Yes but he still has to get from A to B. The medical community is out to get him by inflating the numbers, how are they doing it? By labeling people who fall down stairs as COVID deaths of course.
It's a bit more insidious than that. He needs confusion. He needs people to distrust the experts, to question reality, and for faith in expertise (or institutions) to waver, because that gives him the ability to control the narrative. He can't say "Look at all this winning" when the death count is marching steadily upward. This is a fundamental part of his MO: with confusion, he can control the narrative better. He thrives on the absence of information, in point of fact that might be the only reason he's president at all. I think if there was hard information about him (tax returns, testimony, grades, etc.) so much of his narrative would dissipate. He knows he needs the economy to recover to win in November. He can't hide from the unemployment rate, the stock market and consumer confidence. The likelihood he wins in November with the economy in recession and the unemployment rate at historic highs is incredibly low. He also knows the biggest question regarding the health of the economy is getting this virus under control. That, for a variety of reasons, is practically impossible. Simply put, the ability to actually get this under control is no longer within the purview of the federal government. So, the next best thing is controlling the narrative around the virus. The first step in that process is controlling the data that the nerds use to describe the situation. It's one of the reasons I suspect our testing is so far behind. So, the testing is embarrassingly shitty, so we have to rely on projections and almost by executive order, pretend the confirmed cases equal 100% of the spread of this virus. Well, projections are confusing because they compete and they are based on data (much of which is faulty), and thus...confusion. How many cases do we have? We don't really know, so there's a window for him to say "cool, well I think they are going down and mine is the opinion that really matters here." That uncertainty is absolutely critical for him. But deaths...that's another story. Those are hard numbers to argue with. There should be very little interpretation on a death count. Sure, if someone dies of pneumonia or heart failure, or whatever the physical cause of death is, there's some gray area: we don't run a lot of cancer tests on the elderly dead either. Still, legions of coroners nationwide are attributing deaths to COVID-19 and I'm sure there are a few mistakes among the 85,000 dead (FOR FUCK'S SAKES), but I'd be willing to bet something precious, those errors are few and far between. In statistician's terms, that's high quality input for building models, as a data point, it has a very low probability of error. If anything, we're under counting the deaths, thus the importance of the excess mortality studies. We can build some pretty accurate models with a couple of months worth of data, especially with quality data like what we're seeing with death counts. Those models are already contradicting the official stance. So, the easiest way to inject confusion is to attack the death counts. With that confusion, he can claim victory, or convince people that he has this under control or that he's been right all along and some boogey man has been attacking him using these falsified death counts. Nevermind the simply stupid assertion that thousands of doctors, coroners and medical professionals are simultaneously and apparently telepathically conspiring to mis-attribute death counts to COVID-19, at tremendous professional risk to accomplish the incredible task of...making Donald Trump look bad?? Oh, those doctors and experts are out to get ol President Cheeto...those dastardly doctors and scientists. It turns out, the truth is what's out to get him, and I'm hoping it fucking wins. Tired of losing to this virus, compounded by malicious incompetence, stupidity and apathy from our leadership.
When Howard Hughes started behaving in this same sort of mentally degenerative way, Hughes at least had the common decency to lock himself away from the world so his nonsensical ramblings could be kept to himself. Trump is two seconds away from playing with his own poop on live TV.
And millions of others, including people I know but am starting to wonder if I want to. The stupidity is staggering.
I report back to the office on Monday. It's going to be a pay cut, but I don't care. I worry what's going to happen when the virus stimulus attached to unemployment payments runs out. I've heard a large number of people say they won't return to work because it would be an enormous pay cut. Once the stimulus stops there is going to be a mad rush of people really looking for work, and there's a good chance the jobs won't be there. At least I'll have a job. Even though I benefited from it, I think it was a huge mistake to add a $600 per week bonus for not working. What should've been done is add a stimulus amount that brings your payment to your normal pay level. In the end the people that are going to be hurt the most by this are the low wage earners. They're used to bringing home $300 a week, now they're suddenly bringing home $800 a week. They're not going to even think about returning to work until all the benefits are exhausted and why should they? We'll see how this all plays out, but my guess is that it won't be good.
