For some reason, I’m strongly reminded of Douglas Adams:
“A towel, [The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy] says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.”
A virus is nothing like the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal; it exists whether or not you test for it. But it’s sad (Sad!) that the Orange Menace seems to have the same lack of intelligence as that fictional beast.
The Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses have been designed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to danger. They follow the principle "what you don't know can't hurt you" and turn completely dark and opaque at the first sign of danger. This prevents you from seeing anything that might alarm you.
While it doesn’t make sense in US, it would make sense for a totalitarian country.
I suspect that this is how North Korea controls the spread of disease.
The best part is when he goes on to talk about how those other countries who don’t test have lots of cases but they just don’t talk about it. Basically admitting that he knows we have lots of cases but He doesn’t want to talk about it.
Oh, and did anyone notice this isn’t just a one time brain spur. He said the same thing in at least two places.
But he’s got the “business” of diseases down to a tee. It’s all about perception; if they hadn’t even told us about coronavirus no one would have died.
Seriously though, when will this living nightmare end?
“Cases” are just a way of keeping score for him. Whoever has the most is losing. He’s exasperated that it’s a silly game, because in order to “win” it, all he would have to do is either stop testing or stop test result statistics from being released. He feels like he’s getting beaten up for the high number of cases and is pointing out, executive-style, that the metric can be gamed.
Remember: everything is about ratings with him. He’s not talking about the number of infections, he’s talking about winning the game.
He complains in the clip that other countries have more cases but are covering them up by not testing. To him singling out the USA is unfair because the high number of cases is simply the result of being honest enough to test people.
His is of the same mind that privatizes health care and natural resources, financializes the economy to the benefit of the 10%, taxes income more than capital, and, well, that’s enough socially engineered heartache for now.
I guess Mike Judge was making Idiocracy 2 a few years back, then he discovered that facts surpassed both Idiocracy 1 and the sequel, so he also started writing Idiocracy 3, but facts again surpassed the plots when Trump was elected…
Poor Mike Judge is now in talks with some TV for a 22 one hour episodes series called Infinite Idiocracy, in which he hopes to get to the post-Trump era by the two hour finale.
Seriously, Mike Judge, where are you? There’s so much material out there to keep you working (and us watching) for literally years.
Umm - that’s almost as dumb as his statement. Not testing does not mean you don’t have cases, it just means you don’t know about the cases you do have.
I guess what @davidcjonesvt may be hinting at is that it does make a massive difference who is tested.
Even for a good quality test (in terms of specificity) with low prevalence of a disease (around 2-5% for COVID19) the number of false positives will inevitably exceed the real cases, and we will still miss some real cases (because sensitivity is never 100%). So when we‘re talking about testing people who are vulnerable of severe outcome, or who were in contact with someone who is know suspected to be infected, testing helps. Otherwise it‘s not necessarily good thing, because the majority of positives will be false. So there is some truth to „less testing, less cases“, and the cumulated negative effects of those false positives have to be weighed against the benefits of catching more infections.
That argument, however, is obviously beyond Trumps cognitive capacity, and it is not an argument against testing, it‘s an argument for having a coherent strategy for who should be tested.
