trying to drive panic with stories that are so misleading – and, frankly, so easily checked.” [Alex Berenson]
I agree that the rabid need to “get Trump” is a prime motivator, but I don’t think the only one. The media job is to draw eyes, ears and clicks, so whatever is more sensational is how the report is structured. Even the late Walter Cronkite, no objective prize himself, noted that if one uses adjectives and adverbs one is editorializing not reporting. Listen for yourself how often they occur in reports.
Trump aside, like the scorpion and the frog, this is who they are.
Not 20 minutes ago I told my wife that expect to see a lot more criticism of Trump over his handling of the “crisis”.
Funny that most of the Gov. calling for more and more are Dem.
Funny that two Dem Gov warning against the use of the drugs call Trump and Pence anti science.
Julia Ioffe, an unhinged leftist (with a severe case of TDS), tweeted about this “news” concerning the latest figures by writing “Who’s the s-hole country now?”
—————–
As if the spread of the virus in countries outside of China has do to with being unclean or using unsanitary food handling procedures. If that were the case, why aren’t the squalid inner cities in this country hotbeds of infection? Why isn’t Africa? Seems to me the virus initially came to this country and was spread by people with the means to engage in international travel who passed it along to their well-to-do business colleagues/social circle, hardly the kinds of people that constitute a “shithole country”.
In the late 90’s I read Gavin de Becker’s book The Gift of Fear. Essentially the purpose of his book was to recognize the value of true/purposeful fear, something we are born with and if developed properly protects us from a real threat. One of the points he made, at that time, was that the 24 hr. news cycle and news as it exists in general is fear-provolking, that it is the commodity that is actually being sold. His recommendation was to disconnect from most news sources for the sake of good mental health. I remember Neo doing a post about news and a number of people that frequent this blog stated they were not daily news readers of the MSM. My son made a point in a conversation with our daughter with regard to the fact that none of us were in “panic mode” that none of us watch the news. Yet somehow we stay apprised! I haven’t even touched on the fact that since the late 90’s the MSM has become a blatant tool of the Leftists. A very effective tool indeed.
verth and everyone else:
I put this on a slightly older thread, but I’ll repeat it here because it seems apropos.
Contingency plans for epidemics and pandemics and the overwhelming of hospitals have been in existence for a long time. The fear has always been that existing resources would be overwhelmed, because obviously we don’t have some endless supply of rooms, equipment, and trained personnel to run the equipment and tend to the patients.
It is a problem that will never be solved, because what we plan for is not necessarily what we get, but we need to do our best.
If you look up articles during the H1N1 flu pandemic, you can find scads of them talking about the fear of hospitals being overwhelmed and the need to plan for it. Here’s just one example of such an article from October of 2009:
“—China is probably lying about its number of cases.”
Reading the WSJ today, some article commended China in its strong arm approach that drove new infections to zero. Really? Oh, the journalist quoted some doctor who said that. Accurate reporting while being biased.
_____
I saw an article that I have no confidence in, that suggested that Germany is undercounting covid-19 deaths by being very precise in the CoD, while Italy is overcounting by including all bodies testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 in autopsy.
Anyone know any good medical blogs? Does Paolo know anything?
I also read in several sources that the Italian Minister of Health said that pretty much any one who had tested positive, whether they actually died of the virus or not, were deemed to have died of it. And counted that way.
Thanks Lee Also.
Give Bloomberg news credit, this map is one of the best things I’ve found online to put the coronavirus in perspective.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-united-states-coronavirus-outbreak/
New York and New Jersey have over half of America’s confirmed cases and nearly half of the country’s coronavirus deaths.
Mike
This is New York City’s brain on COVID-19:
Sorry if that’s in bad taste. I do have a relative in the midst of it. I haven’t seen much hysteria yet, but I feel it is coming.
