We're Number 8!

Submitted by fire with fire on Fri, 10/02/2020 - 1:21am

World Wide Statistics on Asteroid Virus

A month or so ago, I looked up the stats from Sweden because I had heard that their experience since June has been very favorable, after catching fiercely angry condemnation for their refusal to shut down their economy. When Sweden suffered much higher case and fatality rates than virtually all of the countries that shut down, the triumphant headlines and sneering internet factoid spinning painted the Swedes as European Trumpites, insanely refusing to follow science in favor of the idiotic notion of herd immunity. I still don't know what herd immunity really means other than "people don't get sick from the shit any more." And I STILL do not pretend to know Jack Shit about how to fight a virus.

I would however like to understand.

On October 1, 2020 I checked the current numbers to see how Sweden was doing. Sure enough, whereas when I looked a few weeks ago, Sweden still had a higher per capita death rate than the USA, we have now "surged ahead" by a score of 642 per million population to 583, more than ten percent higher than Sweden.

How could that be?

So I looked at the rest of the stat chart and I discovered that our fucked up President, our fucked up government at large and our fucked up response to the pandemic was not leading the world in death rate. We come in at Number Eight.

Peru 983

Belgium 864

Spain 684

Bolivia 683

Brazil 680

Chile 669

Ecuador 649

USA 642

UK 621

Mexico 604

Italy 594

Sweden 583

What do these numbers prove? Not a thing. But they do put the lie to a whole bunch of bullshit that comes labeled as "science" with the heavy implication that there is something wrong with you if you don't buy said "science."

I was also surprised to find the stats on number of tests administered by country and adjusted for population. We have already taken over 108 million tests, second on the planet behind China with 160 million -- with almost five times our population. On a per capita basis, we are behind only the UK and Israel and not by much. Both countries are close to us in death rate. Again, this proves nothing in particular other than testing does not necessarily correlate with lower death rates.

I read shit regularly that asserts IF the lockdown had started earlier, none of this misery would have happened. Isn't it pretty to think so? Well seven countries are even more fucked up than we were and none of them is Sweden.

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Comments

Submitted by pro left on Fri, 10/02/2020 - 1:35am

Well just to throw a wrench into things

Trump has just Tweeted that he and Melania have tested positive for Covid and are going into quarantine.

Submitted by ovals49 on Fri, 10/02/2020 - 5:27am

Hopefully

@pro left
Trump has been tested daily and was not infective during the debate. Things would be even sketchier if the other candidate is also positive.

Anti Trumpers first reaction will likely be “Good!”, but Mike Pence???!!

The stock market isn’t going to glide smoothly over this bump in the road. This level of uncertainty is not welcome.

Why is it that Fridays are always the most “interesting” days of the week.........

—

“What the herd hates most is the one who thinks differently; it is not so much the opinion itself, but the audacity of wanting to think for themselves, something that they do not know how to do.”
-Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

Submitted by Pluto's Republic on Fri, 10/02/2020 - 7:34am

He would have been exposed to the virus

@ovals49

...if Trump was infected, with all his loud talking and sputtering, but journalists Alexis Madrigal and Robinson Meyer, writing for the Atlantic, tried as hard as they could not to say so.

The gravest of what-ifs has become a “what now?”: This morning, while many Americans were sleeping, President Donald Trump announced that he and the first lady have tested positive for the coronavirus. He disclosed his diagnosis in a tweet, sent at nearly 1 a.m. Eastern time....

When, exactly, was the president infected? And how many other people in the White House—or across the federal government—might be sick? The first hint that something might have gone amiss came Thursday night, when Bloomberg reported that Hope Hicks, a close Trump adviser, had tested positive for the virus.

Hicks was apparently at the president’s side on Wednesday as he traveled to Minnesota for a campaign rally. The night before, Trump had debated former Vice President Joe Biden, standing about a dozen feet from the Democratic nominee for more than 90 minutes. Hicks came down with symptoms on Wednesday night and “quarantined” on Air Force One on the flight back to the capital, according to The Washington Post.

Hicks received a positive test yesterday morning. Yet the White House did not release the results of that test, or hint that anyone near the president might be ill, until Bloomberg’s report hours later.

