A little perspective on coronavirus deaths by state.

New York has nearly TRIPLE the number of deaths (32,000) as Florida, Georgia, Texas and Arizona COMBINED (12,118) despite having BARELY OVER 1/4 the population of those states.

Any reporting that omits that is propaganda.

That combined state total is also still less than New Jersey (15,400). These numbers are from NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html

Eventually we’ll have a reckoning about what went wrong. But if that doesn’t start with why so many more people died under the leadership of @NYGovCuomo than elsewhere, then it isn’t a reckoning at all.

And for those saying that other states learned from New York, two things to point out:

1) clearly what they did was learn from New Yorks’s failures, which were major and systemic
2) Seattle, where the first cases were reported, took a different path. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/04/seattles-leaders-let-scientists-take-the-lead-new-yorks-did-not

Seriously I want my tombstone to read:

“Tom Frieden, the former C.D.C. director, has estimated that, if New York had started implementing stay-at-home orders ten days earlier than it did, it might have reduced covid-19 deaths by fifty to eighty per cent.”

There’s no gotcha/dunk in all this. It’s heartbreaking. You had people die who didn’t need to because of the bad decision making of a few powerful people. And the lack of conversation and accountability around that is repulsive. It’s a miscarriage of justice.

It should be dominating the airwaves. We should be getting to the bottom of this. Where’s the discussion? Where’s the outrage? It’s nowhere. And it’s impossible for me to separate that from the fact that the US media played PR flak for Cuomo while this was happening.

(There’ll be a thread on that as soon as I work up the heart to post it. But don’t hold your breath. This shit makes me sick.)

And for everyone who’s like “well what about Trump?!” some more math for you.

About half (65k of 136k) of all deaths so far have come from 5 states: NY, NJ, IL, MI and CT.

What, in good faith, do you think Trump could’ve done to persuade those blue-state Govs to act sooner?

It’s preposterous to blame Trump.

I’ve been critical of his strategy throughout all of this, but scapegoating him rather than confronting the fact that bad Dem policies served as an accelerant for this crisis is intellectually disingenuous.