100,000 by June: CDC
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Dr. Robert Redfeld had an interesting Tweet. 100,000 by June first. It will be higher given where we are as of today. This is over 88,000 dead Americans. President Donald Trump continues to lay blame, and say this was an engineered virus. This is purely a distraction from what is happening. The administration has no plan. And no, two binders does not a plan make. If it was? Why wasn’t it acted upon? This is the main question. Because so far the plan is to open the economy no matter what.
There is even a talking point going around asking questions about the economic cost. Mind you, it’s real. But the health issue and safety is also part of this equation. I suspect that many people are discounting the health effect for a few reasons.
The first is propaganda. Far-right media and the president have tried to diminish the virus from day one. They have done the same they do with the climate emergency. They do not believe the experts because it does not feel right. The president does not believe the numbers are as high as they are. Incidentally, these are laboratory-confirmed cases, not the excess deaths we already have. If we add those, we are already over 100,000.
We have this via the New York Times and Nicholas Kristoff, which matches the experience around the world:
Many supporters of President Trump believe that the figures for coronavirus fatalities are inflated, and Trump himself shared a tweet doubting the accuracy of some virus figures.
He’s right that the death toll seems off — but not in the direction he would suggest. We’ve crunched the numbers, state by state, and it appears that somewhere around 100,000 to 110,000 Americans have already died as a result of the pandemic, rather than the 83,000 whose deaths have been attributed to the disease, Covid-19.
That’s my estimate reached with the help of a Harvard statistician, Rafael Irizarry, based on a comparison of death rates this spring with those in previous years. Some states have been largely unaffected — death rates in some even appear to have dropped, perhaps because of less driving and fewer car accidents — but others have seen huge surges in deaths.
The Economist has been tracking European deaths where the same exact phenomena exist. It is not unexpected, and every pandemic…
