Cooking the Books
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is giving an update Wednesday on the state’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 10,000 people in the state. Cuomo on Tuesday reported another 778 deaths from COVID-19, up from 671 deaths in the state the day before.
“That number is up, and that is to me the most painful number, and it has been the most painful number every day,” he said Tuesday.
Poetrooper sends.
NYC Adds Nearly 4,000 People Who Never Tested Positive To Coronavirus Death Tolls
WILLIAM DAVIS
New York City added nearly 4,000 people who never tested positive for the coronavirus to its death toll Tuesday, bringing coronavirus-related deaths in the city to around 10,000 people.
The city decided to add 3,700 people to its death tolls, who they “presumed” to have died from the virus, according to a report from The New York Times. The additions increased the death toll in the U.S. by 17%, according to the Times report, and included people who were suffering from symptoms of the virus, such as intense coughing and a fever.
The report stated that Democratic New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio decided over the weekend to change the way the city is counting deaths.
“In the heat of battle, our primary focus has been on saving lives,” de Blasio press secretary Freddi Goldstein told the Times.“As soon as the issue was raised, the mayor immediately moved to release the data.”
The Times report added that health officials have had difficulty counting the exact number of deaths, because of the demographics who have been hit the hardest by the virus.
“Public health officials say that counting the dead from a pandemic disease like Covid-19 presents difficulties because many of those who die are older or suffering from other serious health conditions,” they wrote. “And the full effects of the outbreak on mortality in New York City, and around the country, could take many more months to study and understand.”
Hmmm. I understand New York hospitals are receiving $12,000 per reported COVID-19 case, so that’s about $44,400,000 of our tax dollars Bolshevik Bill has added to the coronavirus tab. To paraphrase Uncle Joe, it doesn’t matter who dies, it’s who counts the deaths.
Read the rest of the article here: Daily Caller
Thanks, Poe.
Category: "Your Tax Dollars At Work", Guest Link
That is not cooking the books.
Covid19 has a false negative rate as high as 30% in some stages of the disease despite the patient being symptomatic.
Additionally, because testing does not change treatment many doctors do not bother testing since they have become familiar with the disease processes and when they have a patient presenting with Covid19 symptoms and they test negative for the flu (a test they can do at the hoist also and is much quicker) they are able to diagnose presumptive Covid19.
The CDC, WHO, and most state health departments established the criteria for diagnosing the disease without testing weeks ago.
Nobody is cooking the books,
Stop politicizing this shit.
And if you think we should be doing more tests than demand it from your congressman. Since we are still testing fewer per capital than most countries.
And the reason is also almost entirely political. Far too many republican politicians think that high infections numbers hurt their party during the next election. Because their party is following the strategy of their leader which is to downplay this virus and treat the pandemic as a PR problem and not a public health problem.
For the right the best way to keep infection numbers low is to not test as much.
Man please. “…not cooking the books.” Bovine excrement! There have been numerous other articles out there and testimony from healthcare people stating that they have been told to report deaths as COVID19 related. At $12K a pop that’s a nice incentive to blame the ChiCom virus. Hell, right now I’m coughing and sneezing from the pine pollen and have a low grade fever from a toothache. I could get hit by a truck while checking the mail and the local med center would list me as COVID related. My man that came down yesterday to help me with my yard tractor, his mom is a nurse at the major hospital here. She said that “everybody that has died there lately died of COVID19 related causes.” Noo Yawk loses hundreds everyday in their hospitals from ALL causes, but every reported death is COVID19. Did folks all of a sudden quit dying of heart attacks, strokes, cancers, ect, ect. That lying POS de Bloviatingso is on the TV every night screaming Orange Man Bad and warning the world that this week will have record numbers of deaths.
It is kinda good to see you around seagull, you do add to the comment count here at TAH, so there is that. Surprised you haven’t expressed your ire at your Socialist Democrats for screwing your Bernie Boi over again. You ready for Biden to pick Mooshell for his running mate?
“de Bloviatingso”? Are you referring to Mayor Bill de Blashevik?
