A case study in media/political distortion.
To be fair to media, selling Covid-19 early on as, essentially, a severe seasonal flu epidemic might have been equally misleading. Still, one wishes for better accuracy in reporting matters that affect public policy.
Tidewater News and Opinion Forum 
The death rate is shooting behind the bird.
At best it is a lagging indicator for the state of treatment regimens 3 weeks ago and public health efforts 4 to 6 weeks ago.
The new infection rate is a batter current indicator though it is skewed by the increase in availability of testing.
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I wouldn’t necessarily say skewed. I would say it gives us a more accurate representation of who has the virus.
It would also be beneficial if the several states and CDC wouldn’t mix the numbers of tests for the virus and test for the antibodies. Which could also benefit vaccine development, if there is truth to the statement about immunity after having the virus once, which is in question at present.
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By skewed I mean that you can’t use it to determine a trend.
Two months ago, you wouldn’t get tested unless you were sick enough to need hospitalization. As tests have become more available we are testing people who previously would not have been tested, such as mild or suspected cases and even those with no symptoms who think they have been exposed.
As a result, there is a bias toward showing a downward trend in infection rate.
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Might run that by the Oval Office. He thinks increased testing makes us look worse. Or to put it another way, that if we stop all this testing, we won’t have so many infected Americans.
“The media likes to say we have the most cases, but we do, by far, the most testing. If we did very little testing, we wouldn’t have the most cases. So, in a way, by doing all of this testing, we make ourselves look bad,” Trump said on Wednesday.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-says-too-much-coronavirus-testing-makes-us-look-bad-2020-5
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He didn’t say not to do it, just that it exposes more infections. Of course, the percent positive declines.
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There is a difference between rate of infection and number of infections. The rate may be trending down while the number of actual infections goes up based on testing. So hopefully, as more people get tested and more people are found NOT to be infected, we are trending downward on rate.
However, the efficacy of some of the tests is still in question. That and the states and CDC who, oops, lumped all of the testing (virus and antibody) together.
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Hey, it’s you guys that wanted government in charge of health care, not me.
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And it is you guys that want every child born in America to have an AK-47 in their crib.
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The majority of the test kits are commercially made. How bout your market now?
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WWII/4 in 1/4 of a year.
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⁉️
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https://www.google.com/search?q=american+losses+in+ww2&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari
418,000/4 = 104,000 and we did it in just 3 months.
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It’s just the common cold folks. No worse than the flu. A Democrat hoax.
FOX and “friend” were so reassuring.
Don’t worry, however, according to Trump’s offspring, after the election it will all go away, the hoax will be revealed. The dead will resurrect.
100,775 hoax victims.
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The earliest reports were that it could be 4x as deadly as the flu. If you look, you will see the epidemiologists made an error in transmission and deadliness. But not that much. They thought it more deadly, but not as transmissible as it is.
What I find fascinating is the rejoice at a constant death rate!
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