Starting at 1:45AM on a Saturday/Sunday, I have tons of work to do and still not 100% health-wise means it is once again a stream of conscious post this week. Not sure exactly where the extra saltiness is coming from. No time to figure it out. I need to write quickly and get to bed. The title emerged out of a WSJ article on the 2009 H1N1 response in the WSJ from Kimberly Strassel that attempts to compare the response there to Covid-19. That is click bait bullshit. In the early days of a pandemic no one has demonstrated the ability to get it right. No one. Despite that fact the overall US mortality in 2009 is indistinguishable from surrounding years. I'll bet that 2020 stands out against not only surrounding years and also against peer countries. Looks like it will be about +15% in the US with many peer countries at 0-10% based on the latest NYT excess mortality tracker.
I would look more into the comparison if Kim was writing in good faith and making valid comparisons. There is a non-click bait version of that article that has more analysis done to accurately judge the 2009 response without normalizing Trump. That also recognizes there was no recent precedent for 2009 while the current crises had the potential to take learning from both 2009 and 2014 to improve our response. You know, like Obama did when he got directly involved with the GHSA https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/07/28/fact-sheet-global-health-security-agenda And contemporaneous account from the NYT sounds nothing like what Strassel is implying. "Even Dr. Peter Palese, a leading virologist at Mount Sinai Medical School, who can be a harsh critic of public policies he disagrees with, called the government’s overall response 'excellent.'" https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/02/health/02flu.html Fuck Trump is self explanatory but is specifically driven by his actions as a destroyer. I just read Michael Osterholm's call to action in "Deadliest Enemy" from March 2017 where he calls the WHO ineffective for global control of infectious diseases and argues for a replacement. He doesn't call for leaving the WHO before doing the work to get a replacement in place because that would be fucking insane for any rational person with a modicum of knowledge in infectious diseases to recommend. Did Trump do any work to build a replacement before pulling out? Has he done anything since? Of course not. Anyone responsible for letting him destroy things has blood on their hands. How much blood? I don't know. Calling out the specific numbers and getting into semantic arguments like the Democratic leadership is currently doing is dumb. Trump is not responsible for all of the deaths. There are also significant costs beyond the deaths. Just compare the US to peer countries and move the fuck on. We don't have time or energy for this irrelevant bullshit. Stop providing ammunition to run click bait centrist articles that inevitably turn into weaponized social media and right wing counters. I'm sure right wing grifters are eating up the Strassel article and lazily regurgitating the same sloppy conclusions based on bad data (e.g. using estimated 2009 cases vs confirmed 2020 cases).
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September 2020
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