Im a geeks geek, and so i do all kinds of things… an awful lot of stuff.. that most people dont do… I did the preatorian challenge in AI for fun… just to learn python… one of the things you can do with python (and many other languages) is make simulations (java used to be my go to, but i am liking python more and more as i also like coldfusion a lot for web)… the only part i have a hard time with in python is how it handles tuples and so on.
however… while doing a simulation of the corona or any disease spread, i came accross this video… its much better than what i could do in a short time, and more interesting to watch…
why am i linking to it? because it gives regular people a feel for the kind of things numbers people or people who do simulations and so on know… and why things today are about medical fear, instead of red terror, or climate fear, or gender fear, or race fear or or or (see the pattern there? fear… it taps into our non-reasoned responses AND lets one replace that (often) with a unreasoned response without cogitation).
Simulating an epidemic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxAaO2rsdIs
this means i can stop my simulation and go back to a pet AI project i or two i am working on… sadly… i discover things and invent things… but doesnt matter what i do, no one will accept it from me.. proven several times… (the chip that can go through peta bytes of data on your desk with off the shelf tech is still available… as is its ability to go through genomes in seconds despite they still take hours to search for things in similar volume… and always will (certain architectures will always beat out others all things being similar).
enjoy the vid..
I’m currently with my retired parents. My mother, for the past two weeks, has been in front of the television hooked on every word the MSM reports about the virus. Just this morning she learned there has been an increase in cases in our state that has has caused her to be paranoid and fearful of the outside.
How stupid do you have to be to trust the news media by now? I don’t care how left wing one’s leanings are. When the evidence becomes as overwhelming as it is now, continued belief in the lies is a defect in character or mental ability. We have seen non-stop lies and deceit for years and years. The outright falsehoods during the years of the this administration have been worse than anyone could once have imagined.
The only plus in all this arises from the gross incompetence of the worst offenders. They are so afflicted with hatred that they run with every stupid, blatant lie they can come up with. Even fools see through their madness.
We’ve reached the point where anyone identifying as a journalist is laughed at. And deservedly so.
There is an interesting theory for rare events that financial folks were talking about back in the credit crisis of 2007/2008, called a Black Swan Event. I think something like 9-11 was a legitimate black swan event. The COVID-19 crisis only ticks two out of three boxes IMO.
From Wikipedia
COVID-19 wasn’t really beyond the realm of normal expectations in history and science, was it?
@Lee Also
There was a comment about the Italian doctor and what he actually said posted on this blog the other day, you should read it.
The flu death statistics are called “flu associated deaths” by the CDC, a much better name because the proximate cause of death is usually pneumonia or heart related. I suspect the covid statistics are reported the same way but are probably more accurate because there is much more testing.
Here’s a map of Washington State cases and deaths by county:
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/3614241b1c2b4e519ae1cf52e2c3d560
I put all the data into a spreadsheet along with population and area, and it comes out about like you’d expect. With the exception of a few outliers, generally the worst-hit counties are the ones with the highest population and the highest population density.
Half of the counties have less than 10 cases per 100,000 people, representing 1.75 million people (1/4 of the state, and not all in the less-populated east). I’m not sure why they have to be locked down just as much as Seattle, although I expect screeching when Trump releases the guidelines (not orders, you press morons) for evaluating risk at the county level.
(I expect other state governments have released case-by-county maps as well.)
Bryan,
Yep, I have family in Grays Harbor county (1 case, 0 death) and they are locked down just like King. It’s ridiculous. Another relative lives in Lewis county (5 cases, 0 death) and she has three grade school kids at home no school for what’s looking like the rest of school year.
The crazy one size fits all shutdown has to end.
@Bryan Lovely
+1, Nicely done!
TommyJay:
That’s interesting information, but I’m not at all sure that 9/11 would be a black swan by that definition either.
We knew terrorists existed and that they hated us and were only limited by their abilities and imagination. If I’m not mistaken, some writer (Clancy?) had even imagined an attack with airplanes into buildings. I think the whole thing hinges on the word “normal” in “normal expectations.” Pandemics are regularly expected, but not catastrophic ones; they fortunately don’t come around all that often these days. Pandemics ARE planned for. What was not planned for was one with the following characteristics:
(1) Beginning right at the (seeming) outset with a large die-off in a fairly developed country, China, that then locked down millions of people in the affected area, causing a panicked reaction in the rest of the world that thought, “It must be really really REALLY bad if they’re doing that.”
