Five million more applied for unemployment benefits last week
The beatings will continue until morale improves: More than five million people applied for unemployment benefits last week, a jump caused almost entirely by the government shutdown nationwide.
That brings total claims over the four weeks ended April 11 to nearly 22 million workers, erasing the entirety of labor market gains since the 2008 financial crisis, a stunning sign of the colossal economic damage inflicted by the virus outbreak. Before the pandemic, the largest number of Americans to seek jobless aid in a four-week stretch was 2.7 million in the fall of 1982.
With a labor force that totals about 162 million people, that brings the unemployment rate close to 13 percent.
That exceeds the 10 percent peak during the worst of the Great Recession more than a decade ago and tops the previous post-World War II high of 10.8 percent in 1982, bringing the U.S. closer to Depression-era levels of unemployment. A growing number of economists have warned the so-called “Great Lockdown” will push the global economy into the worst recession since the Great Depression.
This by the way is only the beginning. If businesses are not allowed to open in the next week or so, the cascade of new job loses will make these numbers seem tiny.
But hey, we have to prevent even one death from COVID-19, no matter what the cost, even though its overall impact remains comparable to the annual flu.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuse to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation:
5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
The beatings will continue until morale improves: More than five million people applied for unemployment benefits last week, a jump caused almost entirely by the government shutdown nationwide.
That brings total claims over the four weeks ended April 11 to nearly 22 million workers, erasing the entirety of labor market gains since the 2008 financial crisis, a stunning sign of the colossal economic damage inflicted by the virus outbreak. Before the pandemic, the largest number of Americans to seek jobless aid in a four-week stretch was 2.7 million in the fall of 1982.
With a labor force that totals about 162 million people, that brings the unemployment rate close to 13 percent.
That exceeds the 10 percent peak during the worst of the Great Recession more than a decade ago and tops the previous post-World War II high of 10.8 percent in 1982, bringing the U.S. closer to Depression-era levels of unemployment. A growing number of economists have warned the so-called “Great Lockdown” will push the global economy into the worst recession since the Great Depression.
This by the way is only the beginning. If businesses are not allowed to open in the next week or so, the cascade of new job loses will make these numbers seem tiny.
But hey, we have to prevent even one death from COVID-19, no matter what the cost, even though its overall impact remains comparable to the annual flu.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuse to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation:
5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
VIRUS CONTAGION DELIVERED BY THE CHINESE TO THE WORLD + MASSIVE UNEMPLOYMENT + NEGATIVE ECONOMY + A LITTLE LOIS LEARNER EFFECT = WHAT ?
EQUALS = Democrat political solution for 2020
When you have got nothing but an un and anti American agenda that must always be lied about and Joe Biden as the assumed presidential candidate, what are the alternatives?
By any means necessary.
I have to apologize to you, Robert. Since you’re a science reporter, I assumed you understood the mathematics of exponential growth. But it’s clear from your posts on the coronavirus outbreak that you do not.
First of all, this is not comparable to the annual flu. Sometime tomorrow we’ll lose the 36,000th American to this dreaded virus. 36,000 American dead is already half again as many as we lost to the flu this season (24,000) and twice as many as we lost to the swine flu epidemic of 2009-2010 (18,000). But that’s just right now, when we’re — at best — still at the peak of the outbreak. Since we’re still losing 2,000 Americans a day, we’ll almost certainly hit the 50,000 dead mark of a bad flu season by the end of this month. And then the count will continue from there.
For the thirty flu seasons from 1977 to 2007, America lost between 3,000 and 49,000 people to the flu each year, with 49,000 being the worst year. After the 2007 flu season the CDC stopped differentiating between flu and pneumonia deaths, but even adding in generic pneumonia deaths brings a bad year to the 60-80,000 dead range, with 50,000 being typical. As I said before, we’ll hit the bad flu year / typical flu + pneumonia year by the end of April, and we’re likely to blow by the bad flu + pneumonia mark by the end of May.
And all of this is WITH a month-long shutdown bringing the coronavirus R0 value down to about 1.0. With the pre-shutdown R0 value of about 2.5, the number of dead would be well into the six figures. That’s just the nature of exponential growth.
Second, you’re right. We don’t shut down the economy for the flu. That the coronavirus death count with a shutdown will well exceed the typical flu season death count with no social distancing restrictions at all should tell you that this coronavirus is much worse than the flu.
