Covid cases going down in Texas since mask mandate ended
The day before the mask mandate ended, March 9, Texas had 5,119 new cases of COVID-19, and the seven-day average for new cases was 3,971. On that day, the state had 126,404 active cases of COVID-19. As of March 9, the seven-day average for new deaths was 104. As of yesterday, the seven-day average for new cases in the state of Texas is 3,010. As of yesterday, Texas had 109,197 active cases of COVID-19, and the seven-day average for new deaths in the state of Texas is 114.
(While many Democrats love to contend that the Lone Star State and its governor, Greg Abbott, have been particularly reckless in their quarantine restrictions and pandemic response, Texas ranks right around the middle: 24th in the country in cases per million residents and deaths per million residents.)
As liberals like to say... statistics and facts be damned, because they never support our narratives. But statistics and facts in the case of Covid has pretty much never supported the narrative. The states that have been most vigilant and over the top in their Covid responses are mostly near the top when it come to most deaths per million or most. Most of the states that have been criticized by liberals are somewhere in the middle or even in the lower half of most cases and deaths per million. It seems counterintuitive to the rhetoric we hear, but that is the main reason that those who push the rhetoric do not care for things like statistics and fact.
They would rather have you believe that Texas is overflowing with new Covid cases after lifting the mask mandates. Whether or not that is actually true is secondary. The most important thing is to push the narrative.
4 comments:
And the damage will continue long into the future with additional deaths thanks to the overreaction
Death and Lockdowns
There’s no proof that lockdowns save lives but plenty of evidence that they end them.
Now that the 2020 figures have been properly tallied, there’s still no convincing evidence that strict lockdowns reduced the death toll from Covid-19. But one effect is clear: more deaths from other causes, especially among the young and middle-aged, minorities, and the less affluent.
The best gauge of the pandemic’s impact is what statisticians call “excess mortality,” which compares the overall number of deaths with the total in previous years. That measure rose among older Americans because of Covid-19, but it rose at an even sharper rate among people aged 15 to 54, and most of those excess deaths were not attributed to the virus.
Some of those deaths could be undetected Covid-19 cases, and some could be unrelated to the pandemic or the lockdowns. But preliminary reports point to some obvious lockdown-related factors. There was a sharp decline in visits to emergency rooms and an increase in fatal heart attacks due to failure to receive prompt treatment. Many fewer people were screened for cancer. Social isolation contributed to excess deaths from dementia and Alzheimer’s.
Researchers predicted that the social and economic upheaval would lead to tens of thousands of “deaths of despair” from drug overdoses, alcoholism, and suicide. As unemployment surged and mental-health and substance-abuse treatment programs were interrupted, the reported levels of anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts increased dramatically, as did alcohol sales and fatal drug overdoses. The number of people killed last year in motor-vehicle accidents in the United States rose to the highest level in more than a decade, even though Americans did significantly less driving than in 2019. It was the steepest annual increase in the fatality rate per mile traveled in nearly a century, apparently due to more substance abuse and more high-speed driving on empty roads.
The number of excess deaths not involving Covid-19 has been especially high in U.S. counties with more low-income households and minority residents, who were disproportionately affected by lockdowns. Nearly 40 percent of workers in low-income households lost their jobs during the spring, triple the rate in high-income households. Minority-owned small businesses suffered more, too. During the spring, when it was estimated that 22 percent of all small businesses closed, 32 percent of Hispanic owners and 41 percent of black owners shut down. Martin Kulldorff, a professor at Harvard Medical School, summarized the impact: “Lockdowns have protected the laptop class of young low-risk journalists, scientists, teachers, politicians and lawyers, while throwing children, the working class and high-risk older people under the bus.”
The deadly impact of lockdowns will grow in future years, due to the lasting economic and educational consequences. The United States will experience more than 1 million excess deaths in the United States during the next two decades as a result of the massive “unemployment shock” last year, according to a team of researchers from Johns Hopkins and Duke, who analyzed the effects of past recessions on mortality. Other researchers, noting how educational levels affect income and life expectancy, have projected that the “learning loss” from school closures will ultimately cost this generation of students more years of life than have been lost by all the victims of the coronavirus.
wonder why so much of Europe is reluctantly locking back down? Some of them took pretty good precautions earlier.
Whether flare ups will appear in Texas and Florida remains to be seen.
MEANWHILE
There’s No Crisis at the Border
Taegan Goddard
Washington Post:
“We looked at data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection to see whether there’s a ‘crisis’ — or even a ‘surge,’ as many news outlets have characterized it. We analyzed monthly CBP data from 2012 to now and found no crisis or surge that can be attributed to Biden administration policies.
“Rather, the current increase in apprehensions fits a predictable pattern of seasonal changes in undocumented immigration combined with a backlog of demand because of 2020’s coronavirus border closure.”
Hey Reverend...
I hear Goddard has a bridge on some ocean front property to sell you.
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