From our benefactor. Remember again that these numbers will be understated. That said, the curve continues to flatten, good news.
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The chart has been changed a bit to allow it to fit cleanly. Bars every two days and a stacked graph.
In terms of accuracy, from April 1st to 5th, New York pulled 1,125 dead people out of houses. That is eight times more than normal, so we can assume that 984 are people who wouldn’t have died without the pandemic (which doesn’t mean they all died from Covid-19.)
The official death rate for those five days was 2,223, so the undercount was about 40 percent.
We can assume that many bodies of people who live alone, or couples who died at about the same time (remember that towards the end of Covid-19 you can’t move) remain to be discovered.
In hospitals, deaths are often only being counted as Covid-19 if there was a test confirming it.
I still suspect the number, when population studies come out, will be about double official initial counts.
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Please use the comments here for topics unrelated to recent posts; so, stuff unrelated to Covid or the US Democratic primary.
Our benefactor writes:
We seem to be settled in for a while. The exponential curve is flattening, but until the headlines stop announcing more cases and deaths every day, the pressure to stay at home will remain. We’re one day past what was predicted to be the peak. Tomorrow, I will change the bar chart to a stacked graph.
Update: The US federal government has reversed itself on stopping paying for testing.
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Biden was one of the key architects of the bankrupty bill, which made it impossible to declare bankruptcy on student loans.
The result of the bankruptcy bill is that millenials and zoomers who went to university and don’t have rich parents can’t own a house and many have decided they can’t afford families. They expect to live in poverty for decades as a result. (Not going to university means you can’t even apply for good jobs.)
Biden pushed hard for three-strikes laws, the drug wars, and so on. He is responsible for completely destroying entire generations of poor black men and gutting inner cities.
Biden has repeatedly tried to cut social security. He didn’t just vote for war with Iraq, he pushed the lie that Iraq had WMD, and worked hard to promote approval for the war.
He actively helped repeal Glass-Steagall, setting up the 2007/8 financial crisis that caused a ten-year long “recession” for ordinary people.
We live in Joe Biden’s world. Joe Biden was there every step of the way, creating a world in which young people live in poverty, poor black (and white) men are in prison, and in which the rich get richer and everyone else scrambles to even keep up.
By any rational consideration, Biden is a bad man. Evil, even.
Let us move briefly to Sanders. Bernie’s key planks were Medicare-for-all and student debt forgiveness, with a large climate change plan.
There are now great cries that Sanders supporters should support and vote for Biden.
People supported Sanders so ferociously because his policies meant they could actually have health care they could use (Medicare-for-all) and might be able to not spend decades in debt, and thus start families and maybe even own a home.
In other words, Sanders policies would make them more likely to NOT DIE and to be able to live a decent life.
Biden’s policies do not do that. Period. So when you see upset Sanders supporters, understand that they’re angry that people who voted Biden don’t seem to care if they die or live in poverty.
Biden, even if Sanders likes him personally (a fact which should have had no effect on his strategy, and is one of Sanders ethical failings), is one of the top fifty or so people in the country responsible for how shitty the US is to so many people. That is Biden’s legacy. He’s a warmonger, and someone who has favored rich people over the middle class and poor all his life, and made sure that the poor and young were hurt–and hurt badly.
Trump may be worse, but this a case of Beelzebub vs. Satan.
The Left is not Democratic. It does not have the same beliefs as Democrats. It does not believe in war. It does not believe young people should be poor. It does not believe in increasing fracking and destroying the climate (which Biden/Obama did–and do). It does not believe that whether you can have health care should depend on how much money you have.
The two are not friends–they’re not even allies, because allies don’t make separate peace.
The entire argument for voting for Biden rather than Trump, if you’re left-wing, is, “We’ll throw you some scraps, and kick you slightly less often.”
I mean, OK, I guess?
But don’t act like it’s some great moral argument, or that the Left and Democrats are friends, or allies, or even exist in the same moral universe.
Democrats like Biden are people who have done literal incalculable harm to both Americans and foreigners throughout their careers. Those who prefer Biden to Sanders are people who want more evil done than good, claiming that it is less evil than Trump would do (which it may well be, especially if you’re American). But they don’t actually want good. They aren’t, on the whole, in favor of doing good. They are, on the whole, in favor of doing evil. (No, no, don’t tell me about Biden’s platform. His record is what matters.)
So, yeah, Bernie losing matters, and Americans will pay the price. Biden is evil, there is no question about that. He is so far from being good that he’s somewhere around the sixth circle of hell. The argument is, yet again, simply about voting for the lesser evil.
But a majority of Democrats did want the evil guy rather than the good guy, and that’s what they have.
So be it.
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The curve continues to flatten, which is overall good news, though the mortality rate continues its march upwards.
The federal government will stop paying for Covid-19 testing sites on Friday, so data will be even more unreliable after that.
Edit: The three-day moving average chart was wrong for about an hour. It has been corrected. My apologies.
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Bernie Sanders
Yeah, not much to say right this moment. I think this is a mistake; there’s a lot of flux right now. This isn’t an ordinary season, and he might have made it in, though, obviously, the odds were against him. I suspect part of Sanders’ reasoning is that, unlike Biden, he wasn’t willing to urge his followers to go vote during a pandemic and many states were making mail-in voting impossible.
Biden was always most likely to win, alas. There are a lot of people who want a return to the old normal, and Biden, for all his flaws, symbolizes that. Plus, for most people, he’s best known threw memes showing him as Obama’s best buddy (thanks, Onion).
Biden won’t be President for long, if he wins. He’s clearly in decline, even if he’s a figurehead, someone else will be running the show. Or they’ll just hand it to the vice president. His vice president pick is incredibly important, since that person may well be who is actually being elected as President.
As for Bernie, this was his last hurrah. Warren is seen as having betrayed the left; she won’t be able to win if she runs again. I would guess AOC is the heir apparent, but we will see.
Bernie lost because Democrats are actually conservatives (Republicans are reactionaries). Independents tend left, but don’t vote as much as registered Democrats. Likewise, the old vote more than the young, and there was heavy-handed engineering to shut down the votes of poorer or younger people. (For example, shutting down polling places in poorer neighbourhoods, leading to massive lineups in the few that remained. Same with campuses.)
Bernie was the only chance of having a good government in charge in the United States for the next four to eight years.
If Trump wins, we have another four years before a chance at someone decent. If Biden wins, it will be eight, as even if Biden’s VP loses in 24, he still takes up the running slot.
Either way, we’re out of time on things like climate change. We were already past the point of no return, we’ve now lost the serious possibility of mitigation.
So be it. Be well, all and take into account that, no matter who wins, the 20s are not going to be a good time unless you’re already quite well-off.
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The three-day rate of increase of new cases continues to drop, and the curve continues to bend.
As of Monday afternoon, 2,738 New York City residents have died from ‘confirmed’ cases of COVID-19, according to the city Department of Health. That’s an average of 245 a day since the previous Monday.
But another 200 city residents are now dying at home each day, compared to 20 to 25 such deaths before the pandemic, said Aja Worthy-Davis, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s office. And an untold number of them are unconfirmed.
They’ve said they’ll start counting likely Covid cases as Covid, but it seems unlikely they’ll backfit data, and this is only New York.
I’d expect that the death numbers are about double (maybe more) that of the deaths we know about. One of the problems is that when Covid goes from awful to terrible, it can also make it impossible to go for help. So, if you’re on your own or only with other people with cases, don’t leave it too long.
The data from our benefactor:
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