Edit: Derek Thompson wrote yesterday in the Atlantic about the same topic. Probably much more fun to read his piece instead.
Taking the US covid-19 death and infection graphs from world-o-meter on July 2nd and aligning them in the time axis so that the first peaks match seems to reveal a couple of things:
- deaths will soon rise, and significantly.
- on the left side there are deaths before there were cases. The most coherent explaination is the the lack of testing in the beginning.
- while cases did slowly go down after the first peak, deaths did so to a greater extend. Probably since medicine caught up with treatment. Not one miracle drug but good old care and health care pros doing what they are doing. Because, well, they are awesome. Smart, dedicated, caring, just awesome. I hope they never venture on to the Internet and see how stupid and ignorant we all are.
In light of that situation somebody tweeted this:
If there ever was the essence of a turd-tweet, then this is probably up there. Yes he sputters non sense non stop. Pre reign, or now. It is just all self serving nonsense. What makes this one so bad is that this comes from the person who could save those hundreds of thousands of lives. I am of the conviction that there are no evil or good people per se. Just people in circumstances. But once in a while specific people are in power and put a significant and always unnecessary spike on human suffering by nature of them being in charge. This man qualifies. The US is in deep trouble since a small but ardent part of the population got convinced that his stupid man is the only option if you want ‘law & order’. For them it is him or anarchy. People outside of his camp really could do better in communicating that this is not the case.