Sort of like how the last three "surges" were started when public policies were not set aside?

The reality is we have a perfect natural experiment. Some states shut everything down and quadruple masked in the basement while saying seven Hail Pelosies every day. Other states ignored it. There is no statistical correlation between death rate and these policies.

Clearly the death rate follow other, unrelated factors.

This is patently false, given that last summer's US surge came promptly after the fourth of July, when a number of red states prematurely declared the danger diminished and relaxed mitigation measures.

This is also false. Once the primary surge had subsided and infectious disease specialists had a grasp on measures that could reduce spread of infections, states that maintained mitigation measures around masks and indoor distancing had lower infection rates overall than those that did not. These data are readily available for the second half of 2020 on a state by state basis, for instance. Here's just a snippet from a published study out of Johns Hopkins comparing new case loads, hospitalizations, and fatalities across states as a function of their political persuasion, and hence their public policies towards risk mitigation measures: The most significant difference between blue and red states occurred from late June to early August. On August 5, the risk of death in red states was 1.8 times higher than in blue states.

Beyond that, you can see the influence of relaxing mitigation measures prematurely over time by comparing neighboring states. When the Dakotas were leading the nation in new cases and hospitalizations per capita last year, South kept a relaxed set of policies when North finally enacted mandatory mask and distancing measures. Only the latter state saw a large drop over the following two months in measures of pandemic severity.

You can have your own set of opinions, but not your own set of facts. And your hyperbole is pure B.S.

And yet the top for states for per capita deaths are blue states.

I've got the facts, and the facts tell me I'm right and you're full of crap

Not since the first surge came and went they're not. Of the 12 states with the lowest rate of new cases per capita since July 1, 2020, 11 have Democratic governors and a Dem majority legislature.

I already explained that to you earlier, along with the Hopkins data demonstrating the differential death rate per capita. Twice now is more than enough.

Yep, and unlike last year, they're the one's who are ending up sicker and in ICUs moreso than older people.

From today's (Aug 1st) Miami Herald:

Inside a COVID-only intensive care unit at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, all eight beds are filled with patients.

Six of the eight patients are younger than 50 years old. None of them are vaccinated against COVID-19. The youngest patient, a 27-year-old woman on a ventilator, had to be resuscitated with a bag valve mask after her blood oxygen saturation levels crashed.

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/hea...252953008.html

(Note: The article is behind a paywall; I'm including the link for copyright law purposes.)

Re: Masks work etc etc

https://mobile.twitter.com/ianmSC/st...040771/photo/1

That's just LA...

What you're doing is cherry-picking the data. That's what happens when Trump-love and the RepubliQ ideology distort what used to be a reasonably sound mind.

In the early stages of the pandemic, urban areas were much more greatly affected than less densely populated areas. Cities that received a lot of international air traffic were particularly affected, for obvious reasons. And yea verily, states with high urban concentrations tend to be Democratic.

So what the conservitards did, if you'll recall, was start screaming "ONLY THE LIBS GET COVID!!!!!!!!!!!!!."

But since the initial wave/surge, blue states have dramatically outperformed red states in keeping down cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. With the most recent Delta variant, the ratio of red state to blue state Covid deaths is 3 to 1.

The consequences of ignorance are being felt in Trump land. There's an almost perfect negative correlation between how Trumpy a given state or county is (as measured by the two elections) and its vaccination rates. And in turn, there is an almost perfect negative correlation between vaccination rates and cases/deaths.

This is simple scientific data, easy to find, and exists exclusive of ideological considerations. Get the shot, you almost certainly won't die. Don't get the shot, and you just might die, coughing up blood into your MAGA hat.

Some might consider that a karmic outcome

How come most of the sick are vaccinated Einstein?

Where's the dead people junior?

So your argument is that even though the blue states' shutdown+mask policies caused the most deaths, we should ignore that because the death toll was so high so fast?

That's the most brilliant argument I've heard today

FACT: the states with the most per-capita deaths are blue, with blue state policies. That's overall, throughout the pandemic as a whole.

Shutdowns and mask policies did NOT cause any deaths. Your saying that is a mark of the utmost idiocy.

