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Dire predictions for Georgia and Florida COVID deaths have so far not panned out — 33 Comments

1. Several weeks ago I posted a link here to a U of Maryland study that pointed out the link between weather and covid deaths. These numbers from Georgia and FL confirm this theory. Worst is over.

2. I started tracking Georgia when they opened up; I also have a daughter in Atlanta. The state site fortunately has archival data. They are doing very well, and moving down the side of the Gaussian curve of active-recovered.

   Willis has an excellent post today with many state data on death/population. Most states are on the down side. As Georgia, Florida, Texas keep moving along and showing no ill effects I would think it would be harder for other governors to ignore, unless it’s Whitmer who threatened to prolong her lockdown because she’s annoyed with the protestors. LA closing through August? At what point do a whole lot of people say “Enough!” ?

   https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/05/13/attention-citizens-the-covid19-emergency-is-over/

3. For those experiencing withdrawal pain from all the doom-and-gloom ending, the BBC today posted about other crisis that you can worry about.

   https://www.bbc.com/news/world-52630346

   A world in crisis even without the pandemic: Five looming problems

4. Tom Wolf in PA is definitely all about power. He won’t allow mid-state counties to slowly reopen, even though they have relatively few cases. I also read that nearly 2/3 0f the state deaths were nursing-home related thanks to his orders for them to take in covid patients.

5. I haven’t analyzed the list of Republican covers in “purple” states, but I’d imagine that they’re in a political bind. They may want to relax the lockdowns, but they know that any increase in COVID-19 cases will lead to partisan attacks from the left, and probably to a loss in the next election.

   By the way, just one of the reasons — there are good ones too — for supporting more COVID-19 testing is the leverage it will provide to the left. More testing will reveal more cases. More cases mean we need longer lockdowns. Longer lockdowns feed the ambitions of the authoritarian left. One of the left’s ambitions has become crushing small and medium-sized businesses, which include many of Trump’s strongest supporters. The left envisions a post-COVID economy of big business, big government, big media, big academia, and lots of people living on UBI (universal basic income).

   P.S. I mentioned this in another comment, but if anybody wants to look at how the models have matched the data, you can go to https://www.covid-projections.com/. You can then select the location variable, so you’ll be able to see just Georgia, or just Florida.

6. I’m actually feeling a bit optimistic today despite the constant doom and gloom drum beat. It seems the Democrats have put all their eggs in the Trump-has catastrophically-failed-in-his-Corona-virus-response basket. Despite the overwhelmingly negative coverage, Biden actually seems to be losing some ground in the polls as more people realize he is no longer capable of much of anything. I know the results of two special elections shouldn’t be taken too seriously but I get the feeling the news coming out this summer will not be too kind to Biden and and the Democrats. If the predictions of catastrophe do not pan out in the states that have reopened, more people may actually start to question the wisdom of the media elite. I can hope can’t I?

7. A world in crisis even without the pandemic: Five looming problems

   None of them are important problems. He’s a fraud.

8. Sorry, another typo in my comment above: ” … list of Republican covers in “purple” states …”

   That should be “Republican governors.”

9. Dire predictions are a failure – global warming climate change alarmists depending on “similar” computer models are going to find out their influence with normal folk goes way way down.

   Andy’s BBC list of 5 problems (I’d call them normal world issues):

   1-Nuclear Arms Race, 2-Iran tensions, 3-Israel annexation, 4-Brexit, and …
   5-Climate Change.

   No mention of a world reset with China.

   Time to end the lockdown for young healthy non-obese people.

   It unfortunately looks like “wearing a mask outside” is going to become a political statement. I think mask wearing is a reasonable long term precaution, and would like it to become more common. But if only the Dems wear masks outside, that’s going to make it less common.

   Slovakia remains a leader among the lowest death rates in the EU.

   “governors” “covers” – what’s the big difference? Most pols are CYA most of the time.

10. I’ve been watching the stats in my state (OK) and the number of cases has been going up since reopening has started. But, you need to look at more detail to get the “real story”.

    Texas County in the OK Panhandle now has the 3rd highest number of cases. There are 10 people per square mile. The area’s industries include gas production, farming (wheat), and ranching (cattle & pork). And, they have a meat processing plant which is experiencing an increase in cases. The state is doing testing of all employees at the plant (and probably family members), so today’s cases in Texas County were 60% of the state’s total. In OK County, there were only 6 new cases or 5% of the day’s cases.

