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Who’s Died?
The more misleading information about Covid-19 that is published, the angrier I’m becoming. Here’s one of the latest lead paragraphs to one story :
A coronavirus outbreak centered at the White House has exploded in the week since President Trump said he tested positive on October 2. At least three dozen people so far are known to have contracted the virus, but the true number is unknown absent a running update from the White House. Instead, reporters have tapped sources and otherwise relied on the infected to come forward in order to gain a fuller portrait of the disaster. The outbreak has grown so vast that it has apparently infected everyone from unnamed federal employees to senior Pentagon leaders. Here is a running tally of those known to be infected (italics mine).
Disingenuous would be a generous way to describe the information described in this story. Dangerous and treacherous might be a better choice of words. Why do I say that?
First, to my knowledge, many of the people listed in the article are asymptomatic or have mild symptoms. I have no reason to think they are intentionally downplaying their conditions. Those who are contracting it are adding to the herd immunity numbers, a critical factor in the country managing the pandemic.
In the article, one person who is gravely ill has been sick since September 26 and has been hospitalized. Chris Christie, who checked in to hospital as a precautionary measure, has been released. Although early reports tried to blame Trump because many of the people who attended the news conference announcing Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court did not wear masks, most of the people in the article appear to have contracted the disease in other settings, or could not attribute their infections to that event.
President Trump was accused of “blaming” the Gold Star families (with whom he met recently) for his infection. Does this sound like blaming to you?
‘It’s very, very hard when you are with people from the military or from law enforcement, and they come over to you and they want to hug you and they want to kiss you because we really have done a good job for them. And you get close and things happen,’ Trump told Sean Hannity hours before his diagnosis was publicly disclosed.
That Senator Mike Lee subjected himself to this “abuse” (hugging) and his test came out negative is irrelevant.
So just what do we have here? The usual immoral distortions by the press:
- There was no common source for the infections for most people.
- At the Barrett press conference, anyone could have worn masks.
- Almost no one has become seriously ill.
- All reports try to point to Trump for being responsible for all the illnesses.
- People are misled about the truth of the infection.
The most disturbing distortions or omissions are, of course, the most alarming to the general public. Originally the virus was extremely lethal and many died (often needlessly). At some point, people will be exposed to the virus and may present a positive test, which may or not result in symptoms. Many who contract the disease will have mild symptoms and a great majority will recover without hospitalization. In spite of President Trump’s optimism, there is no way to know when a vaccine will be available for wide distribution.
But the most critical information that isn’t publicized: many more people have the disease than we think, and many fewer people will actually die of Covid-19 (and not from other complications) than people are being told. Any death is a tragedy, but the risk of death from the virus is small.
It’s a travesty of immense proportions. What is the truth?
No one really knows.
Published in Journalism
This is the last round of hysteria that can be cashed in before the election, and it is being used to drive early voting. On Election Day, when no one in the White House or the campaign has died or suffered a serious illness rather than a weekend tuneup, all of those Biden votes will have already been cast. Many will regret their rashness when they realize how archly they’ve been played and the rioters come boldly to their street to gather “reparations” under the protection of corrupt district attorneys.
Will they realize their error? Who will point it out to them? Or do you think a Trump election will show their foolishness? I have my doubts, @sisyphus.
The real answer on the election is obviously that something will happen and by Inauguration Day we will have an answer. It won’t be the end of hostilities by any measure, but if Biden wins it is obviously the end of seeking protection and justice under a rule of law.
And Seattle Mayor Janet Durkan pleading with rioters that she needs a little more time to fulfill all of their demands will be the model for every blue jurisdiction and, faster than anyone believes, red jurisdictions as well. Where President Trump is willing to send federal help to besieged cities, a President Biden will send civil rights lawyers to supervise the new American disorder.
Thank you @jonahgoldberg, @claire, @davidfrench, et. al., you will have save Xi from the sewage system of history and brought Maoism to the streets of a once free country. Immanentizing the eschaton, indeed.
