Just released PEW poll:
America: 95,000 deaths, epidemic still raging – just as “reopening” gathers steam.
China: 4,500 deaths, epidemic contained, economy humming along to the extent it can in the midst of a global depression. Like, even if those crematorium calculations were legitimate and China’s deaths were an order of magnitude higher, this still wouldn’t cardinally change the picture. US deaths are at least one OOM higher in per capita terms and that’s despite a couple of months of forewarning.
Still, there’s good news for Trump:
His base actually believes the US did better than South Korea, LOL.
Looks like the MAGA train is in vigorous health going into November 2020.
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
If you are new to my work, start here.
Another good news is that brain cancer won’t decimate his base.
Everybody also thinks Italy did worse than the UK.
It’s just because it hit Italy earlier. Many other countries have done as bad or worse but the memory stuck early on that Italy was terrible and hasn’t updated.
The UK’s response in Europe is widely regarded to have been crap and probably the most incompetent so I don’t get why Americans think it was one of the best.
The general attitude of the British public is among the most casual and irresponsible as well, mask wearing is nearly non-existent and probably the lowest rate in the Western world.
Possibly also because the UK hasn’t received as much media attention as Italy. The total number of deaths is now significantly higher than Italy and the UK is set to shortly overtake Italy in per capita death rate too, yet the UK has received almost zero international coverage.
Your chance of dying if you’re below 60 and if you actually catch this virus, as shown by Sweden’s now extensive surveys, is about 1 in a thousand. Furthermore, that one in a thousand are very often already dying of leukaemia or whatever. In other words, there is very little to worry about in terms of your own health.
And accepting the regression of your entire life combined with what amounts to martial law in order to avoid that paltry risk is pathetic – not responsible or serious…
For those older people, they, except for those in hospitals and nursing homes, need to to decide if the more substantial risk is worth taking and so whether to isolate or not.
I can see rational people making a decision either way, depending on their priorities and their circumstances. Were I 100, I would rather spend time with people than not and potentially die a bit sooner. I mean, of course.
Whatever age you are, please just isolate yourself and your neuroses away and don’t advocate for other people to cater to them. It is indecent.
As for hospitals and nursing homes, there was a big failure there. Such an epidemic hasn’t occured in living memory so clearly lessons need to be learned. Nursing homes need to have more skills regarding this for their staff. Politicians needs to not send the sick into nursing homes and there needs to be stocks of PPE for hospitals to cover this type of event.
But then again, the military, who know plenty about facing very different emergency situations, always recognise that they get stuck fighting the last war to the detriment of the current. Who knows what the next event like this will be?
Regardless, hopefully we won’t make the “cure” worse than the disease as we have done this time…
I doubt if a heterogeneous, developed, non-malthusian country actually has the willpower to do tough clampdowns on a virus with such a low overall CFR. Maybe, if it was like 25%.
Where’s LondonBob? He disparaged the Italians and took for granted that Britain would perform better than Italy. I can only assume he’s never had to use the NHS, which has had 3rd world level care since the 1970s. Not that the NHS itself is mostly to blame for Britain’s predictably poor response, but the whole “protect the NHS” cult played a role.
Fuck off, dipwad.
Agree.
The Pew poll question itself is a little misconceived as regards the US, because there was not really any US national response; instead there were 50 state responses. The Feds issued guidelines and held press conferences, but the laws and exec orders that affected people’s lives came from state governments. And as you note, those broke surprisingly cleanly along red/blue lines.
The 95000 deaths that Anatoly is LOL-ing about were overwhelmingly in the blue epicenters of NYC, Detroit and NOLA. In red states—and red parts of blue states—coronavirus has been a nothingburger. So what looks to Anatoly like ideologically-driven answers are in fact just everyone reporting what their own eyes tell them: blues saw a debacle, reds saw everything was fine. They’re both right, they just have different addresses.
I would agree with that.
The US is less cohesive and more divergent than Europe is on this. Looking at a US average is like looking at an EU average.
Democrats obviously will be more likely to live in democrat states and make up majorities of them, and vice versa. I wonder what it would look like if they had asked if they thought their state was doing a good job.
New York has done objectively terrible, among the worst in the world if not the worst, and a lot of the northeast states along with it. Although I think polling shows New Yorkers think their governor and state did well.
Florida and Texas look like Australia and Iceland, and they are also probably pleased with themselves, but they at least have a reason to be.
So on how their state dealt with corona, they would probably all be >70%. On how the US dealt with it, it’s a pure partisan split based on who’s president.