So let me ask you a few questions. How many dead Americans would it take to warrant a shutdown? It’s not 36,000. Is it 360,000? 3.6 million? 36 million? All of them?
And if you don’t even call for a shutdown until you’ve reached a large number of deaths, how do you get the figure to stop there? With a natural R0 value of 2.5, a doubling time of four days or less, an incubation period of up to two weeks during which a victim is asymptomatic but still contagious, and an additional 1-6 weeks to go from symptomatic to death, what is the total number of dead Americans if the shutdown doesn’t START until the death toll hits, say, 80,000?
You don’t need complex computer models to know that it’s six or seven figures (or possibly even eight). You just need to understand the mathematics of exponential growth. So, again, my apologies for making unwarranted assumptions.
mkent asked: “So let me ask you a few questions. How many dead Americans would it take to warrant a shutdown? It’s not 36,000. Is it 360,000? 3.6 million? 36 million? All of them?”
The modelers decided that telling the decision makers that 2.2 million deaths would elicit a lockdown, the behavior that they desired. They were correct, as this is what happened after they estimated that number.
By the way, it was not to prevent deaths that we shutdown the economy, it was to avoid overwhelming the hospitals. The flattened curve still had the same number of COVID19 deaths under it, it just dragged them out to a longer time frame. The advantage that the flattened curve was supposed to give us was to keep the hospitals available for treating all the other medical problems, too.
This is what we get when there is mission creep. Instead of asking questions about the flattened curve, and why we don’t have beds available for the more minor health care problems, we now have virtually everyone talking about saving lives from COVID19 cases.
The routine-care part of the mission has been lost, because the rules of the shutdown has resulted in many people not getting the routine care that they need in order to keep minor problems from turning into major problems. Keeping us shutdown only drags out this problem and adds to the number of minor problems that will ultimately turn into lost lives. The irony is that the very problem that we are sitting at home to prevent has turned out to have occurred.
One problem is that we now are told to continue the shutdown in order to save lives, but without a treatment, these same lives will be lost when they eventually contract the virus. With a treatment, then we could end the shutdown.
Another problem is that too many people think that it is valid to argue that if we save just one life, then it was all worth it. They are wrong.
What a cluster bleep.
By the way, it was not to prevent deaths that we shutdown the economy, it was to avoid overwhelming the hospitals. The flattened curve still had the same number of COVID19 deaths under it, it just dragged them out to a longer time frame.
No, flattening the curve has several effects:
1. By reducing the peak it reduces the load on medical services, in so doing it increases the medical resources available to treat each person infected, potentially reducing the number of people denied the treatment necessary to keep them alive, about 5% of people end up in critical care, about 1-2% needing intensive care, evidently with the best support 3 times as many survive as would if denied that level of care, cutting deaths under the curve to perhaps 1/3rd of what they would otherwise be.
2.flattening the curve buys time, time to develop tests that would allow even further flattening of the curve, time to develop ways to restrict the disease at less economic cost, time to eradicate the disease simply through testing and restricting transmission, time to develop vaccines. There are several countries whose economies are working fine that have reduced infection rates below R0=1, the disease should soon be eradicated in those countries.
The advantage that the flattened curve was supposed to give us was to keep the hospitals available for treating all the other medical problems, too.
And that has indeed happened in most countries, perhaps in your country they’re too disorganized to allow other treatments to continue, if so, that’s an organizational problem, not a failure of the policy of restricting the rate of spread of the disease.
“Coronavirus: China outbreak city Wuhan raises death toll by 50%”
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-52321529
Interesting coincidence that the increase is *exactly* 50% — a 1,290 increase, from 2,579 to 3,869. (Well, exactly when rounded to the nearest whole number. I suppose it would be more telling if the increase were 1,289.5!)
The SW NM and SE AZ areas (Portal-Rodeo-Animas) saw in late 2019 and Jan 2020 close to a 50% infection rate of an upper respiratory virus. School classes were missing half the students and the elderly of Portal were sick. No deaths. No link to Corona. No CDC followup! How far this epidemic went I have no information.
My neighbor indicates (his wife is Filipino) the Philippines is locked down and people are starving due to it.
So how many deaths does it take? Consider the number of Americans murdered each year by the drug cartels, both directly and indirectly. Yet Hollywood still want their drugs. Consider the number of babies murdered each year in all countries affected by the corona. Consider the number of traffic deaths. We accept this until it affects us directly.
We have our priorities skewed and maybe corona will wake us up.
