The Real COVID-19 Death Toll

An analysis by the BBC of COVID-19 deaths suggests that the death count is significantly higher than officially reported. This is not very surprising. Many countries have responded with chaos, confusion and incompetence. Also, politics is relevant. Officials in some countries, e.g., the US, continue to pretend that everything is better than it really is, so the data may intentionally under count the deaths.

The analysis is based on excess deaths. Excess deaths are the number of deaths above officially reported deaths in view of the normally expected number of deaths if COVID-19 was not a factor. In the plot below, excess deaths are shown in blue, the dotted line is normally expected deaths and red is officially reported COVID-19 deaths.

For the US, the BBC analysis estimates there were about 26,968 excess or unreported COVID-19 deaths between Feb. 16 and May 2. Most of those deaths were probably directly caused by COVID-19. After May 2, the BBC data shows that reported deaths and actual deaths were basically the same. Presumably, that reflects more competence and/or honesty in death reporting in the US. Thus, one can reasonably add, say, about 23,000, to the official US death count to get a better feel for the real direct COVID-19 toll.

NO ANGST THREAD

CORONVIRUS cases surging again in some countries and in some states in this nation.

JOHN BOLTON'S book will be all the gossip over the next week or longer.

ONGOING protests and examples of police misconduct continue.

SUMMER, with Climate Change increase in heat waves and monster hurricanes likely.

THE Biden vs Trump debate will intensify.

ANGST will rule this nation, one way or another, whether the angst is climate related, Coronavirus related, election related, protest related, or White House related.


SOOOOOOOOOOO …

WHILE ALL THIS is fodder for lively debate, heated discussion, virulent arguments, and increased blood pressure, I have to ask a simple question:

WHAT DO YOU, yes YOU, do to get relief from it all, get away from it all, get some peace of mind from it all, take a holiday from it all, put it all out of your mind?

WHAT IS … YOUR Chill Pill?

All the President's Lies

Whopper: a gross or blatant lie

It is reasonable to believe that the president lies more than any US president. The Washington Post fact checkers checked the president's claim that president Obama “never even tried to fix this during their eight-year period”, in reference to police killing of blacks and other people. The president's claim is false. It is another of Trump's endless lies. WaPo writes:

“Just in recent months, while battling the coronavirus pandemic, Trump has falsely accused Obama of mishandling the swine flu epidemic; leaving “empty” the Strategic National Stockpile, a repository of emergency medicines and supplies; and providing “old tests” for a disease that had not even emerged yet. 

Now, faced with another crisis — mass protests against police brutality in the wake of the death of George Floyd — the president knocked Obama again. Before signing an executive order that seeks to provide incentives for police departments to increase training on the use of force, Trump asserted that Obama and his vice president “never even tried to fix this during their eight-year period.”

Obama faced his own uproar over police brutality in 2014, after the shooting death of an unarmed black man, Michael Brown, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo. Indeed, one of his critics at the time was none other than then-private citizen Trump.

Obama took a number of steps in response, in particular issuing an executive order that created a task force on “21st century policing.” The group was asked to hold public hearings and meet with officials and nongovernmental groups to develop recommendations.

A final 115-page report was delivered in May 2015 with dozens of recommendations, such as seeking more data on police-involved shootings, “whether fatal or nonfatal, as well as any in-custody death”; improved assessments of community attitudes toward police; and the removal of incentives on police practices such as a predetermined number of tickets, citations, arrests or summonses.

Indeed, elements of Trump’s executive order could have been lifted from the Obama-era report. Trump called on the Justice Department to encourage more training of police officers with “respect to encounters with individuals suffering from impaired mental health, homelessness, and addiction.” The Obama report had several recommendations along those lines, including making “Crisis Intervention Training (CIT) a part of both basic recruit and in-service officer training.” 

Of course, recommendations are only a start — just as signing an executive order does not mean policy is being implemented. The Obama task force issued an implementation guide for police departments and a year later reported that 15 police departments had agreed to an action plan to implement the recommendations. 

Obama took other steps as well. In May 2015, on the recommendation of a White House working group established that January, he banned federal transfers of certain types of military-style gear to local police departments, including tracked armored vehicles, bayonets, grenade launchers, ammunition of .50-caliber or higher, and some types of camouflage uniforms. 

Trump in 2017 rescinded that executive order.” (emphasis added)

WaPo asked the White House for the fact basis to assert that Obama did not even try to deal with excessive use of force by police. The White House responded with a pack of factually unsupported lies:

“This President is about action and this executive order will do more than any previous administration on police reform,” a senior administration official said. “This executive order has both law enforcement and victims’ families’ buy-in. This is meaningful action for victims and their families, but we won’t solve this problem by demonizing police. We must work together with them, and this executive order will help to resolve some of the issues of injustices we see across the country.”

The official added that “the Trump administration rolled back the practice of consent decrees because they were not effective.”

WaPo awarded the president's false claim four Pinocchios, which correspond to whoppers.

 

In another article WaPo wrote on June 1, 2020: “As of May 29, his 1,226th day in office, Trump had made 19,127 false or misleading claims, according to the Fact Checker’s database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement he has uttered. That’s almost 16 claims a day over the course of his presidency. So far this year, he’s averaging just over 22 claims a day, similar to the pace he set in 2019.”

Questions: Is it fair to call the president a chronic liar? If the president is a chronic liar, is that a fact, a truth, both or neither?

Do you hate religion?

