As I don’t have very much time today, I thought that perhaps I could count you to help in drafting a response to the following comment, which was left on the site earlier this morning by one of our resident conspiracy theorists.
If you want, we can take them sentence by sentence.
As I’ve got a little time, I can take the first one — “I have no doubt that COVID kills nor do I doubt that the Dems are exaggerating the threat to keep us isolated and fearful until after the election.”
Are the Democrats exaggerating the threat? No.
As of yesterday, 157,924 Americans have died as a result of COVID-19. As for where that put’s COVID-19 in the context of other diseases, I’d like to offer the following quote from a July 10 interview with Virginia Tech biostatistician Ron Fricker.
…Today, COVID-19 ranks as the sixth leading cause of death in the United States, following heart disease, cancer, accidents, lower chronic respiratory diseases and stroke. Heart disease is the leading cause, with just over 647,000 Americans dying from it each year. Alzheimer’s disease, formerly the sixth largest cause of death, kills just over 121,000 people per year. If the University of Washington IHME model’s current prediction of COVID-19-related deaths comes to pass, COVID-19 will be the third leading cause of death in the United States by the end of the year.
The American Cancer Society estimates that in 2020 there will be an estimated 1.8 million new cancer cases diagnosed and 606,520 cancer deaths in the United States. Lung cancer is estimated to kill about 135,000 people in the US in 2020, so the number of COVID-19 deaths is currently equivalent and will exceed it soon. Of course, it is important to note that the COVID-19 deaths have occurred in about the past four months while the number of lung cancer deaths is for a year. So, COVID-19 deaths are occurring at roughly three times the rate of lung cancer deaths…
So, not only are we back to losing over 1,000 people a day from COVID-19, but it’s poised to be the third leading cause of death in America by the end of the year. I know the President has said that COVID-19 is not as bad as the seasonal flu, and that, one day, “It’s just going to disappear… like a miracle,” but that’s simply not true. It continues to grow and thrive in the United States under his watch, and people who were absolutely up-in-arms over the fact that we lost two people to Ebola under Obama, are now praising Trump’s response.
One more thing… I find it laughable that anyone would spend his or her time considering Barack Obama’s imagined role in “exaggerating the threat” of COVID-19 for his own political gain, when we have actual, real evidence that Donald Trump did the exact opposite for political gain. As Vanity Fair just recently reported, a former member of Jared Kushner’s COVID-19 task force has said, and I quote, “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy.” In other words, they knew how deadly this was, but, as it was hitting blue states the hardest, they decided to let it unfold, thinking that they could use it to attack Democratic governors. [I cannot wait for the class action suits against the federal government.] One really doesn’t have to look all that hard for conspiracy theories. They’re all right there, out in the open. All you have to do is open your eyes.
Speaking of which, remember in mid-July, when we’d heard that the Trump administration had stepped in to stop the CDC from collecting COVID-19 hospitalization data? Well it looks as though the CEO of the company that got the contract to take over the data collection, TeleTracking Technologies, is run by “a longtime Republican donor with ties to Trump Organization financiers.” So, again, why spend one’s time theorizing about a complicated plot involving Michelle Obama wresting power from a dementia-addled Joe Biden, when we can see what’s unfolding right in front of us, and it’s much, much worse.
Remember how we were told that the job of COVID-19 data collection was being taken from the @CDCgov and given to a private company? Well, guess what?
Just wait until all the #DrainTheSwamp folks find out. I'm sure they'll be absolutely livid.https://t.co/pulx73ESLn
— Mark Maynard (@MarkAMaynard) July 31, 2020
I shouldn’t have to say this every day, but there is an infectious disease that is spreading across America, killing people — like my friend Monica Echeverri Casarez. And we have an administration that is not only neglecting to protect us, but actively lying about the situation, politicizing every aspect, and pushing us toward chaos and civil war. The idea of spending even one minute talking about how Obama might be trying to get back into the White House, when we have Donald Trump, who is actually in the White House, telling us that he’s considering the possibility of postponing the election, is in-fucking-sane. This is absolutely madness. We don’t need imagined threats. We have very real ones.
[Oh, and with almost 158,000 Americans dead, Trump is back on the golf course.]