But you see, all these other things do not (could not) affect me directly. However, corona does and hence the public opinion uproar! When it is us, we are so self centered we will let millions lose jobs in a feeble attempt to stay alive.
Consider also the millions dead from TB or other infectious diseases in Africa, to which we turn a blind eye! No, I am not happy with the pampered first nations who have zero tolerance for anything that affects them!
Lee S, I’ve not seen you post here in a bit. I’m hungry for your boots-on-the-ground Sweden & UK report, and I’m anxiously hoping for some more good news regarding your dad.
My thoughts continue to be with you and yours.
The law of unintended consequences applies here. Dr. Phil M in an interview *he is related more with the left) explains that more will be hurt irreversibly from the lock-down than the virus!
https://www.foxnews.com/media/dr-phil-the-longer-this-lockdown-goes-on-the-more-vulnerable-people-get
This is the point Mr. Z. is showing through a number of posts!
Two successive headlines from my newsfeed:
* The IRS is sending $1,200 stimulus checks to dead people
* 5 Reasons You Didn’t Get A Stimulus Check
Yet not one of those five reasons was, “You’re not dead yet.”
Andrew_W,
I’m glad that the rest of the world implemented lockdown in a better way, but the U.S. mucked it up, so that we don’t have the healthcare that lockdown was supposed to protect. I complain about the U.S., not the world. The world even handled the Great Depression better than the U.S. did. In both cases, U.S. progressives mucked it all up.
I’m also glad to hear that it required lockdown in NZ in order to save everyone from COVID19, and that you couldn’t have done it with regular social distancing.
Wait. I’m not glad for that last part. I wish that you didn’t have to mess up your lives for a few weeks in order to save your lives.
I’m also glad to hear that it required lockdown in NZ in order to save everyone from COVID19, and that you couldn’t have done it with regular social distancing.
I’m pretty sure that the lock-down has been more effective here at cutting down transmission than regular social distancing would have been, we’ve really taken the guts out of its prevalence here, so on balance if we can eliminate the virus here over the next few weeks, and if that elimination of the virus had been much slower with the Swedish approach, probably the lock-down will turn out to be cost effective.
I doubt we’ll keep the current strict lock-down in place much longer, people are starting to bridle against it. I personally don’t think the damage will be as severe and long-term as some think, just a 4 week holiday. Other aspects, trade and tourism, would have been affected no matter what strategies were employed here, arguably tourism from other countries that have knocked it over could get going quite soon. New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan, South Korea and a few other countries could have their own little game of tourism musical chairs, I’ve never been to Taiwan before . . .
Andrew_W,
Sweden’s experience suggests that social distancing without lockdown is the most cost effective method. They aren’t doing much damage to their economy, they are free to live their lives fairly normally, and they do not have overwhelmed hospitals, which is the object of the exercise.
New York, on the other hand, gave their people especially bad advice in the early days of the breakout, directing their people to crowd themselves in an area that was suspected to be have a higher than normal infection rate.
Edward, I can’t say I disagree with your points, not enough evidence for me to say for Sweden, it’ll be interesting to see where Sweden and Norway are in a year. NY might be getting close (over 10% of the way) to herd immunity, so might indeed be better to just finish the job.
NY has after all already had 17,600 deaths, if they’re 10% of the way to herd immunity that would mean only another 150,000 more to get there.
Andrew_W wrote, “NY has after all already had 17,600 deaths, if they’re 10% of the way to herd immunity that would mean only another 150,000 more to get there.”
I just want there to be no doubt. Are you predicting that, based on the present number of deaths, that there will be 150,000 deaths in New York when that state finally reaches herd immunity?
Just to make it clear, my comment at 9:34pm was serious, 10% is a good chunk towards getting to herd immunity. Then I looked at the numbers . . . and put them down at 9:49pm . . cold, that’s a #### load of dead people for one city, makes me feel a bit sick at such a prospect.
. . . that there will be 150,000 deaths in New York when that state finally reaches herd immunity?
That’s 150,000 on top of the 17,600. That’s what the numbers say as I interpret them.
That it takes about 2/3’s of the population to get immunity before there’s herd immunity, NYS has about 20 million people, I keep coming back to about 1/4 of cases in NY being diagnosed, and a death rate across all infected of between just under 1% to somewhere around 1.5%, using a 1.2% fatality rate over 20 million people 2/3’s infected = 160,000.
