| | | According to this file, the highest per capita death from COVID by state is NJ followed by NY, C and MA.
statista.com
But that is looking at cumulative deaths for the whole year since February. You are doing what you always do--you don't differentiate between what is happening now, that is what is happening in the last month, versus what was happening back March And April when people clearly didn't know what they were doing. And you are freezing time, seemingly passing a final judgment based on that. I am not doing that. I am looking taking into account a learning curve and looking at more recent statistics. And it is clear from that that NY, MA and CT are each doing far better than they were when the virus was new. They learned, to give one important example, that putting people on a ventilator was a death sentence and using proning--an old fashioned technique--was a far more effective strategy.
If you look at what has been happening in most EU countries over the past month, it too is vastly different from what was happening in March, especially of course in Italy and Spain. It is deeply misleading to just look at cumulative totals, you have to look at the curve. You can account for it like that guy who posted earlier today did by saying, oh, all the "weak" people died, so no one was left to die. That would, I suppose be like what happened to the Native Americans when the Europeans came to the Americas and brought smallpox, mumps and measles here, killing 80-90% of the people in many areas. The ones who survived were the "strong" ones (smh), in other words, the ones who were lucky enough to have had immune systems that managed to deal with the diseases. Frankly, that perspective seems ingenuous and stupid to me. The slope of the curves in most of the EU countries look pretty similar to me and they were, except for Sweden and GB, pretty much doing the same things after April. It seems more reasonable to suppose that the things they were doing were what was making the difference. And NY, MA and CT were doing those things too, getting a great deal of compliance and the slopes of their curves are similar to the EU countries. We'll have to see what happens in places like GA, FL, SC and certainly to some extent TX where it seems that resistance to doing those things is stronger to see if the slope of the curves in those states over the next few months goes down in the same way. If the slope of the curve goes down without them doing those things, then perhaps the first hypothesis is correct and some sort of "herd immunity" has taken hold. Although it isn't clear to me how to actually measure compliance. I suppose constant polling to see what people are agreeing with and what they say they are doing could be part of the answer to that. If the governing politicians don't recommend those measures and don't mandate them is another obvious way of measuring it.
The Nordic countries are another interesting test case, with Sweden obviously being the outlier. It will be worth while to see what happens in those countries too. Claiming real knowledge of what will happen is, IMHO, simply wrong and unscientific. We are all running real life experiments here. That is what we have to do under the circumstances. |
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