Covid-19 update – things are getting better

From time to time, I take a look at the data – the official statistics – and report accordingly.  I do this because I cannot rely on the media – and even a lot of those doctors appearing on the various so-called news shows.  The news media’s professional tendency is to sensationalize information – coupled with their political biases – makes the information misleading, at best, and downright dishonest, at worst.

I rely on WorldoMeters.info to obtain the latest numbers.  It is among the most accurate and up-to-date reporting services.  If you are skeptical of my analysis, you can check the numbers for yourself.

We are told to put politics aside – and to listen to the scientists.  Researching the real numbers is my way of putting politics aside, but I must confess that the scientists, doctors, nurses and medical authorities you see in the news are neither consistent nor reliable.  Just like the political reporting, their analyses diverge depending on which stations use or hire them.

I never could understand – or accept – that some emergency room doctors in Boston or nurses in Seattle can be interviewed as experts in infectious diseases.  At best, they can tell of their experiences in one of the tens of thousands of hospitals – experiences that may have no bearing on other locations.  The fact that they mostly complain about President Trump reveals their utility to the elitist east coast media.

By way of example, you will hear one doctor say that Hydroxychloroquine is ineffective and another doctor praising it – a doctor who has used it to treat 1,700 Covid-19 patients with a single loss of life.  Statistically, he should have had between 65 and 70 deaths.  Even worse, media propagandists like MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough claim the drug is very dangerous – even though virtually every major medical authority claims it to be among the safest drugs regardless of its efficacy for Covid-19.

I check the Covid-19 numbers regularly because it is more informative than the numbers peddled by the press.  As I have reported in the past, the news media obsesses on the total cases since the onset of the Pandemic – now exceeding 7.6 million.

Brian Williams, on MSNBC, refers to that number as those known to be infected.  He is lying.  We do not have anywhere near 7.6 million infected people running around America.  That is the number you see reported every day – suggesting that the number of INFECTED individuals is rising.  If you only calculate all the people who HAVE HAD Covid-19 from the onset that number will always rise.  Duh!

So, how many people in American are actually infected with Covid1-19 at this time?  That is the more relevant – and never reported – number.

The number of people who CURRENTLY HAVE THE VIRUS, and can transmit it, is approximately 2.5 million people – approximately one-third of the media reports.  More interesting is the fact that that number has not fluctuated very much since August 15.  It has remained between 2.5 and 2.6 million for the past seven weeks.

This means that the number of new cases being discovered is offset by the number of recoveries.  The number of those who have recovered has risen from approximately 2 million on August 15 to more than 4.8 million currently.  On August 15 there were more people with Covid-19 than had recovered.  Today the recovered number is almost double the existing cases.  When have you seen that statistic being reported?

During the period since August 15, the number of daily new cases has fluctuated between 53, 665 (August 15) to a low of 25,466 (September 7).  The daily count fluctuates wildly because the numbers are based on the number of tests and WHEN THEY GET REPORTED.   Some labs and hospital do not report daily, but rather dump an accumulation of cases on one report.

The number of deaths will also constantly increase because a person cannot recover from dying. But the death RATE is dropping.  This is likely because so many of the new cases – that are discovered by increased testing– are the asymptomatic cases – largely younger folks.  They are the folks whose recovery rate is more than 99 percent.

And what about those scary reports that half the states have increasing numbers of cases.  That is due to two factors – the increase in the number of tests and the fact that the disease will impact on different places at different times.  If a state had a relatively low number of cases in the first few months, it will inevitably have increasing numbers in later months.

The thing to keep in mind is that no matter how the virus undulates in various locations – with increasing numbers in some states and decreasing in others – the total number of folks infected remains constant – plateaued.  That generally portends the beginning of a downward trend.

The Pandemic is still with us, but there are signs that better days are ahead.  If Trump is too optimistic at times, the news media is entirely too pessimistic — for political reasons.

So, there ‘tis.