(2) A fairly speedy spread to a far-flung country (Italy) that also seemed enormous and out of control and with the capacity to overwhelm modern healthcare systems that we rely on for a feeling of safety.
(3) Media coverage designed to fan panic rather than soothe it.
(4) Scientists warning of very extreme die-off as a result.
(5) Caused by a virus that is related to other viruses causing diseases of extreme lethality (SARS and MERS) but which were not especially contagious, and this time which seemed to be very contagious and fairly lethal.
(6) The stock market crashing as a result even before most countries had done anything to restrict their population, and then a cascade of such events (closings, etc.) causing even further economic destruction.
We were prepared for pandemics. I just don’t think we were prepared for this particular pandemic.
…they believe they can fool many of the people much of the time.
I think it’s more accurate to say they believe they can fool enough of the people enough of the time. The question is will they, or have they, run out of time?
Griffin:
no school for what’s looking like the rest of school year.
The Seattle SD sent out an email the other day saying they’re not going to attempt remote learning because they can’t guarantee all students would have the same access to it.
So every student has to suffer because a few are too poor to have the internet, I guess. Yay public school! (I can’t verify that it isn’t the teacher’s unions opposing it, but I wouldn’t be surprised.)
Griffin and Bryan:
Is the Space Needle the Eye of Modor?
When I read or hear about “anti-science” I do a 180.
Washington state total deaths: 175
King County (Seattle) total deaths: 125
Which suggests to me that there should not be the same rules statewide for dealing with the Chinese-origin virus.
Gringo:
Well there is Washington (King County) and the other Washington (Washington, DC), all those other counties in Washington state, do they have people in them? None that matter, and I’m an essential employee in a non-closed down business in eastern Washington, at least it seems that way today since our Governor Jay came to the rescue.
Correction: the Seattle SD isn’t doing any grading because not everyone has full access. Teachers are apparently individually putting out lessons, materials, etc., online for their classes.
I am going to be putting neo’s excellent work to good use tonight at dinner. My other immediate family members genuflect to the NYT, and they are susceptible to every little propaganda trick.
Of course, the fundamental rule of propaganda is to “Tell no small lie”. Meaning most people will unconsciously assume that if a story is so preposterous that THEY would never tell it, nobody else would either. Thus when they hear an outlandish claim, they tend to assume it must be true! They just don’t know Democrats very well!
Bryan,
Apparently they are going to be advancing all these kids to the next grade level next fall (if they go to school then) so that pretty much throws out all the usual stuff about how important all these things are to the education of our children.
om,
I am loving our almost daily thoughts from King Jay on whether our jobs are important enough to continue or whether we have in some way let him down and forced him to punish us some more.
This entire thing is so ridiculous and the amount of people that just go along with it unquestioningly is shocking to me.
The precedents being set right now are going to have long lasting implications I fear.
Pres. Trump seemed to me to go a bit out of the way during the afternoon news conference today (a couple of times) to ding Inslee for popping off about something. I don’t follow Inslee at all, so I wonder, what was he shooting his prog mouth off about?
“the press does this because most people don’t have the time (and/or the inclination) to find out whether it’s true or not.” neo
We make time for what’s important to us.
Most people don’t have the inclination to find out whether it’s true or not because they don’t want to face information that challenges their comfort zone. Most people are very uncomfortable with “inconvenient” truths that challenge accepted beliefs.
sdferr,
I guess the basis of this is Inslee was criticizing the federal government for not doing enough and Trump has been saying that his administration has been trying to let each state take the lead and only respond when the states ask. So it’s the typical thing if Trump acts too strongly he’s an OMG dictator and when he doesn’t he’s not doing enough.
Also this is a state with an AG that has taken the administration to court countless times over practically every move. The fact they have got along as well as they have is a little surprising.
Thanks Griffin.
