Health and Sanity category archive
Numbers Gaming, Reprise 0
At Psychology Today Blogs, Matthew Edlund untangles the numbers about COVID-19 testing and fatalities and what they say about the Trump administration’s failure to deal with the pandemic. A nugget (emphasis added):
Lots of people died.
Now when people around the world call the CDC no one calls back.
Numbers Gaming 0
Matthew Fleischer looks at Georgia’s game of three-card monte with COVID-19 stats. An excerpt:
And yet data don’t lie. Or do they?
Thanks to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, we now know things did indeed look too good to be true.
Georgia’s coronavirus numbers looked so rosy because officials misrepresented the data in such a way it’s difficult to believe it wasn’t done on purpose.
Aside:
One of the links to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the one cited around the phrase “misrepresented the data” in the excerpt above, is broken. Try this one instead.
American Exceptionalism: Everybody Except America 2
Afterthought:
This is what can happen in a two-party “system” when one of the two major political parties decides that there is no such thing as the common good.
“What They Don’t Know Won’t Hurt Us” 0
In line with Sam Seder’s comment that I cited earlier this week,
That’s the Trump strategy in a nutshell: If we don’t have evidence, there’s no way for people to know about it . . . .
now comes Florida Man (much, much more at the link):
Rebekah Jones, whose work to build the user-friendly COVID-19 Data and Surveillance Dashboard drew praise and publicity, said her commitment to maximum transparency resulted in her removal from the dashboard project.
All That Was Old Is New Again 0
My local rag reports on a recently-discovered letter written by a man’s mother, when she was still a teen, to her brother, who was in France during World War I, about life during the 1918 flu pandemic.
It is both fascinating and eerily familiar.
The Epidemiologist Speaks 0
As aside, I must say that this is potentially a most disturbing news item.
Image via The Bob Cesca Show Blog.
Unmasked Marauders, Reprise 0
The writer of a letter to the editor of the Portland Press-Herald reports a close encounter of the menacing kind.
Unmasked Marauders 0
The editorial board of the Hartford Courant looks ahead at the “reopening” of Connecticut (and, by extension, other states) and has concerns (emphasis added). A nugget:
First, politicians have turned over communication and key decision making to scientists and public health experts, encouraging community responsibility and backing sweeping rules and regulations that were universally applied. That worked in South Korea, Vietnam and New Zealand. It also worked in Washington state, where the governor took a backseat to doctors and epidemiologists.
Second, effective leaders have learned from past failures in fighting pandemics and used those lessons to adjust their approach. A key lesson from a 2007 public health report “Lessons Learned from the 1918–1919 Influenza Pandemic in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota,” identified a lack of clarity and coordination among local, state and federal authorities as a critical problem.
Both those lessons are being ignored by too many, and we are now at serious risk of losing the gains of the last two months, fueled in no small part by the illusion that not wearing a mask to the grocery store is an act of political will.
Do please read the rest.
Immune to Information 0
At Psychology Today Blogs, Joe Pierre examines the “infodemic” of conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and how they interact with anti-vaxx propaganda. Here’s a snippet:
In order to understand why this informational battle is being lost, at least online, it must be first understood that the anti-vaccination movement is not just a rag-tag group of people worried about vaccines, but a highly organized and strategically coordinated political campaign. And while its members are indeed comprised of parents from both sides of the political divide who are worried for their children, there are larger, dare we say conspiratorial forces operating behind the scenes of the movement.
Follow the link for the full article, including links to and citations of his sources.
The New Pastime 0
AL.com’s Kyle Whitmire notes that American roulette is now all the rage is his home state* of Alabama.
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*And, I would add, many others.
Wait Two Weeks 0
My two or three regular visitors know that I tend to ignore the daily hot-button kerfuffles that every leftie blogger thinks he or she must needs comment on and that I am not much given to prognostication (hell, I trained as an historian and understanding the past is hard enough–I’m not going to try to predict the future and you don’t want to know what that prediction would be anyway because it ain’t pretty), but, mark my words, just wait two weeks.
“Nobody Could Have Predicted . . . .” 0
Yet many persons did.
In my local rag, Steven T. Corneliussen rounds up a list of warnings of the possibility of and need to be prepared for a global pandemic reaching back almost three decades.
Numbers Gaming 0
Sam and his guest do the math and discover (surprise!) that the Trump administration is fudging the statistics on the effects of COVID-19.