    I predict that some people will look only at the gross numbers and yell that we need to shut down again. OH well….

11. “Texas County in the OK Panhandle now has the 3rd highest number of cases.”

    A lot of us who have been tracking stats from the beginning ignore case counts. They vary from one state/nation to the next, as well as from one time to another in a given place; they are completely inconsistent. Since most cases are asymptomatic or so minor that no test is sought, official case counts are practically useless anyway and skew drastically toward the worst-case population. Of interest are only those circumstances when they do entire-population testing – preferably both PCR and serological – in places like prisons, shelters, ships, etc.

    I opt for hospitalization and death counts, preferably only lab-confirmed cases, when monitoring.

    I am quite sure that the recent push for testing is driven entirely by those who want to further panic the sheep in a desperate attempt to keep the world locked down. As far as recently reopened places go, watch for increased hospitalizations and deaths, considering the generally accepted timeframes: 4-5 days to symptoms in almost all cases that develop symptoms; and last I saw, somewhere around 8-10 days from symptom onset to hospitalization. For a while there was about a median 14 days from symptom onset to death, but I don’t know if new ideas about treatment have affected that.

12. Perhaps, when we reach 1930s levels of unemployment, 50+% bankruptcies of small and medium business, and devastated Main Streets, we will realize we over reacted in order to destroy orangemanbad. Trump has allowed himself to be lead by the nose by Fauci. Fool.

13. Predictions and models are just like assholes, everybody got one. Crude but true It applied to experts.

14. parker:

    Trump isn’t keeping the country shut down. Governors are. He is allowing each governor to decide the issue for his or her state. That’s federalism at work.

    In the political sense, this might backfire on the blue state governors, the resentment against them is becoming so great.

    Trump does not have the power to overrule them, as far as I know.

15. Andy,

    Any list that contains an item about climate change listed as “the really big one” is nothing to be taken seriously.

    First off, the term itself is idiotic. If climate change is bad, or wrong, then what is the ideal climate for Earth? What is it supposed to be? No one can tell you, so what are we measuring the change against? Were global temps between 1960 and 1980 correct? 1900 – 1920? 1800 – 1820? How can you measure delta in an experiment with no control?

    II: Of course humans affect the climate. So do ants. So do plankton. So do beaver. Welcome to planet Earth. Although almost no one, including experts, seems to discuss this sensibly, I think what the serious thinkers (not idiots like Extinction Rebellion) mean is we ought to reduce human pollution. Well I’ve got some good news. Humans are doing that. We’ve been doing that since about a week after the first civilization formed. About 5 minutes after humans get comfortable and don’t have to devote all their waking hours to finding food they look around and start making their local environment better. Which means not living in, or near, or breathing toxins. As nations develop above a basic living standard their pollution goes down, their birth rates decline, life expectancies go up.

    C) The Sun. We’ve been in an unpredicted and disturbing solar minimum for awhile which usually means colder temps. Tell any biologist human activity affects global temperatures than ask him or her which she or he would prefer the impact to be; warmer temps or colder? They’ll all answer warmer. Although, perhaps, preferred, static is impossible (the Earth’s temperature has never been static). If we must have change, and we must, almost all living things do better in warmer situations than colder. That big, orange ball in our sky has a lot more to do with climate than everything else combined, and if we don’t get some sunspots soon we may be wishing for “man made global warming.” Or have a major volcano erupt and see what happens to climate? We humans are nowhere near as mighty as so many imagine us to be.

    Global Warming/Climate Change
    The catastrophe that is always 20 years away.

16. neo,

    No Trump isn’t keeping the country shutdown but unfortunately reality doesn’t matter. If things continue to go poorly economically he will be blamed for it by the media and the fact that they are even more supportive of the shutdowns won’t matter. Maybe it couldn’t have been avoided but he really boxed himself in.

    So in a bassackwards way Parker is right.

17. Seems like a good place to put this. Doc Zero aka John Hayward.

    https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1260561220576387073.html

    A bit of very early Monday-morning quarterbacking, with the understanding that nearly every bit of info about the coronavirus is hotly disputed: the original idea for a 15-day lockdown followed by social distancing was probably right for most parts of the country.
    …
    Trump’s much-derided call to reopen by Easter was pretty reasonable in retrospect, provided other measures were put in place quickly enough. Everything after that was needlessly destructive, and now Lockdown Forever has become a religion, a political platform, not science.

