“All animals die, but only some deaths get noticed”, not quite George Orwell.
Historical tidbit, arguably our nation’s greatest President, Abraham Lincoln presided over a war which kill over half a million Americans.
Meanwhile in Lala Land, certain retarded elements of the loony left media, have attempted to concoct an moral analogy between the Vietnam War and the Chinese Wuflu pandemic, from Afreenews [1]:
[R]eporter Olivia Nuzzi actually asked President Donald Trump, “If an American president loses more Americans over the course of six weeks than died in the entirety of the Vietnam war, does he deserve to be re-elected?”
Nuzzi’s argument such as it is depends on the premise that some deaths matter and some don’t. She implies Donald Trump has blood on his hands. Nuzzi holds that President Trump is guilty of some crime, moral or legal, of killing Americans. Yet, one American death counts are not increasing but rather decreasing. Further, two, COVID-19 is less an actual cause of death than rubber stamp hastily applied to a death certificate. from Issues & Insights [2]:
So why are death rates falling while COVID-19 deaths continue to grow? It may be that many deaths that aren’t really COVID-19 related are counted as that anyway. The net effect is to exaggerate COVID-19 deaths, while underestimating others.[…]
Could it be that the number of COVID-19 deaths has been inflated? There’s strong evidence for this.
Pennsylvania, for instance, recently removed some 200 deaths previously recorded as COVID-19 fatalities from its data after coroners complained that state numbers and methods for tallying virus deaths didn’t match their own.
“Pennsylvania Health Department officials had included in their count ‘probable’ coronavirus deaths in cases where they believed the virus was the cause of death but did not have confirmation from a positive test result,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer
Nuzzi’s argument isn’t that the big pile of total dead bodies is too high. Her argument rests on her premise one of the contributing little pile is too high.
If Nuzzi wants to make her case for some moral crime on part of the President, she is going to need some real evidence, and not mere hysterical moral posturing.
Eric adds:
what’s driving questions like that is the need for fear on the part of the anti Trumper’s…and fear makes rational conversation nearly impossible, especially when compounded by mid-wits educated for 13+ years in all the smart-sounding, but ultimately thoughtless talking points of the media-leftist-education complex.
I bring to light three points:
We have, within the last 48 hours, statistics from Italy that suggests that 98 point something percent of deaths which involved covid-19 also involved subjects who had other health issues, emphysema, asthma, blood pressure related issues and so on. I’ve seen nothing in American statistics which suggests anything to the contrary. In other words the number of people who have died specifically from covid-19, while tragic, is statistically very small…. Less than 1% of those identifed as being infected, and symptomatic…
Second point:
Also within the last 48 hours we have fresh information from California which among other things suggest that the number of people who actually carry the virus but are asymptomatic is larger than previously thought. Now, this is important for several reasons, Butler just among them, the death rate from a covid virus infection is low enough that it has a period and 3 zeros in front of the actual number. the danger is far more minimal in other words than we have been led to believe.
Third point:
It is still true that SARS killed more Americans then covid-19. I don’t remember anybody calling for a shutdown in that situation.
As a bonus:
The single most unarguable point about Donald Trump and his presidency is the wild success economically. now ask yourself, why would some be interested in shutting the economy down? Given the relative risks involved that are now well-documented, I think we can pretty much figure that it’s not to save lives..