But yeah, some (or alot) of his base actually might have done better than South Korea in terms of outcome. Even if Florida doesn’t know why it did it. Corona just did not do anything much to them, regardless of what their policy approach was. Texas, same thing. California and Illinois are nothing compared to the northeast. New York state had it way worse than Belgium.
The US has the lower life expectancy (all those dead babies!) and shorter unhealthy life years expectancy compared to the UK so the NHS outperforms the at least.
Only if you’re poor.
The middle class healthcare outperforms NHS and the rich have arguably the best healthcare in the world.
That being said US healthcare has been trending toward NHS overall because it keeps getting more ridiculously expensive that less and less people can afford it. If I catch a sinus infection I could probably buy antibiotics in Mexico for about $3. In the US, it’s probably going to cost $300 to get them (you have to pay a doctor for a prescription too). If you have insurance, the co-pay will probably be around $60-100 (you will probably have a co-pay on both the doctor and the pills from a pharmacy).
In some ways Mexican health care is better than US health care, in other ways it’s far worse. US health care tech and expert training is obviously way better than Mexico, and the general standards across the whole sector are higher. But Mexico will provide you with about 80-90% as good health care for common stuff at 10-15% of the price or less.
As if dying from SARS 2.0 would be the only worry for those below 60, e.g. 41 yo pro dancer, so presumably even more fit than usual 40 yo person, is alive, now “recovered”, but was ventilated in coma and had leg amputated because of clots and still has fucked up one lung:
https://globalnews.ca/news/6967741/nick-cordero-coronavirus-update-amanda-kloots/
To be fair, the US view on China’s response to the outbreak can be viewed in two different ways, one of which perfectly justifies American dissatisfaction with it. On the one hand, China was remarkably successful at controlling the pandemic within its own borders. On the other hand, the outbreak did start in China and China’s overall cultural habits as well as initial government response are directly to blame for tens of thousands of deaths and unprecedented economic devastation sweeping the United States. With that in mind, only the most “meta” of US observers could possibly proclaim to be satisfied with China’s handling of Covid 19, so there is no discrepancy there.
If your house burned down to its foundations because your neighbor stupidly let his woodshed catch on fire, would you express approval of his handling of the situation because he managed to save his own property and you suffered most of the damage?
I agree that red states generally did better protecting their nursing home populations and elderly. And many blue states have done abysmally, sending sick people to nursing homes with healthy (or at least, non-positive for corona) people.
It’s not clear though that that’s the whole difference, and if New York had done better with that, they would have had the same outcome as Florida.
Nations are not people, China and America are not neighbors. America views China as a rival.
Only Americans and some other modern westerners feel entitled to have their rivals protect them from natural disasters. There are 2 security checkpoints to every international trip. Though they are, Americans should not really be blaming the Chinese for not stopping sick people from getting on planes when they did absolutely nothing to stop them from getting off. It’s like Americans expect Chinese to do all diligence possible for America’s sake while America slacks off and does nothing, and despite America being aggressive and antagonistic toward China.
I have no idea what point it is you’re trying to make. It also seems you do not understand basic human communication techniques. No shit countries are not people. No shit China and America are not neighbors. Most of us learn about analogies and how to use illustrative arguments by the time we’re 10 years old. What’s next, you’re going to tell me Covid is a virus and not a fire, and no Chinese woodsheds were harmed during this whole sorry episode?
Be careful with the crematorium calculations, or you might end up like Ivan Lagacé.
Your analogy is bad on several levels. Basically it is false. It is just a propagandistic talking point for idiots so they can deflect and continue in the state of idiocy.
The neighbor with the fire had other neighbors living closer and they did well or even better than the one with the fire. Why the neighbor who live far keeps complaining so much and why does he say that fire was because of stupidity? Was he oblivious to what was happening and what was the proper response? Was he consumed too much with Schadenfreude that it did not occur to him to prepare?
All this poll proves is that most Americans are frightfully uninformed about what is happening in the rest of the world.
Of the five foreign countries on this list, it should be easy to judge the COVID-19 responses for four of them. South Korea, great; Germany, good; Italy and the UK, terrible.
China is tricky since one could make a pretty decent case for its response being either good or bad (or somewhere in between), depending on what criteria you were using.
My analogy is perfectly sound and you did nothing to disprove it. The fact I could have or should have been able to do more to save my own property does not in the slightest absolve my neighbor of the culpability for starting the fire in the first place. Imagine going to court and trying to escape punishment for starting a fire that burned down your neighbors house by saying your victim should have done a better job dealing with the conflagration you shitted onto his lap!
