He’s wrong on both counts. The US is being led by something stupider than witchcraft. But, also, LOOOOOL at the idea that the Chinese people would do anything of the sort over 90K COvid deaths.
It’s a solid troll, though.
Trump letter inaccurate, says medical report editor
A letter from Donald Trump criticising the World Health Organization’s response to the coronavirus is inaccurate, says the editor of a medical report cited by the US president.
Mr Trump sent a letter to the head of the WHO threatening to pull US funding and outlining a 30-day deadline for the body to commit to “substantive improvements”.
In it, Mr Trump says the WHO “consistently ignored reports of the virus spreading in Wuhan in early December 2019 or even earlier, including reports from the Lancet medical journal”.
However, editor Richard Horton says The Lancet did not publish any report until 24 January.
In a tweet, he wrote: “Dear President Trump - You cite The Lancet in your attack on WHO. Please let me correct the record. The Lancet did not publish any report in early December, 2019, about a virus spreading in Wuhan. The first reports we published were from Chinese scientists on Jan 24, 2020.”
https://twitter.com/richardhorton1/status/1262662304048562176?s=20
Just wanted to point out that this is part true but part wrong, I think. @Danspartan can chime in with his expertise perhaps, but I think the way this works is if your R > 1 it’s exponential growth and it’s going to blow up at some point. 5.7 may look like a rounded off 90 degree angle and 1.1 may look linear for a while, but eventually it hits a critical mass and starts to bend upward.
Maybe we can keep going 1.1 → .9 → 1.1 but I have my doubts on the ability of American society to care enough, let alone do it.
That said the main takeaway from your point is correct. It may not look that bad for a few weeks or even a couple months in Texas and Georgia, because maybe they still manage to mostly keep it to 1.x and the weather helps. If that’s the case, and it’s a big if, it’s still a big problem when they have way too many cases active when fall/winter arrive. Then they’re going to giraffe that graph up real quick.
I think this is going to be very hard to pull off, unless we start throwing doctors and nurses out of windows. Nurses have empathy, it’ll be hard to keep them quiet. There are just too many potential whistleblowers to cover up hospital overcrowding. I think. I hope.
What they can pull off is propaganda that keeps people from getting tested or going to the doctor/hospital. Cooking the books will help, if people think all the deaths are in nursing homes and meat processing plants, they won’t think they have it. If they think the death toll is 1/3 what it is, they’re more likely to just give it a few days at home before seeking care.
I totally agree deaths above normal will be the eventual metric for scientists and people who believe in science. 40% of the country will always spout off about fake cases to get the $39,000 and it was a bad year for the flu and that’s where the extra deaths came from, etc.
Bit rough blaming the Chinese people for the behaviour of a totalitarian regime.
We non-Americans do our best here not to hold the American people responsible for Trump. 
Not all of them, anyway
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Another update in the CR:
111 new cases yesterday. It’s largest number of new cases in a day since April 30th. Also the highest percentage of positive tests (1.51%) since April 26th. The sudden spike after what was a pretty good day on May 17th was the result of an outbreak at a coal mine in Darkov, a village on the Czech-Polish border where 53 people tested positive. That area is the poorest part of the country and relies on dying heavy industry for survival. It’s the West Virginia of the Czech Republic (just replace opioids with crystal meth).
Seems that so long as contact tracing doesn’t fail and outbreaks are contained locally, then the government’s cool with things continuing to open. I suppose they believe that they now have the infrastructure and technology to keep things under control.
Thanks, awval.
True, I wasn’t trying to come down on the Chinese people in particular. I was just thinking that the Chinese government has sanctioned putting nets around their sweatshops to prevent the miserable workers from committing suicide, and that probably the least horrific thing they’ve done in the past twenty five years, and there aren’t riots. The point that I actually think is true is that it’s getting incredibly hard to take that kind of action against a government, for a variety of reasons. I don’t blame the people for not burning shit down.
Making these sports illegal would be ridiculous. I’m pretty sure 99% of modern professionals if given the choice well after retirement would still have chosen to compete in the sport.
Hell if you gave ME the choice to be an NFL player I would instantly take that. 5+ million dollars minimum for a couple concussions is WAY better than being a fucking wage slave for 50 years constantly worrying about money.
I’d agree that kids shouldn’t be allowed to play full contact football or fight in MMA obviously, but adults? Fuck yeah.
Maybe I’m a caveman but MMA can be exciting as hell. Is it really sad that some fighters continue to fight after clearly taking way too much damage? Yes, but I’m going to have to be a Republican and go with personal responsibility on that. You can’t protect everyone from themselves at the expense of everyone else. I used to train BJJ and know a lot of fighters and they all loved it.
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Yeah I know.
I wasn’t having a pop at you, more at the common usage of The Chinese or The Indians or The Japanese seen here a lot, which although it seems like a small point about language is actually quite important imo and contributes to the embedding of assumptions about large groups of people that are often inaccurate, which in turn become ammunition for racists to manipulate perceptions of foreigners.
