The Other McCain believes that they want to distract you from something. A ‘Surge’ of Media-Hyped Fear
Look at that graph, and tell me if you think we are facing a crisis.
Two graphics, courtesy of the New York Times. The first shows U.S. COVID-19 deaths dating back to the beginning of the pandemic:
I have included the first of the 2 graphs. Click thru for the 2nd. That 2nd graph shows cases for the month of July through the 26th.
My hunch — and it is only a hunch — is that this “surge” hype is really being driven by the teachers unions, who want to keep schools closed, and are exerting pressure on the Democratic Party who, in turn, are pumping out “surge” propaganda via their media allies. Part of this message is about scapegoating Republicans as responsible for vaccine “resistance,” even though the lowest vaccination rates are among blacks and Hispanics, both of whom are key Democratic Party constituencies.
I think it is more likely something related to Joe B.'s health, or China doing something warlike.
Coincidentally, I was looking at exactly the same numbers this morning. I had heard at least a month ago that data was saying that the new variant might have been more transmissible but was much less likely to be serious than the start of the outbreak.
ReplyDeleteI had a couple of thoughts that I just don't know how to set up the problem for, so let me drop them on you. Maybe the ideas will be viral enough that you'll get interested ;-)
The first is the commonly expressed idea that the only reason it's less lethal is because more of the victims have been vaccinated than during the initial outbreak. That says that for the non-vaccinated victims it would be just as lethal as the original - or close to it. The tiny uptick in fatalities, though, seems to say that the variant isn't as lethal. I'd think we'd need to know the equivalent rates on both groups and probably know things that nobody talks about, like exactly how much protection do the vaccines give against fatality vs. simply getting infected.
The other thing I'm curious about is that one of the things that separates these "experimental use authorizations" from approved drugs is that there were no long term safety studies. It's an axiom that it takes three years to find a three year survival rate, but just as Poisson distribution can be used to establish confidence limits on the percent defectives by the number tested before the first failure, can we use the fact that we have millions of jabs over six months to put tentative limits on what the frequency of long term effects might be? I don't even know if this is a reasonable thing to ask. I can envision problems showing up in three years - or more - that we simply would have no clue about now.
The millions of jabs do set limits on probability of side effects and I don't even know if that's a reasonable number.
Offered for your consideration...
That needs some thought...
DeleteOne thing that springs to mind is that viruses, like all life, want to live and reproduce. Evolution drives that. To that end, it is aided by being more transmissible and less deadly. You infect a larger population, and no one cares. A common cold can swing through an office quick, and everyone is pissed, and no one dies.