I’m starting to feel a profound sympathy to these victims of public schools, unable to logic the hype and political usefulness of this plannedemic.
We should be free to be stupid but this trained ignorance is inexcusable.
Once again you are wrong. DeBlasio and his gang have already been caught several times presumptively declaring deaths as due to Coronavirus, regardless of the real reason. A number of medical examiner staff as well as medical people dimed him out on that. One example, guy killed in car accident, determined to have been exposed to the coronavirus, listed as a coronavirus death.
YOU STOP POLITICIZING THIS.
I think there’s quite a bit of “Yes, he died in a car crash, but he also had a cough. No way to be sure, better list it as COVID.” Pretty much the opposite of what the Chinese are doing.
Well, if there is $12k of fed tax dollars going to the hospital for every death, I‘m surprised they haven’t started exhuming people who died two months ago from gunshots and stabbings so they can add them to the ChiCom virus death toll.
They’re checking the voter rolls as we speak…
Heh, I remember you. You were the guy that gave out the weekly body counts in Viet of the Nam.
Beans, I’ve told this story before about the Vietnam body count.
Right after a major battle had ended, a full-bull brigade commander, a very respected Airborne soldier, instructed me, “Sergeant Poe, call down to each of the companies and get an enemy casualty count. If a trooper aimed his weapon and fired at an NVA, that’s to be considered as a KIA/BCC (Killed In Action/Body Count Confirmed).
I protested, “But, Sir…” and he shut me down fast with, “Just do it, Sergeant, EXACTLY the way I told you. Got it?”
Stars and Stripes ran a cover story reporting a major American victory with almost 500 confirmed enemy dead when the reality was far less than half that.
That began young Poe’s disillusionment with the war leadership and I haven’t trusted any government since.
Thanks Poe. I’m sure your experience was
not a one off by any stretch.
“If a trooper aimed his weapon and fired at an NVA, that’s to be considered as a KIA/BCC”
I recall a friend being asked long after the war “did you kill anybody?”
He answered “probably”.
He was a terrible mess sergeant, right?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pSg_6T8HrRg
I hate phone URLs
“That began young Poe’s disillusionment with the war leadership …”
Dittos. When I returned home my father and I (an Annapolis grad with 23 years in) would sit around swapping war stories. There were a few uncomfortable times when I could tell he was trying to decide whether his first born son was a damn liar or that the military he served most of his adult life was the liar. I think that was the only time I ever had to feel sorry for him. The shrinks call it cognitive dissonance.
CSPAN and the internet have only increased that disillusionment.
Man 0 man is that the stink of borsch on you commie comrade
Sorry, Lars, but we are, in fact, paying attention to the man behind the curtain. You may go cry now.
Herr Kommissar –
Do you find it to be a burden to know more about everything than anybody else?
“Dreh dich nicht um, der Kommissar geht um…”
It’s not so much that Herr Kommissar knows so much, it’s that he knows so much that isn’t so.
alles klar, herr kommissar?
In the end, he is just a bad 1980’s pop song cliche
Nein, nein – die Originalversion in deutscher Sprache bitte!
Lars, quit trying to talk to the adults! Go back to the card table and sit and be quiet with the rest of the children! Now quit wetting the bed and sucking on your mommies teat! Orange Man Bad!!!
Bull shit Lars it’s cooking the books
My cousin who lives in Long Island
Said it’s amazing no one is dying of anything
But COVID anymore everyone knows it to
What socialist logic are you know going to use
To justify this BS
You’re absolutely correct, Commissar. This is not cooking the books.
It’s blatantly lying in order to increase the numbers of COVID-19 deaths, in order to gain federal funding and add to the “orange man bad” manufactured outrage. I don’t know what you call it in Berkeley, but in my corner of the world, we call that fraud. We also call that politicizing the pandemic. Or, as your Lord and Master, Obama’s handlers would say, “Never let a crisis go to waste”.
There is huge, obvious difference in “dying of COVID-19” and “dying with COVIS-19”.
“Nobody is cooking the books,…”
Coming from the SAME Seagull who screeched that China is not communist!