.
The authors proceed to discuss, with a great deal of feigned confusion, whether Hope infected the President and the First Lady, and how many days had passed between her infection and her symptoms. Getting those numbers mixed up. They discuss how many days the coronavirus must incubate in the body before it can be detected by "even the best PCR tests." The West Wing has state-of-the-art tests with relatively instant results. The tests produced by the CDC are not among them. Finally they blurt:

Perhaps Hicks was sick for longer than she knew, and she infected the president earlier this week. (If so, was she infectious when she attended the presidential debate on Tuesday?) It would not be surprising if, in coming days, we learn that more members of Trump’s retinue and cabinet have contracted the virus. Nor would it be shocking to learn that the president was contagious when he shared a debate stage with Biden.

Or perhaps some other person infected the president, the first lady, and Hicks....

It’s also possible that the Trump White House has not been or will not be forthcoming about the president’s condition.

.
That last part, they got right.

Hope Hicks apparently spent considerable time with the president this week. She's known to be a very private person and presumably is a trusted confidant to both the President and the First Lady. Hicks is also close to Ivanka, who introduced Hicks to her father.

Hicks was infected and did attend the debate. Probably the last debate we'll see before the election.

The remainder of the article consists of professional level schadenfreude.

—

____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato

Submitted by Blue Republic on Sat, 10/03/2020 - 9:43am

"Probably the last debate we'll see before the election."

@Pluto's Republic

Gives the Dems some weasel room. In some of my daily spam from DK -
who of course claim Biden won the first debate - is an appeal for me
to sign their petition for there to be no further debates, this coming
before the announcement about Trump being infected.

If Joe did that great the first time you'd think they'd want to give him
more opportunities to press his advantage...

#1.1

...if Trump was infected, with all his loud talking and sputtering, but journalists Alexis Madrigal and Robinson Meyer, writing for the Atlantic, tried as hard as they could not to say so.

The gravest of what-ifs has become a “what now?”: This morning, while many Americans were sleeping, President Donald Trump announced that he and the first lady have tested positive for the coronavirus. He disclosed his diagnosis in a tweet, sent at nearly 1 a.m. Eastern time....

When, exactly, was the president infected? And how many other people in the White House—or across the federal government—might be sick? The first hint that something might have gone amiss came Thursday night, when Bloomberg reported that Hope Hicks, a close Trump adviser, had tested positive for the virus.

Hicks was apparently at the president’s side on Wednesday as he traveled to Minnesota for a campaign rally. The night before, Trump had debated former Vice President Joe Biden, standing about a dozen feet from the Democratic nominee for more than 90 minutes. Hicks came down with symptoms on Wednesday night and “quarantined” on Air Force One on the flight back to the capital, according to The Washington Post.

Hicks received a positive test yesterday morning. Yet the White House did not release the results of that test, or hint that anyone near the president might be ill, until Bloomberg’s report hours later.

.
The authors proceed to discuss, with a great deal of feigned confusion, whether Hope infected the President and the First Lady, and how many days had passed between her infection and her symptoms. Getting those numbers mixed up. They discuss how many days the coronavirus must incubate in the body before it can be detected by "even the best PCR tests." The West Wing has state-of-the-art tests with relatively instant results. The tests produced by the CDC are not among them. Finally they blurt:

Perhaps Hicks was sick for longer than she knew, and she infected the president earlier this week. (If so, was she infectious when she attended the presidential debate on Tuesday?) It would not be surprising if, in coming days, we learn that more members of Trump’s retinue and cabinet have contracted the virus. Nor would it be shocking to learn that the president was contagious when he shared a debate stage with Biden.

Or perhaps some other person infected the president, the first lady, and Hicks....

It’s also possible that the Trump White House has not been or will not be forthcoming about the president’s condition.

.
That last part, they got right.

Hope Hicks apparently spent considerable time with the president this week. She's known to be a very private person and presumably is a trusted confidant to both the President and the First Lady. Hicks is also close to Ivanka, who introduced Hicks to her father.

Hicks was infected and did attend the debate. Probably the last debate we'll see before the election.

