Categories: Health

A Prize For Worst Covid19 Statistic Of The Day

Clearly, I mean obviously, since the Orange Man is Bad he must be using the wrong response to the coronavirus epidemic. We need no other proof that that Trump is doing something to know that what he’s doing is wrong. We’d be drummed out of polite society if we didn’t internalise that truth now, wouldn’t we?

At which point we have this little chart in The Guardian:

Scary!

Ooooh, scary, eh? Would you prefer the opening to Twilight Zone or the dum dum dum from Jaws as the soundtrack to this?

As they say:

Not only has the US suffered the most deaths worldwide, at more than 75,000 people so far,

Hmm, gosh. At which point we should note that the US also has rather more people in it than most other countries worldwide. At 320 million-ish it’s about 6 times, a little over, little under dependent upon comparison nation, the populations of Spain, Italy, France or the UK. That reported case rate is about 6 times any of those individual countries too.

What’s being shouted at us us is that larger countries, places with more population, will have more people succumbing to a pandemic.

Well, yes, and your point is?

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Tim Worstall

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  • Never forget that the Centers for Disease Control "and Prevention" have dictated that any cocaine overdose or car-crash where the corpse is COVID-positive be included in this body count, no matter what the coroner eventually reports, and the C.A.R.E.S. Act gives hospitals a nice cash bonus for treating "COVID patients" even if they were never tested for COVID but seemed to have it. The CDC is full of Democrat holdovers, just like the FBI/CIA/DOJ, and they are exaggerating this "crisis" to feed Trump a policy dilemma!

  • Not forgetting that 40% of the deaths are in New York, governed funnily enough by it's Governer, Mr. Cuomo. And the bulk of them are in New York City, where the added brilliance of Mr. De Blasio helps the death rate enormously.
    BTW Cuomo is being touted as a possible Democrat presidential candidate should Biden fall by the wayside.

  • What do the USA, United Kingdom, Italy, France and Spain have in common? Only one of them (USA) ranks among the top five by population. Four of them (France, Spain, USA and Italy) rank in the top five by international tourist arrivals. But, with no apologies for data mining, all five of them rank in the top five in terms of cultural influence.

  • The stats for the USA are 238 deaths per million, at the home of the EU Belgium are 740. Of course direct comparisons are not exact, bearing in mind different clarifications systems in respect of deaths; however, one is surprised (not) that the Guardian has not mentioned that Belgium is doing 310% worse that the USA (and Belgium is more strictly locked down). Indeed Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden, France, the UK, Italy and Spain are all faring worse that the USA. It seems that Orange Man isn't so bad after all.

    • Currently the UK is doing twice as worse as the USA. Yes, as of this morning, the sainted NHS has given the UK 389 deaths per million, the USA has 212 deaths per million. (ish)

      If I get more bored I'll type more columns into my spreadsheet.

  • Something simple like deaths per million is probably too much advanced math for their journalists.

  • What is required at this point is say 'deaths per 100,000' and low and behold you can see this on the John Hopkins site :

    https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

    which gives a death rate per 100,000 - the US is 7th on the list

    and an observed case-fatality ratio - the US is 9th on the list.

    Belgium is top on both. It should be pointed out that there is much criticism with the government there as they record any death that could be linked to Covid-19 as a Covid-19 death.

    Also no one believes the stats given by say China and Iran with most analysts saying the latter has at least 60,000 deaths i.e. 10x the declared number.

    The Guardian .. why bother.

    • But I note above that the US stats are also crap. Someday someone may do a count from the coroner's reports but the current numbers are crap.

      NY Gov. Cuomo today describes a pediatric condition involving swollen blood vessels coincident with COVID, n=3. This feeds his line that we are all equally at risk, and doesn't necessarily mean anything - except that he leads all the newscasts.

  • The graphs imply that deaths in Italy and Spain started to drop earlier than in the other countries. They must be doing something right.

  • And from the same camp, the reverse ferret: Sweden with fewer deaths & cases doesn’t count because it has a much smaller population than, GB, IT, FR, DE, ES, so pointing out its results sans-lockdown are no worse (a bit better in fact) than locked-down Countries does not count to demonstrate lockdown makes no difference.

    And the more testing done increases the reported case number, but since it mixes symptomatic (disease) with asymptomatic (not disease), and the degree of testing is variable between Countries, the number is as misleading as deaths where no common standard of reporting exists so some Countries include comorbidity, others not, some only where post-mortem test is positive, others with no test but if the doctor ‘thinks’ it might be.

    But they are guided by ‘science’. It’s science Jim, but not as we know it.

    If you extract the number of deaths in institutions, the overall deaths and reported cases and serious/critical cases fall by over half. Take out hotspots like NY and cases/deaths fewer still. So we are not actually seeing from the statistics what is happening in the general population... high degree of asymptomatic infections, over 80% mild, high level of immunity - Not much actually.

    I just wish we could ‘Get Coronavirus Done’.

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Tim Worstall
Tags: coronavirus

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