1/ Let’s talk about Wisconsin. Nice Upper Midwestern state that this fall has gone through an all-too-typical media cycle of #Covid hysteria about overrun hospitals and context-free death counts. It starts in September. Cases (positive tests) are up. Hospitals are on the brink...

2/ October: tests spike, and the warnings get grim. By late October, a “field hospital” has opened!

Side note: a field hospital isn’t what you think. The admission criteria for these places essentially mean they can accept only people who are healthy enough to be discharged...

3/ But for whatever reason aren’t ready to go home. The mew one in Massachusetts has exercise bikes (clearly these patients are at death’s door!). As you might imagine, this proposition isn’t attractive, and the Wisconsin field hospital remains at 4% capacity through November...

4/ Which doesn’t stop the panic reporting from spreading, well, virally. Somehow though we are always “on the brink” or “just weeks” from hospital collapse, we never quite get there...

5/ Meanwhile the state data shows that hospitalizations are down ~20% since the mid-November peak. This is exactly the same pattern we saw in the Sunbelt this summer - it is the same pattern everywhere. A 6-8 week surge that ends abruptly an declines slowly...

6/ But what about deaths? Yes, unfortunately, deaths have risen. Wisconsin, population 5.8 million, now has ~3,700 deaths attributed to #Covid. 21% were in people over 90, and 3% in people under 50. (No one under 20 has died of #Covid in Wisconsin.)

7/ What the deaths actually look like - from the Milwaukee coroner’s office, here are the three most recent cases for which specific causes of death are available.

Yes, that first case is of a 102-year-old, and the third of someone who had cirrhosis and pancreatitis. The reason average people no longer fear #Sarscov2 isn’t because they’ve been brainwashed. It’s because they aren’t brainwashed anymore.

8/ One final note: in the last month, positive tests in Wisconsin largely decoupled from hospitalizations, continuing to rise even as hospitalizations fell. Not because admission criteria changed - the field hospital is empty. Because the virus hits the most vulnerable first...

Another fact that has been clear at least since April (if not since the 19th century, when William Farr noted it)...