The remainder of the article consists of professional level schadenfreude.

Submitted by Pluto's Republic on Fri, 10/02/2020 - 5:36am

I saw one answer to your conundrum just awhile ago

...in the Atlantic. The wild differences in infections rates in similar cities are not so much affected by the pandemic management strategies and policies of local leaders. Massive outbreaks may be caused by random bad luck.

Why, in the spring of 2020, did so few cities account for a substantial portion of global deaths, while many others with similar density, weather, age distribution, and travel patterns were spared? What can we really learn from Sweden, hailed as a great success by some because of its low case counts and deaths as the rest of Europe experiences a second wave, and as a big failure by others because it did not lock down and suffered excessive death rates earlier in the pandemic? Why did widespread predictions of catastrophe in Japan not bear out? The baffling examples go on.

It seems that there are a few people who are Super Spreaders. If early in a modest epidemic, an infected super spreader happens to go to an indoor event — a wedding reception, a popular church, a sports bar, a concert — where it's noisy and people must talk louder to be heard, or there is singing or cheering — that one super-spreader is often the cause an unstoppable explosion of infection. A super spreader sheds a massive amount of virus and, in the course of breathing or talking, projects it thought the enclosed space. It's called an Overdispersion event.

There are COVID-19 incidents in which a single person likely infected 80 percent or more of the people in the room in just a few hours. But, at other times, COVID-19 can be surprisingly much less contagious. Overdispersion and super-spreading of this virus are found in research across the globe. A growing number of studies estimate that a majority of infected people may not infect a single other person. A recent paper found that in Hong Kong, which had extensive testing and contact tracing, about 19 percent of cases were responsible for 80 percent of transmission, while 69 percent of cases did not infect another person. This finding is not rare: Multiple studies from the beginning have suggested that as few as 10 to 20 percent of infected people may be responsible for as much as 80 to 90 percent of transmission, and that many people barely transmit it.

This highly skewed, imbalanced distribution means that an early run of bad luck with a few super-spreading events, or clusters, can produce dramatically different outcomes even for otherwise similar countries.

.
The death rate is affected by additional bad-luck variables: How many unhealthy or elderly either attended the super-spreader event, or were infected during in the rapid chain reaction of no-symptom contagion that followed the event? Another death-rate variable is how much virus did those who were infected take in? The larger the Viral Load they get at one time, the sicker they become.

The article is titled, This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic by Zeynep Tufekci.

It was news to me.

—

____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato

Submitted by Raggedy Ann on Fri, 10/02/2020 - 8:11am

The universe is in charge

and it will have it's way with the world. The virus is here to change our world - our society - every facet. Get used to it and look to the universe for the answers. Create your own reality - now is the time!

—

"The “jumpers” reminded us that one day we will all face only one choice and that is how we will die, not how we will live." Chris Hedges on 9/11

Submitted by QMS on Fri, 10/02/2020 - 8:24am

Funny that

@Raggedy Ann

RT had a blurb up today about some research finding covid infected patients have similar dream experiences...

Submitted by Fishtroller 02 on Fri, 10/02/2020 - 10:18am

This sounds too much like Deepak stuff to me.

@Raggedy Ann Or Marianne Williamson and the Noetic Sciences crowd.
Just where exactly in the universe should we look for answers?
I personally vote for the sword in Orion's belt. It contains a treasure box called the Trapezium. The answers are probably in there.

—

"Without the right to offend, freedom of speech does not exist." Taslima Nasrin

Submitted by Lookout on Fri, 10/02/2020 - 9:27am

According to worldometer

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
The US has the 10th most deaths per million population (642), and Sweden is 14th (583).
You may need to click on the column Deaths/million to rank the countries accordingly.

We are number one in total deaths 212,729 and counting...69 new deaths today so far.
Sweden is 27th at 5,895 with 5 new deaths today.

—

“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Submitted by fire with fire on Fri, 10/02/2020 - 10:46am

Interesting

@Lookout .

I purposefully did not include "countries" that were not nation states like the United Arab Emirates or Andorra. I have no rooting interest in the number 8, and if I missed a couple of countries with higher death rates with my amateur googling "research", it only supports my argument about the fear mongering in our political culture.

