Fox/Trump Immoral Handling of covid19

If we had a Leftist in charge, we would be where Italy is now, and the media would be in a total blackout.

lol

That doesn't mean I have to agree with them.  I think to bring the whole country to a screeching halt, there has to be thresholds, and so far, to me... Those thresholds have not been met.  I understand the need to save lives..... it may sound crass, and how Ebuc puts it, immoral, but there is a line that has to be drawn, and the panic it spreads can be more dangerous than the pandemic itself.  

Even Dr. Fauci has changed his feelings, he put in a research paper that we don't really know what the mortality rate is, and it is hard to calculate, but based on the information it is probably .1 to .2 %... Then when he is on the news, he says it is 10 times that, but still says you can't really calculate it.  If you can't calculate it, then don't.....  Quit filling people's minds with possibilities that could be completely false, instead, he says he knows it is at least 10 times worse than the flu. If we have 12,000 deaths from the flu each year in the US, then we should expect 120,000 deaths from this virus.  I just don't think that is going to happen.

I understand your problem with the Celebrities as a sample, but it is the closest thing that I have to go off of.  I doubt their healthcare is a huge difference better from the general population... now when it comes to testing for the virus, yes, and when it comes to special procedures, and procuring the best doctors for that procedure, yes, but when checking themselves into a hospital, or seeing their regular doctor, probably not that different.

I agree with you in the sense that inciting fear can be worse than the disease itself. That being said, I don't think taking measures like this inherently incites fear, i.e. I think we can both address the issues of how people respond these pandemics and reduce their spread. It's essential to manage both fears and the disease, and I think in the case of the former, it's been an utter failure. I don't agree that they oversold the harms of this disease, but I do think they mismanaged the response. By the by, I think the mistake Dr. Fauci is making is in trying to provide numbers while simultaneously trying to say that it's difficult to provide them. You can actually calculate numbers and come to reasonable conclusions, it's just that there is enough variability to yield some uncertainty regardless. Your extrapolation that it being 10 times worse than the flu means we will expect 120,000 deaths, however, is an example of what could happen should the spread of the virus be too wide. It's not what we should expect because we're responding to the virus fast enough to, hopefully, prevent that outcome. As such, your take-away from not seeing those numbers within a year shouldn't be "they overblew how damaging that virus was", but rather that measures taken to control it were likely successful.

Without a trial and conviction? Not in my republic. Sorry about yours.

I like how ebuc can toss out  a word like "immoral" without offer of a single example of either what the moral miss is, specifically, and from what morality it originates. It is as if, like climate, there is only one morality that is ideal for ubiquitous consumption.

It’s cheaper that way. And here I thought you were fiscally conservative..... Smh

the government has done a bad job at something! like thats never happened before LOL

..."A few weeks after the outbreak began in China’s Hubei province in December, U.S. health officials warned Trump of the seriousness of the threat. But in his first public comments about the virus, on Jan. 22, Trump told the public he wasn’t worried. “Not at all,” he said. “We have it totally under control.”

....Throughout February, Trump dismissed Democrats’ alarm about the virus as their new “hoax,” blamed “the Democrat policy of open borders” for the pathogen’s spread and insisted that his Jan. 31 decision to restrict travel from China had contained the outbreak. By Feb. 29, officials reported the first coronavirus–related death of an American on U.S. soil.Trump brushed aside the mess. Asked on March 13 if he accepted -responsibility for the testing debacle, he uttered seven words that could come to define his presidency. “No,” he said, “I don’t take -responsibility at all.”......

The list of non-truths and immoral acts these piece of &)^#  { Trump } has done in lifetime is enough to make 50% of the sane or semi-sane Bellevue patients puke.

No.

Anything more than that will send EBUC into a frenzy.

Redmangood!

