Why do elected officials dismiss positive information about Coronavirus?

Washington Times ^ | 03/29/2020 | By Everett Piper

[SeekAndFind]

Dr. Eran Bendavid and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professors of medicine at Stanford University, published an article in the March 24 edition of The Wall Street Journal, stating the following:

“Fear of Covid-19 is based on an estimated mortality rate of 2% to 4% … We believe this estimate is deeply flawed.”

Drs. Bendavid and Bhattacharya continue:

“The true fatality rate is the portion of those infected who die, not the deaths from identified positive cases. The latter rate is misleading because of selection bias in testing. The degree of bias is uncertain because available data are limited … If the number of actual infections is much larger than the number of cases — orders of magnitude larger — then the fatality rate is much lower as well. That’s not only plausible but likely based on what we know so far.”

After summarizing all presently available data from China, Italy, Iceland, and the United States, the authors conclude:

“An epidemic seed on January 1 implies that by March 9, about six million people in the U.S. would have been infected. As of March 23, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 499 Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. If our surmise of six million cases is accurate, that’s a mortality rate of 0.01%, assuming a two-week lag between infection and death. This is one-tenth of the flu mortality rate of 0.1%. Such a low death rate would be cause for optimism … If we’re right about the limited scale of the epidemic, then … we should undertake immediate steps to evaluate the empirical basis of the current lockdowns.”

I repeat, “This is one-tenth of the flu mortality rate of 0.1%”.

Why are we not demanding that our elected officials tell us why they are dismissing such positive information?

[Grampa Dave]

‘cui
bono’

How to implement ‘cui bono’:

To implement the principle of ‘cui bono’, you need to ask yourself “who benefits from this?”

When trying to figure out why a certain event has happened or will happen in the future. The more someone benefits from the event in question, the more likely they are to be responsible for it.

TDS is a mental disease that is incureable! Those afflicted with TDS, pray every night for lots of Chicom Coruna dead American bodies and a ruined American economy.

[Calif Conservative]

The real question is why do Freepers — I mean, of course, FEARpers — dismiss hopeful studies.

[NobleFree]

If only the ghouls at the WSJ didn't have the original article behind a paywall ...

[SeekAndFind]

RE: If only the ghouls at the WSJ didn’t have the original article behind a paywall ...

In times like this, the least they could do as a public service is to offer this one article for FREE to the public.

[AndyJackson]

I refuse to read articles that begin with a methologically qustionable premise. He states "An epidemic seed on January 1 implies that by March 9, about six million people in the U.S. would have been infected."

If you look at the FT figure, the US is presently 24 days from it's 100th recorded case. In other words the 100th case was on or about 4 March. This was not seeded (defined as exponential growth back-extrapolated to 1 case), but maybe late February.

In fact according to the Worldometer, the first recorded death in the US was 27 February. Also looking at the worldometer we had 11 accumlated recorded cases on 15 February

It's not that we didn't have random cases here and there. It is that we did not have enough cases that epidemic spread occurred.

If you take the 25 day growth factor of 1000, then if we had had epidemic start in late January, we would have had a million cases, assuming we did nothing.

Now doing nothing is not what we did and so you cannot prove that unmitigated projections were wrong based upon a world which took strong and vigorous mitigating actions.,

[tinyowl]

I think 2 fundamental reasons in ADDITION to the dems wanting to capitalize on a crisis for bigger government:

1. To crap on Trump (always seems to miss his head and fall back on them.
2. There is a legit reason, if you are in a position of being held accountable for something, to want to publicly over-push the thing's difficult-ness and manage expectations. Trump DOES do this but he talks about how difficult and big the virus is, and then like a true leader, offers reasonable hope (not fake hopey changey Obama empty hope-as-a-drug), a rational vision of how we get through it and that we will be stronger once we're done - that is hope that is all likely and true and minimizes fear. Lesser leaders are just looking to minimize blame and accountability. That is to say, they are not leaders.

[AndyJackson]

There is good news in all of this. It is that strong public health measures are showing a very positive effect - here and globally.

The problem is the FLUBROs who argue that we should have done nothing and we would be fine.

[central_va]

The problem is the FLUBROs who argue that we should have done nothing and we would be fine.

I don't think the FLUBROS are saying that. What they are saying is if a family has a high risk member the onus should be on them to find an isolation solution for that person and not on society as a whole to figure it out.

