Four hundred thousand

[Kevin]

In the new documentary, Birx gives Gupta her gut-wrenching answer when asked how much of an impact it would have made if the US had paused earlier and followed through with the safety measures that were proven to slow the spread.

"I look at it this way. The first time we have an excuse," Birx says. "There were about a hundred thousand deaths that came from that original surge. All of the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially."

Source

That's the cost of our botched response to this virus. Four hundred thousand people dead, who could be at home now with their families. They died alone, without the touch of a loved one to ease their passage. They got loaded into refrigerated trucks because there were too many for morgues. They were left literally to rot in a couple of cases by funeral directors who could not keep up with the number of people dying, only being found when the stench and liquid from putrefaction alerted outsiders. They were buried alone, with survivors unable to receive the comfort of their worship. We bitched about wearing masks, about a violation of our freedoms, armed mobs took over statehouses. Fights on airplanes. Stupid reactions such as signs that said you could not wear a mask while inside a store. Asians were and are being targeted by bigots. We promoted quack cures, listened to the My Pillow guy talk about ingesting oleander - a poison - or our own President talk about cleaning our lungs with bleach and introducing UV light inside our bodies to kill the virus. Briefings to keep the public up to date became petulant combat sessions held by a leader who was simply not interested in the problem. Scientists were harassed and death threats made. Local public health officials quit or had to have police protection. Our disease experts were overruled by politicians looking for personal gain.

Fifty years from now, when all this has had the benefit of time and retrospection, there will be only one conclusion:

WE LOST OUR ****ING MINDS!!

And four hundred thousand men, women and children paid the price.

[Honda]

We were told by dr. Fauci and by Speaker Pelosi that masks were not necessary for weeks.

[Kevin]

Well, that gets us to April. 63,000 people had died by then. Since then, another half million have died.

Needlessly.

[Honda]

Okay it's fruitless. No sense in arguing or continuing multi paragraph disagreement regarding the response to the virus. I can find as many sources as you can supporting the other side of it. So like I started it's fruitless.

[Kevin]

I don't think there is any side to this. 400,000 needless deaths pretty much tell the story here.

[Honda]

Look this is as far as I'm going. When the virus hit nobody knew a damn thing about it. The Brilliance of our entire National medical machine knew nothing about it or how to deal with it. We like almost every other country in the world were blindsided by it. Your numbers can't be proven , in fact they are supposition. I don't like the fact that the whole virus situation has been politicized. But it has and it will continue to be as long as people think there's some political Capital to be gained. Over and out have a great evening. I'm going to watch some basketball.

[Kevin]

By April, we all knew it was airborne, deadly, spread asymptomatically, and highly transmissible. We knew masks and social distancing worked. That was nearly a half a million deaths ago. No amount of hand waving will change that, as Trump's own virus coordinator said today.

They didn't have to die. That's not politics. That's human tragedy. And it did not have to be.

[UTAH]

...400,000 needless deaths pretty much tell the story here.

Ding Ding Ding...

Hunter

[Scooter]

https://www.statista.com/statistics/...vid-by-age-us/

300,000 deaths were of people that were over 75. Another 113,000 were of people over 65.

I think it is a stretch to say that 400,000 people died unnecessarily because of COVID. I think it is more correct to say that because of political infighting and shenanigans, it was probably more deadly than necessary if political pundits would have been more worried about constituents, than political points.

[Kevin]

Trump's own virus coordinator thought 400,000 was a pretty accurate number. She would be in a better position to judge, I think, than anyone. After all, in large measure, she is talking about her own effectiveness.

What point are you making with the age breakdown? I didn't follow that.

[mgrist]

In another thread Dave posted;

I have continued to listen to the news and hear the stories of continued doom by the TV media and then look at published statistics in published media, ie WSJ and NYT---and I cannot correlate the two----and now I am not alone:

From today's NYT:

The U.S. media is an outlier
The coverage by U.S. publications with a national audience has been much more negative than coverage by any other source that the researchers analyzed, including scientific journals, major international publications and regional U.S. media. “The most well-read U.S. media are outliers in terms of their negativity,” Molly Cook, a co-author of the study, told me.

About 87 percent of Covid coverage in national U.S. media last year was negative. The share was 51 percent in international media, 53 percent in U.S. regional media and 64 percent in scientific journals.

Notably, the coverage was negative in both U.S. media outlets with liberal audiences (like MSNBC) and those with conservative audiences (like Fox News).
There is much more than that---but you can get the essence of this distortion---and I have to ask---why?

Every morning in the hotel I hear the sad news of how the numbers are rising----and then I look at the daily insert on the front page of the NYT---shown below---and again--wonder why

BTW---there is detail data down to state and county levels to backup this front page summary.

In that thread Curt said:

Now’s the time?

Liars will be lying about these figures for the next generation.

I don't think we will ever know how many died or what the real truth of the whole thing is. It's easy to blame everything on China and Trump also, who knows?

[Kevin]

For some reason, people want to make everything about Trump. He is the lens through which everything is seen. I only mentioned Trump in one sentence, as part of the larger overall situation. I expressly did NOT blame Trump for everything and neither did Birx. I kept it in terms of the overall response, both federal and state, and how we as a people acted.

Yet that gets interpreted as blaming Trump for everything.

It is a depressing sign of the tribalism of our society that we cannot speak of facts such as 550,000 dead fellow Americans without simultaneously making the issue not about them but about one man - Donald J. Trump - and seeking to deflect any blame from him.

It isn't about him. It is about four hundred thousand Americans who died needlessly. We knew from April on how to keep them alive but chose not to do so. That's partly on Trump but even more on just plain people who decided to follow a politician instead of public health officials. They made it about Trump, just like here in this thread.

That's why I say we lost our ****ing minds. This is about us, not Trump. Maybe this was the real problem we faced - our own tribalism kept us from treating the pandemic as anything but another game of political football and four hundred thousand fellow Americans were just collateral damage in our fight with ourselves.

That's the real pity of all this - score being kept in terms of dead Americans.

[CactusCurt]

But it eliminated the flu......

[UTAH]

One thing I'll point out is this did happen on Trump's watch. He was the President of the most powerful country on earth at the time. Yet, we responded like a Third-World Country.

We are better than this.

Hunter

[Kevin]

As of today

Uzbekistan has had 82,000 cases. 80,000 have recovered.

Only 626 Uzbeks have died. Their death rate is .7%. Ours is 1.7. We are dying at a rate more than twice that of Uzbekistan.

Responding like a third world country would have been a vast improvement.