As of January 31, travelers arriving in the US from countries with severe coronavirus outbreaks have been sent through 13 designated ports of entry where they were supposed to be screened for the virus. If you compare those ports of entry with the states that currently report the highest numbers of coronavirus cases, they match very closely. Maybe those states report higher numbers of cases because people infected with the coronavirus have been funneled there for the purpose of containing, testing, and counting people who have the virus. A circular process, it seems, though of course it would account for only a portion of the cases in those states. Moreover, I wonder how careful the screening and quarantining has been.
Red terror
women fear the men
fear the weather
fear war
fear the bomb
fear your boss
fear covid
fear asteroids
fear artificial intelligence
fear death
All are friends to those who wish change by driving a herd..
the herd will run over the cliff to save itself from nothing
Neo,
Thanks for that, sorry about the delay. Regarding 9/11, it wasn’t Tom Clancy, but John P. O’Neill that got me thinking about black swans and predictability. I’ve forgotten most everything I had learned about O’Neill. The Wikipedia page is awful, and there is a 5 bazillion word essay on him in The New Yorker.
He was in FBI counter-terrorism, and later was head of security for Morgan Stanley at the World Trade Center before the attack. He was adamant that Al Qaida would come back the finish the destruction of the WTC tower(s) though I don’t know if he predicted anything about jet airliners.
But would I chalk up 9/11 as predictable because John O’Neill sort of predicted it? I don’t think so. Even though he was in a federal counter-terrorism department at one point. Why? Because no one would listen to him. There is a mass perception to these things that is not BS (even though other portions are BS) but very real.
_____
There is an old joke on Wall Street that Joe X. is a brilliant analyst because he predicted 11 of the last 4 recessions.
Back when people thought Alan Greenspan could do no wrong, he was asked why he used a rather rote approach to potential financial crises when Joe Y. predicted the last one correctly. He said that people warn him about upcoming financial crises every few weeks. Some are crackpots, but most are very smart and informed people.
____
Your number 4) is interesting. My impression is that the Govs. of NY and CA had scientists who said that, which makes them suspect scientists to my mind. But I could be wholly wrong about that.
5) Reminds me of the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster. Because we got away with our high risk gamble 5 times before, why wouldn’t it work the 6th time? This is a real mass stupidity. SARS, MERS, and Ebola wasn’t a big deal; why worry?
6) A couple years ago someone estimated that some small but whole number percentage, 2 or 4% perhaps, of all U.S. consumer expenditures goes to Apple Corp. Astonishing. Then some weeks ago, Apple reported that because of Foxconn factories in China would be closed, there would be shortages of iPhones in the coming quarters. The stock market really started paying attention at that point.
Thanks again.
TommyJay,
One of the most tiresome cliches on Wall Street is the ‘hedge fund manager who predicted 2008 crash says…’ story that gets printed about three times a week. It’s of the same ilk as your economist that has correctly predicted 7 of the last 3 recessions. It’s always important to know who is saying what and what are their motives for saying it. Crying doom saying Ackman last week is the most recent example. He apparently made a killing after his apocalyptic doom rant.
Nobody knows anything and the next crisis will not be like the last are the two things I firmly believe.
For those interested in possible projections for your state, you can find them here. Pick your state from the drop down menu. The projections are based on a simple model, but the parameters were derived from existing data for the various states combined with the overall data available. The model is simple, but I think folks might be interested in the results even so. Complicated models have too many knobs.
“Panic drives clicks” is the new “if it bleeds, it leads” mantra of the profession.
J. P. Sears has them nailed. (h/t Powerline)
Second link is a bonus, plus a couple of pictures from PL comments at AmmoGrrrl’s post today.
Why you should panic more (I don’t think I’ve seen JP get this worked up before)
https://youtu.be/OW7dASdQIgU
What to do when you run out of toilet paper (NSFW)
https://www.youtube.com/user/AwakenWithJP
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e118b507e74d3d2e4ea476d9ff99cbf4a88972ef5b31d7ada32043d5933ce92e.jpg
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a619dc367e450daa2c87dd8121321c5e1aa1a65be3697487dbe08e61cc461506.jpg
Bryan Lovely on March 27, 2020 at 7:56 pm said:
Correction: the Seattle SD isn’t doing any grading because not everyone has full access. Teachers are apparently individually putting out lessons, materials, etc., online for their classes.
