Coronavirus (COVID-19) Discussion Thread

[Torillian]

Jumpin said:

JRPGfan said:

Did you guys know that in 24 states in the USA they dont report "possible or propable" covid19 deaths?
(if a doctor exsamens someone, or looks though a list of symptoms before their deaths, and think it likely it was covid19, they arn't markted as such, unless they had a test before they died)

In NYC in area's that was sometimes 20-30% of their deaths to covid.

The real amount of deaths in the USA to covid19 is probably higher than its 138,200+ reported numbers.
(possibly another +11,000-16,000 deaths, actually due to covid19, not counted because people died before getting tested)

Not shocked at all. Based on Trump comments, it seems that they're going to do whatever they can to keep reports low for political reasons. It's sad that this sort of thing happens.

But what's even more sad is Trump's messaging, declaring the US has among the best numbers in the world. Has no one told him that high numbers are NOT the best when talking about a deadly pandemic!

I'm pretty sure what Trump is doing to tout low fatality numbers is to take the current daily death rate divided by the current daily new cases. When you look at it that way the "fatality rate" has gone down almost a factor of ten according to him. Checking this myself you can see that our highest death rate was around April 21st with 2700 deaths with 26,000 new cases or a little over 10% while it's been as low as 600 deaths with 46,000 new cases (a little over 1%). I would be curious who around him clued him into this math trick that makes rising case counts a good thing.