I'd like to write about politics. It's still all too crazy to write much about. A good many of the Republican-leaning bloggers are still living in fantasy-land, and a lot of The Usual Dem-Leaning sources seem to have found opium dreams of their own. Those are not good places to be.
The pandemic is still raging, and still killing off the elderly in significant numbers -- it's as if we'd fought WWII by filling the enlisted ranks with seniors. But we've already lost more Americans to the coronavirus than we did soldiers in that war. That's not a fantasy -- it's a nightmare.
It sounds like a good excuse to tell us more about the Far Edge.
ReplyDeleteI tried this before. I am a little suspicious of the numbers. Italy did a review by a board of doctors and found about 1/8th died of the virus, and 7/8ths died with the virus. It apparently is quite opportunistic, and infects a lot of people weakened by other things. No doubt our fraction is different from the fraction in Italy, but what it is, I have no clue. We won't know the right answer until it is in our rear-view mirror, and perhaps not then.
ReplyDeleteDon M: first off, [citation needed} for this supposed "review by a board of doctors" in Italy: don't cite stuff without providing a link to the source!
ReplyDeleteSecond, the whole weaselworded "by COVID vs. with COVID" line is, simply, bullshit. Death certificates list the things that, taken together, killed the person. If I die because I was morbidly overweight and I had an infected hangnail my obesity-compromised immune system couldn't cope with, both of them caused my death. Likewise, if someone "weakened by other things" contracts the COVID-19 coronavirus and dies, both it and the other thing killed 'em -- and they might've done fine had the only had one or the other, but they are dead now and would not have been had the virus not come along. Dead is dead and you can look up "excess mortality" for 2020 compared to each of the preceding ten years for more info about the damage the virus has done. You can even find links by searching my blog for those terms.
Reuters explains it better than me.