I’ve just about had it with the nightly news programs, especially WMUR. Each one is almost a mirror image of the other. What’s the latest from yesterday’s numbers from the Communist China Flu? Each one is pretty much the same: “LOOK HOW MANY MORE CASES!!”
Related: NH Sen. Maggie Hassan Says Masks Help: Evidence Proves They Do Nothing
Followed (sadly) by “1 more person has died.”
Am I the only one that’s just about had it with the preaching from these news readers?
Never is there context given as to the percentage of cases to deaths. Never is additional context given for cases to hospitalizations. No context is given for what KINDS of hospital services are given: outpatient, inpatient, ICU utilization.
Raw numbers are good but anyone can get those. Aren’t news programs supposed to provide context?
All they do is flash the numbers up on their lovely board. You’d think that simply capturing what the State of NH provides would provide decent (not complete, but decent) context. For instance, to better cement their “we’re all gonna die if we don’t mask up and stay home (and did we say mask up AT home?), they could be putting this up:
Ooooh – SCARY CURVE on the top one. Look how FAST that upturn is – we’re all gonna die unless we do what our experts tell us to do (like Joe Biden is telling us how to behave).
The bottom one, well, that has an upward curve as well. But that top one – SCARY! I just don’t understand why WMUR doesn’t use it instead of their “breathless” pronouncements. The problem is…
…if they do, they need to show the results of those new infections. Like this – Oops:
From the reporting (again), you’d think that this was as bad as the Black Plague in being both infectious AND killing its host. Yet, what we are seeing is that while WuFlu is rolling through the NH population, hospitalizations are down.
Right now, there are 77 hospitalizations IN TOTAL. At the site, these curves are interactive – if you hover over that last point above, the 7-day average is 0.9 /day.
Ponder that against the rate of 373 new infections per day (also 7-day average). The former isn’t even a rounding error of the latter.
“15 days to lower the curve”
That was the mantra we were told in the beginning to “shut up and obey” so as to not overload the hospital system. What ended up happening is that the hospital systems WERE overloaded – by underutilization. They shut themselves down to all other concerns and then…..waited for the overflow that never happened. And financially overloaded themselves by killing off their revenue sources in not treating other diseases.
And for those screaming “ICU! ICU! ICU!” – yeah, not so much:
Like the above, the last two data points in this daily is 0.0 for a 7-day rolling average. And THAT was really the problem at the head end of this pandemic – the burden placed on ICU assets. We didn’t know what was going on, didn’t know the diagnostics that were the most important, and didn’t have procedures/techniques to mitigate the disease.
It’s clear, though, that we do now.
If you spend some time at the link and select New Cases by Report Date and change the filter underneath it and look at the younger ages, you get a sense of who is really getting infected now – younger, stronger, and healthier youngsters and younger adults better able to fight off the infection IF they are getting it at all.
The total cumulative cases add up to 15,749 out of a total population of 1.32 million residents. Do the math: 1.2%. With deaths at 497, that’s an “excess death rate” of 1.5 over a normal NH death rate /day of around 31-32.
WMUR News readers – hoisted by their own petards (and lack of doing their jobs). But do you think they’d put up these charts and spend 30 – 45 seconds on the context?
How about having the FABULOUS Dr. Chan go over the entire lifecycle with these? Or Gov. Sununu?
Nope, not happening – we just keep getting more and more Emergency Orders taking decisions about our evaluation of risk away from us.
Instead, we are supposed to just whimper in our home (NO MORE THAN FIVE! MASK ALWAYS!) and isolate.
When Political figures are making any kind of decisions, they are by definition, political. We don’t live merely by Health decisions especially when they are unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats – that’s not how our representative system is supposed to work. They advise, they don’t rule.
And tell me again, when was the word “guideline” turned into Law? Yet again, we see our common language being weaponized against ut.
