First, it is acknowledged that the covidtracking website has had better data than the federal government--in fact it was started at the beginning of the pandemic by reporters from the Atlantic because the federal data released by CDC was limited and unreliable. Subsequently it has become foundation funded and its founder left the project.
This graph, from Our World in Data, compares countries wrt their Covid deaths per million population, as the pandemic progressed. You can see that deaths in the US are only up slightly at end October, and have been fairly steady for the past 3 months.
While tests and cases have been skyrocketing, deaths have not, at least so far. Hopefully that reflects appropriate treatment with HCQ and other drugs, despite NIH/Fauci advice to use nothing but remdesivir, which the WHO multicenter trial showed to be of no benefit.
Yesterday the WSJ published an excellent piece that explains a lot of things, but very quickly. Track and trace is useless because there are too many asymptomatic cases. There are probably 50-100 million Americans who have already had Covid, most asymptomatic, and are immune and will not benefit from a vaccine. Mortality is similar to flu. Read it or listen.
While agree with hospitals not being overwhelmed. Staffing is another issue, staff are burned out from conflicting information poor training and inappropriate amounts of correct PPE. Thanks his coupled with limited educated leadership leaving boots on the ground staff to fend and educate for themselves. This leading to inconsistent sometimes bad information being used for education.
ReplyDeleteThese factors by themselves easily overcome and corrected, but all together lead to fatigue and burnout.
Some thing that is never taken into account by the number crunchers.