It is not. That is a god damn indisputable fact of contemporary political science and economics.
China began moving away from communism in 1979. By the late 90s they were no longer communist.
The fact that you steadfastly refuse to accept it shows how utterly incapable you are of accepting new information. You are literally clinging to decades old perception.
How is it possible that you could reconcile all your beliefs about the ineffectiveness, inefficiency, and economic dysfunction of communism…and still believe one of the most economically productive nations in the world – literally the global supplier of countless products, all sold in the free market for profit – and the largest consumer economy in the history of human civilization… is communist. How do you reconcile that?
How does it not dawn on you that maybe they no longer operate under communist economic ideas?
You seem utterly incapable of understanding that authoritarianism can exist without communism and a former communist nation can shift from communism while maintaining authoritarian control of much of the society.
Man, you really need to stop getting high by sniffing your own farts. Here’s a vid, scroll to 31:12
Communism is pervasive and no one is immune.
https://youtu.be/GlJ6gNMvrfc
You forgot to tell us (again) that you were trained in Mandarin Chinese.
“China began moving away from communism in 1979. By the late 90s they were no longer communist”.
I guess you need to pack your bags and go tell the Chinese they’re no longer communist. Present your empirical data to them. Because those poor misguided people still firmly believe they’re a communist country.
Bon Voyage.
You think they’ll stick him in a gulag? Useful idiots tend to end up there, after all…
He’ll just disappear like anyone who speaks out about President Winnie the Pooh. While they’ll have no record of him, his kidneys, liver, eyes, and heart will be found just in time to transplant them into unhealthy Communist Party elites.
Doncha just love it, he gets all wee wee’d up trying to get his genius point across the way I would when I tried to explain the 2A to a clown like him !!!
So how many quarts of spit did he let loose of when he brought his genius to our TAH ????
I’m betting at least 3 quarts today !!!
Anybody up on that with me ???
According to their Constitution, they are – tàidíquǎn.
I cannot even begin to tansliterate it, but the phrase I was thinking for him renders approximately as “wolf’s heart and dog’s lung”, meaning on one level stuff that simply cannot be made edible.
Doubly appropriate, given the origin of the ChiCom Cough.
(Thanks again, Ng.)
Keep honking that Kazoo, Komrade! You are doing more to re-elect Trump than most folks here.
You are correct. We should not believe those inveterate liars (the Chinese) when they say the Communist Party of China is the founding and ruling (and only) political party of the People’s Republic of China. Let a thousand flowers bloom!
Been to Hong Kong lately, dipshit?
They might have a slight difference of opinion than yours.
“Stop politicizing this shit.”
I’m sure the irony flew right over your pointy head.
In Larsie’s world
2+2 = 5
Did someone say 2 + 2 = 5? Oh, yeah – the USSR did.
.” Far too many republican politicians think that high infections numbers hurt their party during the next election. ”
And you know that because….? I rather doubt it is your high-level and frequent access to Rep. political circles.
It’s only false negative if you’re using those fucking shitty Chinese test swabs, dipshit.
How far are you going to defend the CCP and WHO, until its painfully obvious to even the most casual observer that they’re complicit in this all the way up to the corrupt and incompetent eyeballs?
Nah, you’ll still be eating their shit with a spoon and asking for seconds.
To see this as ‘cooking the books’ requires a willful ignorance of statistics and the situation on the ground.
In a perfect world, we’d have tests for everyone. This is far from a perfect world, so instead we have to rely on inference and statistics. For example, if we know, through past data, that typically the death rate for people with respiratory illness at home is X per month, and suddenly we see 4X during the pandemic.. we can estimate that the extra 3X is from it. Is it perfectly accurate? No, of course not, but absent a better explanation for the uptick, it’s a good start.
Similarly, there are a number of tests going on around the world right now where random testing -as opposed to testing symptomatic people- is happening. Afterwards, we’ll have a better estimate of the true virus spread. Just because we’re not making sure every single person is checked does not invalidate the statistics.
