WUHAN VIRUS DAILY UPDATE FOR MAY 7
SECOND WAVE OR FRAUD? DATA IS CLEAR - AND A WARNING. Now I've warned of the absolutely legitimate potential for new curves from non-hot spot states, aka a "Second Wave", long ago. Back on March 31st, when the government predicted "100k - 240k deaths over the next two weeks" I described the two conditions that MUST come into being for this to happen:
QUOTE:
"1) the current hotspots remain pretty much hot and are not seriously altered due to availability of treatments or quarantine, and/or
2) serious new hotspots develop around the rest of the country with the same power curves as what we've seen with the existing hotspots."
This still holds true today. Since then, the CDC has changed their policies that helped accurately track Wuhan-virus deaths so that now Wuhan-virus gets blamed for more deaths than all other causes. Combine that with our historically really poor test coverage that guaranteed that we were undercounting the number of incidents and you have the perfect storm for bad data informing bad policies. The result?
Tuesday more deaths in a single day since April 21st, and Thursday's numbers were the highest ever at 2,746! How can this be? Well clearly there must have been new cases blossoming either in NYC/NJ or all over the country forming new hot spots as feared. EXCEPT EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE HAS OCCURRED. That's how you know this is simply inflated numbers by hospitals and state agencies just like we described yesterday. The reality is that while our testing numbers have gone up (today was our highest ever at 346,171 results in a single day) - the percent positives have been falling down quickly now down to 8.77%, way lower than the 20+ percent rates we were seeing up until April 18th. So even with more and more tests, we're still seeing between 25k-30k new incidents on a daily basis which is not enough to sustain those death rates.
Our new total for incidents is 1,248,137 (+30,366), an increase of 2.49% over the previous day (+0.64% from yesterday). Deaths have totaled 70,002 (+2,746) which is an increase of 4.08% (+1.10%) over the previous day! Since the peak in Mar 19, rates of growth for incidents has fallen by 49.14% and for deaths has fallen by 38.77%. Again, the vast majority of these deaths are "trueing up" data by states over the last several weeks. Weeks that we know had already inflated their numbers because of the cause of death tracking reports by the CDC.
Another telling parameter - hospitalizations in absolute numbers have been relatively stable or going down since April 21st. Did these people dies elsewhere? Well, outside of nursing homes the answer, according to the CDC, is absolutely not. Hospital deaths overwhelmingly account for all identified Wuhan-virus deaths followed by less than a third as many for nursing homes, and then the rest combined don't even come close the nursing home levels.
So it must be the re-opening of those evil Red states I hear someone cry! Well no, that's also not possible because their numbers are behaving exactly as we anticipated and, if there was going to be a second wave due to states reopening, it would be impossible for it to manifest itself as new deaths until the end of May at the absolute earliest just because the time it takes for a person to get symptomatic and die even in the worst conditions like Italy - which we don't have anywhere, especially in the states that are reopening.
So what's personally frustrating to me, and anyone who's been seriously trying to track the data and make objective projections based on it so as to properly inform public policy for a seriously deadly crisis - is the actions of our policy makers, hospital administrators, state health officials, and national health officials absolutely makes everyone who is honestly trying to do real science, whether they are 100% correct or have honest mistakes - ALL OF US - sound like conspiracy theorists because those are the only explanations we have left. Because all of these people should have demanded strict reporting standards - destroyed the standards. All of these people should have demanded randomize anti-body testing since mid-March so we'd absolutely know how big the pandemic has spread - have cast down on widespread testing. Instead they take actions that are precisely the opposite of what all legitimate data demonstrates and suppress everyone that reports this data and the OBVIOUS conclusions that must be drawn from it.
So what happens when you suppress all the reasonable people's criticisms and actions? What does that leave you with? Naturally that leaves you with the unreasonable ones. And that's what I am afraid is coming soon if these people whose jobs it is to properly inform and protect us don't change their ways in a damn hurry. Because it will not be pretty for anyone - but it will be especially nasty for them.