So I am in effect isolated with my dogs (and family, including the cook, the maid and the secretary and her family) in the house, with of course, a TV and internet connection.
I keep seeing these lies posted on my facebook page, and what makes me angry is that the MSM fact-checkers didn't stop them from being published.
Are they ignorant, or twisting things for political purposes? Trumpieboy speaks in his usual vulgar manner which is easy to understand but may exaggerate on the side of hope, and we read he is lying: One wonders how FDR's phrase "we have nothing to fear but fear itself" would be spun in today's toxic press environment. Probably they would be ridiculing him for lying about the Nazi threat, I guess.
At a time when people need to understand what is going on, and to have hope, I am aghast at this behavior.
LINK is conservative PJMedia list of the press' accusations that Trumpieboy is lying, along with the explanation that any 13 year old with access to google could have fact checked, but apparently no editor bothered to do so.
A lot of them are so obviously political spin and bad reporting.
But some of the "spin" is merely a difference of opinion by two different experts.
But some of the Spin is a misunderstanding how bureaucracy works (and a mis-understanding of how American government works, since much of this is controlled at the state, not federal level). No, the president does not micromanage everything: often this is done at a lower level of government.
as a doc who worked for years in the federal (and state) jobs, I am aware of how bureaucracy works: and the dirty little secret is that alas too often regulations are more important than common sense, alas.
For example, it's not really a the lie that the slowness of getting tests available was a government problem. It was true. But part of it was because of "red tape" that emphasized that the tests be evaluated to make sure they were accurate, never mind that the need to test was urgent.
So of course, the tests had to pass quality control and a maze of paper work to be approved before the laboratory could use them.
Townhall noted that “Testing in the United States was fraught with difficulty in large part due to the slow approval by the Food and Drug Administration to allow testing kits developed by private companies outside of the government controlled CDC to be used at a local or national level. Those FDA policies are consistent with the Obama Administration's response to H1N1 and Ebola in 2009 and 2014 respectively.”
actually don't blame President Obama: the problem started long before his time in office.
Another problem in the media is all those fake experts who go around saying huge numbers of people will die.
True, a lot of people will die, but unless one analyzes the data, it will sound worse than it is.
one, you need to know the percentage of the population who die: 30 die in a nursing home sounds different than 30 out of 120 people in a nursing home died.
Then there is the problem of "x number people have the disease have died" numbers. Out of how many people?
This sounds terrible (and it is):
As of Feb. 29, there were 48,557 cases of the coronavirus and 2,169 deaths in Wuhan, according to the study.
left out of the article: That Wuhan had 11 million people.
1.4% of people in Wuhan with symptoms died:
but this ignored that most people never never got sick so weren't tested. So the actual death rate in the population was much lower (less than one percent).
Another lie is that this is no worse than influenza, usually written by someone who never worked at a hospital or clinic in the middle of a major influenza epidemic.
The difference being that, unlike the 2009 "swine flu" epidemic (where both Lolo and I were immune since we had antibodies from a previous influenza epidemic in 1974), in this case everyone can get sick at the same time: including a lot of the nurses and caregivers, leading to the hospitals being overwhelmed with sick patients and not enough staff to care for them (which is what happened in Wuhan).
One is happy that the phrase "lower the curve" is finally being noticed by the clueless and picked up by the MSM in recent days.
As for treatment: see previous posts on that data and how the MSM is so busy spinning their web of political bias that one cannot rely on them for straight new (and no, I don't watch CNN: CNN Phil is off line for some reason and I can't stand Fox, so my news is from the internet, or from local news outlets on TV)
FYI: approval of medicine takes time, but if a medicine might work doctors will use it because they dislike patients dying when something might work and the "approved" treatments aren't working.
Finally, there are a lot of crazy stories out there: Grandmom says her potato soup cured her. Yup and probably Grandpa's whiskey helped him avoid the virus too (but only if he used it to clean surfaces), and no, a gin and tonic won't cure you either.
And it gets crazier if you check out Facebook: Vitamin C, Silver nitrate, miracles veggies...
well in medical school we were told a story about onion poultices.
During the Spanish Flu, there was a very high mortality among pregnant women.
One doctor was called to see a pregnant woman who was very sick and he know would probably die, and advised the latest scientific treatment that he knew was probably useless, but hey, he had to try.
The family's grandmother however, insisted that "all she needed was an onion poultice" and she'd be cured. The doctor forbad that useless treatment to be used in his hospital, of course. And of course, the woman died as he anticipated.
But for years, the family members would rebuke him saying: if only we had used an onion poultice, she would have lived.
sigh.
The problem of course is when people use folk remedies in the place of a treatment that would actually cure the disease.
But gentle folk remedies are not a problem if it helps the patient feel better (placebo effect) if you add them on top of the treatment that works.
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