Europe is doing worse than the U.S.   Where is the criticism of Macron?   The press ignores the extremely poor response in France because they like technocrats like this guy.

They also ignore the fact that all the worst performing states and municipalities are run by Democrats.   If you took away the deaths in New York and New Jersey alone, America's death toll from covid-19 would be proportionately lower than just about any country in western Europe.

And the thing is: public health policy is the province of governors, not presidents.  

This whole 'blame Trump for covid' thing is just plain stupid.  It's so stupid and so wrong that I suspect most who repeat that line don't actually believe it themselves.  But again, maybe I'm underestimating the illiteracy and innumeracy of the general public.

Will America succumb to safetyism? - Heather Mac Donald, The Spectator, 2 November 2020
https://spectator.us/will-america-succumb-safetyism/

A vote for Biden is a vote for fear over optimism

The triumph of Tuesday’s presidential election will reveal whether the feminized, therapeutic culture of the university has become the dominant force in the American psyche.

During the last eight months of coronavirus panic, a remarkable number of Americans have deliberately — one might even say, ecstatically — embraced fear over fact. They have shut their ears to the data, available since March, showing how demographically circumscribed the lethal threat from coronavirus infection is: concentrated among the very elderly and those with multiple and serious preexisting health conditions. 

A remarkable number of Americans have voluntarily cowered in their homes despite the lack of a scientific basis for doing so. When they finally ventured outside, they did so wearing masks, despite the absence of any chance of infection in outdoor settings. They have without protest traded a vibrant economy made up of hard-working small businessmen for the narcotic of government transfer payments and debt-ridden stimulus spending.

And now former Vice President Joe Biden promises to double down on all of the above. A vote for Biden is a vote for spirit-crushing safetyism over such traditional American virtues as optimism, risk-taking and entrepreneurial drive. Biden is itching to shutter more of the economy. He has embraced the idea of a national outdoor mask requirement, which would turn every American citizen into a walking billboard of fear and reinforce the message that threat is everywhere. He will claim to be guided by ‘metrics’ for reopening or shutting enterprises down, metrics that are pulled out of thin air. He will pretend that he has no option but to ‘follow the science’ in mandating further shutdowns. The science, however, argues for reopening. And a leader should base decisions on a range of considerations, rather than being dictated to by one particular group of ‘experts’.

Biden may well govern from a bunker, to model the fanatical risk aversion that will become the national norm.

And in doing these things, Biden will be channeling the spirit of the American university. It is the American university that tells students, preposterously, that they are at risk even of their lives from circumambient racism and sexism, and that they need a vast anti-discrimination bureaucracy to survive. It tells them that speech challenging campus orthodoxies is a form of violence that can rightly be suppressed. It showers them with therapeutic safe spaces, complete with massage, mindfulness sessions, aromatherapy, essential oils and the inevitable therapy dogs. It derides rationality as a tool of white male supremacy. It promotes itself as the only route to a productive meaningful life, disparaging hands-on labor and the mastery of machines.

President Donald Trump, for all his vast personality flaws, is the antidote to this suffocating safetyism ethic. The key moment of his political career was not the overhyped ride down the escalator but rather his emergence on a White House balcony after returning from the hospital for coronavirus infection. He removed his mask and uttered words that were once the hallmark of leadership: we will persevere, we cannot be cowed by fear, we must move forward. And in the most stunning indication of the sea change in America culture, the Democratic and media establishments reacted to this message with howls of rage and contempt. 

The problem is the haphazard and contradictory information.

States have different counts and case numbers for more reasons than a Democrat or Republican in charge.

Of course densely populated areas will have higher cases than rural areas. 

Everybody chooses the statistic that works for their argument.

Right now, the only statistic that matters is the amount of tests that come back positive.  But this is not uniform, as there are different numbers of tests.

Perfect example in yesterday's results for the top 5 states:

South Dakota: 50.6 percent positive

New daily cases: 526

Tests per 1,000: 2.6

Iowa: 37.4

New daily cases: 1,542

Tests per 1,000: 1.6

Kansas: 36

New daily cases: 2,082

Tests per 1,000: 1.4

Idaho: 33.4

New daily cases: 757

Tests per 1,000: 1.4

Wyoming: 30.4

New daily cases: 444

Tests per 1,000: 2.2

We don't know how many tests were done to get these results.

So Trump's call to slow down the testing could backfire badly.

You test ONE person in Alabama and they come back positive... I guess that's a 100% positive test rate.

Source

All I have ever maintained is that the impact of covid has been greatly exaggerated to the benefit of certain very large corporations and governments, both their leaders and their bureaucracies.  

Who has benefited and how?

Large corporations benefit, especially any that have a fully developed online presence.  Contrarywise, small businesses remain shuttered or are struggling with limited business.

Government bureaucracies benefit because they get more funding as politicians scramble to throw money at the 'problem', which incidentally provides them for an excuse for tighter surveillance.

Apollonius (Theocritos) said:

Large corporations benefit, especially any that have a fully developed online presence. Contrarywise, small businesses remain shuttered or are struggling with limited business.

How is that different from any other time?

Yes, companies like Amazon and Uber greatly benefited.

Chain restaurants that could deliver benefited more than small restaurants that couldn't.

But ALL hairdressers, chains and independents, were hurt the same.

But if businesses are STILL bordered up and shut in your neighbourhood, then you need to look at who was supposed to be looking out for the health and economy of that neighbourhood and vote them out.

The latest research into Remdesivir, chloroquine, lopinair-ritonovair and interferon beta concludes that "none of the four drugs studied produced any measurable benefit in mortality or disease course. "

https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4057

Apollonius (Theocritos) said:

The only truly important figure is the number of deaths or those left permanently disabled.

Guessing you don't work in health care. The numbers that need medical attention are the ones you need to watch.