Pun Salad

‘There is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free,” former president Barack Obama reportedly told members of the Obama Alumni Association. “That’s the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic — not just institutional norms — but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk. And when you start moving in those directions, it can accelerate pretty quickly as we’ve seen in other places.”

This is, at best, shameless projection.

We now know that the Obama administration engaged in unprecedented abuses of power, not merely in its persistent attempts to circumvent the other branches of the United States government, but in its weaponizing of government institutions for partisan ends, including our intelligence agencies.

Are COVID-19 deaths undercounted? Yes, especially if people with other illnesses die at home and are never tested for the virus that causes the disease. Are COVID-19 deaths overcounted? Probably also yes, especially when physicians try to compensate for the lack of testing by inferring that COVID-19 caused a death without laboratory confirmation, but also when they assume that the disease killed someone who tested positive, even if the actual cause might have been something else.

Judging from excess mortality in places hit hard by the epidemic, the first problem is bigger than the second problem, although those figures are ambiguous, may be incomplete, and so far are limited to relatively brief periods of time. In principle, the accuracy of COVID-19 death tallies is an empirical question, albeit one that may never be conclusively answered. But like virtually every other pandemic puzzle, it is also a political question, as illustrated by a recent New York Times story that charges Scott Jensen, a Minnesota family doctor and Republican state legislator, with aiding and abetting right-wing "denialists" who think all the hoopla about COVID-19 is a conspiracy cooked up by Donald Trump's enemies.

Compare it to all the diseases and events that cause death in the world. Don’t let yourself be duped. We are witnessing the idiocy of health bureaucrats, fake news media, and politicians. This faux crisis is all about power, control, and money.

Look at the list of causes of deaths worldwide. It is a way to gain a perspective on this manufactured crisis. National Geographic magazine says your lifetime chance of being struck by lightning is 1 in 3000. Your chance of dying of COVID-19 this year in Texas is 1 in 50,000. You are 16X more likely to be killed by lightning than by this coronavirus in Texas.

With respect to "Compare for Yourself": You are not comparing apples to apples in your risk calculation.

That National Geographic Flash Facts About Lightning demands my e-mail address, so I passed. But I assume the National Weather Service (How Dangerous is Lightning?) risk numbers aren't much different.

According to the NWS Storm Data, over the last 30 years (1989-2018) the U.S. has averaged 43 reported lightning fatalities per year. Only about 10% of people who are struck by lightning are killed, leaving 90% with various degrees of disability. More recently, in the last 10 years (2009-2018), the U.S. has averaged 27 lightning fatalities.

And I'm sure you can compare Covid deaths with that as easily as I can.

The pandemic is complicated. Deciding on good policy is complicated. But a basic aspect of the American experience is not complicated and ought to be decisively affecting policy: the relationship of population density to the spread of the coronavirus. The relationship means that a great deal of the discussion about why some cities are doing worse than others is beside the point. These analyses may satisfy a natural urge to assign blame, and some of them surely have merit, but the role of one underlying demographic variable, population density, is immune to manipulation by the smartest policy.

Numbers don’t lie.

And the shocking number about the true impact of the coronavirus pandemic on New Hampshire comes from the NH Department of Health and Human Services: The total number of Granite Staters under 60 and without some co-morbidity who’ve been killed by the coronavirus?

Zero.

Not a single, healthy New Hampshire resident under the age of 60 has died from COVID-19, despite estimates that approximately 60,000 of the state’s residents have been exposed to the virus.