Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Fake COVID-19 News Abounds
Today in the headlines:
Live updates: Texas coronavirus cases surge as restaurants, gyms, bars, and childcare facilities reopen.
There was no “surge” in Texas aside from random variation. The graph in the article has the “surge” starting five days before Texas opened up. And a spike due to cases discovered at a meatpacking plant isn’t germane to Texas’s public policy of opening up. The meatpacking plant had stayed open the whole time. A single such spike does not make a surge, anyway. The numbers have gone down since then, which is not shown on the graph, which only goes to May 13. The story was posted Thursday.
11 Alive: A national news article about the risk of Georgians getting COVID-19 now that businesses are re-opening caught the attention of many, including Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance-Bottoms and even the Georgia governor’s office.
But a day later, Forbes has removed the article from its website after The Reveal, 11Alive’s investigative team, found those who closely follow the number of cases in Georgia had serious questions about the accuracy of the article.
There’s no telling where they got their numbers, but Georgia’s new case number varies as much as 70 percent from day to day. Looking at the overall trend shows this is just random variation.
Associated Press: Italy has big jump in confirmed COVID-19 cases
There was no “big jump.” Only random variation.
Reports of spikes or surges of COVID-19 that support the media’s preferred narrative of COVID-19 flareups subsequent to economies reopening often don’t stand up to close scrutiny.
Published in Journalism
Any one who watches and believes CBS Evening News is incredibly misinformed about everything they cover, and may be completely ignorant of the things they refuse to cover.
The jump in positive cases in Texas (and probably everywhere else) is also due to an increase in testing. I’ve done more tests in the last two weeks than in March and April combined.
99% of cases are mild or zero symptoms
Virginia’s average daily number of positive tests have increased from 670/day to 880/day for the last 4 weeks. During that time, total hospitalizations as a percentage of the positive cases have gone from 15.1% to 12.1%. It’s a rough comparison, but it’s consistently declining.
This. If you measure something more, you will find more of it. That is not the same as “new cases” appearing. You’re just looking for them better. People (like our Governor, ahem) who think that finding more cases with more testing means you’re “discovering” some new situation are wrong. All you’re doing is finding the extent of what was already there.
If there is a surge in cases because of the re-openings, we won’t know it for several weeks. I know this b/c the media repeated it incessantly back when the lockdowns began, even though cases were still growing exponentially: “we all need to be patient, we won’t even begin to see results for several weeks!” Surely the reporters are clever enough to realize the same logic applies to the end of the lockdowns.
They may be clever enough, but can they resist the chance to write a fake news story that gains a lot of clicks because it looks scary?
In Los Angeles until recently, testing was only reserved for those who displayed symptoms.
Clearly an attempt to exaggerate the case fatality rate and the rate of hospitalizations.
Cases are rising but how many are serious? how many are trivial?
Exactly the same here: until last week, you couldn’t test a test without symptoms, because they were rationing the tests.
I believe the breakdown is like this:
Out of every 100 cases identified, 90 of them recover on their own.
Of the 10 that remain, 7 of them require hospitalization for 2 to 3 days, 2 go into the ICU without need for a ventilator, and 1 is in the ICU on a ventilator. Almost all of the deaths are from those last two categories.