Has anyone seen Melania recently?
Nope. She made a statement that she’s choosing to recover and stay at home, so as not to expose those who protect her or any medical staff to her illness.
The overreaction to this disease has been the biggest scam pulled on the world in my lifetime. Why was this disease singled out for locking down the world and trying to frighten everyone to death? Because Trump.
As one on Twitter said:
James Delingpole interviews Ivor Cummins on the unscientific and tyrannical approach governments took on Covid.
@scottwilmot, the lives that will have been ruined or lost to maintain this fraud is horrible. I just wonder if people will ever know the truth?
I sure hope so, Susan. The information is coming out slowly. There are so many alternatives to the MSM. The seemingly full recovery of Trump from Covid has the doomsayers panicking.
Not many:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm
Originally the virus was believed to be extremely lethal but we’ve known for months it is not unless one has certain co-morbidities that seem to give the virus a leg-up in overcoming one’s immune system. The death rate for those confirmed to have contracted the virus in the US is now 2.75%, do the math yourself as none of the media will tell you this. Of those only 6% have no known co-morbidities and we don’t know how many have contracted the virus but not been tested as they had to symptoms but we can be sure the number is significant so the real death rate is much lower even than that. No one is saying being sick is fun or looking to catch any disease but these facts alone tell us the shutdowns are not justified when the truly vulnerable could have been protected without such massive disruption including destroying businesses, jobs and lives. Advances in treating Covid19 since March have made this disease even less lethal over time.
I said on day one this shows that our society has become way too risk-averse and, sadly, it seems my assessment is being born out. I can’t agree that any death is tragic, death is a part of the human condition but unnecessary death, especially those caused by unwarranted actions such as this are indeed tragic.
I especially appreciate this part of your comment, @okiesailor. The distinction is important, yet people are terrified of dying and live their lives in fear as a result. Thanks for the additional data.
Most people will not know the truth because the truth is complex, while fear is simple.
Unfortunately for the prospects of my getting back my life, most of the people in my social/church circle have bought the fear and are convinced that testing positive for Covid-19 is certain to lead to at least extremely serious illness if not death.
Just this morning some members of our Sunday School class (conducted via Zoom) said that fear of the “deadly” disease was the rational, thinking response, and the desire to see people in person was the emotional, non-thinking response. Exactly backwards from the facts. But since logic didn’t get them to their position of fear, I figure I have no chance of trying to talk any of them out of their fear.
That is so sad, @fullsizetabby. I’m so sorry. In one sense, you have lost your community. Mending that distance may take a long time.
I blame Emmanuel Goldstein.
The corruption of the media feeds the anxiety all on its own. They are such total and transparent liars that the mind fills in the blanks. Lies are a poison, and our media are toxic.
I saw a video today that showed Pelosi explaining how they fed the press lies, and the press promoted them. I couldn’t believe it. I wish I knew where it was from, but she described it with such delight.
The liars are winning the COVID narrative.
Between the reaction to COVID-19 and America’s political breakdown, I’m feeling, these days, like I have no future. Nothing to look forward to except masks, more masks, lockdowns, masks, and civil war. Like a cancer, the overarching sense of crisis has invaded every inch of social tissue. There is no escaping it.
“Known” is a big word there.
Have you ever looked at the death rate in sports? For example, what would you say is the annual death toll among high school and college football players? Would you be surprised to find out it’s double digits?
On average 12 otherwise healthy young men drop dead either during games or on the practice field every season – and primarily from a previously undetected congenital ailment.
Trump has the gumption to end the plandemic and keep a lid on violence. I suppose you’re praying that Trump is reelected and that he serves righteously and wisely, yes? Or else some other act of divine mercy is possible.
How many people have contracted the flu? Oh right, there is no flu anymore just COVID.
That accusation was a blatant lie. But the media and the Democrats tell — and continue to tell — blatant lies and there are no consequences for them. We have a media that has been lying about the President for more than four years. None of them have faced consequences. We have Democrats daily repeating the media lies. None of them have faced consequences.
