TrickstaPriest

I was looking at that this morning and I thought:  Germany must be doing some bleeding-edge treatment to have such a low rate.  Turns out they were testing more aggressively than most other countries.
If their medical treatments have any advantage at all its that they're identifying sick people earlier.
 
It just feels insane that Italy has a mortality rate more than 10x higher than that of Germany.

Ratchets up the suspicion they're lying through their teeth....
 
From a planning perspective, it also says that if we want a more reliable estimate of the mortality rate of the virus......we have to take the Chinese data out.  It is completely unreliable.
 
Lessee...
  total cases total deaths case/1M Est Pop (M) Deaths/1M Mort Rate World 746178 35347 95.7 7797 4.53 4.74% China 81470 3304 57 1429 2.31 4.06% World – China 664708 32043 104.4 6368 5.03 4.82%  
Just a bit of number crunching.  The top 2 rows' data from worldometers.com,(https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/) except for the population estimate...that's from cases per million and total cases.  The third's simple math, only here the cases /deaths per million people is computed from the total cases/deaths and estimated population.  Mortality rate is simply deaths/cases.
 
So the big upswing is, both infection rate and death rate go up about 10%.  The death rate goes up but not by enough to matter *yet*.  It's too early, there's too many variables at play for that mortality rate to be considered final.  And the data for Spain and Italy are disastrously high;  their mortality rates are about 8 and 10%.  

EDIT:  Mortality rates by country.  Same data source.
  Cases Deaths Rate World 746178 35347 4.74% USA 145131 2608 1.80% Italy 97689 10779 11.03% Spain 85195 7340 8.62% China 81470 3304 4.06% Germany 63929 560 0.88% Iran 41495 2757 6.64% France 40174 2606 6.49% UK 22141 1408 6.36% Switzerland 15526 333 2.14% Belgium 11899 513 4.31% Netherlands 11750 864 7.35% S. Korea 9661 158 1.64% Austria 9520 108 1.13% Turkey 9217 131 1.42% Canada 6671 67 1.00% Portugal 6408 140 2.18%  

It being pert and grippable is a bonus.

Trump dropping a BIG announcement.
 
PEAK death rate by the modeling should hopefully be in 2 more weeks.  
Declaration of emergency and measures extended to April 30th.
 
 

It also showed up on Daily Wire.
 
I'll try to find something less right-wingy.
 
TrustNodes?
https://www.trustnodes.com/2020/03/28/debate-ends-over-chloroquine-as-france-officially-sanctions-usage
 
It's pretty breaking news, but skepticism - especially these days - seems warranted.
 
 
 

Trump is a lousy politician. He's inept at utilizing existing power structures, building consensus, tapping expertise, and keeping his mouth shut when he should. He is, however, an aggressive self-promoter, of the crude and obvious variety -- which, unfortunately, still seems to work on many people.

I suppose it's a silver lining that when a tornado collapsed my city's airport and part of the main shopping mall today, the shutdown of air travel and non-essential businesses thanks to the virus seems to have spared us from potentially hundreds of casualties that might have happened on a normal Saturday in March. There are only reports of six injuries so far, which is a miracle considering the amount of property damage.
 
https://www.kait8.com/2020/03/28/tornado-warnings-issued-throughout-region-craighead-poinsett-counties-pm/

We should clearly be adopting the high-tech Coronavirus combating methods of India (less than 1,000 cases) and Libya (only **3** cases!).
 
Far too many countries are posting tiny, tiny numbers which make me pretty certain they are simply not testing for the virus with any regularity at all.  Or, worse, they're lying about the numbers.
 
Additionally, our purchase of Xena the German Pinscher got cancelled today as Kaufman county got their shelter-in-place order.
Hopefully, that'll be the worst thing we experience with this mess as my wife and I are both in high-risk categories.
 
In a bit of morbid curiosity I occasionally turn on my webcam at work and watch the unlit empty building on one monitor as I code. 

I would like to see verification of what Trump or his campaign actually did to block that video. The last rumor I heard was some sort of legal action, which should be easy enough to verify if true.
 
I mean, the soundbites are real enough and the exponential curve looks about right. I just think the caption of him trying to block it might lack basis.

Oh, yes. A historian of epidemics, interviewed on On the Media, predicted that the next stage would be the search for a scapegoat. Jews for the Black Death, gays for AIDS.
 
It's deeply rooted in the human tendency to personalize everything. Bad things can't just happen: They must be the result of someone's malice. Jews, witches, evil spirits, Communists, Catholics, bankers... or even Jewish Communist bankers.
 
Imagining that the upcoming relief check is from Donald Trump, personally, and so one should be grateful to him, personally, is just the flip side of this.
 
Dean Shomshak

I agree with all you wrote. I comprehend the mindset and rationalization. But the gist is still, "if you take this money you have to vote for the person (we believe to be) giving it to you." It's the most direct and obvious brand of pork-barrel politics, bread and circuses with a coat of paint.

I mean, those plagues did have the power to end countries that they entered.  We aren't at that level.

I'm fine - Gen-X and have worked from home for over 10 years now...I was made for this.  The town I'm in is eerily quiet (normally a big tourist/vacation town), but the whole midwestern attitude is coming through and folks are really banding together and helping each other.  Nice to see.

On the personal front, may use this as the kick in the pants I needed to get a full forging operation setup at home (the "working museum" blacksmith shop that I normally forge in is closed until this all clears up)

The rationale falls into the "you should be thankful not ungrateful" type thing.  You have to understand that people who speak/talk like this are acting like they are at war with 'your society', viewing it as both hostile and dysfunctional.  It's literal decades of propaganda, and you'll see both those themes constantly.  'Your' society isn't legitimate, nor functional, it's scary and a threat but can't possibly win.  It's the same rationale that has people support things like 'how dare California have all those forest fires'.  It doesn't matter which side we are talking about, but for the specific type I am talking about, the words are very much mirrored in certain wartime propaganda...
 
edit: (You can tell I particularly hate the way certain radio and television programs have created a populace that not only gets information from them, but are essentially dependent on them for their entire worldview... and how that relationship has been horribly abused for decades...)

In essence, vote-buying. Got it.

Hmm.  My recollection was that he said a prediction of 400,000 deaths "was not absurd" if the government stuck to its mitigation strategy rather than actively seeking to shut it down.   He has now, like a good scientist, revised his estimates in light of new data.
 
I would stick with the problem that the media is there to make money, not to educate or inform.  If they achieve all three then it is a happy coincidence.
 
Trust the scientists when they are talking science, when they stray from science they are just another opinion.
 
Doc

We'll be past that by the end of the day.

AH, apparently the article was mistaken so the site took it down. originally it seemed as if the EPA was basically letting mega corps have a free for all during the pandemic, but it turns out it's more about letting some EPA workers stay home and letting testing go ahead or some such. My apologies. Glad you caught it

Regardless, it's about to get real ugly.  We only went to shelter in place what, three days ago?  Some other places haven't even done that.  The incubation period means there's a two week lag before we start to see any effect from the extreme social distancing.  So the case trajectory will continue to increase exponentially for two weeks.  I'm pretty sure it's too late for NYC and Detroit, where I'm starting to read about hospitals running out of space already.

Honestly I quit following the news quite so closely because I'm pretty sure I know how things are going to turn out.  I really, really hope I'm wrong.