These things have so many connotations. It’s strange that when someone says “China would do anything to downplay the number of deaths” it’s obviously a statement about the government there, but “The Chinese would do anything to downplay the number of deaths” is much more ambiguous, but that’s because of how certain idioms have been cornered by the racist crowd.
It’s the same as how talking about “coloured” people conjures up images of the pre civil rights deep South or South Africa during apartheid, and people wisely avoid the word, but “people of colour” has been chosen by those people themselves as a descriptor because it has no baggage.
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I thought owning a minor league team was a solid profitable business? Obviously no where near the raw dollar amounts as compared to a major league team but still millions in the black a year? But without people attending and no tv revenue they are pretty screwed now, which sucks because going to a minor league game is a lot of fun.
No doubt. The average MMA fight is more entertaining than the average boxing match. Boxing undercards are mostly terrible.
That said, I had a really hard time watching Smith/Teixeira and Gaethje/Ferguson, especially the former. It was absolutely brutal.
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Finally an answer to the age-old question of why 7-Elevens have locks in their doors
Today virologists can watch pathogens attack cells. That’s what those yellow dots (aka SARS-CoV-2) are doing in this 30,000X magnification of vervet monkey cells. “People think we’re trying to make them look scary,” says microscopist John Bernbaum, whose team at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases captured and colorized this image in March to better understand the virus. “But we just try to come up with pleasing color combinations.”
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Yeah some fights are super hard to watch. I wish there was way less of a stigma of refs stopping fights early if one fighter is taking too much damage. I think the athletic commissions need to do a way better job at protecting fighters and there should be way more safety regulations but at the end of the day if adults want to do something that isn’t hurting others, or at least in this case others that don’t agree to be hurt, they should be able to do it. Same thing with drugs.
It’s fucking incredible how tough some people are. Like how is Ferguson even human? When I trained BJJ I would tap out pretty quickly if things got really uncomfortable. The things human beings can push themselves through is super impressive, although obviously really stupid.
Do we have excess death data for Texas, Georgia, etc?
Mexico joins the list of countries lying about corona deaths.
More than three times as many people may have died from Covid-19 in Mexico City than have been accounted for in official estimates, according to death certificates issued since the start of Mexico’s epidemic, the Associated Press reports.
The anti-corruption group Mexicans Against Corruption said in a report on that it got access to a database of death certificates issued in Mexico City between 18 March and 12 May. It showed doctors had included the words SARS, COV2, COV, Covid 19, or new coronavirus in explanatory notes attached to 4,577 certificates.
The federal government acknowledges only 1,332 confirmed deaths from Covid-19 in Mexico City.
Sars-CoV-2 is the technical name of the virus. The notes the group counted included terms like “suspected,” “probable”, or “possible” role of the virus in the deaths.
In 3,209 of the certificates, it was listed as a suspected contributing factor along with other causes of death, like pneumonia, respiratory failure, septic shock or multiple organ failure.
Only 323 certificates list confirmed coronavirus as a cause of death; 1,045 other death certificates listed COVID-19 but didn’t specify if it was suspected or confirmed.
On Tuesday Mexico reported 155 more deaths from Covid-19, bringing the total official death toll in the country to 5,332. According to the latest update, 2,414 more people tested positive for the coronavirus, bring the total number of confirmed cases to 51,633.
Excess deaths are here, but it lags. I have it set for Texas but you can choose any state.
Honestly that story about the woman in Florida resigning rather than agree to alter data is one of those stories which makes me fear for the human race. Not the story itself but the fact that it’s so plain that nobody cares. The news cycle has already moved on. In a functioning society that would be a major scandal, but it’s already too coloured by everyone’s preconceptions.
I think I’ve said before that the advent of the internet and the ability to “do your own research” is a bit like the printing of Bibles in common tongues rather than Latin. That was followed by an explosion in cults and weird belief systems. The optimistic view is that that dies down as people become used to the new media. The pessimistic view has two prongs: firstly, the internet concerns every subject, not just religion. Secondly, is it true that it died down? Isn’t American Protestantism a relatively new and dangerous cult? How far back does the Prosperity Gospel date? How much Evangelical influence is there in US policy towards Israel?
Like here’s a conspiracy theory doing the rounds on Australian Facebook right now:
That’s a new (released maybe… 2 years ago?) Australian $10 note. See that? THOSE ARE PICTURES OF CORONAVIRUSES BRO!
Like I doubt all that many people believe that but the thing about the internet is it throws up 10,000 different answers to every question. I am pessimistic about the ability of people to cope with this.
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UK sees almost 55,000 extra deaths
Figures released by the UK’s national statistical agencies show that there were 54,437 more deaths up to 8 May than would normally have been expected by this time of year.
The figure is larger than the 34,796 people who died after a positive test result for coronavirus up to that date, or the 41,020 people whose death certificate mentioned Covid-19.
Robert Cuffe, the BBC’s head of statistics, said the larger “excess deaths” figure was likely to capture the true impact of the virus, reflecting the numbers of people who died without a test or who died because of the strain on the healthcare system.
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