The Pandemic Blog

  The US passed the figure of one million Covid-19 deaths last week. I should point out that this is based on the numbers published by Worldometers.info, whose numbers I’ve been using since I started writing these posts in mid-March 2020. The Johns Hopkins site says 978,648 as of today (March 30). The JH deaths figure has been consistently lower than Worldometers since early in the pandemic, when I know that the numbers were constantly being revised, even for past weeks. I suppose that, during all those revisions, the two sources diverged, since the difference between them has stayed relatively constant since then. One cause of the divergence was probably due to the New York City wave in April 2020, when a lot of people died at home of what was clearly Covid. They died at home despite the EMTs having been called, since the EMTs were given the unimaginably terrible responsibility of not taking anybody to the hospital who would probably just take up a bed for a day or two before ...

I have great respect for the Wall Street Journal ’s news operations, but just about zero respect for their editorial page. I used to think that even the editorials were at least well-reasoned, even if their reasoning was wrong. But since maybe a couple months after the pandemic began in the US, the editorials essentially abandoned any real effort to reason in their editorials, so that they now seem to be driven solely by ideological calculations. So it was with today’s op-ed titled “ Covid Lockdowns were a Chinese Import ”. It makes the argument – which they’ve made a number of times previously – that the US never needed lockdowns in March and April 2020. They blame them on a Democratic inclination to do whatever the Chinese do. The Chinese locked down Wuhan, so Gavin Newsom locked down California in March 2020 – and other states (especially blue ones) followed his lead in April (I don’t recall the WSJ objecting to the lockdowns until May, though). Of course, they don’t allow tha...