Did you find any information on the H1N1?  The death timeline is only a good comparison up until probably next week.  I give it a two week period from the time the states started shutting everything down and requiring quarantine, to the deaths that may occur.  This will slow the spread of the virus as well as the death count and we will lose the control we had.  But if the death count rises to more than what H1N1 is, then it will prove to be a more deadly and more contagious.  

I'm still looking for specifically a death timeline from April 2009 to anytime in 2010.  Preferably month by month, or week by week if possible, day by day is probably asking too much.  I am unable to find that.  If I can, maybe I can help some people calm their nerves.  My roommate vomited this morning she is so worried about getting this virus.  That is just too much.

Then I will be able to put together a montage of the media putting words in people's mouths, and making everyone scared for their lives.  

Also in print, showing all worst case scenarios that they can find, they don't even care of it is someone that has credentials... They print it,or say it on the news channel to get people riled up.  Built up anxiety also reduces your immune system capabilities.  Good job media, regardless of how deadly this disease is, be soothing and comforting.  Hannity actually did a good job of that the other day.  I don't watch Fox, but someone sent me a blurb from him.

Yeah, it's not easy to find. Best I've been able to discover is a really detailed timeline from when it started to when it ended, but it's all in text and difficult to parse.

There are also charts that depict it more easily, but they're imperfect. This one shows the number of cases worldwide and by country, but doesn't specify deaths.

This one shows the number of cases vs. deaths in Spain, though it's just limited to that country. There are charts like this for other countries, but they don't include death tolls.

The info just isn't that readily available, apparently. Surprised no one's done a larger case study on this, though it may just be that I'm not finding it. In terms of raw numbers, I did find info on US cases vs death toll:

"60.8 million cases (range: 43.3-89.3 million), 274,304 hospitalizations (195,086-402,719), and 12,469 deaths (8868-18,306)"

So, if we're using these numbers, the mortality rate from H1N1 in the US was 0.02%. Pretty low, all things considered, though certainly not inconsequential. We'll have to see what happens with COVID-19, but I suspect the ratio will be higher. That CDC page does provide as close to a death timeline as we're going to get, insofar as it covers several month long periods, including from April to October 2009, and then extending that timeline through future months for comparison. It sounds like your roommate might be a little overly worried about this, and while that's understandable to some extent, I don't think he/she should be so worried that it's making them sick. There's a difference between caution and terror, and I don't think that's a fine line. However, I think putting this on the media grants them a little too much power. Public officials have a lot of power in this regard as well, and Trump the greatest of all.

Even when the flu vaccine is a mismatched year, they say it still helps with immunity to some degree.  If there was no flu vaccine it would seem reasonable to assume the flu stats would be that much worse.  Since there is no covid vaccine yet, when it's all taken into context perhaps the flu is "worse" than covid?

Yeah and Trump is trying to calm the people a bit, that is what he started off trying to do, but he pretty much got chastised for doing it, even though he had done pretty much everything that Obama did back then.

That amount of people that contracted it is also a big range because they didn't have the test kits available then either, and it didn't seem to be a big deal.  Still, even if the death toll is .02 percent, it was only affecting people under 65, so it excludes everyone above that age, which is completely different than the seasonal flu. Coronavirus is exactly like the seasonal flu on who is the most vulnerable, but from these graphs.

My point is, there either should have been a lot more attention paid to H1N1.. and/or there is too much attention being paid to Coronavirus.

Based on the verbiage from the CDC report, it sounds like they were estimating the amount of deaths as well, which should really be a finite number.  But that may have been in the middle of the pandemic.  

Thanks for looking into it.  Yeah, the graphs don't make much sense, or at least I can't make sense of them.  But it looks like the were quite a few deaths in a matter of weeks, but nothing compared to this.  Although it did start in the states.  

I do appreciate you finding this, I'll try and look deeper into it a little later.

