Then, Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine attributed the Tuesday change to the department adding probable virus deaths to confirmed deaths.
For probable deaths, death certificates list the virus as at least a contributing factor to a death, but without a positive test, Levine said. Confirmed deaths have a positive test.
She attributed the change to the way state epidemiologists “usually report infectious illnesses.”
In the beginning, we had a goal: to flatten the curve. We were warned that COVID-19 would overtake our hospitals and cause a health-system collapse. We were to stay home to give our medical heroes a fighting chance.
So we did, and thanks to the strength of our system, it worked. The Javits Center never filled up; the USS Comfort is sailing away. Three weeks ago, Gov. Andrew Cuomo was vowing to seize ventilators from upstate hospitals and send them to Gotham. Last week, we were dispatching our ventilators out to other states.
We did our part; we flattened the curve. So why is there no move to loosen regulations?
Add all this up, and the COVID death rate will likely settle into the 0.25%-0.4% range (1 in 250 people infected to 1 in 400). Far from 20 times higher than flu. Meanwhile, the median age of death is 78-80. And unlike the flu, #SARSCoV2 is basically not dangerous to children.
Everyone knows that President Trump places much of the blame for the global pandemic on China, and more specifically on its slow response to the initial outbreak and its failure to share information about the disease with the rest of the world. China tried to project a “business as usual” image to the world, to the great cost of the hundreds of thousands of people who will be killed by COVID-19, even in the most optimistic scenarios.
Those hundreds of thousands might easily have become millions, had Western leaders, including President Trump, not acted so decisively to cut off travel to and from China back in January and February. China, meanwhile, has deflected blame, even nurturing bizarre conspiracy theories that describe the virus as an American bioweapon.
The problem? Articles shared as illustrations of this actually said no such thing.
One article making the rounds, from the New York Daily News, is headlined "A spike in New Yorkers ingesting household cleaners following Trump's controversial coronavirus comments." But the article makes no mention of anyone deliberately consuming household cleaners. It simply states that 30 people called the city's poison control hotline "over fears that they had ingested bleach or other household cleaners."
