About Those Numbers

I've said before that it seems Cult45 is kinda softening us up to believe the numbers of dead Americans due to COVID-19 are coming down &/or "aren't really as high as the Fake News wants you to believe".

Golly gee - guess what.

WaPo

The fast-spreading novel coronavirus is almost certainly killing Americans who are not included in the nation’s growing death toll, according to public health experts and government officials involved in the tally.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counts only deaths in which the presence of the coronavirus is confirmed in a laboratory test. “We know that it is an underestimation,” agency spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund said.

A widespread lack of access to testing in the early weeks of the U.S. outbreak means people with respiratory illnesses died without being counted, epidemiologists say. Even now, some people who die at home or in overburdened nursing homes are not being tested, according to funeral directors, medical examiners and nursing home representatives.

Postmortem testing by medical examiners varies widely across the country, and some officials say testing the dead is a misuse of scarce resources that could be used on the living. In addition, some people who have the virus test negative, experts say.

Some points:

1. We're not testing enough
2. 45* needs us not to know we're not testing enough
3. Because 45* needs us to believe it's all good, and it's all good because he's doing such a great job

To be clear, this cause-of-death discrepancy happens. A lot.

Death certificates for cancer patients almost never make it obvious that they died of cancer. There's always something like "organ failure due to sepsis", and even though there's also generally something along the lines of "...complications due to a diagnosis of hepatic cancer" or whatever, you have to look past the "actual cause of death" for the underlying condition.

So if you haven't diagnosed COVID-19 in that patient, because you haven't tested that patient for COVID-19 - before or after they died - then you get some statistical results that are less than fully credible.

And again - we don't know where the fuck we're going because we don't now where the fuck we are.