Some people really (I’m gonna say) “hate” religion. I have been having a discussion with one of my online “anti-religion” atheist friends, for several days now.  He insists that religion (in particular, Christianity) is just a “pack of lies” (my words) and sees absolutely no good use for it; that it’s way more harmful than helpful to humans.

Maybe you also consider yourself an anti-religious atheist.  Heck, I myself am an “agnostic atheist” (don’t know, but don’t happen to believe in any god(s)).  For the record, I’m also (spiritually) a Pantheist (recognize/connect with what I refer to as a “God Process”).

OK, enough on our religious bios.  Here is the comprehensive question:

If no Jesus or God exists, does that really matter?  Isn’t their legacy that was left behind the thing of worth?  If those sentiments hold human value (don’t kill, steal, lie, honor each other, do unto others, etc.), what does it matter if there was no actual Jesus or God?  Aren’t the teachings, and the encouragement to follow them, the point?  Weren’t Jesus’ words much more important than the man (or believing he was God in the flesh)?

Please think about it more deeply, and then give your thought on this, my POV.

Thanks for posting and recommending. :)

Recent Research on Slowing Covid-19 Infections

Blue to blue-green indicate less virus spread and 
yellow-green to red indicates increasingly out of control virus spread

Research is continuing to come out with evidence that wearing face masks in public is the best protection against COVID-19 currently available.

Results from humans

A paper from Texas A&M analyzed spread of the virus among people wearing cloth face masks compared to those who did not. The paper, Identifying airborne transmission as the dominant route for the spread of COVID-19, analyzed infection trends in view of mitigation measures in Wuhan, China, Italy, and New York City, from January 23 to May 9, 2020. The analysis indicates that the difference with and without mandated face covering shapes the pandemic trends in all three study areas.

Airborne transmission of the virus in droplets was found to be the most common route of transmission among people. Wearing face masks in public significantly reduces the transmission rate. Social distancing in the US was insufficient by itself in limiting virus spread. The researchers conclude: "wearing of face masks in public corresponds to the most effective means to prevent interhuman transmission." They argue that face masks coupled with social distancing, quarantine, and contact tracing, appears to be the best means practical to stop the COVID-19 pandemic.

In an interview, one of the researchers commented: "Our work suggests that the failure in containing the propagation of COVID-19 pandemic worldwide is largely attributed to the unrecognized importance of airborne virus transmission. Social-distancing and washing our hands must continue, but that's not sufficient enough protection. Wearing a face mask as well as practicing good hand hygiene and social distancing will greatly reduce the chances of anyone contracting the COVID-19 virus."

Computational biology: Modeling virus spread

Another paper, A modelling framework to assess the likely effectiveness of facemasks in combination with ‘lock-down’ in managing the COVID-19 pandemic, describes computer modeling analyses that included modeling the effects of wearing face masks in public. The model allows researchers to set and test various parameters that influence COVID-19 spread from person to person. The parameters that were analyzed include (i) comparing populations in lock downs compared to non-lock down populations, and (ii) effects of different levels of effectiveness of facemasks in stopping droplet escape from people and in preventing droplet transfer to other people.

The authors write: "Our results are illustrated for a number of plausible values for parameter ranges describing epidemiological processes and mechanistic properties of facemasks, in the absence of current measurements for these values. We show that, when facemasks are used by the public all the time (not just from when symptoms first appear), the effective reproduction number, Re, can be decreased below 1, leading to the mitigation of epidemic spread. ..... Under certain conditions, when lock-down periods are implemented in combination with 100% facemask use, there is vastly less disease spread, secondary and tertiary waves are flattened and the epidemic is brought under control. The effect occurs even when it is assumed that facemasks are only 50% effective at capturing exhaled virus inoculum with an equal or lower efficiency on inhalation."

The authors also commented: "A key message from our analyses to aid the widespread adoption of facemasks would be: ‘my mask protects you, your mask protects me’." In other words, an infected person who wears a cloth facemask spreads less virus and an uninfected person who wears a facemask is exposed to less virus, both of which reduces virus spread.

At present some countries do not require wearing facemasks in public, but the accumulating research evidence suggests that is probably a major mistake. The researchers comment that their analyses could explain why some countries with a facemask requirement had significantly lower rates of COVID-19 spread and associated deaths.

Laissez faire?

I live in small town USA, a tourist town that has been hard hit by Covid 19 restrictions.

Fortunately, we are, for the most part, a town that cares about our people, so we have been wearing masks when we go out, there have been NO "let's open now" protests, and even our recent very small gatherings of George Floyd protests have shown social distancing and mask wearing.

Mind you, we are small, not a big city with it's inherent risks of having so many people cramped into tight spaces - we have no big box stores as example.

STILL - with recent news that we have had no outbreaks in the last week in our town, I am still stunned by how "lax" some of our citizenry has become.

Suddenly, mothers with the toddlers going to our shops without masks, people picnicking at our marina in large groups, our sidewalks filled with strollers and shoppers - with more and more people coming from outside our town.

If one person in our town ends up being a carrier, there will be another outbreak.
BUT the counter-argument is, we have to open for the sake of our economy at SOME point, right?

I agree, but with all the precautions in place. My argument has nothing to do with government dictates, but the behavior of the average Joe or Mary.

The same people I observed last month observing distancing, wearing masks, going out ONLY when absolutely needed are now taking their unmasked kids shopping?

SO - simple question:

HAVE YOU observed the same change in behavior amongst your fellow citizens over the last couple of weeks? A more "Laissez faire" attitude towards protecting self and loved ones from the potential of contracting Covid 19?