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Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

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You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 Coronavirus / COVID-19 Coronavirus Update – Tuesday / Wednesday, April 28-29

COVID-19 Coronavirus Update – Tuesday / Wednesday, April 28-29

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Seriously good, short read:

… We’re all used to verbal bullshit. We’re all used to campaign promises and weasel words, and we’re pretty good at seeing through that because we’ve had a lot of practice. But as the world has become increasingly quantified and the currency of arguments has become statistics, facts and figures and models and such, we’re increasingly confronted, even in the popular press, with numerical and statistical arguments. And this area’s really ripe for bullshit, because people don’t feel qualified to question information that’s given to them in quantitative form.

Are there bullshit narratives about the coronavirus that you are concerned about right now?

What’s happened with this pandemic that we’re not accustomed to in the epidemiology community is that it’s been really heavily politicized. Even when scientists are very well-intentioned and not trying to support any side of the narrative, when they do work and release a paper it gets picked up by actors with political agendas.

Whether it’s talking about seroprevalence or estimating the chance that this is even going to come to the United States at all each study gets picked up and placed into this little political box and sort of used as a cudgel to beat the other side with.

So even when the material isn’t being produced as bullshit, it’s being picked up and used in the service of that by overstating its claims, by cherry-picking the information that’s out there and so on. And I think that’s kind of the biggest problem that we’re facing…


Reader Interactions

19Comments

  1. 1.

    Mary G

    Carl Bergstrom rocks. I started following him on Twitter last July when he posted about his friends who are crows. He has a book coming out in August titled “Calling Bullshit” I hope to read.

  2. 2.

    Amir Khalid

    Malaysia’s daily numbers: 94 new cases, total 5,945. Only 22 new cases are from local community infection; the other 72 are imported cases i.e. Malaysians returning from abroad. 55 patients recovered and discharged, total 4,087 or 68.7% of all reported cases. No deaths, total still 100. Case fatality rate: 2.39%. Worldometer link to come when updated.

  3. 3.

    slightly_peeved

    That tweet about NZ and Australia’s response really nails it. Clearly the issue for the US was all the infected people who drove over the US’s land border with the EU.

  4. 4.

    Mary G

    @Amir Khalid: Very impressive stats. Is there a very strict lockdown or universal mask use when people do go out? I am still enraged about our VP prancing around the Mayo Clinic bare faced.

  5. 5.

    Amir Khalid

    @Mary G:

    Lockdown here is quite strictly observed and enforced. From what I’ve seen, most of us here are compliant with lockdown and mask-wearing. And our national leaders are definitely not doing photo-op visits to hospitals.

    Re the Mayo Clinic visit: Did Pence invite himself, or did the Clinic invite him? With so much work to do, I can’t imagine them having much time for VIP visitors.

  6. 6.

    Mary G

    @Amir Khalid: They are in a very red area of a blue state so I would guess that Jared cooked it up with a big donor there to distract from Twitler’s stupid off the cuff “remedies,” but Pence’s arrogance was all anybody could talk about, so it failed.

  8. 8.

    terben

    Australian Dept of Health bulletin:

    ‘As at 3:00pm on 29 April 2020, there have been 6,746 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Australia. There have been 15 new cases since 3:00pm yesterday.

    Of the 6,746 confirmed cases in Australia, 89 have died and 5,667 have been reported as recovered from COVID-19. More than 544,000 tests have been conducted across Australia.’

    There are now less than 1000 active cases in the country, less than 100 of those are hospitalised. States which have imposed restrictions beyond the national guidelines have either eased or indicated that they will ease them this week.  There is a note of cautious optimism in the air.

  10. 10.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    One example [of intentional bullshit] might be this insistence for a while on graphing the number of cases on a per-capita basis, so that people could say the US response is so much better than the rest of the world because we have a slower rate of growth per capita. That was basically graphical malfeasance or bullshit. When a wildfire starts spreading, you’re interested in how it’s spreading now, not whether it’s spreading in a 100-acre wood or millions of square miles of national forest.

    Fun fact, if the US was handling the Virus like England, we would have 120,000 dead right now, like Belgium, the worst hit country in the world, 180,000 dead.  And this is the US with the Trump admins non-existent virus response.  Maybe it’s me, but an informed, actively involved public may just help more than well informed leaders and a docile public.  So do on on about weasel words…

  11. 11.

    Ixnay

    The good Dr. Ixnay and I have been discussing the alarming undercount of fatalities caused by Covid 19. There is clearly a need for a concise and easily understood term for this gap. Borrowing from the sabermetricians, who use WAR, Wins Above Replacement to make a players value to the team clear, she has coined DAR, Deaths Above Replacement. When you want to lay waste to a good portion of the population, you don’t want some minor league reaper who can turn the double play some of the time, you want an MVP Grim Reaper who can do the job. Feel free to steal. DAR.

