Conversation

Still can’t believe the official Chinese Covid fatalatity statistics of just over 4634. Even if it’s “only” an order of magnitude off and the real number is 46k it’s still unbelievably good. Hard to believe authoritarian control works that perfectly. Anyone have alt estimates?
21
83
Accepting 100x as high US fatality rate as correct, and factoring out aging population, obesity, I’d like to see a real estimate of “cost of freedom” fatalities vs “cost of trump” fatalities. We’ll never know for sure. I’d guess Trumpism added 20% on top of basic Americanism.
Replying to
I do believe the India numbers, currently at 133k. More like China in size and culture, more like US in governance. Accounting for much younger population, I’d say the better performance is entirely a result of the early strict lockdown that they couldn’t keep going long enough.
3
15
The US really seems like a case of “play stupid games, win stupid prizes” What’s the game what’s the prize
9
27
Replying to
Agreed with others that Trumpism likely added many more. If Trump had gotten his base to wear masks as enthusiastically as they wear his hats, doing nothing more than signaling COVID is real and "patriots protect patriots", that could have well mitigated the "cost of freedom".
1
2
Replying to
I’m not so sure. He reinforced what the base was already inclined to do. He followed the mob. It’s not clear he could have led them.
1
1
Show replies
Replying to
The honest comparison is going to end up being to Western European counties. And we're ahead, but not that much ahead. And they did government permits to make it legal to leave the house. So there's some "Cost of freedom" on top of that.
Replying to
Probably more. We can be galvanized into action by good leadership; the falloff would be more like 50%. Maybe more than that. Trump's negligence had criminal intent surrounding it, rather than mere laissez-faire neglect.
1