Thread by @Coyoteblog

It appears that the tools of panic-exaggeration developed over 20 years in the climate movement have been fully deployed to justify limitless government authority during COVID. Note the map below -- the scale has been chosen to push nearly everything into the most extreme red

https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1317849521691402240

To describe us now as almost completely in the worst possibly condition when things are clearly much better in terms of deaths and hospital utilization than 60-90 days ago begs the question of why such an uninformative scale was chosen where everything is always at the max

The reason cannot be scientific -- scientists would never choose a scale where 90+% of the data consistently exceeds the upper bounds. It has to be a political choice, to try to scare people and develop a constituency for authoritarianism.

A year ago I never would have believed it if you had told me that the lead argument for Trump would be that he was... wait for it ... insufficiently authoritarian. Apparently, he should have shut down more businesses & locked more people into home-based solitary confinement.

Ironically, Trump's biggest early mistakes were, imo, that he was insufficiently libertarian. He allowed the CDC to monopolize test development and the FDA to shut down promising tests, treatments, and PPE manufacture when he should have been slashing regulations

To me this is just another example of ham-handedness of Trump's opposition. There is just so much he can be rightly be criticized for and the opposition chooses to focus on a failed collusion narrative and not enough lockdowns.

BTW, I will give @erictopol extra political credit for only mentioning in his thread potential super-spreader events championed by the Right & totally ignoring super-spreader events of the Left, proving again that COVID only infects those with whom one disagrees politically

I find it interesting in his source data that of all the metrics on the main page (link in his tweet), deaths does not appear anywhere. I am not sure why, but I will confess the only reason I can think of is again to tell the direst possible story.

US deaths flattened out months ago, and remain concentrated in the very old. Young people who make up the huge growth in cases, many of whom are in age groups that have no more death risk from COVID than from flu.

We under-reacted to the COVID threat to older folks and with certain pre-existing conditions like diabetes, and have grossly over-reacted for everyone else. I just don't know why the media not only can't make this distinction but won't allow anyone else to do so