We Still Don’t Know How Many People Are in the Hospital With COVID-19 | Talking Points Memo

This story first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1302682

Do we really expect a country that has never been able to manage a simple matter like maintaining its bridges and roads to be able to manage the complexities of digitalized health records?

Ha ha ha. It’s like a group of inestimably optimistic bureaucrats decided we could suddenly wake up and be an advanced Western culture like Germany. The only thing we do here is money. The rest is a Potemkin Village.

3 Likes

This administration, by its very nature, opens the question of whether they are slow walking or massaging the data for their self-serving purposes.

1 Like

“We’re in a fog because we have so little reliable data,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute

No kidding…and it is further exacerbated by the gaslighting aka “Viral Infection of the Facts” and the exceptionally gargantuan selfishness of the person in charge of mitigating a pandemic…

1 Like

Neither does Donnie…

1 Like

This is not a surprise at all…

We Still Don’t Know How Many People Are in the Hospital With COVID-19

Which is all the more reason why we should stop testing and open for Easter. Knowing will get in the way of our greatness.

4 Likes

Numbers - all numbers, any numbers - are wrong if they don’t support Trump’s delusions.

“Don’t believe those phony numbers,” Trump declared during his victory speech after the New Hampshire primary, in February. “When you hear 4.9 and five-per-cent unemployment, the number’s probably twenty-eight, twenty-nine, as high as thirty-five—in fact, I even heard recently forty-two per cent.” By June, when he did an interview on Fox News’s “Justice with Judge Jeanine,” he’d received new data. “The number five per cent is a phony number—it’s really twenty per cent, close to twenty-per-cent unemployment. That’s just a phony number to make the politicians look good.” In an August speech on the economy, he said, in reference to the official government unemployment rate, “The five-per-cent figure is one of the biggest hoaxes in American modern politics.”

Trump and the Truth: The Unemployment-Rate Hoax -

The New Yorker 9/10/16

1 Like

Take the worst stats you come across and add at least 50% to get something closer to the real number. Infected, deaths, unemployed, losing or about to lose their homes, unable to afford food and other essentials. These and other vital stats are being grossly underreported due to incompetence and intent.

And why are PPE still in such short supply? How is that psychopathic monster able to sustain 45% approval levels given how horrifically disastrous if not willfully malicious his handling of this has been? How are more Americans not making the connection between the US being by far the country that’s been most harmed by the pandemic both in absolute and relative terms, and Trump’s being the most responsible for it? How have so many people lost the ability to engage in such basic critical thinking? Why are we so stupid?!? If there’s anything more dangerous to our long-term survival than Trump and the GOP, it’s our collective stupidity, which is epic and itself a pandemic.

5 Likes

And only 50% disapprove.

2 Likes

50% of people have below average intelligence.

1 Like

Most of the approvers are baked in and have nothing to do with objective reality, i.e. they’d approve of him no matter what he said or did, however awful, because they like what he says and stands for, and, well, they’re mostly privileged white racists, like him, preaching the prosperity gospel (which is basically be white and you will be rewarded). The rest are basically ignorant, lazy and undereducated non-entities who follow the herd and have no critical thinking abilities or the desire to acquire them.

If any of the first group abandon him, it’ll likely be because they felt that he wasn’t sufficiently racist, nasty and disgusting, and not because he was too much of these. But the second group’s approval is far more tenuous, and he could lose it if things continue to deteriorate and it’s clear that he’s why. You’d think that would have happened already, but with the media largely taking it easy on him for fear of his and his supporters’ retaliation, I can see why not.

Perhaps the solution is to stop waiting for the media to do its jobs, or even Dems, who too have taken it too easy on him, and for everyday people who realize how horrible he is to stop taking it easy on Trump supporters, especially the more “casual” ones, and enlighten them as to how awful he is. Some people need to be hit on the head to get it. Perhaps it’s time to hit them?

2 Likes

Accurate numbers will be found on the secret server that Trump uses for all his cover-ups.

2 Likes

Holy Fucking Shit!

Also interesting

1 Like

I still think that the uptick in approvals and downtick in disapprovals is more a “he isn’t being as big a jerk as he was when this started” thing. He was being REALLY awful, now he’s less awful and folks who don’t know any better are giving him credit he will almost certainly misinterpret. I’m not convinced it will necessarily translate to votes in November.

2 Likes
Comments are now Members-Only
Join the discussion Free options available