This is like claiming that DPAA is ‘cooking the books’ by including the nearly 79K MIA in WW2 in the list of over 400K lives lost. Sure, there are more detailed lists that probably have these as PKIA, and we don’t know for sure… but they’re still counted among the dead from war.
Nope…to see this as “cooking the books” only requires seeing that taxpayer dollars are attached to the numbers.
Once the dollars get attached, the apparatchiks report everything as being in the group remunerated. It really is not a difficult concept to grasp once one frees their mind of the Bernisms.
But I’m sure that in your world, no corruption exists, eh?
Try again.
Well, you’ve done such a thorough job of explaining the large uptick in uncategorized deaths at home, nursing homes and in hospitals, that how can anyone argue with your unassailable logic?
Come to think of it, maybe the Democrats are murdering people in old folks’ homes to get more of that sweet, sweet money. I mean, if we’re throwing around totally unfounded theories, that fits too.
I heard stress, real or imagined, can increase the likelihood of premature un-life.
But I don’t know, I’m going to consult my speak-n-spell later, it’s brekfest time! Crayons and paste, mmmmboy!
Medicare is the reason for cooking the books
Money Money 💰 💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰
OMG, the Democrats are murdering people to get more money?
“In a perfect world, we’d have tests for everyone.”
Really? Because I haven’t seen waves of people willing to wade thru the onerous process to make $5-available-at-gas-station tests.
Although, if governments keep pissing currency away on all these tests they’ll either make them mandatory or the surplus market will be lit!
I want to respond, but I genuinely don’t understand what you mean by this — there are lots of people working on tests, but it’s not a simple process. And the antibody tests are now problematic because (for better or worse) restrictions were relaxed that allows them to be made without proving they work, so a lot of quick and questionable tests are coming out from China, without proof.
I figure I’m missing your point and would like to respond, but I don’t get what you’re trying to say.
People are not clamoring for tests, if they were there would be tests, and because of market principles they’d be cheap, ergo ‘tests for everyone’ is undesirable so saith the Great Benevolent Market.
Non ironic use of problematic, ew.
Please. This is an utterly ridiculous statement that displays your complete ignorance about how science works.
The free market system is the best the world has ever seen for generating solutions to mankind’s problems, but it is not magic. It cannot overcome the laws of physics or thermodynamics. It can accelerate scientific research, but it can’t deliver solutions on demand.
Your completely right, they don’t teach them fancy scientific-type classes here in Ludditevillberg.
At least I can take statements in a thread within context.
Boom.
Stay classy.
GOTTA be careful about that boy, it looks like he’s got a little college ejamakation and he’s not afraid to whip it out!
I mean, it’s hard to refute ‘thermodynamics’…
Empirical data proves thermodynamics…or something.
It is “paper refutes Spock”.
Everything’s going to shit!
Entropy wins again!
Home testing for the Wu Flu was banned. Several labs got shut out of that market.
The numbers of people showing up at testing stations has dropped significantly in the past week.
If the local news is starting to report on traffic accidents and people shooting each other in bad neighborhoods, they’re either running out of things to say, or the statistics, which are beginning to level off, are no longer alarming, or both.
We might not get back to roller coaster rides before the end of summer, but that does NOT mean this is not coming to an end.
If this bug is as lethal as it’s touted to be, then why is the death toll not significantly higher? Maybe we just have better and stronger immune systems.
What would the death toll have to be for you to consider this a serious problem? How many preventable deaths are you willing to accept?
The lower infection and death rates are directly related to efforts to curb both; if we took no action there would be far more infections and therefor deaths.
The
The death toll will be the same
no matter the rate of change.
The area under the curve will
not change no matter the rate.
It is a fixed event.
Arrgghh!! Science!!!~
This is going to turn out to be no worse than a Flu year, net.
Not worth wrecking the economy and destroying millions of American lives.
Have you really missed the lists of things causing more deaths than he corona virus that we accept quite willingly? Automobile accidents, for example?
Depends. We have over 250k dead every year due to medical mistakes but you don’t see people stop going to doctors, do you?
