By the Numbers

That's the point I was trying to make.  Sweden has about the same population as Michigan yet, last I heard, Michigan with their lockdown had a thousand more deaths than Sweden with no lockdown.  Of course there may be other factors at work, and I don't know what they might be, but one possibility is that somebody's numbers are not accurate.  That nice Swedish lady on TV assured us that her numbers are correct so it must be our numbers that are not accurate.  I have said previously that I am suspicious of the numbers they are feeding us.  I have no hard evidence of that, but I never said that I was positively convinced, just suspicious.

As Uncle Ken has previously pointed out, "confirmed cases" is a pretty soft number because of differences in testing, but it seems that it would be pretty hard to distort the number of deaths.  Pretty hard, but not impossible.  Old Dog has alluded to one possibility, there might be a difference between dying by the virus and dying with the virus.  As I understand it, the virus itself seldom kills anybody, it's when complications like pneumonia set in that virus patients' conditions becomes critical.  The last time Michigan had a spike in deaths, the authorities admitted that it was probably attributable to the fact that they had recently begun testing dead people "after the fact".  So if a guy dies of pneumonia or a heart attack, and his body tests positive for corona, is that counted as death by corona, and are they using the same standard in all jurisdictions?

This evening's news reported that a clinic in Petoskey has begun testing people not previously diagnoses with COVID-19 for antibodies.  Their first round of testing found antibodies in a surprising percentage of 200 subjects (20 or 40%, I don't remember which).  They cautioned us that they need to test way more people before saying this with certainty, but it appears that the virus may not be as deadly as generally believed if that many victims can recover from it without even knowing they had it.

The Michigan legislature voted today to not extend the governor's state of emergency beyond today, when it was supposed to expire.  The governor insists that she doesn't need legislative approval to extend her order, and the legislators have proclaimed that she legally does.  I suppose it will end up in the courts eventually, but what are we supposed to do in the meantime?  Maybe they will tell us more tomorrow.

Cheboygan is still experiencing empty shelf syndrome.  Different stores are out of different products on different days, so it might take two or three trips to town to find everything on your list.  Since our governor seems to enjoy issuing orders, she should order the stores to keep their shelves filly stocked at all times so we can minimize our trips to town and spend more time staying home and staying safe like she wants us to do.  But seriously, I don't know if it's the fault of the stores or their suppliers.  It seems like the panic buying and hoarding should be over with by now, but I don't know that for a fact.  One thing for sure, though, rumors of shortages have a way of becoming self fulfilling prophesies, so don't mention running out of beer, not even in jest.