A day after the NY Times runs a laudatory piece on Arizona's successful pandemic response, the state sees a surge in new cases and deaths

Not that I needed necessarily believe anything they say, but

https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/26/kim-jong-un-conveys-urgent-meeting-after-suspected-case-of-covid-19

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Exactly. It is readily available, so why aren’t news outlets like the NYT regularly reporting these data?

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Agree. It’s like using an anecdote to argue with a trend, as in “nobody I know is sick!”

Statistically speaking, today is not today. Today is two weeks ago.

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I remember it as “Lies of Our Times.”

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I would add that “leveling off” is not the goal when your level is high.

It’s better than the alternative of continued, uncontrolled growth, but it’s definitely still counting chickens that have yet to hatch.

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You know that one about the guy who fell off the top of the Empire State building?

The whole way down he was saying “so far, so good.”

Fact is, we have only part of the picture of how this virus works, and our experts are making their best guesses based on available knowledge, but they all say this is going to go on for a long time.

Just because the new cases leveled off for a period doesn’t mean the problem is solved, or that it will stay leveled off.

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Especially given the catastrophically terrible mismanagement of this crisis thus far, particularly by red states who just want to ignore the problem because it’s bad for The Economy™, and who are crippled in their meager responses because the only effective solutions are the kind of unconditional Big Government™ aid to struggling people that they’ve decried for the last 50 years.

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If I had to guess, it is because that is a harder number to explain and requires some context and analysis that doesn’t fit in a headline. Every reader gets how much worse 3000 cases is than 2000 cases, but understanding what a shift in cases from 5% positive to 10% is requires more steps. It is just easier to write the other story.

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