The problem here is twofold: first, we (mostly Western countries, but particularly here) are tending to overestimate deaths due to coronavirus. Second, we’re finding out a far higher number than estimates before show that people infected are actually asymptomatic. If we only test those who show symptoms, but the majority (now estimated to be >60%) are asymptomatic and not tested, guess what? We have more cases than currently stated.
A LOT more.
Both these factors combine to make coronavirus LESS lethal than current numbers indicate. Is it something to take lightly? No. But it’s far from the Black Death, Spanish Flu, or other pandemics through history.
20-50 years from now, people will look back and marvel at how we shut down the planet’s economy, and how quickly we surrendered our civil liberties over this. YMMV.
Medicare
💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰
Abbott Labs announcd they have an inexpensive test working and they expect to ramp from 4 million this month to 20 million in June. I would think 30+million tests is a pretty stout commitment, especially from ONE company.
A couple of things about comparing the current mess to MIA/KIA assumptions. (Yes, I think it is valid to compare just about anything with something else, but you MUST develop some baseline for the comparison.)
Who received an incentive to convert the MIA’s to KIA’s? With a bounty of $12K, obviously there is a serious incentive for hospitals today to collect as many of those bounties as they can to balance their lack of other income from patients, just because they are greedy, or any number of other reasons/excuses. If somebody received a comparable bounty during the conversion process from MIA to KIA, you really should include that with your other presumptions.
Would “skewing the books” sit better with you? Or some other descriptive term? Feel free to use that instead – it won’t alter the fact that those who determine cause/manner of death are being encouraged to over report toward that for which they will be compensated. Which is the apparent point of this post.
Data collection from testing must also conform to some sort of rigid formula for it to be meaningful. Testing just to collect a bunch of data solves nothing, produces nothing worthwhile and can easily can be a complete waste of time. Who develops the protocols for it? What system is/was/will be used? Will the saliva test be most accurate and can it be valid to compare it the results garnered from the stick-up-your-nose test?
Too many questions. Too few controls (of the statistical analysis variety).
I agree the numbers are imperfect, but I think the revised numbers are closer to an accurate count, based on the large spike in undiagnosed deaths. Take nursing homes, for example, as we know those can be particularly hard hit. If you have data that shows in past years, deaths in March ranged from 5-8 in a home, and this year there were 21, and some positive COVID-19 cases but not enough tests for everyone, you can make a reasonable assumption that the majority of those are likely due to the virus. That’s a strong signal over a well-established baseline. If it showed, say, only nine deaths, that’d be a different story, since it doesn’t deviate from the baseline by a huge degree.
But I think ultimately the issue I have with Poe’s premise (and yours, it seems) is the assumption that the deaths were revised in order to get more money. The reality, though, is that statisticians have been talking about this for weeks already, and it was only a matter of time. And more importantly, since everyone focused on the money question, NY is not getting $12K per COVID patient- rather, that’s what the numbers came out to from HHS funds based on historical Medicare needs, not the number of COVID patients they have.
I’ll put a source for that below, but that means increasing the numbers doesn’t increase the funds – it lowers the per-person funds, in fact. And it also shows that states like Nebrasks are getting (right now) ~$300K per case, because they have fewer cases. Again, this money is not related to COVID-19 cases, so there’s no ‘incentive’ to lie about them for more of it.
Source:
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/492325-analysis-some-states-getting-300k-per-coronavirus-case-new-york-getting-12k
In summary, this revised number was in the works for a while, and doesn’t change the amount of money they get. It’s simply a way of accounting for the spike in unknown deaths, in a reasonable way. Is it perfect? No. Is it ‘cooking’ or even ‘skewing’ the books? Also no.
Our thinking may not be as far apart as you might assume, LC. I simply have not been keeping up with it – too much data for me to process at the moment what with life around here getting in the way.
I tend to not deal well with hypotheticals beyond trying to personally prepare for typical events by running some possible scenarios. Like – we may or may not be snowbound for a week THIS winter but we always stock up just in case we are. We do have a generator because it is useful, and used several times each year. Sometimes fairly often. Once for almost two weeks.
