A service called Worldometers has been keeping track of coronavirus infections and deaths, disaggregated in a number of ways.
The latest report from Sweden counts 813,191 infections and 13,498 deaths.
The latest report from Illinois counts 1,258,736 infections and 23,665 deaths.
Conditions in Illinois are such that a transition to a full reopening is in order. If I have to keep extending this post until Anthony Fauci comes to his senses, or resigns, or until the governor is primaried, or until the ukases are vacated, or until the cows come home, I will.
Conditions in Illinois are such that a transition to a full reopening is in order. If I have to keep extending this post until Anthony Fauci comes to his senses, or resigns, or until the governor is primaried, or until the ukases are vacated, or until the cows come home, I will.
The Centers for Disease Control are currently reporting over six million Trump shots (in many cases, these are both doses of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines) administered statewide. The statewide recovery rate is still around 98 percent. The legislature, however, is still doing nothing to rein in the governor's ukases. I'm encouraged that Republicans seeking state office are going to make that a campaign issue.
That's despite Sweden doing at least as well as most of more lockdown-obsessed western Europe, despite ignoring scary advice that their relatively moderate mitigations would be deadly. John Tierney comments.
Public-health officials widely denounced Sweden for refusing to lock down and mandate masks last spring, when its Covid-19 mortality was high. A computer model projected nearly 100,000 Swedish deaths from the virus last year. But that prediction turned out to be ten times too high [see above -- Ed.], and other countries have since caught up with Sweden. While it suffered another outbreak this winter, mainly in regions that were not hit hard in the spring, Sweden’s cumulative death toll per capita from Covid-19 is now slightly below the European Union’s average and about 20 percent lower than America’s.Illinois policies, helping push the national average up.
Free states have largely avoided the labor market carnage associated with the COVID pandemic, while lockdown states have wrought higher unemployment levels — without guaranteeing better pandemic health outcomes.Although public health officials aren't necessarily economists, they ought be sensitive to the notion of tradeoffs.
As famed economist Thomas Sowell said, in complex issues of public policy “there are no solutions, there are only tradeoffs.” There was never an easy answer to the COVID pandemic, but the economic, health, and social outcomes of free states all suggest that they made the right call in rejecting the authoritarian instinct embraced by too many of their neighbors.
Public-health officials are supposed to consider the overall impact of their policies, not just the immediate effect on one disease. They’re supposed to weigh costs and benefits, promoting policies that save the most total years of life, which means taking special care to protect younger people and not divert vast resources to treatments for those near the end of life. They are not supposed to test unproven and dangerous treatments by conducting experiments on entire populations.That, though, is not the way for public officials with ambitions to be the next Platonic philosopher king to roll. "The goal is always to make fear of something the problem and then empowering the government the solution." That means keeping up the skeer. "A February bar opening in rural Illinois led to at least 46 COVID-19 cases, a school closure affecting 650 children, and the hospitalization of one long-term care facility resident, according to a Monday report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)." Nobody died, and the school closure was on the basis of Illinois ukases. That doesn't matter, though, because there's a Narrative. "Local health department officials first traced a cluster of cases to the bar event, which was mostly attended by 18- to 44-year-old white men. It's unclear how many people attended, but the venue could hold 100 people."
Sweden and Florida followed these principles when they rejected lockdowns and trusted their citizens to take sensible precautions. That trust has been vindicated.
Last week, the governor trailed by 10,125. Note the time series: a margin of terror that used to be growing by hundreds in a week is growing by around a hundred, or less.
As of 22 March, 10.095.
As of 15 March, 10.070.
As of 8 March, 10,017.
As of 1 March, 9,933.
As of 22 February, 9,857.
As of 15 February, 9,693.
As of 8 February, 9,623.
As of 1 February, 9,662.
As of 25 January, 9,739.
As of 18 January, 9,727.
As of 11 January, 9, 860.
As of 4 January, 9,595.
As of 28 December, 9,057.
As of 21 December, 8,414.
As of 14 December, 7,815.
As of 7 December, 7,049.
As of 30 November, 6,201.
As of 23 November, 5,706.
As of 16 November, 5,040.
As of 9 November, 4,516.
No comments:
Post a Comment