* * *
Someone will still sue, not just because of the kids that don’t have home computers (are there really that many?? or just ones where the parent/s don’t let the kids play?), but because some kids who do have access, and use it, will then have an unfair advantage over those who won’t bother (and their parents won’t make them).
Reminds me of the PC complaints a few years ago that people who read to their children should be forced to stop, because it created an unfair advantage over others whose parents did not.
SMH then and now.
Griffin on March 27, 2020 at 8:42 pm said:
… So it’s the typical thing if Trump acts too strongly he’s an OMG dictator and when he doesn’t he’s not doing enough.
* * *
Not just governors; journalists and others as well.
I think that’s why he either ignores them or gets testy on Twitter or both.
And I don’t fault him for any of that.
See Jim Geraghty’s short essay on that type of double-pronged dilemma.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/universal-truth-of-coronavirus/
The contemporary use of “they” for “themselves” grates on my nerves, though.
TommyJay on March 27, 2020 at 10:16 pm said:
…
But would I chalk up 9/11 as predictable because John O’Neill sort of predicted it? I don’t think so. Even though he was in a federal counter-terrorism department at one point. Why? Because no one would listen to him. There is a mass perception to these things that is not BS (even though other portions are BS) but very real.
* * *
We (homo sapiens) have a very poor track record of ignoring our prophets, regardless of the subject. AesopSpouse was listening to this talk, on the need to prepare for the next pandemic, that was given ten years ago (by our favorite nutrition & diet expert, but you take prophets where you can get them).
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/pandemics-history-prevention/
Actually, his blurb has better credentials than I gave him:
“How to treat the cause by preventing the emergence of pandemic viruses in the first place (a video I recorded more than a decade ago when I was Public Health Director at the HSUS in Washington DC).”
Don’t know about the US, but every time the number of new cases is posted the credibility of the government where I live goes down a notch, because people know full well who caused the wholly deficient state of the (government run) healthcare system that we’re stuck with here…
Each day the hospitals get more overcrowded, more healthcare services get suspended, and the healthcare authorities restrict the categories of people that are allowed to get tested even further.
Each day they claim that the number of new cases is going down, while each day the number of new cases reported goes up…
Morning update: Not much change from yesterday. active cases still exponential primarily driven by NY’s exponential rise. US stands near 100,000, subtract NY and its 56,000. For the last two days, about 70% of the US uptick is from NY-NJ. As of now, NY and NJ are driving this runaway train. Again, though the active cases is still slightly below the best fit exponential. Don’t get excited about this until the US-NY curve begins to bend which means the rest of the country is starting to flatten…no sign yet.
Serious cases at 2400. Recovered at 2500, which again compared to my model of two week recovery should be 2740, so the reporting on that aspect may be better.
Prediction for end of day today, US near 130,000, NY near 60,000
When you start fretting over the media, remember that the press had two overwhelming favorites during the Democratic primaries:
1. Kamala Harris.
2. Elizabeth Warren.
Yet the media wound up forced to blindly rally behind Joe Biden, who arguably ran the worst campaign of all the candidates.
Mike
Right now, people can lie without any repercussions. The journalism industry has become the “propagandism” industry.
This is why we need some sort of crowd-sourced Credibility Index for both institutions and individuals. A person’s credibility score should be attached to their byline just like the stock symbol is attached to company names in the news. Our apps would have filters that we could set to eliminate news articles, tweets, etc from persons or institutions having credibility scores below a level that we designate.
I live in a fairly small town. With few exceptions, the people here are not panicking. They are following instructions and bearing with it, but they are not excessively worried.
The BS we read in the social media does not reflect the thinking or mood of the general public.
Neo, I would say people should not panic but there is a reason to be scared. Covid-19 is not just like the flu, which some want you to believe. In all the years of the flu we didn’t have hospital bed shortages or a worry about the number of ventilators that will be needed.