Sweden isn't comparable to the US in any way, shape or

@fire with fire

fashion. I suspect that the Swedes might be aware of that, but maybe not. We're also not comparable to Cuba or Spain. We rally can't draw any conclusions about anything from comparing the two except that both have people.

be well and have a good one

#4 .

I purposefully did not include "countries" that were not nation states like the United Arab Emirates or Andorra. I have no rooting interest in the number 8, and if I missed a couple of countries with higher death rates with my amateur googling "research", it only supports my argument about the fear mongering in our political culture.

More on Sweden:
.

Number of deaths as of June 30 -- 5498

Number of deaths as of Sept 30 -- 5890

392 over 92 days = 4.2 per day
.

Number of deaths as of March 31 -- 284

Number of deaths as of June 30 -- 5498

5606 over 91 days = 61.6 per day

Put another way, The Asteroid Virus claimed 94% of its fatal victims by June 30.

So let's look at our six month record --

Number of deaths as of June 30 -- 130,301

Number of deaths as of Sept 30 -- 211,740

81,439 over 91 days = 895 per day

.

Number of deaths as of March 31 -- 5206

Number of deaths as of June 30 -- 130,301

124,095 over 91 days = 1,364 per day

So the American "curve" has been flattened modestly from 1364 per day to 895 per day -- roughly by a third. In Sweden, there is no "curve" -- the death rate abruptly shrank from over 60 a day to less than 5. This does not prove anything in this chaotic environment, but it damn sure fits with the Herd Immunity Rationale perfectly. Maybe, just maybe, our "scientists" might not be right.

Where are the screamer headlines about Sweden now? Where are those smug experts sneering about how unscientific and foolhardy the Swedish government is?
.

I agree with the point made by Pluto's Republic that cause and effect are extraordinarily hard to determine in this affair. Bad luck is probably the very best explanation for who does worse and who does better in counting up the dead bodies.

My dogged crusade is against certitude. And the certitude behind the avalanche of MSM accounts and social media "influencing" skews very, very heavily toward the voices telling you how bad the virus is and how stupid anybody is who does not follow the orders given by "science." Sweden was such a malefactor and for a while it looked really grim.

In Sweden they are saying, "Ah those poor Americans. Too bad they did not follow the dictates of science like we did."

—

That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

Submitted by fire with fire on Fri, 10/02/2020 - 5:55pm

I make no comparison between any countries

@enhydra lutris .

I am reacting to a zillion paid trolls who did compare Sweden to the US so long as it suited their propaganda purposes. Sweden can't be relevant when it suits you and irrelevant when it does not.

I stated clearly that the numbers I posted proved nothing. I am only attacking certitude. I have none.

You demonstrate tons of it.

—

I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.

Submitted by enhydra lutris on Fri, 10/02/2020 - 4:18pm

Since you decided to talk about "science", you might

@fire with fire
consider using data on infections over the periods in question to support the theory of herd immunity, since it related to infections. Deaths, especially over time, needn't be proportional to infections in civilized modern countries like Sweden. They have a health care system and could've learned the disease and its treatment and ramped it up in order to better treat and deal with the disease. Data on infections would speak far more directly to the question.

be well and have a good one.

#4 .

I purposefully did not include "countries" that were not nation states like the United Arab Emirates or Andorra. I have no rooting interest in the number 8, and if I missed a couple of countries with higher death rates with my amateur googling "research", it only supports my argument about the fear mongering in our political culture.

More on Sweden:
.

Number of deaths as of June 30 -- 5498

Number of deaths as of Sept 30 -- 5890

392 over 92 days = 4.2 per day
.

Number of deaths as of March 31 -- 284

Number of deaths as of June 30 -- 5498

5606 over 91 days = 61.6 per day

Put another way, The Asteroid Virus claimed 94% of its fatal victims by June 30.

So let's look at our six month record --

Number of deaths as of June 30 -- 130,301

Number of deaths as of Sept 30 -- 211,740

81,439 over 91 days = 895 per day

.