    It will take a great deal of data-crunching to prove it, but to lay the hypothesis out now: sometime around Easter was the point at which total nationwide lockdown became counterproductive for public health in the long term, lives lost and horribly damaged exceeding lives saved.

    We’ll be counting the cost for a long time to come, because the lockdown and its aftershocks will be killing people, damaging their health, and ruining their lives for months to come, probably years to come. Efforts will be made to obscure that human cost for political reasons.

    But when the proverbial final analysis is made, April will be when the lockdown became an error, and May is when it became a psychosis. The coronavirus was dangerous, but we went overboard with symbolic and politicized actions, and now we’ve entered the realm of madness. /end

18. The only positive effect of the pandemic I can see is the permanent and irreparable damage it inflicted on public trust toward science and experts. This is long overdue development. The false gods of the science Infallibility and expert competence must be toppled and this pagan worship stopped.

19. Sergey, as a scientist I agree wholeheartedly. What we see on the left is the elevation of science as a religious belief. As I found out from my leftist faculty colleagues, they have no understanding that science involves continuous mistakes, and questioning of results. Eventually we get to a place of understaning, but it’s a messy process. They were shocked, and proclaimed “How can you be a serious scientist?” when I would question a statement with contradictory data. This usually came up in the context of making the campus “greener” with nonsensical, 2nd Law violating, energy proposals. But it carried over into almost all other aspects of their thinking. Like many of the other “ideas” of the left, it has now oozed out into the general population.

20. Sergey, as a scientist I agree wholeheartedly. What we see on the left is the elevation of science as a religious belief.

    I’m going to disagree with you. I think what you’re seeing is that among certain strata and guilds, particular attitudes and stances are markers of in-groups and out-groups. Faculties tend to be composed of people who are witlessly status-conscious and more other-directed than most. Attitudes toward sexual deviance, social fictions like ‘white privilege’, Hansenism in climatology, &c. are salient in this regard.

21. In the political sense, this might backfire on the blue state governors, the resentment against them is becoming so great.

    My wager would be that Whitmer in Michigan and Wolfe in Pennsylvania are storing up trouble for themselves. Just a guess.

22. I have a friend in Michigan who posts on Facebook about their circumstances fairly regularly. I asked, “What do people think of your governor’s actions? Are they going to vote her out, or do they appreciate her for keeping them safe?” She said she thinks it’s 50/50 and the following comments on the post bore that out. Around half of her friends said they are so grateful that Governor Whitmer is being a strong leader who is putting their safety first.

    One highly unscientific sample, but a reminder that as depressing as it is, many many many people do not think with their heads but with their lizard-level emotions. Tell them they are in danger, send the message out to be shared (in distorted and sensationalized fashion) through social media, rely on their inability to think critically or ask questions and on social pressure to not do either of those things, and you can do whatever you want. Yell BOO! and they will all scramble for the covers and you are free to take whatever actions you like.

    We might be on the downslope of this particular thing but get ready for more. It’s been demonstrated that you can scare people senseless with very thin facts and that once you do they will do whatever you say.

    As another Michigander at another blog says frequently, don’t you think bad people are watching this and taking notes.

23. RE: the Chinese Coronavirus–

    Check this article out today, discussing what may well be, and is assumed to be, ongoing Chinese biological warfare research, and speculating—based on hints in Chinese authorities/scientists own discussions about this subject—that among the lines of biological weapon research the Chinese are pursuing is research into being able to create biological weapons that could be engineered to attack certain specific ethnic groups ( I would guess, via their common and unique genetic profile).

    See https://www.lucianne.com/2020/05/15/chinese_deception_fuels_fears_of_ethnicbrbiological_weapons_experiments_34164.html

24. Somebody posted the figure of 675,000 deaths in the US for the Spanish Flu pandemic. I commented, “yeah, but adjusting for population that would be” and then did the arithmetic. 330M/108M * 675K = … 2.2 million.

    Huh. What a coincidence.

