Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Only 60,000? That is less than flu season, year before last. We certainly did not shut down the economy for that. And that number is down from Fauci's warning of "Millions" dead, just a few weeks ago.
To be fair, President Trump was also in on the hyperbole, when he warned of a possible 240,000 dead. And Governor Cuomo has done his share of exaggerating as well, especially when it comes to demands for ventilators, which he is now walking back, suggesting that they will not be needed.
A few weeks ago, Dr. Anthony Fauci sat down in front of Congress and warned that millions of Americans could die if the federal government didn't take the outbreak seriously. And now, after the Trump Administration scrambled to ramp up testing capacity and the states worked with the Feds, private entities, and others (including in some cases foreign nations) to distribute ventilators as Gov. Andrew Cuomo painted a horrifying portrait of sickened New Yorkers suffocating to death in hospital hallways because there were no ventilators available.
Well, yesterday, NYC Mayor de Blasio said that, after a few days of near capacity numbers, hospitalizations have dropped by such a steep degree that the city believes it has enough ventilators on hand, and won't need any more.
Now on Thursday, Dr. Fauci is taking to cable news to spread the message of optimism that has lifted US stocks over the past few days: Instead of the 240k figure used by President Trump as recently as two weeks ago, Dr. Fauci told NBC News that if the public continued to stick to the "mitigation efforts", that the death toll might be as low as 60k.
This is very possibly going to go down as one of the most extreme overreactions in the history of human government. The damage that the government's "solution" to this problem is causing is truly incalculable at this point.
Of course it is good news that the deaths estimate are so extremely far below what the models predicted and what the so-called "experts" estimated. At least if you are not a psychopath, it is.
Yes, the number of deaths could just be a bad flew season, GIVEN that we shut down the economy and avoided each other in unprecedented fashion.
Had we not done so, this would have made a normal flu season look like a trip to Disneyland.
You knew it wouldn't be long until the right wingers began ignoring the effectiveness of the mitigation strategies in terms of the statistical improvement regarding COVID-19.
Our world economic shutdown and collapse due to "social distancing' and government shutdown mandates do NOTHING to stop the spread of the virus and will not change total infections, nor mortalities. It only SLOWS the process. Sooner or later it must spread and will only go away from mass immunity due to people being infected and recovering.
It's NEVER going to be "over." COVID-19 is in nature now and will continue to attack people who have not previously had the illness nor been vaccinated. Until there is a vaccine and the vast majority of Americans take it, the death rate will continue to climb beyond the "best estimates." Might not be as heavily reported as it is right now, but workers will still kill one another with regularity by infecting them unknowingly.
Our world economic shutdown and collapse due to "social distancing' and government shutdown mandates do NOTHING to stop the spread of the virus and will not change total infections, nor mortalities. It only SLOWS the process. Sooner or later it must spread and will only go away from mass immunity due to people being infected and recovering.
You are correct. We had to slow the spread to avoid the health care system being overwhelmed by the number of people needing hospital care from this disease (~20% of those infected). The health care system nearly breached its capacity to handle these patients in NYC (but thankfully didn't), even with this.
I find that people who compare this to a flu season lack the capacity to understand why that is not so. Take New York. Do you remember the last time a regular flu season looked like that? No? There's a reason for that. Without social distancing, other places would look like New York and we're still not entirely out of the woods yet.
The original number of 240,000 was based on models using assumptions.
The latest numbers are based on actual data, providing a clearer picture of what can be expected.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
