Thursday, May 28, 2020

COVID math


The issue of credit or blame is complicated. Trump ought to be credited with adopting the federalist strategy of allowing each state's governor to decide for him- or herself how to handle the pandemic. Beyond that, though, I think the individual governors deserve the credit or blame for their responses. It seems that red-state governors generally enjoy lower morbidity and mortality rates in their states than do blue-state governors. (Trump continues to be blamed because certain Americans are idiots who don't understand how federalism works.) This style of thinking works in reverse, too: Trump doesn't deserve credit for "saving the country" since he left the actual saving up to the state governments. He deserves credit only for opting to go federalist, as well he should have. And in so doing, he has once again exposed which ideology hews more closely to reality. I don't give Trump credit for saving 1.9 million lives, but it's certainly true that 1.9 million people who ought to be dead, according to wild-eyed projections, are not dead. And that's primarily thanks to certain state governors.

ADDENDUM: regarding my claim that red states are generally faring better than blue states, there's this from Instapundit:

As states began reopening their economies a month ago — led by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott — the media’s favorite “experts” predicted doom. We were told to expect a deadly “surge” of new cases, a “second wave” of COVID-19 infections.

And then . . . it didn’t happen.

The per-capita death rate in Georgia remains 88% lower than New York’s; Florida’s rate is 93% lower and Texas is 96% lower. In Florida last week, there were 264 coronavirus deaths, an average 38 deaths daily, which is about half of what they were averaging two weeks ago. In Texas, 151 of 254 counties have never reported a single COVID-19 death. While Georgia reported an increase last week in the number of identified infections, officials say that reflects greatly increased testing, and the daily number of reported COVID-19 deaths in Georgia has continued trending downward after peaking at 55 on April 16.

The media don’t want to accept the reality that has become apparent, namely that this disease will never become as prevalent in the rest of America as it has been in New York and New Jersey, which combined have 40% of all U.S. coronavirus deaths. The specific conditions that gave rise to the epidemic outbreak in March and April — when the New York/New Jersey region was racking up hundreds of deaths daily, week after week — simply do not exist in Texas or Florida, and are not going to exist in the future. “Experts” have been reluctant to admit this.

And see here for how the media dupe you into thinking the opposite is true.



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