It’s absolutely preposterous, and the fact you are going down this route just shows you’re blinded by your own politics. If you look at my comment history you can see I’m much more impressed by the Chinese leadership than the traitorous puppets running the West, but logic is logic. Ignoring it in favor of partisanship is as stupid as believing Corona is a hoax because if it’s real it would hurt Trump.
What I don’t get is why Sweden is brought up as some kind of example. With 3.8k deaths and 32k confirmed cases, it is clear they are just YOLOing it and don’t even bother counting the sick.
According to you, he’s responsible for starting the fire because his house and shed caught on fire first, and he didn’t do enough to put out the fire before it spread to your house. At least he didn’t stop the fire spreading to your house when he theoretically could have when he was busy trying to put out his own house. Or if he ran down the block and hid.
He is not the fire department.
Unless you have hard evidence China engineered the virus in a lab, you will lose in court.
Your argument is the people upstream caused the drought.
Tell you what, why don’t you start a nuclear war, or a naval war in the south china sea. If I were Chinese I would laugh at you and sneeze in your face.
And this analogy becomes even more extreme if the angry neighbor’s psychopathic teenage son was the arsonist who started the original fire, which then eventually burned out his own home due to laziness and incompetence.
As I’ve repeatedly pointed out, there’s pretty strong evidence that the Covid-19 outbreak was an American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran):
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-our-coronavirus-catastrophe-as-biowarfare-blowback/
https://www.unz.com/announcement/our-facebook-ban-the-fatal-0-2/
Good point.
Sweden sucks. It is a bad example to follow.
It is brought up because it had a different take on public health response. They did not mandate social distancing or mask wearing and did not shut down public storefronts or close parks and recreation facilities.
Some people will surely blame the fact that they are as bad as a dozen other modern developed countries on their difference in policy response. But the dozen other countries that did as bad as them all had different policies and there is no evidence it made them any better off than Sweden.
So, basically…. YOLO.
We’re one OOM deeper in death and far deeper in debt than the commies & soshulists but that just shows that you should vote GOP in November or muh USA will become soshulist, which is communism.
That’s because our ghetto inhabitants shoot each other and engage in other life-shortening activities such as becoming obese etc. that don’t reflect the healthcare system. It’s not because the health care system is worse.
I’d imagine the UK is a vitamin D deficiency hotspot in Europe.
Nothing about Sweden, eh? Pushing that one under the rug?
Only assuming that the only complication is death (untrue, you could get permanent damage, or damage which is not permanent, but still lasting several months), and assuming that flying a 737 MAX was safe.
Looks like the MAGA train is in vigorous health going into November 2020.
Eat your heart out asshole.
Especially the minorities, and the same is probably true in Sweden.
Anonymous (n)’s flawed and false analogy serves the purpose to overlook and hide the fact that it was American administration, American CDC, American Congress and American media that are responsible for the inept and incompetent response to the coming epidemic for which they had plenty of time to prepare. They could have followed the approach of the closest neighbors of China like Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, S. Korea and Japan which went for the virus elimination strategy just like China. Eradicate the virus. Make it strict and stricter it is less time it takes. New Zealand eradicated virus in 49 days.
Instead a false alternative of the herd immunity vs. the curve flattening was presented first in the UK and followed by the US while the eradication of virus was never put on the table and people were left oblivious to that option. The troll dis-info campaign of flu hoaxers, Swedish fetishists, ‘let it rip’, ‘die for economy’, libertarians form the CCC (Church of Chamber of Commerce), euthanasia enthusiasts and gerontophobs was launched to completely obfuscate and cover the fact it is not about the herd immunity vs. lockdowns but about virus eradication.
One could think that having seemingly inept, incompetent, confusing and chaotic response to the epidemic was the real objective from the very beginning. The question is why. Why would TPTB want the chaos, suffering and economic destruction? Was it the Plan B that would not be invoked if China was thrown on its knees by the epidemic? Or was it the Plan A from the beginning to make China the pariah nation responsible for the misfortunes visited upon the whole world. This calls for the Analogy Generator Subroutine {Anonymous (n)| n=1, 2, 3,….}.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/what-is-the-herd-immunity-rate-60-infected-in-3-italian-towns/#comment-3908367
You seem to have a hard time understanding the simplest of logic: that A can be true even though B is also true. In the case of this specific discussion that we’re having, it makes perfect sense for Americans to be pissed at China for breeding and then covering up Covid 19 even though the response of the American government to the outbreak was woefully incompetent. Or to put it another way: just because the American government was woefully incompetent in countering the spread of the “Chinese virus,” does not mean Americans are unreasonable to be pissed at China for creating the problem in the first place.
