The Great Covid Con

I want to write about an issue that should be at the very forefront of reporting today, combining information about the covid outbreak with desperately bad news about what the Republicans are getting up to in the runup to the November Presidential election.

In discussing this, I want to quote from two articles from reliable left-leaning websites.

The first was published yesterday at Talking Points Memo, an almost invariably reliable source of information.  Here is an excerpt; I hope you will take the time to read the whole thing:

"Are We On a Permanent COVID Plateau?

We’re getting a mix of information about the state of the COVID epidemic in the United States – much of it contradictory. I wanted to take a few moments to pick apart these seemingly contradictory realities which are happening at the same time.

The first fact is that the initial experiments with easing the strictures on social and economic life have not generated the spikes in new cases that some predicted. Georgia is the clearest case of this. Neighboring Florida is another. We don’t know yet why this is the case. Perhaps we need to wait longer to see the impact. Perhaps continuing mitigation efforts are more effective than anticipated. Perhaps there are cultural, social, epidemiological or even climatic factors that make these states less susceptible to the kinds of outbreaks we saw in New York and other urban centers in the North. But we’ve seen enough data to say with some confidence that the worst predictions are not coming to pass, or at least not quickly."

Now, let me move on to an article from Daily Kos today.  Again, I encourage you to read the whole thing:

"New analysis suggests COVID-19 deaths massively underreported, especially in the South

Because Donald Trump is the angel of death, people are dying in numbers that would have been inconceivable just a few short months ago.

We’re rapidly approaching 100,000 officially reported coronavirus-related deaths in the U.S...Unfortunately, it turns out the actual number of dead might be considerably higher than the official number.

The Surgo Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that “integrate[s] ideas and approaches from multiple disciplines to examine stubborn problems in a new light,” recently did a deep dive into U.S. COVID-19 cases and concluded that the official picture is likely a lot rosier than reality:  "what we’ve learned is disconcerting. Our data suggest that we may be especially undercounting COVID-19 deaths in Southern parts of the US. In more than 200 of the counties we examined, excess death rates were between two times to 30 times higher than reported COVID-19 death rates."

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my fear that, in the face of an uncontrollable epidemic, Donald Trump, with the full cooperation of Republican run States, would simply resort to massive lying about the true death toll.  Calculating the deaths from an epidemic is a fairly complicated process that not very many people know a thing about, and a lie is so easy to tell, particularly given the extreme unlikelihood of our pathetic excuse for a mainstream press doing a thing to arrive at the real numbers.  Here, even intelligent and highly informed people at Talking Points Memo seem to have accepted numbers from Republicans; God, shouldn't they know by now not to do that?


Trump probably correctly perceives that he cannot be re-elected unless he makes people think he has handled the covid epidemic.  Actually handling it, of course, does not mean a damned thing to him; just getting people to believe that he has.  And it has been obvious to me for some time that the most straightforward way to accomplish his goal is to simply spread massive lies about the extent of the damage.  Well, here it comes.