Daily deaths nationwide move past 900!

MONDAY, JULY 27, 2020

Where can you go to get facts?: Yesterday, Kevin Drum said it. What he said was accurate, true, right and correct:

"Here’s the coronavirus death toll through July 25...[T]he US just keeps going up and up."

Our death toll does keep going up! Because you rarely encounter any actual data in the upper-end press, we thought we'd update you today, using two different measures.

First, let's consider the continuing rise in daily deaths nationwide. After a long, steady drop from mid-April through the end of June, daily deaths have been rising at a rapid rate:

Daily deaths from coronavirus, nationwide
7-day rolling average:

Last week in June: 538.7 (June 24-June 30)
One week ago today: 747.4 (July 13-July 19)
As of today: 905.1 (July 20-July 26)

We're working with the Washington Post's day-by-day numbers.

At the end of June, the rolling average stood at 538.7 deaths per day nationwide. The average for the past seven days was 905.1 deaths per day.

That was up more than 20% from one week ago. That's a rapid ascent.

Now, for a bit of dark humor, let's review a related statistic—total number of deaths nationwide in the past 7 days. This time, we'll compare our country's total to those from other lands:

Total deaths from coronavirus in the past week
As of July 27:
United States: 6,401
Canada: 38
Germany: 32
France: 40
Spain: 12
Italy: 62
Japan: 11
South Korea: 3

You'll rush to say that our population is larger than the populations of those other nations.

That statement will be correct! But Germany is one-fourth our size; Japan is more than one-third. We're fairly sure that you can handle the math from there.

Those numbers quantify a rolling disaster—an ongoing American carnage. To review the numbers for the whole world, you can just click here.

We're especially struck by this second set of numbers because of the places where such numbers didn't appear last week.

Eight days ago, they didn't appear on your TV screen when Chris Wallace "fact-checked" Donald J. Trump's crazy claim that we have the lowest and best mortality rate in the world.

Yesterday, we heard someone blame that failure on Fox. But those numbers also didn't appear in the New York Times or the Washington Post when they reported Trump's lunatic claim. Our journalists simply don't traffic in information. It simply doesn't occur to them to seek and present hard facts.

Wallace, the Post and the Times all said that Commander Trump's statement was wrong. They didn't report the fact that his claim was batsh*t crazy—and they didn't present the simple statistics which demonstrate that fact.

They traffic in Storyline only. It doesn't seem to occur to them to present information or facts. We'll guess that most people have no idea how crazy Trump's statement was.

Despondent anthropologists keep telling us that our species was wired this way. When these international experts tell us this, they speak in a scary past tense.