You’re so blinded by your own politics that you’ve defaulted to the stupidest of false dichotomies. You’re basically arguing that because not ALL the blame for what happened can be laid at China’s doorstep, NONE of it should. That mode of thinking is not even wrong, it’s insane.
The idea of Britain as a perpetually overcast, gloomy country that is always raining is a bit of a myth I think, London is statistically one of Europe’s dryer cities.
I would doubt Vitamin C deficiency rates in Britain are any worse than other countries at similar latitudes, places like Northern France, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Denmark, Belarus, etc.
I thought Florida is accused of hiding the extent of the coronavirus deaths.
A classic neurotic response. Take a rare example and try to push your irrational fear of it onto others.
Your anxiety won’t actually diminish just because you make more people feel it. In fact, it will increase. Though I know you can probably rationalise your compulsion to yourself in a thousand ways…
What next? Avoid cars because some athlete was in an accident and got paralysed?
Such cases with all kinds of serious health complications under 60 are not that relatively freakishly rare at all among infected, considering that infection overall spread rate in population is still quite low and those cases received wider media attention, cause affected were kinda celebrities, while more ordinary people under 60 being alive, but with similar fates are not getting in the news anymore, as just deaths are already counted in hundreds of thousands worldwide, e.g. somewhat similar kinda celebrity case in UK too:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-8345569/Kate-Garraway-joins-kids-weekly-salute-husband-Derek-remains-ICU.html
Do you collect news articles of individual scare stories for all diseases and causes of infirmity?
Here’s something more for you to worry over:
Reye’s syndrome may cause serious liver and brain damage and can lead to permanent brain injury or death.
It mainly affects children and young adults under 20 years of age.
It often occurs a few days following a common cold infection.
The guy was morbidly obese so not a great example. I don’t wish him ill and I don’t disagree that for every death there’ll be several people who get very sick from this thing, but what’s the alternative? Supposing it’s eradicated from a country, then what? It’s endemic throughout the world now which means several months at least cutoff from the rest of the world until there’s vaccine. I’m not even opposed to lockdowns that much, but this “new normal” crap is beyond the pale. A 1/10 chance of hospitalisation is preferable to an impoverished police state. Our idiot government seems to want social distancing to continue for months; individuals will (and are already starting to) disobey this with impunity, but businesses and organizations will have to comply, so there’ll be no economic rebound for years. On top of that they want all incoming foreign travelers to quarantine, three months late to do any good and just as mass testing is becoming available.
Given the hellscape this will likely produce (90s Russia with its 30 percent gdp drop wasn’t a healthy place), informing individuals of the risk and letting them decide how much they’re willing to take seems preferable.
Life expectancy in 1930s America, a much poorer place than today’s America, went up. Lessons of 1990s Russia are irrelevant for capitalist economies. Especially since even in Russia it wasn’t the economic collapse as such that did in the life expectancy, as the breakdown in law and order, and above all, the end of Soviet-era restrictions on vodka sales and prices.
Also, UK is the only overseas place that satisfies US Republicans more than US Democrats. The other shithole is not reciprocating as far as I know.
Well, yes and no. Sure, there are shootings by our more diverse denizens and excess donut consumption by the rednecks, and that contributes to lower life expecancy.
BUT – the key driver for lower life expecancy in the US has been drug overdoses. Those overdoses are fully the fault of the American medical system – doctors, instead of looking out for their patients, took bribe money from pharma and overprescribed pain killers. Once prescriptions ran out people switched to harder stuff to keep getting high.
It is doctor’s job to prescribe correct medication and dosage and act in the best interest of the patient, but they chose to become pill pushers for pharma instead so they could buy their 3rd Ferrari or whatever. So those overdose deaths are fully on the healthcare system.
No, you are the first person I have heard accuse Florida of that.
Florida is definitely not hiding coronavirus deaths any more than everyone else. Damn near every state and country is accused of doing that by people who think their death tolls should be higher. Florida is a ridiculous candidate though.
