My betters at The New York Times lead with this this morning:
( ): You cannot write that as a general statement. If you snip the data at the last twenty days or so, yes, then that would be accurate. If you snip it in the last week, which has been a daily rollercoaster, it's not an accurate statement.
As further refutation it would serve here to snip the Johnnies logarithmic scale.
The four right-most, that is, most recent, dots are 1.4M. The five before that are 1.3M. The four before that 1.2M. And so on. The New York Times is simply WRONG.
Coronavirus Cases Slow in U.S.,... (emphasis on "Slow" added)
Ledes are often misleading for their brevity. That one is accurate. "Slowing" though is being used optimistically there, it's progress, near synonymously with "declining." Cue old joke about cop beating suspect for blowing a stop sign: Now do you want me to slow down or stop? Slowly growing or even flat-lining is not a precondition to declining.You know? The graph can go down without pausing to "flatten." I mean, this is just silly. The CDC's own guidelines for reopening were not 14 days of slowness, they were 14 days of consecutive decline.
The sub-lede was worse.
(Reports of new cases have declined nationally,) and deaths have slowed.
As further refutation it would serve here to snip the Johnnies logarithmic scale.
SHOW ME ON THAT GRAPH WHERE CASES HAVE "DECLINED," EX-QUASI'S!
The four right-most, that is, most recent, dots are 1.4M. The five before that are 1.3M. The four before that 1.2M. And so on. The New York Times is simply WRONG.
"Deaths have slowed": I don't think that is accurate either although the Johnnies do not offer a graph for deaths...Wait, let me see if they have something similar...No, they don't
I didn't like the sound of where this was going.
The first sentence in the article:
The number of new coronavirus cases confirmed in the United States has steadily declined in recent days.
...
Oh my God, that is just NOT TRUE. NOT TRUE. Period there. This is the last fourteen days. That is the outer limit of "recent."
So in the last 14 days we started up, went down, went down, went up, up, up, down, down, down, down, up, down, up, down. That's a "steady decline"? No. NO! It is not a steady decline. If we use a more reasonable meaning of recent, say, five days, we started down, went up, went down, up, down. Fourteen days, ten days, seven days, five, three, whereever you snip your meaning of "recent" there has been no steady decline.
The nation has reached a perilous moment in the course of the epidemic, embracing signs of hope and beginning to reopen businesses and ease the very measures that slowed the virus, despite the risk of a resurgence.
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More than 20,000 new cases are identified on most days. And almost every day this past week, more than 1,000 Americans died from the virus.
...
That last informs that next last, no? The Ex-Quasi's would have been well to have led with that. But then they fall right back into it.
The slowing of new cases is a stark change from two weeks ago, when coronavirus cases were stuck on a stubborn plateau nationally...
Oh my goodness, "stark change." Above is a snip of the logarithmic plots April 15-May 15.
plateau def: "an area of relatively level high ground." Correct word usage if applied to the entire last month, i.e. no "stark change" in the last month. "Relatively level high ground," would be accurate for the last month. But the Ex Quasi's write that "two weeks ago," so May 1 on the plot, we "were stuck on a stubborn plateau." Not true. "Stuck on": that means we had been there awhile? How long, two weeks? That would take us back to April 16. There were 667.6k cumulative cases on April 16. The number rose every single day until April 28 when it hit 1M. It stayed there all the way to the 30th when it rose to 1.1M. And so on until 1.4M May 15. So, if we were "stuck on" a "stubborn plateau" for two weeks starting April 16, that "plateau" encompasses going from 667.6k total cases to 1.1M. That's 433,000 new cases April 16-30. That is a 66.8% increase in cases from the April 16 count. I'm sorry but that plateau was not very stubborn, in fact, it wasn't much of a plateau at all.It would be more accurate to term the April 16-30 period a "relatively gentle, steady rise." But quibble. "Stark change" is not a quibble. There has been no stark change: not in the last month, not in any segment of the last month, there has been no change at all from a "relatively gentle, steady rise."
Americans began to change their behavior in March, and it has undoubtedly helped control the spread of the coronavirus.
No quibble there.
...
...in settings where distancing took place, the results have been overwhelming, researchers say...Without government orders to stay at home, 10 million more people in the United States would have been infected with the virus by the end of April, suggested a paper published this past week in the journal Health Affairs.
That would be 11.5M total cases. At Trump's Kill Rate of 6.05% that would be 695,750 Killed as opposed to the up-to-the-minute 88,211 who he did whack. Trump saved 607,539 lives, see? Only the Lord saves more than Trump.
Still, even with the slowing growth in new cases and deaths, the cumulative death toll in the United States is projected to reach about 113,000 by June 6, according to Dr. [Nicholas] Reich's latest ensemble model.
Perfect phraseology Ex-Quasi's! Truly. Why did you not use that throughout you fucking idjits. 113,000 by June 6, well, we'll see.
