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I was honored to get name-checked in this thread by a guy named Alex Berenson, a leader of the COVID Truth Movement, oddly a foreign Times reporter. So let's take a look at this. His argument seems to be that notwithstanding a lot of people testing positive, people are not ... https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson/status/1281960368357736453
2/ really getting sick or requiring hospitalization in any great numbers. So basically it's fine. Look a bit more closely and his argument is that since hospitals are not yet refusing to treat people that this is the plan, flattening the curve etc. Everything's great.
3/ People have various drives and thwarted ambitions that lead them to stuff like this. But let's look at some details. New cases have been rising rapidly since the middle of June. And starting after about three weeks deaths started going up too.
4/ This graph shows cases and fatalities in three hard hit states combined together -Arizona, Texas and Florida. Cases going up and then a couple weeks later deaths go up. Today was 266 people in these three states. The daily fatality number seems to be rising rapidly ...
5/ ... as it is across the country. Perhaps Alex is too bright for me. But this seems like a substantial public health problem and the pretty established trajectory of out of control case growth followed after a few weeks by rising death tolls.
6/ Now let's talk about "flattening the curve". This was an initial goal to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed and people dying because they couldn't get care. Not to mention people be unable to get treatment for other diseases. The point of the lockdowns was also to ...
7/ knock down the disease and do the legwork to prepare for serious mitigation to beat the outbreak and stamp it down to a level where people can go back to some sort of normal life. Unfortunately, we didn't do any of that. Not in most of the country.
8/ Anyone know what this is? It's called baseball. Once the national pastime of the United States. This is a game played today in Taiwan. See the players? See the crowds? Remember sports? Oh well. https://twitter.com/BaseballBrit/status/1281906634835591169?s=20
9/ In Taiwan, the last person died of Coronavirus on May 11th. Yesterday the country had two new cases. How many the day before? Well, none. A week earlier they had one case. Well, Taiwan's an island. They must have it easy. What about Germany? How are they doing?
10/ Admittedly COVID is substantially worse in Germany than in Taiwan. 4 people died from COVID today in Germany. They reported 224 new cases of COVID. That's roughly 1/12th the number of cases in New York today, on a per capita basis and of NY is doing better than almost any ...
11/ other state in the US. If Germany were the size of the US they'd have 16 deaths today. We had 757. But oh yeah, cases don't matter. But they're getting back to something like normal life. Can I show you **that** graph again? Thanks.
12/ All these other countries are going to reopen their schools because you can do that when there's so little virus in the country. Once you get the virus under control and to extremely low levels by not being a dick and following a good strategy, you get to have ...
13/ all the good things back, like school and sports and just going out and doing things. But yes, Alex, you got me. Everything's awesome here in the US.
14/ Because notwithstanding cases rising rapidly in almost the entire country it really doesn't seem to be causing any ill effects on health or the economy or the ability to educate our kids or anything. Consider me owned.