That's true, so the question certainly exists regarding how bad the flu would be in the absence of any vaccine. That being said, I don't think there are many strains of the flu that could reach a similar threshold of mortality to COVID-19 - perhaps the 1918 H1N1 strain, but I can't think of any other. It's difficult to estimate what those mortality rates would be in the absence of vaccines, though I doubt it would rise above 2%. Chances are that many of us do have some immunity to COVID-19 resulting from previous infections with other coronaviruses (most of the others we're exposed to cause common cold symptoms), though that's speculation. I would say that, in many ways, the flu is the "worse" virus and also the more proximal one for the majority of us, but that's largely because of its relative ubiquity.

I would have to agree with that.  Didn't even think about that, just in 2017, there were an estimated 61,000 deaths just in the US from the flu. That was a really bad year.

But there are other years that are really bad as well, and everyone just throws up their arms and says, well that is the flu season, nothing we can do about it.  

Now I know you can't trust China, but they are only reporting that 81,000 people contracted the virus.... Out of 1.5 billion?  It seems like they are really underestimating their numbers, or they knew how to handle it.

It is unbelievable that they have not even discussed what will be financially done to help the poor afford the rent as they can't work.

In all other nations this is being discussed. America should be offering socialised testing and treatment, instead Trump congratulates the private sector. This is the moment where you know when the right-wing have gone to moral bankcruptcy (at the sake of those who will really go bankrupt from this event, or worse to die).

I think that he thought, by the numbers that China was actually giving us, that it was just like the flu.  I thought that too, I would have dismissed it as well.  I think his people were saying the same thing, but the media was putting words into the people they were interviewing mouths.  

I don't have the Washington Post, but I was looking for articles about the flu, and saw a title that was pretty recent from them.  It said something to the effect of what TheDredPriateRoberts said about the flu being worse, and we are all overacting. 

I could not read the full article because I have used up my 10 free ones (or whatever they give for free).  Can you find it?

I looked up "how many people died from the flu in 2017 in the US?"  and it popped up in the search.

I want to see if they are now going against what Trump is saying. It just seems that no matter what, he is the target, and the media needs to stop with their stupid questions.  They questioned Trump about a doctor that was assigned in China that was then reassigned right before the outbreak, like if he did not do that, this wouldn't have happened.  How do you answer questions about one reassigned  doctor when you are the freakin POTUS.  He doesn't just choose doctors to move around.   They are trying to scare people and trying to get him to blow his lid.  You see them doing that don't you?

Don't you think it is a bit odd that you can't find anything certain things at the grocery store, when Grocery Stores do not really plan on closing?  It's because of the media.  It's also because of the Surgeon General though, that guy is a moron.  He might be a doctor, but he should not speak on camera, much less get interviewed by anyone.  I think that is why they sidelined Dr. Fauci a well.

I'm... a bit confused by the statement that "it was only affecting people under 65" - it says most of the deaths occurred in people under 65, but not that it only affected people under 65 or that it excluded those "above that age". The numbers include people above 65. I'm not sure what should have been done with H1N1. It's entirely possible that those numbers could have been reduced substantially, in which case it may have required more attention. That being said, I don't think measures being taken now for COVID-19 would have been as necessary for H1N1, given the differences in their mortality rates.

What I meant was, no one above 65 died, so if we are talking about the mortality rate, that whole group is pretty much taken out of the equation. 

I guess you could say the same is true for Coronavirus where no one under 65 is dying.  There are always outliers, I guess.

But be honest, which one is worse?  A virus that kills people under 65 or the one that kills people above 65 at the same rate?  Not saying this one is the same rate, but where do you think the balance should be?  Or are people all the same, no matter the age?

Have you been completely de-coupled from the arguments in the Senate and House today and yesterday in which Democrats argue that the Green New Deal crisis is more important to address, right now, than addressing, by obfuscation, "what will be financially done to help the poor afford the rent as they can't work."

Yes, you're right; it is unbelievable. Just not in guise you assume it takes.

I trust you do not use the same brush with which you paint others to brush your teeth; otherwise, your teeth are turning orange.