After a month of stalling at about two deaths per million, our mortality rate dropped to 1.85 per million on Tuesday. This is a rolling 7-day average, so it's not just a single day's anomaly, and it comes right on schedule, about a month after our case rate started dropping. So cross your fingers and try to persuade any holdouts you know to get vaccinated. We might finally be on track to beat this thing.
Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through May 11. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.
I've said this before, but you should probably switch out the UK now. They've had at least one day with no COVID deaths, and the death rate has been extremely low for more than a month now.
Drum learned his lesson when he dropped Spain.
UK stays.
We need to care about the real issues that matter. We need to stop the masks, stop the vaccines and stop COVID-19 from controlling our lives.
Said Majorie Taylor Green on Steve Bannon’s show.
https://crooksandliars.com/2021/05/marjorie-taylor-greene-we-need-stop
Greeneberg alert.
Pretty good article over at The Atlantic:
"COVID-19 Lays Bare the Price of Populism"
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/covid-19-lays-bare-price-populism/618838/
"As populism has experienced a resurgence in recent years, many have focused on the hazards the ideology poses to democratic systems. But today’s complex and highly technical global threats—pandemics, climate change, cyberattacks, financial crises—that demand technocratic solutions have driven home a grim reality: Populism can place us all at risk.
... Frenk listed four common attributes of various populist leaders who have mishandled the pandemic: First, “the tendency to underestimate or dismiss expertise,” because “experts are considered part of the corrupt elites that the populist leader is going to defend people from”; second, “the distrust of science” and of the sort of “independent, critical thinking” that populist leaders with authoritarian inclinations dislike; third, the impulse to divide citizens between the “good people embodied by the populist leader” and “the corrupt elites,” even going so far as to politicize public-health measures such as mask wearing, rather than instilling in the public “a sense of shared destiny”; and fourth, the instinct to “trap themselves in a narrative” and then “refuse to acknowledge that they were wrong” and correct course, blaming others instead. The governments that have performed best against COVID-19, by contrast, have implemented policies “informed by science and by expertise and by political leaders who unify the country.”
Good article.
The genius of Trump, I think, is his ability to talk out of both sides of his mouth without his supporters caring. On the one hand he downplayed Covid, calling it just a flu that you get then get better. On the other hand it is the China virus, the Kung Flu that was deliberately manufactured to harm China’s enemies. And he was responsible for the vaccine (which he took but allows his supporters to tell others is an elitist plot) which would never have happened without him.
Bolsonaro went all in on “Covid is overblown” and is left without a fallback.
We are finally dropping below 2 per million deaths in the US. I am starting to really have hope that we are nearly out of this thing.
After a month of stalling at about two deaths per million, our mortality rate dropped to 1.85 per million on Tuesday.
On Wednesday it was back up to 1.94 per my calculations. Also, the 7-day daily death average is only down about 12% in the last 30 days.
We might finally be on track to beat this thing.
I think the US in on track to emerge from the throes of the public health crisis, and reach a point where covid19 deaths are comparatively rare and manageable, sure. But I continue to be disappointed by the slowdown in the decline in deaths, and the overall lack of progress compared to some other high income countries, especially the UK, which only had (IIRC) about a ten day head start on the US in terms of vaccinations. We were doing pretty well in February and March, and then progress slowed down dramatically in April, in contrast to Britain, where they seem to be relentlessly on a path to squelching the outbreak. I'm puzzled this hasn't received more attention from the MSM. The US is on track to soon overtake the United Kingdom in total covid deaths per capita.