May 7, 2020: Disinfectant Donald Claims Miracle Success Battling COVID

 

5/7/20: It’s time to face hard facts. If you listen to President Trump and believe what he spews, you are suffering permanent brain damage. This week he said he was going to disband his Coronavirus Task Force because … who knows why? The next day he announced he wasn’t going to disband his Task Force because … no one knows. Not even Disinfectant Donald.

 

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Disinfectant Donald’s “miracle” is no miracle at all. It’s not water into wine – it’s water into vinegar. Or even arsenic.

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Yesterday, to prove he was doing an awesome job, Trump tweeted the following graph. And look, you have probably heard the old line: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Trump combines them all, telling lies and damned lies, buttressed by statistics. 

Sadly, more than 73,000 Trump fans “liked” the graph and more than 22,000 retweeted it, spreading dumbness far and wide. 

Trump even added a little whining to go with his lies: 

For the constant criticism from the Do Nothing Democrats and their Fake News partners, here is the newest chart on our great testing “miracle” compared to other countries. Dems and LameStream Media should be proud of the USA, instead of always ripping us down!

 

So, there, on the face of it, it was. It was a “miracle” what Trump and his administration had done. Look at that graph!!!!

Lies, damned lies, and Trump's statistics.

 

Fortunately, you don’t have to become dumber if you’re an avid Trump fan. You can read this blog! 

 

Japan has one case per 8,292 persons. 

You can also check the president’s math, which is often off by a factor of ten or a hundred. You could go to the same source and create a chart using the same data, adjusting for total tests performed per 1,000 population. 

Then the graph would look…uh…not miraculous at all.

 

 

This blundering blogger was not able to include Japan on this chart without it blurring for some reason. Much here is still clear. Italy, Germany, and Canada have tested higher percentages of their populations. And there is a critical reason which explains why South Korea has “fallen behind.” South Korea began testing as soon as they learned they had their first case of COVID-19. See that difference on March 18, where the graph begins. You can see it starts even earlier if you look at Trump’s own graph. 

South Korea ramped up testing in February, while the U.S. and President Trump diddled. That made all the difference. 

By way of Johns Hopkins University, here are the sad statistics just a little before noon, May 7, 2020: 

The United States has more cases than any other country on the face of the earth: 1,231,992. That would be 1 case for every 266 Americans. Italy, the country hit second hardest, has one 1 per 282. 

Germany has 1 case per 498 persons. With a population one-fourth of ours, they have only 7,322 deaths. The U.S. death toll is 73,573 – a little more than ten times as bad – and not a “miracle” at all. 

Canada has one case for every 581 persons, and they don’t have a border wall to keep themselves safe. 

France has 1 case per 375. 

South Korean leaders didn’t waste weeks talking about how COVID-19 was just the flu, and it would miraculously go away in April. On March 17, four days after Disinfectant Donald finally declared a state of emergency, South Korea already had 8,320 confirmed cases. The U.S. had 4,661. But they had been testing for weeks. As of today, South Korea has 10,810 cases, or 1 per 4,743 people.

 

I couldn’t manage to put Japan on my graph – but I wasn’t trying to fudge statistics to make the president look bad. I used math. Japan has 15,253 confirmed cases of the virus as of today. 

Japan also took the threat seriously from the moment the infection broke. Japan has one case per 8,292 persons. Only 556 Japanese have died as a result of the COVID outbreak. 

If you want to find miracles in the math of this pandemic, don’t go looking in the Trump administration’s fun house mirrors.

 

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NOTE TO CANDIDATES: If you are a Republican running for Congress, try not to make racist, anti-Muslim and other shocking social media posts. (Then again: You may be appealing to a large part of the GOP base.) 

Case in point: Ted Howze, running for a seat from California. Howze has called Islam “a death cult.” In another post, he slammed a Palestinian American woman, saying if she was typical of her faith, “I finally understand why so many Muslim men would rather copulate with a goat!” He said Rep. Maxine Walters, an African American lawmaker, was “hitting the crack pipe too hard.” 

Worst of all, he mocked one of the survivors of the Parkland, Florida school shooting. “If you’ve been in a squirt gun fight, you’ve seen more ‘gun violence’ than David Hogg,” Howze said. 

Pretty “funny” when you remember that the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School ended only after 17 students and teachers had been killed. 

Sure. Squirt gun fight.

 

(Howze now says someone else made these posts – even though they were up on his social media accounts for years. They have since been removed, with Howze calling them “disgusting,” “negative” and “ugly.” 

Correct, you bonehead.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: Checking back later, I can report the good news. Howze gets defeated in his run for office. 

And bad news: he gets 45% of the vote.