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Eughh. You want to strip away the politics, but all your reporting is political. The spectator uses it's arguments to hold a specific political position, usin
by dm319 6y ago
Eughh. You want to strip away the politics, but all your reporting is political. The spectator uses it's arguments to hold a specific political position, using emotive terms like "The coronavirus doomsayers could not even wait until the fall for the apocalyptic announcements of the dreaded second wave.", "those New York death numbers have declined, but they have not been replaced by deaths in the rest of the country. This should be good news. Instead, it is no news."
As usual, it is an argument about the behaviour of people and the press on the opposite side of the political spectrum, like every damn discussion in America is about.
Some of the points are valid, but it's hard to take the article seriously when it clearly has a political agenda. It's main thesis is that there isn't an uptick in deaths, so this is a good thing. It doesn't talk about the death rate in absolute terms and whether that is acceptable. It doesn't model the economic impact of lock down on future deaths. It also misses the obvious point that the death rate lags around 3 weeks behind the cases, because that is how long the virus takes to kill.
There are valid discussions to be had about the economic and human costs of lock down, the worth of human life. In europe the places that locked down hard and early have the virus under far better control and were able to open up their economies with safety measures in place earlier than those that have had to deal with the cost of locking down late. If you look at the number of cases in the US, it is clearly taking off again, and is at a rate higher than the peak in April [1].
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
- zaroth 6y agoI may not have made it clear enough, the Spectator was just an article I found equally flawed as TFA but from the opposite perspective. So basically I agree with the faults you found with that article. We are absolutely seeing an uptick in cases. Compared to early April we are also testing a lot more, and I’m not sure that the average positivity rate across the US is higher now than it was, e.g. April 1, but at a local level there are definitely places where this is true. Certainly positivity rate has increased dramatically since, e.g. June 1 in many places. We don’t see a concomitant increase in death rates because most cases must be in the 20-30 yrs age range, probably due to that age range predominantly being the ones going out in large groups over the last month. I think everyone is looking for the right balance of policies that minimizes overall suffering and loss of life. I’m not sure which European countries you would consider having locked down “early” rather than “late”. The decision to open economies at this point seems purely a political one and no longer based on objective facts like hospital capacity. I think the simple fact is the US saw a surge over the last month because millions of young adults held truly massive rallies. If rallies subside or the population becomes substantially infected and then immune, case counts will fall rapidly. That age range is largely unaffected by SARS-CoV-2 and the US doesn’t have a large number of multi-generational households, so luckily I think the case counts amount to a lot of smoke with little fire.