Applying those principles to the entire population is beyond my comfort zone. If you happen to live over a grocer, you may not need to keep as much “survival” stuff around as I legitimately need.
Oh, well. Got stuff to do, like feeding the critters. Y’all behave yourselves.
I didn’t mean to imply we were far apart – honestly, I greatly appreciate the civil discussion. I think that’s something the country could use a lot more of. I just meant that Poe’s position seemed predicated on the notion that NY was getting money per COVID patient, and that you seemed to have that understanding too. Perhaps I was wrong about that.
And personally preparing for events is far more important than arguing on the internet, so I think you have the right approach. Hope you and your family are doing well and staying safe.
What frustrates me most about all this is that I/we simply do not know with any surety what IS true. The numbers do look serious. But so do the number of people killed each year by drunk drivers. I have no objection to doing what we can to reduce the numbers. All the numbers.
Some of this hysteria appears from here to be quite arbitrary. And not presented by anyone in a very coherent manner. Makes no sense to me to shut down the economy of the country over one communicable disease when we seem comfortable with high death rates of another communicable disease, and lots of other high numbers for any number of manners of death.
LC seriously my cousin who lives on Long Island sent me a news link were Cuomo
Said 80 percent of medical people either
Have or have had COVID
Based on what !!!!
His wife who is a PA is at a lost
Even stranger is the state is classifying
Most of there death as COVID even if they are
Natural what give with that !!!!
Sounds like cooking the books doesn’t
I’d love to see that link if you can share it – I could imagine that rate being true in some heavy-hit hospitals (bearing in mind maybe half of people are asymptomatic and most recover fine), but certainly not country-wide or even state-wide.
And I can’t speak authoritatively to them classifying natural deaths as COVID-related – is it possible? Sure. As I said in the example above, if you have a nursing home (or, home deaths, but that’s a little harder) that has had 5-8 deaths a month for ages, and suddenly has, say, 21 and known cases of COVID, but lacks testing for all 21 deaths, you can reasonably make a first-guess that the ‘spike’ -the 13 deaths over the baseline high of 8- are COVID-19 related. You get a bit better numbers when you start checking how many people had any symptoms vs who didn’t, since natural death at a nursing home isn’t uncommon. And at the end of the day, you’ll get some right, and some wrong.. but mostly you’re on the right track.
And the incentive to ‘cook’ the books doesn’t exist , the money the article mentions, is not being given based on COVID cases. It’s based on historical Medicare needs.
There’s lots of misinformation around, sometimes spread intentionally, but mostly because we’re still learning a lot, and numbers do change as we learn more. Cuomo won’t get everything right. Neither does Trump. Neither do you or I. And for that matter, even the number of dead from COVID in NY is almost certainly wrong… but it’s now less wrong than it was before.
LC, DPAA uses the term “MIA – Presumptive Finding of Death”.
Legally, that is correct. After a period of time missing, a person is presumed and can be declared legally dead. I believe that period is 7 years; and that is DoD’s general practice when someone has been missing the requisite period of time. It allows their survivors to get on with their lives – and to collect their SGLI.
So yes, including those still MIA from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam among the war dead is accurate, in the legal sense.
This is very different from what is going on in NYC at present. There, the practice is equivalent to saying, “Well, we really don’t know what killed a lot of these folks. But there’s $12k in it for us for each one we say was a 2019 Wuhan coronavirus victim, so what the hell – we’ll call all of them coronavirus deaths and take the free money whether that’s true or not!”
“but absent a better explanation for the uptick, it’s a good start.”
The better explanation for the uptick is that corona virus is a convenient diagnosis when they are unwilling or unable to find the true cause.
In a few years, after the hysteria has died down, reputable statisticians and other medical professionals will point out that the current numbers are crap. Perhaps due to actual autopsies or examining medical histories.
That is when some of us nasty folks with attention spans longer than a fruit fly’s will say “I told you so”.
Cuomo and De Blasio are bitching at each other over all kinds of things.
Wow.
