Okay, so getting back to this... serological studies indicated that as of June, about
25% of New York City had COVID. That's 2 million people. Now consider that New York
State only has 434k confirmed cases. Now we're running massive testing and it's distorting the picture for everyone. Absolutely nowhere is like New York, but because we're getting all these positive tests back, we're seeing the
amount of positive cases exceeding that of NY back during their peak, and we're making the assumption that this is the same thing or worse. I can't find the graph right now, but if you actually look at the curves of deaths per capita over time, NY has a huge spike and tails off. Absolutely no other state that everyone is panicking about has any kind of spike. They trend up in a slow, flat line. But the difference is drastic. I'll have to find it.
Anyway, for all the discussion about how bad off the US is, here's a per capita breakdown of deaths for COVID:
The main reason I link this graph is for a country comparison. However, it is worth noting that the largest component that makes up the US' death curve is due to what happened in the northeast when this all got rolling. My point isn't to make this political, as I think simplistically laying blame at the feet of Cuomo lacks nuance (but does warrant discussion). When COVID hit, it was like game 1 of the playoffs. Sure, you can go into it with a plan, but as soon as you play that first game, you realize (in hindsight) that there were perhaps some glaring holes in your game plan that perhaps were simple to fix. Forcing COVID+ patients back to nursing homes is a massive blunder. But I'm willing to judge that from that place in time rather than by hindsight. Obviously, even given that context, it's still problematic, but these are live situations and lay society has this inborn belief that bad things don't happen, and when bad things happen the explanation is some kind of villain causing something unnatural. But that's just often not the case. And then there's the reality that New York is one of the most highly densely populated areas in the entire world. So, you could certainly play politics here, but it lacks nuance. I'm sure everyone would agree with me on that to some extent. But I don't think people would agree with that regarding any of these other states that are nothing like New York that we're currently playing politics with. Nobody wants nuance. Nuance is a one-way street.
So, there's COVID discussion, and then there's discussion as if we're watching a Marvel movie, where there's a team of heroes going up against a team of villains. I like good COVID discussion. Too much it looks like everyone's talking about a movie, and they're at the midnight showing dressed up as their favorite character.
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