I would like this (as a funny bit of sarcasm) except that this is very likely very close to what a number of Trumpkins actually believe.
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How? How the fuck are death numbers supposed to go DOWN? Do the people his spawner murderd by neglect come back to live? Fuck you, Uday. Fuck you with a barbed wire fence. I hope this whole despicable clan of bottomfeeders crashes and burns like the Hindenburg. Except Barron, from what I heard the kid is allright.
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I believe that for people like the Trumps, words are sounds they use to make other people feel things. I’d be surprised if they gave a lot of thought to whether something was true. I believe they’re mostly just thinking about how people feel when they say things, and whether it’s true or correct or even plausible is another matter for another day - like maybe a trivia contest or something.
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It is obvious to me that the white house is focusing on a different metric than everyone else. They are also willfully ignoring the metrics everyone else is focused on. They are probably looking at some curve somewhere in the west wing, and passing these things memos around the leadership, and may not even realize how different it is from what everyone else is focused on.
They have been focused on death rates for a while, and what I think they mean by that is the probability of someone leaving the hospital in a body bag when they enter because of COVID, or maybe the probability that the death certificate says COVID when they have earlier tested positive, or the number of deaths that get reported to CDC as coming from COVID versus the number of positive tests for a given time period. Each of these are different, and could be seeing changes for different reasons. They complain that they can’t subtract out the deaths that would have happened anyway because of comorbidities, and the deaths that would have happened anyway because of diabetes and cancer and whatever, but of course ignore the deaths we are avoiding from Flu and pneumonia and car accidents because of masks and the lockdown. But there is evidence for the death rate dropping:
From the white house’s perspective, they want to argue that this is what matters. If we ‘have a handle’ on the virus and it becomes no different from the common cold because of treatments or mutation or whatever, then we can end the lockdown and they have won. From this perspective, it makes sense to say death numbers are going down to almost nothing. The death rate in this surge is certainly smaller than the first surge. After all, this narrative goes, you can’t really control who gets it, but we can control who survives and that is all that matters. This is also why they complain about that we are testing more–if a bunch of people got this in march but it was basically a common cold so they never got tested and it never got reported, then the infection rate of this surge would appear much larger than the first one. There are many diseases where detection is driven by testing on not severity of the disease, and in these cases (breast cancer, colon cancer, and other things) there is little evidence that early and massive testing improves outcomes, so it is reasonable to ask whether the same is true for COVID.
Of course, the truth is probably the opposite of their narrative. Public policy and communication role these people have probably has its biggest effect on spread, not treatment, except for maybe fast-tracking certain treatments and making more ventilators available (if policy-makers can take credit for that). And I’ve heard talking heads discuss how the drop in death rate is really because more younger people are getting it now than in the first waves, but I’m not too sure about that. But if true, that would argue that the mortality rate they see dropping is just an illusion and has nothing to do with rounding the corner.
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Basically, the only way I can cook this to see anything like an “exponential decrease” is to look at the bottom graph and think “Oh that’s gotten to where it is pretty flat” and look at the top graph and see that it is exponentially increasing and then reason that the deaths per case are exponentially decreasing. Who fucking cares when close to 1000 people are dying of this every day and it doesn’t look like it is going to stop.
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The administration did, after all, state that is their official policy towards handling the pandemic.
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The only official policy is lying, bullshitting, gas lighting and grifting their way to another four years of lying, bullshitting, gas lighting and grifting.
Meanwhile people are dying needlessly because trump has simply walked away.
Don Jr is simply trying to hide the fact that almost 230,000 people have died of COVID in this country because his daddy didn’t care.
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This thread has been a good example of why Mark Twain famously labelled “statistics” as the worst kind of lie. Statistics are wonderful and powerful, but people very broadly don’t understand them and you can always take the next derivative of a curve if you want to say something is going up or down (or even focus on going up or down instead of on the raw number).
If you think 1,000 deaths a day isn’t a lot compared to 2,000 deaths a day you should be put in a room with the families of 1,000 dead people and hear their grief. When your parent dies you don’t say, “Hey, that’s not a lot of people compared to traffic accidents.”
People who can actually use statistics well and apply them to real world problems are important to making good public policy. But I know statisticians and even though they can talk numbers they know that dead people aren’t just numbers. Any approach based on dismissing the number of deaths or diminishing the impact of dead people is the wrong approach.
Lastly, I’d just like to say something about “The media will stop covering this after the election.” I guess what I want to know, and I’m not being facetious here, is if that turns out not to be true, will that change your opinion about anything? I don’t like to accuse people by saying their words are just agitation, that they don’t really mean what they say, that they are just muckraking or whatever. I just don’t really think that anyone who believes that would feel differently about Trump or how the pandemic was handled regardless of whether that statement is true or not.
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Deaths also lag infections by a couple of weeks. Daily new cases have increased from ~50k/day (7 day average) to about 75k/day since mid-October, and still rising. The number of deaths has begin to rise, but not quite as quickly - but there’s no doubt an increase is coming. Average daily deaths have grown from around 700 to about 800, but the last few days have been about 1000 and that’s going to keep going up as more sick people don’t recover.
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Yes, the number of new cases is a lagging indicator for deaths. The lag has increased because we know how to treat the sick better than we did 8 months ago, i.e. more time between new cases and the worst outcome. But those outcomes are on the way. No doubt.
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Also, ICUs are still not overwhelmed, yet.
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Obviously a chip off the old orange lying block.
I don’t know which is worse: To think these people are so stupid they actually believe the words coming out of their mouths or to think they are so enamored of power that they will lie any lie or commit any atrocity in order to keep things going for themselves until they are kings atop the smoldering ruin of a once great nation.
Either way, I fear we have been reduced and have begun a slow slide into the shadows while others, well prepared, take the world stage and become the focus and the goal of other nations and peoples while we sit in the corner mumbling about our former greatness to the few people who will still talk to us…
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getting there… 
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This may be the most important factor of them all. As soon as care becomes rationed, the death toll will climb for covid as well as all causes.
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It’s a huge worry here in the UK, the seasonal flu is a big big problem for ICUs ever year, if this gets even slightly out of hand, the collateral damage will be gigantic.
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At least four thousand Americans have died of COVID-19 every week since early July
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I’m sure there must be a good reason why that chart shows a clear trend toward seven-day cycles (even more pronounced on the lower graph) but I’m not sure why that would be. Do a lot of hospitals just not report cases that took place over the weekend until the following Monday or something?
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I believe that’s it, most of the administrative staff are likely just working the weekdays (if it isn’t contracted out), and they just have a skeleton staff over the weekends.
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