There is also this; Look at this graph of New York deaths of the flu vs Covid-19. Note that the numbers of deaths for the flu are over an entire season while the number of deaths from Covid-19 related illness has skyrocketed in a very short time. Imagine what an entire season of the deaths would be if we did not take precaution. Even Trump – who hates the media – understands this much. After all, he declared a state of Emergency.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/fqi9pw/oc_its_not_just_the_flu_comparing_weekly_seasonal/
https://i.redd.it/oc5exnk2dep41.jpg
Well said. I have been focused on these stats for weeks. What amazes me is that the administration does not do a better job of communicating these facts. While I think Trump as taken the appropriate actions (maybe TOO many actions that could crumble our economy) he is not the best messenger for the vital task of communicating caution while pointing out some of the obvious facts in you post.
So how long are Americans going to talk about a dead main sewer media, before the supposedly dead MSM kills them with fear?
Or Americans can kill the main sewer media… but nay, that requires guts and a spine.
“the press does this because most people don’t have the time (and/or the inclination) to find out whether it’s true or not.” neo
Most Americans don’t even have a job to work now. What do you mean they don’t have the time? Hah.
The outright falsehoods during the years of the this administration have been worse than anyone could once have imagined.
Still not worse than what I imagined.
Journalism has been propaganda ever since they started worshiping a man who lied about starvation…. its just they got less and less subtle about it, as they lost more and more respect for the intelligence of the average person (they feel superior to, because they think they arent rubes)
Montage, that’s a ridiculous graph intentionally plotted to be scary and misleading. If you want a much better graph, go here:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/daily-coronavirus-covid-19-data-graph-page/
Scroll down to his states graph. Yes, NY is climbing, but is still below the seasonal flu death rate. May reach that in a few days, but at least this is plotted as a percentage of the population and on left axis as normalized by population.
Montage, it wouldn’t surprise me if NY has gone to the “Italian model” of counting every death unless it’s obvious physical trauma as a WuFlu death.
physicsguy
You seem to miss the point of the graph but then concede the death rate may reach the seasonal flu rate in a few days. The point of the graph is super obvious. In a much shorter time than a full flu season the COVID-19 related deaths will exceed those of the flu in New York. It is not misleading at all. Scary, yes. That’s why we have a lock-down.
Again, this isn’t about the media. The media didn’t create Covid-19. Of course, they will promote the scariest headlines imaginable. It’s one reason I don’t watch the MSM. Better to cruise the internet and get info from multiple sources.
SDN
Do you have a link about Italy counting every death as Covid-19?
“In all the years of the flu we didn’t have hospital bed shortages or a worry about the number of ventilators that will be needed.”
The virus has been circulating in this country for over two months. It has a still-debated but definitely high R0, an incubation time of 4-5 days and – in China – had a median time from first symptom to hospitalization of 10 days. Does anyone know about mass shortage of hospital beds and ventilators in the US, or is it just the media, mainsteam and social, driving mass hysteria?
Montage: “Do you have a link about Italy counting every death as Covid-19?”
I can’t speak for SDN, but this is the main source I have seen people quote from:
From Telegraph.co.uk, March 23:
“According to Prof Walter Ricciardi, scientific adviser to Italy’s minister of health, the country’s mortality rate is far higher due to demographics … But Prof Ricciardi added that Italy’s death rate may also appear high because of how doctors record fatalities.
“The way in which we code deaths in our country is very generous in the sense that all the people who die in hospitals with the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus. … On re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health, only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88 per cent of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity – many had two or three,” he says.”
Subjectively, from watching the news unfold, I recall that the virus got into hospitals in Italy and killed viciously, as it did in the Washington state nursing home. Virtually all COVID-19 deaths in Italy have involved people with at least one and usually multiple significant pre-existing health issues. Victims skew elderly: as of yesterday’s figures, they tabulated data on 7,590 deaths … 90 in people under 50, 0 in people under 30. 6,351 in people 70 and over, an age group that constitutes 36% of overall cases.
