The day the horrible truth became clear to me

I wrote my first post in this blog (it was actually written for my other blog on cybersecurity. When I created this blog, I transferred the 8 or 9 existing posts into it) on Saturday, March 14, 2020. This was immediately after I finally read an article that had been sent to me by a friend 20 hours before. That article had already been read by I believe 20 million or so people, and within a month it had been read by probably a couple hundred million.

The article made it clear that it was certain the US already had a lot of Coronavirus cases (the term Covid-19 came later), and they were already growing exponentially. It was already too late for a policy of containment. The only good option was a total lockdown of the country, since at that point nobody knew exactly where the disease had taken hold and where it hadn’t. I thought I’d do a post to warn my friends, then get back to my normal life.

Well, the next morning, I looked at the numbers about the pandemic and decided to write another post. In fact, I wrote a new post every day for many months after that. At first, my mission seemed clear: spread the word on the huge problem the US was facing and make helpful suggestions on what could be done.

I assumed the government – and citizens in general – would be open to these suggestions, since it was clear the US was heading for a huge death toll if nothing were done. I could see the government had already made some huge mistakes in responding to the coronavirus, most notably in not aggressively expanding testing capacity; but I naively assumed these were honest mistakes and could be corrected. After all, wouldn’t everyone want to make sure the impact of the pandemic was limited as much as possible?

My attitude started to change as evidence began to accumulate that the Trump administration had a completely different goal: suppressing evidence of the pandemic as much as possible, so that people would continue working and the economy wouldn’t tank – and Trump would be reelected (as it turned out, he would have had a much better chance of being reelected if he’d just stepped aside and let somebody competent run the response).

As I became more and more concerned, I wrote this post. I wasn’t expecting Trump to resign or be pushed out, but I thought well-meaning Republicans could force him to turn management of the pandemic over to someone who would do the right thing: enforce a widespread lockdown for a couple weeks and aggressively test people and quarantine the sick. In a few weeks, we could start opening up again.

Needless to say, that idea proved wrong. I was quite surprised when I started hearing from some of my readers (many of whom had read my cybersecurity blog posts for years) that I should stop meddling in politics. Politics! How could the issue of saving thousands of lives possibly be considered political?

As it turns out, that was easy. Hundreds of thousands of people needlessly died (predominantly in states that supported Trump) because of this attitude. Even today, almost everybody who dies of Covid is unvaccinated, which is nowadays a political decision. Although this attitude isn’t confined to the US, we’ve lost a lot more people because of this craziness than probably any other country. USA! USA! 

The numbers

These numbers were updated based on those reported on the Worldometers.info site for Sunday, November 13.

Month	Deaths reported during month/year	Avg. deaths per day during month/year	Deaths as percentage of previous month/year
Month of March 2020	4,058	131
Month of April 2020	59,812	1,994	1,474%
Month of May 2020	42,327	1,365	71%
Month of June 2020	23,925	798	57%
Month of July 2020	26,649	860	111%
Month of August 2020	30,970	999	116%
Month of Sept. 2020	22,809	760	75%
Month of Oct. 2020	24,332	785	107%
Month of Nov. 2020	38,293	1,276	157%
Month of Dec. 2020	79,850	2,576	209%
Total 2020	354,215	1,154
Month of Jan. 2021	98,604	3,181	119%
Month of Feb. 2021	68,918	2,461	70%
Month of March 2021	37,945	1,224	55%
Month of April 2021	24,323	811	64%
Month of May 2021	19,843	661	82%
Month of June 2021	10,544	351	53%
Month of July 2021	8,833	287	84%
Month of August 2021	31,160	1,005	351%
Month of Sept. 2021	56,687	1,890	182%
Month of Oct. 2021	49,992	1,613	88%
Month of Nov. 2021	38,364	1,279	77%
Month of Dec. 2021	41,452	1,337	108%
Total 2021	492,756	1,350	158%
Month of Jan. 2022	65,855	2,124	159%
Month of Feb. 2022	63,451	2,266	96%
Month of March 2022	31,427	1,014	50%
Month of April 2022	13,297	443	42%
Month of May 2022	11,474	370	86%
Month of June 2022	11,109	370	97%
Month of July 2022	11,903	384	107%
Month of August 2022	16,199	540	136%
Month of September 2022	13,074	436	81%
Month of October 2022	12,399	400	95%
Total Pandemic so far	1,100,127	1,115

 

I. Total deaths (as of Sunday)

Total US reported Covid deaths as of Sunday:          1,100,127

Average daily deaths last seven days: 424

Average daily deaths previous seven days: 433

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 0.3%

II. Total reported cases (as of Sunday)

Total US reported cases as of Sunday: 99,898,467             

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 388,020 (55,431)

Increase in reported cases previous 7 days: 301,885 (43,126/day)

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 0.3% (0.3% last week)

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.