Mostly bad news. It just passed France for fifth place in highest number of deaths per million in the world. Whether it will catch up to Italy - remember when Italy was the world's horror story? - remains to be seen. Not soon, at any rate. Of course it's not really fifth, as the dishonest numbers out of China, Russia, and Iran, just for openers, likely change the picture. And the highest-death countries have always been more likely to be those with the highest amount of international connections. New York may come to mind.
Still, it's not good.
Yet it may still prove out. The idea was always higher risk now, herd immunity later. Stockholm's herd immunity is only a discouraging 7%, but the new possibility of cross immunity is now out there. There is so much still to be learned.
An update from my email group about Dougherty County in Georgia, which I mentioned a few posts ago. "Dougherty county this morning had 9 more deaths since I
emailed last week. The funeral that kicked off all their problems was
February 29th. I keep thinking people aren't really wrapping their head
around the timelines here, how long it really takes people to spread
this illness, to get sick, or to die. The impression seems to be if we
don't see a change in 10 days, nothing's happening." Well yes, we are all like that, not just the people we disagree with. We not only believe our eyes over the numbers, we also cannot wait for all the numbers to come in either.
This headline of the morning's email from the NYT includes the phrase "Sweden admits it messed up."
ReplyDeletePerhaps they did, although the fact that the Times views it as a kind of confession of sin points to an additional hardship in knowing what's right. The investment in the rightness of correct opinion is a reliable source of cognitive bias, perhaps here as certainly elsewhere.
I get angry when I read the NYT myself. Kudos for being able to endure it.
ReplyDeleteI can’t read it. Headlines that are opinion pieces kill me.
ReplyDelete