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?
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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.
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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".
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True for certain topics but "paranoid about the virus" could have fit both Trump and his base with "Do you trust China on this virus?" as a rallying cry (which he later used). I don't think his base equated masks with a lack of freedom before politicization (i.e. think preppers).
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