    You don’t think maybe that all Neil Ferguson’s model runs came out with numbers all over the place due to code only a professor could love and he just settled on the one that was a straight extrapolation of 1918-19? Naaaah, couldn’t be.

25. I’ve listed, on another recent thread here, a couple of Academics–including the Head of Harvard’s Chemistry Department–who have been found to be doing secret research for the Chinese government, and getting secret payments in return.

    It starting to appear that–while we were all just going along singing a song (the image of the Tarot card, “The Fool” comes to mind)–the Chinese have been quietly moving in on us, have been hijacking a good portion of what we have naively been thinking has been research done for tohe good of us us here in the U.S.A.

    Well, today here comes notice of another such Academic, this time at the Cleveland Clinic.

    See https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2020/05/15/chinese-born-researcher-cleveland-clinic-accused-fraud-links-espionage/

26. JFTR, the Media is doing its usual job of spinning. It’s a wonder any of them can stand upright, they should be so dizzy.
    https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stephen-green/2020/05/13/media-bias-democrats-and-covid19-n390362

    What’s a Republican governor have to do to earn respect from the mainstream media? I’m asking because saving a lot of lives without totally trashing their state’s economy doesn’t seem to do the trick. Meanwhile, certain Democrat governors are portrayed as quietly competent heroes while having the worst infection and death rates in the nation.

27. physicsguy

    As others have said, science is seen as if it were a religion. You know it’s messy. But if someone points out lacunae in global warming theory, or evolution, or now in pandemic time, the reaction may be as if somebody doubted some quibbling bit of detail in the gospels–which might make no difference to the doctrine–and is a heretic. Light the fire.
    They may call it science, but the treatment of skeptics shows it’s religion.

28. I’ve definitely debated the “science as religion” topic before. Basically, as soon as you have a revealed truth that cannot be questioned, you have a religion.

    Science does not deal in permanent revealed truths. Anything we think we know today could be totally overturned by something we discover tomorrow. If you don’t think that’s exciting, you don’t belong in, or believe in, science.

    Based on what I see in my lefty friends, “science as religion” is one of the foundations of their belief system. It’s barely a millimeter under the surface for most of them.They pat themselves on the back for rejecting Christianity (because they really don’t give a lot of points for rejecting any other specific religion), then accept without question any word spoken by priests in literal or figurative white coats. Their response to anyone who doesn’t agree with them is entirely like any religious zealot, plus they continue to pat themselves on the back for imagining that they are so smart while those who disagree are so stupid.

29. Basically, as soon as you have a revealed truth that cannot be questioned, you have a religion.

    No, you don’t. You have a political orthodoxy. Religions have a half-dozen different aspects, not just dogma, and have copious discourse within the scaffolding of dogma.

    Contemporary liberal discourse outside of rarefied academic settings is notable for its crudity and its high-school-never-ends gamesmanship.

30. Dire Predictions? How about 99 years after a huge Geomagnetic storm.
    https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2020/05/12/the-great-geomagnetic-storm-of-may-1921/
    I didn’t really follow or hear about that storm from years ago, nor the Spanish Flu problems. All mushed in the post WW I problems leading to Hitler.

    Today I’m thinking more of a new Little Ice Age to come, and haven’t been hearing much about the lack of sunspots, but here’s a reminder:
    https://nypost.com/2020/05/14/the-sun-has-entered-a-lockdown-period-which-could-cause-freezing-weather-famine/

    I’m hoping for enough ice age to kill the global warming alarmism, without too much famine…

31. Tom – if the Climatistas get their way, we will “cool the earth” enough to exacerbate any natural ice age AND have plenty of famine.
    Imagine the COVID shortages with the government in charge, not just putting their thumb on the scales.

32. Here is a very interesting, and I think pursuasive, analysis by Dr. Theodore Dalrymple–himself a physician–of the various claims for this or that drug/treatment regimen for the Chinese Coronavirus, and the quality of the “scientific” proof that is used to justify those various claims.

    See https://www.takimag.com/article/no-cure-for-impatience/

33. Speaking of the Chinese Coronavirus and China–

    Another day, another Academic arrested for secret ties to China, this time it’s at Case Western Reserve.

    I believe that’s three Academics in trouble in the last week or so, for a total of four Academics reported to have such secret Chinese ties and funding, just since January 1, 2020.

    See https://campusreform.org/?ID=14873

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