Even if they were hiding 2/3rds of their deaths they would still be a nothingburger. And no, there is no way they are doing that or would get away with it.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.usatoday.com/amp/5226744002
First, there is the politics in the US and the medias relationship to southern Republican governors, I don’t expect you to know anything about that or how our media works. Here is a political satire. Don’t take any of this too literally:
https://babylonbee.com/news/florida-ruled-to-be-in-violation-of-science-for-not-having-more-people-die/
Of course all sorts of scandalous claims and defamations are put forward through the media for partisan political purposes, on both sides.
I already told you that every country in the world and every state in the US is being accused of falsely lowering it’s numbers if it’s detractors think the deaths are too low.
The reverse is also obviously true, every same country and every same state is accused of falsely padding it’s numbers by detractors who think it’s too high.
If you don’t believe me, the evidence is all over this very website.
Florida is not even alone, most of the south around Florida has had hardly any deaths. And Texas last I checked was lower than Florida and seriously competing with Australia. So getting hung up on the numbers for Florida is missing the point.
But the numbers for Florida are great and there is no chance they are faking more than New York (in either direction it makes sense to you). Like I said, it’s a question of scale. If you think they are fake, how fake are they? 20% fake? 200% fake? 2000% fake?
If actual deaths in Florida were 3 times as much as is reported, it will still be as low as Ohio, which is also reopening. It’s not like DeSantis needs them to be that low to be claiming political victory. He was OK in that he wasn’t NY gov Cuomo, but he got lucky, they are ridiculously low.
And if actual deaths in Florida were 3 times higher than they were reporting? You don’t think hordes of liberal doctors in Florida would be blowing the whistle, and every television network would have a live crew in the emergency room in Miami with a Cuban lesbian wailing about her abuelita on national TV? And Nancy Pelosi would be in congress calling for federal investigations? You don’t know nothing about US politics if you don’t.
The media here is very Democrat biased. They attack Florida and DeSantis with relatively weak crap because they have nothing on him. He fired someone is the evidence you’re citing. 1 disgruntled person. But mostly they cover for Cuomo who actually quarantined sick people inside nursing homes for sick poor elderly patients, a disproportionate number of whom were ethnic minorities.
Believe whatever you want.
I think this is identical to what these animals ( American dickheads) showed when they were miraculously beaten by the Soviet Basketball team in the 1972 Olympic final….. these cheap whore Americans refused to shake the hands of their winning opponents, or come out to collect their silver medals – just nonstop moaning.
Probably the same mindset in relation to China over the coronavirus. You can see this insecurity even when talking about not leading in the testing rate rankings. Anyway, the large population Asian countries near China have had a fraction of the problems the Americans have had from this.
Yep. That somalia tan in the dark swedish winter? Not the best look in winter 2020. From what I’ve heard the covid death stats showed it very clearly. It wasn’t just that they probably cared less about the distancing.
Sweden is a bad example because it has by far the highest percentage of single-person households in the west, if not the world – which must have been a big factor in their governments policy. They should actually be doing much better, because I am sure that intergenerational living together is a big explanation for supposedly high rates of Negro deaths in America.
I would not be placing Australia or South Korea at very top of performance – both of them only exposed to the Chinese wave of infections – very minimal from the European wave. Russia did much better than either on the Chinese wave of infections. Russia also has high connectivity with Turkey, a major infections hub, some decent connectivity with Iran (particularly from Kavkaz region) also a major infections hub, in addition to China and western Europe. We have performed excellently.
Well, you can see the results –
US – 97000 deaths
Russia – 3000 deaths
You can add it other European states doing extremely bad by comparison
Those foaming at the mouth WuFlu hoaxers do not understand genetics and statistics.
A New York City study by Gonzalez-Reiche et al from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (US institution) showed that out of the 85 sequenced cases of SARSCov2 found there only 1/85 was from Asia
https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.08.20056929
“Introductions and early spread of SARS-CoV-2 in the New York City area”
https://i.ibb.co/M2ghDBF/nyspread1.png
From US Michigan State Univeristy genotyping of 6156 SARS-CoV-2 genomes worldwide up to 2020 April 24 and splitting the sample into 5 clusters/clades/haplogroups, C1, C2, C3, C4 and C5 and none of the very dominant non-Asian clusters 3, 4 and 5 variants are found in Asian countries.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.14114
“Decoding SARS-CoV-2 transmission, evolution and ramification on COVID-19 d
iagnosis, vaccine, and medicine”
https://i.ibb.co/Rcg9ZzT/wanghap5.png
From the GISAID 2020-05-08 dataset,
https://i.ibb.co/QfCQbXc/clapct.png