Number of deaths as of March 31 -- 5206

Number of deaths as of June 30 -- 130,301

124,095 over 91 days = 1,364 per day

So the American "curve" has been flattened modestly from 1364 per day to 895 per day -- roughly by a third. In Sweden, there is no "curve" -- the death rate abruptly shrank from over 60 a day to less than 5. This does not prove anything in this chaotic environment, but it damn sure fits with the Herd Immunity Rationale perfectly. Maybe, just maybe, our "scientists" might not be right.

Where are the screamer headlines about Sweden now? Where are those smug experts sneering about how unscientific and foolhardy the Swedish government is?
.

I agree with the point made by Pluto's Republic that cause and effect are extraordinarily hard to determine in this affair. Bad luck is probably the very best explanation for who does worse and who does better in counting up the dead bodies.

My dogged crusade is against certitude. And the certitude behind the avalanche of MSM accounts and social media "influencing" skews very, very heavily toward the voices telling you how bad the virus is and how stupid anybody is who does not follow the orders given by "science." Sweden was such a malefactor and for a while it looked really grim.

In Sweden they are saying, "Ah those poor Americans. Too bad they did not follow the dictates of science like we did."

—

That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

Submitted by fire with fire on Fri, 10/02/2020 - 6:06pm

I make no scientific claims

@enhydra lutris @enhydra lutris .

None. I just reported on the numbers that are posted. Since you missed this, let me repeat this sentence:

This does not prove anything in this chaotic environment, but it damn sure fits with the Herd Immunity Rationale perfectly. Maybe, just maybe, our "scientists" might not be right.

—

I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.

Submitted by enhydra lutris on Fri, 10/02/2020 - 9:52am

The dog that didn't bark. Testing, per se, is irrelevant. Where

is China in that Top 8? Missing, but why? Tons of factors, it isn't simple or mono-causal.

1) Test only a handful of folks every day because they are very, very (self) important and need to be given very, very special treatment from the earliest sign of infection on.

2) Test only the symptomatic, but only for purposes of seeing if they should be given medical care appropriate to the virus and quarantine the infected.

3) Combined 1 & 2

4) Test the symptomatic, inbound travelers and those who have attended potential superspreader events as well as those linked to them by rigorous contact tracing, and perform rigorous contact tracing on all infected persons in addition to quarantine.

5) Test randomly from pools of different pools based on occupation, location, and travel, contact trace and quarantine the infected.

6) Combined 4 & 5

Each of those testing regimens should be expected to have a different effect on per capita infections, especially on an all other things being equal basis. (timing, degree and extent of any lockdowns, amount of social distancing, number and size of potential superspreader events, etc.)

Fatalities are an entirely different matter. They will be partly based on total and per capita infections, of course, but also on much more. In the case of the US and less developed countries, it depends very much upon the ability of the populace to deliver relatively decent quality and pro-active home care and life support with minimal government and/or professional assistance, this will be different from places where all infected will be immediately given significant professional and governmental support, and countries somewhere in between the two poles.

The question, all things considered isn't why are we only #8. The question is why a country with our wealth and resources and productive capabilities isn't #80 or below.

be well and have a good one

—

That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

Submitted by Blue Republic on Sat, 10/03/2020 - 10:33am

Just guessing

@enhydra lutris

The question, all things considered isn't why are we only #8. The question is why a country with our wealth and resources and productive capabilities isn't #80 or below.

that it has more than a little to do with how unhealthy far too many Americans are. Given that, being at #8 might actually constitute doing pretty well.

Also a factor the high level resistance to early treatment at the onset of symptoms with safe and affordable therapeutics (as urged by many doctors and as censored by social media).

Last time I ran through the numbers a few weeks ago, the US' per capita death rate was something like 47 times higher than Japan's, despite having minimal lockdown restrictions compared to most places in the US. Again, I'm guessing, but kind of doubt that all that difference is attributable to Trump's incompetence.

As FWF points out (IIUC) - those claiming certitude about the situation seem to be those most adamant about maintaining authoritarian restrictions on their populations. And the woker they are the more extreme and intolerant of dissent. (see Victoria, Australia for example).

Kind of naive to expect a high degree of safety and certitude in life, generally.
Although a factory farm offers that, up to a point...