A New Winner in the Dumbest Coronavirus Statement Contest and Some Minnesota Briefing Items

Our political leaders often seem to be vying for who can say the dumbest thing about how to handle the coronavirus epidemic.  The early winner was Governor Cuomo, who declared that whatever it took to save even one life in New York would be worth it, and then proceeded to dump recovering coronavirus patients in nursing homes so they could infect thousands of other residents.  And of course, ignored all the lives that would be lost from his extreme lockdown.

But the Mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, has topped that yesterday by encouraging parents to not let their children play with friends, “keep your children away from their friends”,  and telling everyone to suspect everyone else of being infected, “assume that everyone around you is infected”.  Nothing like creating a good sense of paranoia and a truly comprehensive reign of terror, totally unsupported by any data or science.  This is the worst garbage ever.

And of course, our state is not immune.  At Wednesday’s coronavirus briefing, here are the prominent misleading or false statements.  They were asked about the model and tried to say that it wasn’t about a specific prediction.  This is just a load of crap.  I watched everyone of those press conferences where the Dictator emphasized his reliance on the scary case and death numbers coming out of the model.  Now that it has been shown to be so far off the mark it isn’t even a joke, they don’t want to talk about it.  The second main lie was when asked why Minnesota was doing better than some states now, they said it was because we had a more gradual open.  The measures of mobility and opening are largely uncorrelated with any growth in cases, California being exhibit A.  Arizona has had very low mobility and sees rising cases.  And of course, they don’t want to talk about it, but Exhibit A is right next door in Wisconsin.    And finally, they used the “young people need to be careful so they don’t infect the old” BS again.  The state has the contact tracing data, so show us the specific evidence that this ever occurs.

And the Dictator chimed in in a separate press conference, claiming that cases aren’t rising just in the south and southwest but in neighboring states like Wisconsin and Iowa.  I look at the data every single day, and that is not true.  Wisconsin has no faster case growth than does Minnesota and continues to have an even lower death rate.  Iowa, despite being very open, has had low case and death rates throughout.