Read on Twitter
(DEATH TOLL) For those trying to calculate an accurate 9-month US COVID-19 death toll, the NYT reports that as of 11/14, the max undercount was 100K. So on any given day, take the toll—now 281,307—add 100K, and the accurate toll is between those numbers, but closer to the latter.
(PS) To ensure this is clear, I want to underscore that 100,000 year-over-year "excess deaths"—as they call them—*confirmably occurred*, the NYT just can't determine how *many* were from COVID-19.
History suggests the *overwhelming* majority would be from the "new" annual event.
History suggests the *overwhelming* majority would be from the "new" annual event.
(PS2) If you take the current actual death toll (somewhere around 350,000); realize it's only a 9-month toll; realize things are getting *way* worse; and realize post-vaccine herd immunity is over a year off at best, you understand that over a million people will die of COVID-19.
(PS3) The death toll ceiling is unclear—unlike the floor. If Trump continues to provoke civil disobedience for political gain post-January, herd immunity and adequate public health measures to stem community transmission may be impossible. That could send the toll over 2 million.
(PS4) Whether there is any sufficient legal—criminal or civil—mechanism to pursue the matter is unclear, but as a matter of morality and ethics, no American should doubt that Donald Trump will by the end of the COVID-19 pandemic have *murdered* hundreds of thousands of Americans.
(PS5) We would all do well to consider Donald Trump the worst mass murderer in American history whenever we hear from anyone in the Biden administration that a politics-conscious determination may be made in Biden's DOJ not to investigate *any* of Trump's actions while in office.
(PS6) A column in the Post today very cautiously allowed for the possibility that we may see 2,800 deaths daily by Christmas—and my first reaction was that it will be a Christmas miracle if we're not at 4,000 daily deaths by then. The Thanksgiving surge won't be felt for 2 weeks.
