Saw this on google news. I probably should ruthlessly pare down the sites google news brings to my attention, but foreign fact checking can be a reminder that the form lends itself to politicization and propaganda.
The “fact check” purports to examine the claims in this report:
and the extent of the fact checking is whether the authors of the report improperly used the logos of their respective institutions.
The statement attarcting the most attention is this one:
At baseline (without interventions), between 300 and 400 million Indians are likely to be infected by July. Most of these cases will be mild. At the peak (somewhere between April and May 2020), 100 million individuals will be infected. Of these, approximately 10 million will be severe and about 2-4 million will require hospitalization. This is the most critical period.
(crore=10 million, lakh=100,000)
This is half the estimate proposed in this atlantic essay (published late february)
Lipsitch predicts that within the coming year, some 40 to 70 percent of people around the world will be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19. But, he clarifies emphatically , this does not mean that all will have severe illnesses. “It’s likely that many will have mild disease, or may be asymptomatic,” he said. As with influenza, which is often life-threatening to people with chronic health conditions and of older age, most cases pass without medical care. (Overall, about 14 percent of people with influenza have no symptoms.)
So they are looking to a lawyer for advice on evolutionary biology, epidemiology, virology, statistical analysis and medical practice. Damn, that’s rich. Especially when he pulls the Trumpian “how dare you question my conclusions, I just have a sense…” shit. (I do like the internal fact checking that is used in this article.) But this is the same party that thinks a vapid reality show star is the fricking second coming, so yeah, it makes perfect sense.
Moscow Orders Citywide Quarantine Starting March 30
Moscow will enact an indefinite citywide quarantine starting Monday, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin as the city’s number of coronavirus cases surpassed 1,000 over the weekend.