[wastedyears]

Because they will do and say anything to hurt Trump, no matter who else it hurts in the process.

[BillyCuccio]

Anyone who doesn’t think this virus was here by December doesn’t understand that we are connected to China with nonstop flights and huge amounts of Chinese Americans going back and forth all the time. This was here all winter but was just thought to be the flu. Yes it’s not pleasant to get sick and die and we should do everything to help people at risk but putting trillions of dollars on our kids backs and shutting down everything is very moronic. Obviously we are watching the culminations of the russia and Ukraine and every other thing thrown at the President. This coordinated effort between many in the government and the media should be easily spotted by intelligent people on free republic .

[angry elephant]

In fact according to the Worldometer, the first recorded death in the US was 27 February. Also looking at the worldometer we had 11 accumlated recorded cases on 15 February.”

We had that first recorded death February 29 in Washington state. Since then the stat has had 189 die. We had a huge bump near the beginning with the Life Care center deaths.

I think we might have peaked on Friday, March 27. We had a recommended stay home and social distance about two and a half weeks ago. We had a hard order on Monday to state home and social distance this last Monday.

The death rate per day declined on Saturday and on today, Sunday. So we are a month into it and my hope is we are flattening. Washington state and California should be the first to flatten since we had the first deaths.

[ocrp1982]

Because there are people who are simply prone to being fearful. And, those people are also susceptible to fearmongering. And, the fearmongers are well aware of this fact.
Fearful people, when confronted with a choice to believe either the glass is half full or half empty, will choose the half-empty every time. Present them with charts and graphs that show them we’re all in danger and those that show the danger is much less they will always believe the charts that indicate great danger.

[AndyJackson]

Trump was complaining at his briefing today about what the FLUBROs were telling him to do. I will only indulge them the notion that there is a spectrum of opion when they stop calling those of us who just point out the date on charts and graphs (not even projectons) as Fearpers.

[Calif Conservative]

The real problem is the FEARbros who constantly cite the worst case scenarios as if those are a certainty.

Like poster wastoute who was predicting 2000 USA deaths a day starting Saturday then said he/she had used the wrong models yet can’t admit he/she’s wrong.

The FEARbros will just keep moving the goal posts until they luck into the blind hog who found a truffle scenario

[Calif Conservative]

Would FEARbros work better? Yes it will

[AndyJackson]

Washington state and California should be the first to flatten since we had the first deaths.

The date of the first death only matters if you believe that say 1 in 10,000 die and so based on a handful of deaths "everyone" already has had the disease and so it stops because there is no one to pass it on to. That view is disproven by the present continued exponential growth.

What does actually control this is when you slowed down the rate of pass-on infections through social distancing, quarantine and other public health measures. On that measure California and Washington State should not do any better than anywhere else in the country.

Now, two weeks into social distancing we should start to see the cases begin to role over, and there are some indications that we are seeing that, but we need a week or so to confirm that it has worked, and a couple of more weeks to allow recoveries to put a significant dent in active cases.

That is when you can begin the restart process.

Living in DC I have to tell you that Trump could do the country a favor and keep the bureaucracy in lock-up. The damage they do to this country is a large multiple of their pay.

[AndyJackson]

Anyone who doesn’t think this virus was here by December doesn’t understand that we are connected to China with nonstop flights

Well then we would have seen the exponential takeoff of cases in December. We didn't. There may have been the odd case here and there, and there probably was, but an epidemic wasn't "seeded" until much later.

[freeandfreezing]

If our surmise of six million cases is accurate, that’s a mortality rate of 0.01%, assuming a two-week lag between infection and death.

The other assumption that their model requires is that the number of cases requiring hospitalization or ICU level care is very small, although data to support that hypothesis seems to not exist.

[null and void]

Good news is the natural enemy of tyrants and would-be dictators

Bring Out Your Dead

Post to me or FReep mail to be on/off the Bring Out Your Dead ping list.

The purpose of the “Bring Out Your Dead” ping list (formerly the “Ebola” ping list) is very early warning of emerging pandemics, as such it has a high false positive rate.

The false positive rate was 100%.

At some point we may well have a high mortality pandemic, and likely as not the “Bring Out Your Dead” threads will miss the beginning entirely.

*sigh* Such is life, and death...

If a quarantine saves just one child's or one old fart’s life, it's worth it.