Two pithy sayings come to mind:
1. Figures don’t lie but liars do figure.
2. Never let a crisis go to waste.
When I sent this link to Ed, I anticipated blowback from the usual liberal choirboys, Seagull and LC, singing their usual defenses of any and all liberal treachery. Right on cue, here they are in full throat and predictably off key.
As to the value of their arguments, that brings to mind a third pithy saying:
3. Always consider the source…
Show me where NY will get more money with inflated cases. I provide sources on most of my comments, and I’m happy to add more. As the one I left above shows, the money is based on historical Medicare use, not COVID-19 body count.
Show me where NY will get more money with inflated cases.
Your statement at the current time is not wrong. It is just not right either.
While your statement on how money was allocated is correct (source: https://www.hhs.gov/provider-relief/index.html) the fact of the matter is that NY and other states are claiming that they should be paid in the basis of the number of patients and deaths. (source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/nyregion/coronavirus-ny-cuomo-funding.html )
Quote: In a memo last week, Kenneth E. Raske, the president of the Greater New York Hospital Association, wrote that the funding formula was “woefully insufficient to address the financial challenges facing hospitals at this time, especially those located in hot spot areas such as the New York City region.”
“It was as if everybody was treated the same, and of course under this crisis that we have, that is entirely not the case,” he said on Tuesday. “We’ve been making the case that Covid dollars should follow Covid patients. How simple is that?”
Cuomo and other state representatives are making the case that because New York had more cases, they should get more more.
So while you are correct in the current, initial allocation of money not being based on the number of cases, it is clear that Cuomo and others wants money allocated to be on the basis of the number of cases.
More cases – real or imagined – will result in more money going to New York.
A real simple way to quickly check if the numbers are being cooked (and I know of plenty of them like the auto accident example above) would be to not only look at the numbers of deaths being attributed to the Chinese virus, but to also look at deaths from all other causes over the same time period. While a drop in traumatic deaths is to be expected due to stay-at-home orders, deaths from other causes should remain relatively consistent with the same time period from previous years. If the number of deaths from other causes has suddenly taken a nose-dive, it’s reasonable to assume that the numbers are being manipulated.
Along those lines, the number of “at home deaths” increasing is somewhat of a strawman argument, because many people are smartly staying away from hospitals, to avoid being exposed to the Chinese virus. If those people have other conditions that result in their deaths (hospice patients, etc), it doesn’t have any relation to this outbreak, just because they died at home vs. in a hospital. It kinda reminds me of the skit on gun violence in the “Archie Bunker”, where his daughter is yelling about the number of people killed by guns, and he replies with something along the lines of “would you feel better if they were killed with knives little girl?”..
This situation should not be politicized by either side, but when a person or group does do that, they should be called out, and anyone using the situation for personal gain should tarred and feathered, especially if it’s a politician.
Even those numbers might not be accurate. Second and third order effects being what they are.
For example, my state has reported an uptick in traffic fatalities since the stay at home order came on. That’s counter intuitive. The reason is that there are indeed fewer accidents, but the accidents that are occurring are more fatal because speeds are greater.
Very accurate Mason, and one could reasonably argue that the person killed by an inmate released early due to the Wuhan Virus is actually a death attributed to the virus, as they would likely be alive if the inmate had stayed in prison…
Of course it would be just as accurate to argue that such a death was democrat caused….
When I was a GMG3 (loved the rating, hated the hours), when we were giving close in gunfire support at the VC, we counted every shell as a direct hit on something/somebody. Those 5″38’s were bound to hit some target. Our CO was a LCDR and wanted to make CDR in the worst way. Cooking the books???
My Father in Law was on a destroyer off the coast of Vietnam. Thank you for your service and welcome home!
Technically, this qualifies as a Coronavirus related death.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8221509/Florida-man-26-commits-murder-DAY-released-jail-early-prevent-coronavirus.html
If we could save just one life……
Thoughts and prayers.
Think of the children…
Don’t worry about those 10,000 dead, regardless how they died. Hack Stone is quite confident that they will turn out on record numbers this coming November to cast their ballots.
#DeadVotersCountToo!