  12. 12.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Amir Khalid: Re the Mayo Clinic visit: Did Pence invite himself, or did the Clinic invite him? With so much work to do, I can’t imagine them having much time for VIP visitors.

    Are you being sarcastic? This is the Trump administration.

  13. 13.

    VOR

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques:  The State of Minnesota announced a partnership with Mayo Clinic, which is based in Minnesota, to increase testing capacity about 10x. The Governor is Democratic and was targeted by Trump earlier this month with one of his “Liberate” tweets urging on the stupid people protesters. Minnesota has historically been a blue state but the local (Rochester area) Congressman is an R. I don’t know if Pence was invited or not, but his comments make it sound like he invited himself. And who is going to turn down a visit from the VP, especially at a time when the state needs federal help?
    https://www.twincities.com/2020/04/28/pence-visits-mayo-clinic-learns-of-coronavirus-testing-partnership-with-minnesota/

  14. 14.

    Laura Too

    A few things I notice-Putin’s PPE VS Pence PPE (?) okay, lack there of. Such a striking difference would make a remarkable side by side photo comparison.  I think the Mayo visit may have come about because of the flap on 45’s tweet to “liberate MN”. Reading between the lines, a CEO of a major world corp. based in MN called 45 to tell him to knock it off or he would be getting even less PPE than he was now or some other form of blackmail. It was very effective as his little war of words ceased. It is possible the visit came about because of that. Pence’s lack of mask sort of seems like a dogs humping your leg to show dominance, outward display of affection that is actually aggression.

  16. 16.

    Laura Too

    @Mary G: A high compliment, thanks! I do miss him daily, and during this especially. I would go crazy if not for this place. I hear his voice in so many people. And I love the story tellers. He was a great story teller. And it is good to know he is remembered.

  17. 17.

    Amir Khalid

    Reposted from wrong thread.

    I have The Guardian‘s coronavirus liveblog on another tab. It just put up this Agence France-Presse story:

    Treating coronavirus patients with the antiviral drug remdesivir showed no “significant clinical benefits” in the first randomised trial of its kind, according to research released on Wednesday, AFP reports.

    In a study among more than 200 COVID-19 patients in Wuhan, China, published in The Lancet, doctors found no positive effects of administering the drug compared with a control group of adults.

    The findings were released after US pharmaceutical giant Gilead, which makes remdesivir, said a separate large-scale trial with the drug had showed positive results.

    “Unfortunately, our trial found that while safe and adequately tolerated, remdesivir did not provide significant benefits over placebo,” said Bin Cao from China-Japan Friendship Hospital and Capital Medical University in China, who led the research.

    “This is not the outcome we hoped for.”

    As I recall, Trump was touting remdesivir. He’s an investor in Gilead, isn’t he?

  18. 18.

    UncleEbeneezer

    So, a month ago I had this problem with swelling of my toes.   I went to a podiatrist, got tested for gout and some other tests then ultimately determined it was probably chilblains.  I’ve always had issues with circulation in my extremities and the weather was very cold and wet so it made total sense. They’ve since cleared up (which is par for the course with chilblains). Now it looks like this could be (asymptomatic) Covid-19 related.  Otherwise I haven’t had anything beyond usual allergy symptoms for lungs/nose etc.  Doctor’s office is closed because of Covid concerns but left a message to see if I need/can get antibody test.

    Anyways, just wanted to share for anyone else who may have these symptoms and general knowledge etc.:

    In addition to attacking the respiratory system, coronavirus may be attacking toes. Cases of a new mysterious skin condition that causes purple, blue or red discoloration of the toes, and sometimes the fingers, are popping up across the country, prompting dermatologists to wonder if there is a connection to COVID-19.

  19. 19.

    Kay

    My client just got one of the PPA loan/grants. 27k – we applied for 36 but they reduced it. He has a body shop with 4 employees. I’m ridiculously pleased that someone finally got one :)

    It starts to get complicated because we had already put his employees into “shared work” which is a UI program where the employer pays half their wages (for half time) and UI contributes half of what they would have gotten in unemployment. THEN they started getting the extra 600 a week so now we have to take everyone off that and into this new program because it’s the paycheck protection act so is to be used to be used for payroll (in addition to some other things).

    My take on this so far is small businesses aren’t maybe putting enough thought into this- how to use the various programs that are available to get thru this in a flexible way- plug one in and then another. I would exempt restaurants from that observation- they have a really tough situation. I could see just curling up into a ball ‘o hopelessness with owner/operator restaurant.

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