Everything this. I'm back at work helping train new hires. This is a frequent topic of conversation. The thing that comes up the most is a moral argument, some version of how they can't sit at home and take money when they can work and earn it and have something to do. Also jokes about how boredom is expensive. Second point that comes up a lot is that it's gonna run out at some point, like you said, and they don't wanna be the last person on the life boat when it's full. Eventually that money is gonna run out, and it's gonna run out in a hurry, and all the sudden the job market is gonna be flooded even more than it already is. Better to secure a job now, start earning benefits, start vesting in your 401(k) and sit pretty when the extra $600 expires than rush to apply for anything that will hire you. It's gonna be an absolute shit show in a few months and those who are taking jobs now are gonna be laughing come July or August. Related, I've also met a lot of people who have seeking a higher-than-bachelors level of education and are either pausing that because they don't think it's gonna be worth it anymore (it largely isn't, depending on career field), that higher education is gonna change in a major way and they want to see how it plays out first (it will, and smart move), that a lot of colleges are gonna go under and those that are still active are going to be steeply discounted (yup), or that this is gonna be around for a while and it's prudent just to take a few years and revisit the program once it all settles (what I'd do).
Can someone explain why we’re still on lockdown? We flattened the curve. Hospitals are stocked up, some are furloughing employees they’re so slow. Anything from here on out is just kicking the can. Fauci said there’s a decent chance we’ll never have a vaccine for this. Are the SJWs going to shame people for the next 6 months until they realize a vaccine is long shot?
Not sure where you live, but in the quarter million population county I'm in, we've skyrocketed from 163 confirmed cases (as of April 30th) to 179 cases today. Shelter in place has been extended to the end of May. Sorry, I don't feel one confirmed case a day is worth demolishing the local economy.
I’m not worried about the infected rate. I have no doubt that’s going to spike. Mortality rate is the only concern.
Interesting. Clark County, NV (Las Vegas) had 185 new cases reported in the last 24 hours and even some of the casinos there are starting to re-open. They haven't even flattened the curve, it's more of a roller coaster.
Honestly, we're stuck. The feds bungled the original window to clamp down on this thing before it spread too far, and now we're in a position where we don't have any real way to eliminate it, we don't have a vaccine, and we don't have an effective treatment. We can project the consequences of letting the disease run wild, and no one wants to accept those consequences, but we don't really have any other choices, so we're staying in this holding pattern with lockdowns.
With zero end game. Experts are saying there may never be a vaccine. So what the hell are we doing? You’re gonna catch it if you haven’t already. There’s zero reason to keep the lockdown going.
The goal posts have been moved. I have heard it is now infection rates, hospital bed occupancy rates, its wait for the second wave.....all types of benchmarks have been floated out there. Its bullshit at this point. Government does what government does.
In other news, how fucked up is Japan's work culture? So fucked up that the lockdowns have decreased their suicide rate.
We don’t have a clue what the actual mortality rate is, but we do know we’re severely under testing the population and the asymptomatic count continues to rise. I’ve yet to see a single news source that supports your estimate.
There have been 20,000 COVID deaths in New York City. We're likely undercounting deaths by some amount, but that still represents a fairly solid data point to start from. Now, you can take a look at how many infections would be required to yield that number of deaths for a given fatality rate: 0.100%: 20.0M (250% of the population of New York City) 0.238%: 8.40M (the population of New York City) 1.190%: 1.68M (the number of infected in New York City estimated by the late April antibody testing) 10.70%: 0.187M (the number of confirmed cases in New York City) You've got a lower bound of 0.238% and an upper bound of 10.7% for the fatality rate based on New York City's data, with a likely rate of 1.19%. At 50% of the country infected (which is much lower than what I've seen claimed is necessary for herd immunity with this virus), the lower bound translates to 380,000 dead, the upper bound to 17M dead, and the likely rate to 1.9M dead.
You can’t take one of the most congested cities in the US and extrapolate those numbers nationwide. It’s disingenuous and misleading. Not to mention there’s plenty of info about the antibody tests being less than reliable.