#DeadVotersCountToo!
Of course! Why should US citizens be deprived of their right to vote simply because they no longer take an active interest in politics?
It’s interesting to look at the contrasts between America and Red China amid this Chinese Bat Flu season. China is communist, totalitarian, violently repressive, and has a growing movement demanding liberty. Chinese communist leaders have drastically underreported both the spread and the mortality of the disease, insisting that everything is fine. America is a free society—though that freedom is constantly threatened from within—whose leftist fringe is doing anything it can to exaggerate both the spread and mortality of the disease in an attempt to cultivate fear and panic.
As with so many things, the truth lies somewhere in between. The disease is nasty, but it’s not going to transform society into “Mad Max.” Fear of it, and especially the exploitation thereof, will have much farther-reaching and longer-lasting consequences than the bug itself ever could.
Arizona’s statisticians are in a quandary. Locations of positive COVID-19 cases are released by numbers of cases per ZIP code. So. If a hospital does not have an accurate street address for a patient that tests positive, they use the hospital’s address. This has artificially created “hot spots” in the ZIP codes containing hospitals.
The point of all that is that there are no accurate statistics of anything related to this pandemic. Nobody is using the same scoring system.
This is especially true in the more rural/remote areas.
I spent a good chunk of my misspent “yute” in the Four Corners region. Then as now, few full service hospitals are responsible for a very large area, including Native reservations which may only have a clinic or small ER: more serious cases would have to be shipped to Farmington, Durango, Gallup, or Flagstaff, which may show artificially high infection and death rates.
Something to ponder.
I don’t doubt that numbers of CCP virus deaths are inflated somewhat because there are always deaths due to other sicknesses. But… I can’t fault health departments from recording a death as due to the virus even with pre-existing conditions. An elderly person may have heart or lung issues but might live several years. For example, my mother had a heart bypass in her 60’s and several stents in her early 80’s but lived to the age 93. If someone like that contracts the virus in, say, their mid-80’s, and dies it doesn’t seem right to say they died of heart disease.
Commissar when asked about Red China, replied:
“I think it goes fabulous with a white tablecloth”.
Commissar is nothing but a water boy for the PRC.
Their standards are higher than that.
He is just angrily wrong.
And yet is too stupid to realize he is what Stalin derisively referred to as a “useful idiot”, and further remains blissfully ignorant to the fact that if communism ever came about here, he’d be one of the first against the wall.
Sucks for him.
Have fun.
https://townhall.com/columnists/marinamedvin/2020/04/15/israeli-professor-shows-virus-follows-fixed-pattern-n2566915
The Socialist controlled media will destroy this country on their march to destroy Trump.
The only surprise this article brings to me is that it was allowed to be published here.
If that’s the case, we’ll be in the home stretch shortly if we aren’t already.
I’m sure the media will pillory anyone looking at this, like they did every time Trump had the audacity to give people hope.
Cuomo was doing his daily follies today, with his usual chart of “the curve”.
Weirdly, the pointer for ” apex” was well to the right of the obvious apex, well on the down-slope.
It was so blatantly obviously wrong, and so gob-smack obviously intentionally false…
He used that bogus “misplaced” apex chart again today.
It is so far of the peak as to look like the + 1 / +2 Sigma boundary.
In other words, this is all about Power, not about “helping” folks.
And the very big business that stay open generally donate and support Left, and the small businesses that tend to go Trump get to stay closed. Hmmmm
You missed the obvious reason; they are too stupid to know what “apex” means.
And, speaking of cooking the books as only the disciples of Marx can:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/coronavirus-wuhan-lab-china-compete-us-sources
The ChiComs wanted to show their superior ways.
Oops. Lost much face. Gained much ass.
Gee, that sounds familiar . . . like from several days ago (video was posted roughly 2 weeks ago).
Worth banging that drum repeatedly.
China gained -much- ass.
Sir Mixalot has them on his list.
(Record scratch noise)
Why is losing face so important in Chinese culture?
because it will get you exterminated.
Because if you don’t get it back quickly someone will eat it.