I already pointed out that your statement about blue state per-capita deaths is a lie.

Labeling a lie as a "FACT" does not make it so. Have a nice day.

Gee, I don't know...how come the sun is green?

How come cows have twelve legs?

How come Trump won the election?

How come the Martians are sucking out our precious bodily fluids?

https://www.npr.org/2021/07/16/10170...e-unvaccinated

https://apnews.com/article/coronavir...6e7354f5d5e187

Those articles are 2-4 weeks old. Things change fast. Lets see some updated real numbers and not the media spun crap.

What makes you think those numbers are, in your timeless phrase, "media spun crap"? For you to legitimately make that assertion, you would have to have some alternate source of information that not only contradicts those numbers but is also more reliable than those other sources.

Fox News doesn't count.

I'm continually amazed at the extent to which people regard information provided by experts as less worthy of consideration than their own grossly uninformed opinions. It's as if what people want to see completely trumps reality.

The vast majority of people being hospitalized for Covid and dying from it are unvaccinated. That in fact has NOT changed over the last few weeks, and probably won't change until the Delta variant has completely torn through the tiny-brained unvaccinated population.

KN95 is just a cheap chinese knockoff, named to fool people. N95 is a real standard. KN95 is pure bullsheet.

Mad robin is the Covid of LVL

shut downs caused a lot of deaths - most of them were drug over doses and alcoholics relapsing.

Shut downs ruined a lot of lives but no one talks about that. You have to have a balance.

Also natural immunity is actually more effective than the vaccine. They have a lot of data from Italy.

If that was the case we would not have over 600,00 dead. At this point if a person does not believe in the virus there is little anyone can do. We can only hope that the virus is not using the unvaccinated like a petri dish and evolving into a strain the vaccine does not protect against.

I remember when Trump said ‘if you take out the blue states we’re doing well’

It was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard a politician say and I highly doubt anyone will match it in my lifetime. The height of scum to discount deaths of your fellow citizens because of who they voted for. They’re not less dead but apparently less important.

You should be ashamed of yourself for repeating that filth. But you just follow the leader (straight to the ICU).

FDR: Our D-Day landing was spectacularly successful. Let me break down the causalities by political affiliation.

First off, population analysis suggests about half those deaths can reasonably be attributed to COVID. When someone with a terminal illness like congestive heart failure or cancer dies and has COVID, scoring that as 1.0 COVID deaths and 0.0 deaths for heart failure or cancer is absurd. Let's say 300,000 can reasonably be counted as COVID which is in line with excess deaths in the population.

Second, there's some lack of clarity of what the mortality of COVID is, but once you take into account asymptomatic cases it's almost certainly between 0.1% and 0.3%. Our population is about 330 million if you count illegals. So the disease would kill between 330,000 and 990,000 people if everyone got it.

So the actual death toll is completely in line with natural immunity being effective. Repeat infections aren't required.

And he was right.

You don't have to like it, but facts are facts. And the fact is that the failed policies of NY and NJ created the worst COVID results in the country. It may be that can be entirely attributed to the policy of distributing COVID spreaders to the nursing homes. That policy is so bad you'd have a hard time creating a worse one short of injecting nursing home patients with COVID directly.

What the same data shows without question is that masks and shutdowns are ineffective/irrelevant to the outcome, as both states had both and got the worst possible results.

I am not in LA, but know some people that were there over the weekend and every photo they posted showed them sitting around with no masks, so it is hard to determine how many people are actually wearing masks. Of course all photos were when they were outside or eating, so maybe maybe people are wearing them everywhere else.

Also, it is hard to determine where the spike would have gone to if no mask mandate was implemented, so you are just saying cases when up when a new variant came through, but there is really no way to determine if a mask mandate reduced the infections or not, so the data doesn't really help either side as. Also, two weeks is too short of time to determine the effectiveness of a measure that is being used to slow the spread of a disease that takes up to two weeks before you realize you have it. Many of the people testing positive now could have had contact prior to the mask mandate being reinstated and felt nothing for a week or so, then had minor symptoms that didn't go away for a few days and then went and got tested and were positive. There is no real way to determine what date that someone testing positive on July 28 had their contact.