Folks have really listened to Rauner since the beginning of the Covid pandemic. Very few question him (unless I have missed it). THREAD. 1/ https://twitter.com/journalstarnews/status/1335216369881722883

What seems to go on with Rauner is he is not quite sure how the death numbers seem to be working in Nebraska. Does this lead to “people in control” to overreach as has happened maybe a few times in Nebraska as it relates to sports and school. 2/

I have tracked the data since early March. (Now have 277 days of data.). Let’s go back to May with Rauner when we hit 10,000 cases. Rauner tells me 500 deaths imminent. 3/

Here is that conversation. The argument at the time was at 10,000 cases, Nebraska had 123 deaths. At that rate, 500 deaths wasn’t going to come until approximately 35,000 cases. 500 deaths came FIVE MONTHS LATER, October 5th. 4/

Fast forward to September 15 when Rauner does another YouTube talk about herd immunity. Again, he wanted to either fear monger death or didn’t get the math. Here is a screen shot from his talk. 5/

As you can see in the chart (based on 9/15 cases), Rauner fears “herd immunity” based on a minimum amount of 2,516 additional deaths based reaching herd immunity of 30% and identifying 1:5 cases. 6/

The issue with the deaths? He projects at .65%, 1%, 1.3% and 3%. It’d be super cool if anyone in the media ( @JournalStarNews, @OWHnews, @JackMitchellLNK) wound question why he does this? At the time, the IDENTIFIED death rate was 1.13% and at 1:5, it’s only 0.23%.

So, what you get there his MINIMUM projection was 3x what was actually happening. That seems off to me. If using what was actually showing, a more accurate projection would have been 870ish more deaths. So let’s fast forward to now and what is ACTUALLY happening. 8/

So we now have actually hit the 30% and 1:5 for here immunity. Clearly not add HI, but we could have had more accurate figures. Here is what we see currently. 9/

You can also see how the original death numbers are well off from the 9/15 chart (because basic math wasn’t used).

So, again, we have passed on initial HI metric that Rauner predicted a MINIMUM of 2,516 deaths with a total of 759 deaths. I don’t know why some “leaders” continue to overshoot deaths figures by so much and what they are trying to accomplish by doing so? 11/

We have plenty of math to back up otherwise. And it’s sad that we’d show data that didn’t support anything that happening in the real world. Why do this? 12/END

Sorry, more. Covid is real. It stinks. Came through my house. We should be treating very seriously and protecting vulnerable AND health care system. But leaders should be sharing good data, not creating mistrust.