Montage:
Where is your link to the hospital bed and ventilator shortages?
Montage to physicsguy
he is not missing the point… YOU are… we have a lock down as a means to destroying economy… why? well its well known that in a winning economy, the encumbant wins the election… in a bad one, they lose… your point on flu is not fully right..
You do know (probably not) that the flu killed 60,000 in the US in 2018..
ALSO are you making distinction between cases, vs deaths?
Cases are going to fly up because testing is flying up.. but testing has no bearing on other numbers any more than shining a flashlight in a dark room changes the objects in the room…
so there is a game going on that we did not play with H1N1 or Ebola during Obama administration, and something we are doing in this one. But note, all over the world we have a similar condition where the left was losing again… not just in the US… so the game is lying by omission… the key leave outs..
Between April 12, 2009, and April 10, 2010, the CDC estimates swine flu caused 60.8 million illnesses, 273,304 hospitalizations and 12,469 deaths in the U.S.
currently… US death for covid is 1,841… do we start the clock at the first death? or the first sick person? Lets start with January.. regardless… to match H1N1 by end of year would require what kind of number change?
well, to catch up we need 10,628? more deaths.. with 9 months to go..
that means we need as many to die each month than died in the past three months… This doesnt happen, because the time of the most spread and dead is when people have not changed behavior…
but also… the key here is that a huge number do not get symptoms.. if its anything liek the diamond princess, you can take your tested cases ad multiply them by 5-8 which would bring the death rate down precipitously
this is why the mostly unheard and not scary epidemiologists have started to quote numbers that are LESS than flu..
but you talk as if you WANT the people you believe in (the govt) to be right..
if not, what does that do to your world view, and what you trust? it shakes it
people dont like their tree shaked.. they dont like the things they think they trust and depend on, to be found out negatively… they reinforce to death (almost)…
and they try to get others to validate this world view…
there is a small group that knows our politicians are full of crapola… some of us have worked with them, some of us have familial or personal experience with this up close… we never had a world view invested in trusting strangers..
Coronavirus may have already infected half of UK, study says
The leading person behind this finding is an expert in precisely this subject, so her conclusions carry more weight than most other pontifications on the subject.
And her prediction is highly congruent with what we know already: Lots of people are exposed to the virus but don’t get ill. It seems highly likely that the people who get ill are a quite small fraction of the population. And those who die are an even smaller fraction. Given that, calculations of incidence have so far been much overblown. The numbers reported as adversely affected amount to less than 1% of the population and those who die are a tiny fraction of that.
In Australia only 11 people have died. What fraction of the 25 million population is that? It’s totally insignificant.
And those who die all seem to be in risk groups anyhow. In Italy, the average age of those who have died is 80! And people in that age group frequently succumb to whatever flu is around that year. In Britain deaths were also in risk groups. 43 coronavirus deaths were recorded there on Wednesday 25th. But only one of those did not have an underlying health condition
Unless that radically changes, we must therefore conclude that the number of cases adversely affected may be no greater than what we see in a normal bout of the flu. We are, in other words, moving heaven and earth to prevent something pretty normal and of no unusual concern.
comment by JJR
Globally, an estimated 151,700 to 575,400 people died from swine flu in the first year of the pandemic.
covid world wide deaths are 30,249
has a freaking long way to go with warm months coming…
the question is… why didnt we stop the world for something that was worse?
the answer was who was in charge… the collective or the opposition
China does not report positive tests for corona virus for people that are asymptomatic and they haven’t since early in February. We now see that 50 to 85% of all positives are asymptomatic so China’s reporting is skewed far towards under reporting positives.
The Federalist had a post explaining how all the governors locking down their states are using a model website called COVID Act Now. https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/25/inaccurate-virus-models-are-panicking-officials-into-ill-advised-lockdowns/
The numbers they are using are absurd. The governor of Michigan said if they don’t quarantine, 400,000 Michiganders would die. In the entire world, where the virus has been spreading for almost 4 months, 30,000 have died. And 400,000 will die in Michigan? Why doesn’t anyone see how absurd this is?