Given that they never suffer for constant lies why would they ever stop lying?
They don’t have to, and they won’t. That’s one constant we can count on.
It’s depressing. The lies are told through megaphones. The truth is spoken in whispers.
I just glanced at the pictures of the Senate hearings on Fox News. Everyone is wearing a mask. I wonder when we will be at the point where 10 percent of the public is officially immune because they have already had the virus and can prove it, and therefore they are officially excused from having to wear the mask.
Over the course of the pandemic, I have seen it said that it is wildly contagious, and it certainly seems to be given how fast it has spread throughout the world, if the tests in the rest of the world are accurate. Other scientists have said it is actually not. Looking at the Senate hearing, I’m leaning toward not. Which means achieving community immunity may not be an answer after all.
Who’s died is an appropriate question all around, not just at the White house event. It was sold as a child killer and a death sentence. It turns out to be about the same as a flu for the vast majority of the population. It was overhyped, over reacted to, and over politicized. And once the statistics bore that out, they doubled down and waved ‘Science’ as the justification. G-d save us from statistics, specifically, their interpretation by ‘science’.
Interestingly, the WHO has (after the fact) declared long term lockdowns an inappropriate reaction to COVID
“We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,” Nabarro said.
“The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.”
It has all been an elaborate and destructive scam, it is another example of never letting a crisis go to waste, and it is intended to create fear, chaos, and economic hardship so as to have a cudgel to beat Trump with in the election.
How may voters are there who know the difference between urine down the leg and rain? Enough to overcome the blatant vote fraud we are already in the midst of?
Finally to answer the question in a bit different way, Who’s died? Yes, it appears WHO has.
Powerline linked to a tweet from Kyle Smith of National Review and the New York Post, who in turn linked to a Gallup poll of people’s opinions of COVID. Basically, because the left trusts the media more than the right, Democrats truly are scared out of their cotton-pickin’ minds that a coronavirus diagnosis is only a few steps away from a death sentence:
That mentality also points towards the urban/suburban-rural divide on reacting to COVID, in that the Bluer an area is the more likely things are going to be disrupted well above normal precautions to deal with the virus. But at the same time, it could explain the differences between the Trump and Biden rally turnouts — there truly may be Biden supporters out and about who think if they go to see Joe or one of his surrogates speak, they’re going to get the virus and die.
That still wouldn’t explain why Trump-hostile urbanites have no problems at all gathering in other protests without fearing for their lives, but it could be the case for the less perpetually angry voters in the older demographics who the polls claim are switching from Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020 (though to mitigate that mitigating circumstance, Gallup — which doesn’t to head-to-head presidential polling anymore — still shows Trump’s approval rating above where the presidential poll averages have him, and with a majority of voters supposedly more happy about their personal situations now than four years ago. As with the crowd turnout for Trump and Biden, the Gallup voter survey numbers on the peripheral issues just isn’t syncing up with the other pollsters’ election preference results).
Thanks for that link, Stad. I had been spending the last week reconstructing the actual daily deaths for North Carolina because Worldometer, which quotes NC-DHHS website as the source, was obviously too peaky and sporadic to be real. Worldometer’s deaths are reported as if they happened on the day (they don’t go back and correct recent numbers except in very few cases), but the CDC site confirms that the data (i.e., number of deaths occurring on a specific day) comes in over a period of 8 weeks or more, and this is well illustrated in the NC-DHHS death history chart [https://covid19.ncdhhs.gov/dashboard/cases]. But as of October 9th, CDC shows only 2,577 deaths confirmed or presumed for COVID-19 for North Carolina, as opposed to the 3,447 deaths that North Carolina DHHS reported up to that date, and which was then reported by Worldometer [https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/north-carolina/]. NC has included Antigen positive tests in their data going back to 7/8, but that amounts to only 35 of the confirmations. NC deaths seem inflated compared to CDC, at least in this example, even though they appear to all intents and purposes to be following guidance of the CDC.