In the early days of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, the Trump administration and right-wing commentators were only too keen to condemn this Chinese government secrecy Citizens of Democratic Nations, ”wrote one observer End of February Atlantic story “Can reasonably expect their governments to be more open and accountable.” 1
If only. 2nd
It is now known that the government has failed to test Americans on a large scale and in a timely manner to ensure that the spread of the virus is practically invisible to us. Less well known are all other methods the government has attempted and may continue to attempt to massage the data to obscure the reality of the US coronavirus pandemic.3rd
Infections are generally understood as quantifiable biological phenomena that reflect certain brutal facts. Either the test was done or not; either the result was positive or not; The victim either lives or not. A consensus has emerged that these key facts will be critical to the political epidemic after the epidemic. Trump suggested this in his recent announcement that a The number of 100,000 deaths would be proof of its success The evidence, you know, will be in the pudding 4th
Consider the test fiasco. The administration not only botched the introduction of virus tests, it was also effective for a certain time extinguished 5
The problem started earlier this month. As soon as it became clear that the tests had started embarrassingly slow and confused, the government tried to wash their hands to compile the total number of Americans tested. On March 2, the Centers for Disease Control cut out information about the number of people tested on their website. “All of a sudden,” said Wisconsin representative Mark Pocan to CNN, “these statistics have disappeared.” When Pocan complained to the CDC, he was told the agency would “Trying” to collect and “possibly” share the status data public . 6
The administration justified this lack of transparency by referring to their decision to decentralize the coronavirus tests and allow private companies and laboratories to use their own test kits. This meant that to collect the total number of people tested, data had to be collected from a variety of untracked, different sources. It also meant taking a full look at the number of Americans tested could become impossible 7
On March 10, the test data was finally released again on the CDC website, but there was still a problem: The agency listed the number of “samples” tested voluntary efforts found the available data “incomplete” and “not useful for citizens or political leaders” lagging far behind that of other countries 8th
Weeks after the virus appeared in this country, the persecution remains at risk and incomplete. In a vacuum, officials were free to spread exaggerated claims Speed and scope of the test 9
T. he pFor many Outbreaks, containment require painful and certain short-term economic disruptions in exchange for uncertain, long-term and invisible results. The best “contained” outbreak is in the absence of excessive deaths and diseases. There is no triumphal march. Nothing happens at all. Massaging the data reduces political pressure on uncomfortable compromises. 10th
And, as history shows, this is surprisingly easy because assessing the number of infectious agents is an estimate. Take one of our oldest known infections, malaria. People who do not have access to health care or who do not access it because they are not so sick or because they do not believe that they can get useful help are not counted regularly. Experts estimate that up to 90 percent of malaria cases worldwide are not reported. In addition to this enormous amount of so-called “sub-reporting”, there is also over-reporting. Doctors who are aware of the ubiquity of malaria or who are trying to relieve paperwork can simply assume that their fever cases are caused by malaria, regardless of whether they bother to spy on malaria parasites in their patients’ blood or not . The total number of cases of malaria depends almost entirely on the “assumption based on the assumption based on the assumption”, as one expert put it, and offers ample opportunities to inflate or reduce statistics on the size of the infection. Estimates of the number of malaria cases worldwide can vary by hundreds of millions.11
For this reason, conspiracies to disguise outbreaks in democratic societies are far from being the only province of authoritarian governments. For example, following an outbreak of cholera in New York City in 1832, the Department of Health and the Mayor refused to let the public know about the spread of the disease and instead issued vague reports of “sudden deaths” due to an “unknown disease”. Hospital records that quarantined cholera patients, which would have exposed the scale of the epidemic, mysteriously disappeared. Angry local doctors who coped with dying patients called it “criminal neglect” and instead published their own bulletins. The conspiracy helped protect the shipping industry, which continued to carry cholera-infected passengers across canals and oceans during the nineteenth-century cholera pandemics. 12th
Italy hid its 1911 cholera outbreak, in which 18,000 people died for over 80 years from the press, historians, and the international community. The disease had broken out unpleasantly on the eve of the country’s 50th anniversary celebrations. The Prime Minister sent a telegram to his health authorities asking them to “maintain and maintain the greatest possible secrecy”. Officials stopped counting cases diagnosed by doctors and coroners, as they had in the past, and instead decided to report only those cases that were confirmed by laboratory tests. This shift did not change the course of the outbreak, but nevertheless halved the official number of cases.13
Government officials also secretly paid newspaper reporters not to mention the disease; censored telegrams mentioning the scourge; and carried out nightly raids on medical societies that dared to distribute cholera education materials, as historian Frank Snowden described in his 1995 book. Naples in the time of cholera . Even as cholera spread and felled thousands of Italians, the Italian government created medical fiction that only a small outbreak had occurred that had been quickly contained. The German writer Thomas Mann, who visited Italy during his secret contagion, called it a kind of “nameless horror”.14
T. Today, more than a century later, another contagion is emerging, the contours of which are not fully known, as countless Americans across the country suffer from mysterious diseases that suffer from flu, allergies, or “a bug”. How the administration can continue to cook the data as the COVID-19 outbreak progresses is a critical question. fifteen
A politically sensible way to manipulate statistics is to tinker with the way cases are defined. For example, overly restrictive criteria for defining hurricane-related deaths have enabled government officials in Puerto Rico to cover up the massive number of people killed by Hurricane Maria. For months, they counted only the 64 deaths directly caused by the storm, not the thousands of other deaths that had resulted in independent analysis. The state updated its death toll a year later forced to do so by a court order 16
How could the Trump administration tinker with the criteria in the case of the new corona virus? One way: by only counting the deaths that result directly from the Covid-19 infection, as opposed to the deaths that were caused by the cascading breakdown of hospital systems, emergency services, and the broader safety net.17th
Widespread Covid-19 home self-test kits Kind of invasive 18th
At the moment there are many exaggerated claims. For example, FEMA administrator Peter Gaynor said in an interview with ABC News on March 22 that the agency was “ready to go to zero” in the national supply of masks and other medical protective equipment, citing “Hundreds of thousands of millions of things In fact, he couldn’t even give the “rough number” 19th
In the meantime, Trump has made overstated statements about data on the effectiveness of new treatments. A study of COVID-19 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin who Trump described as “one of the greatest game changers in medical history” actually included only 36 patients. STAT called the study “small and hastily designed, even according to the standard of phase 1 studies 20th
But the president tells us not to worry. He said that Ordinary car accidents are far worse 21
During the secret contagion of Italy, the newspapers boomed: “There is no cholera and never was!”22