So, yes. Sounds like a lot of people, but a month ago 17,600 would have sounded like an unbelievable figure. You were recently sneering of 61,000 US deaths from Covid-19, I still think that, despite the efforts to slow the spread, we’re going to see that number passed before the end of May.
Andrew_W: Heh. Okay. We have it now on record. I will remember.
I live in hope that you won’t misrepresent my comments.
1. If herd immunity is achieved through vaccination when I was talking about through the spread of the virus that would be a misrepresentation.
2. To claim that I said that there would be 160,000 deaths in NYS without giving the context of that being due to the spread of the virus until herd immunity is reached would also be a misrepresentation of my words.
I would expect that vaccination, or something similar, will interrupt NYS getting to herd immunity through the natural spread of the virus.
Bob, you sound incredulous. You certainly aren’t balking at the arithmetic, so it is presumably the fatality rate you are objecting to.
We all hope that the fatality rate will wind up being much less, but will you go on the record advocating a course of action if in fact CFR = 1.2%? It is disingenuous to compare the socioeconomic effects of the lockdown with only the current death toll during lockdown. The fair comparison is to the deaths which would occur without lockdown, though that is currently unquantifiable.
I’ll go on record saying that the loss of 1.2% of 2/3 of the population (2.6 million across the US, 62 million worldwide) would, assuming those deaths were rapid and inexorable, be less disruptive that what we will likely put ourselves through in an attempt to avoid them. And there shall be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt, such as there was none like it, nor shall be like it any more. But we would pick ourselves up from that acute, shared trauma, and move on. And though we would long talk of the plague of 2020 which doubled that year’s typical annual death rate, it would be a small event when viewed in a greater historical context and against earlier, more serious plagues. However, given the ability to draw it out, I don’t expect modern societies not to do so — from the combined motivation of ever wanting to delay the inevitable at whatever cost and of the hope of salvation in some form like a vaccine delivered well before current expectations. If that salvation arrives, then it might be the best bet. If not, then we will have the destructive combination of the chronic trauma of the drawn out deaths added to the severe socioeconomic disruption of long term lockdown.
a death rate across all infected of between just under 1% to somewhere around 1.5%,
Just thought I should mention from what data and reasoning I’m basing that on:
With the Diamond Princess, Iceland (4.3%), South Korea (1.9%), Taiwan (0.75%), Australia (1.6%) and New Zealand (1.4%) we have a ship with near complete data on fatality rates and asymptomatic rates and 5 countries that have used contact tracing to locate individual cases with very little in the way of missing links, in New Zealand out of over 1400 cases diagnosed we have just 4 individuals for which links remain unknown, untraced.
The 5 countries I mention all have very lower positive test rates (in brackets), they are all well past the peak in infections, and the fatality rates (along with that of the Diamond Princess) are all in surprisingly close agreement (0.5%, 1.9%, 1.4%, 1.6%, 1.4%, countries in the same order mentioned).
The relevance of the low positive test rates is that these countries have been using Covid-19 testing not as a diagnostic tool for suspected cases (as with countries swamped in cases) by primarily as a tool to trace the path of infection through their communities, so I don’t think there are many infected people that have been missed, if there had been there would have been unlinked clusters popping up here and there.
Diamond Princess now at 13 deaths from 712 cases = 1.8%.
Andrew_W–
ref Diamond Princess–
I would like to know the demographics of the passengers, compared to the population as a whole.
Sorry, the positive test rates % and fatality rates % above should be:
Iceland ———- 4.5 ————————– 0.5
South Korea —-1.9 ————————- 2.2
Taiwan ———– 0.75 ———————– 1.4
Australia ——– 1.6 ————————- 1.1
New Zealand — 1.4 ————————- 0.8
Wayne, so would I, but it’s passengers and crew that were infected, one might expect that with older passengers there would be a higher fatality rate, but having been on cruises, from my observations of other passengers I would expect lower rates of comorbidity’s with the passengers (and with the crew) than is typical of elderly populations, they’re typically middle class+ and reasonably healthy.
wayne: Go to the link about Diamond Princess here: COVID-19: the unwarranted panic The graph there provides the demographics. A much older population.
Mr. Zimmerman, the conclusions that the study reaches that the WUWT article is based on are in very close agreement with my own. Given that there were a few people hanging to life in critical care after the study was done, 4 of whom died from Covid-19, there isn’t even the thickness of a sheet of paper between those what that paper conclude and where I’m at. The asymptomatic rates are much higher than the figures I’ve seen for wider society, but I suspect that’s due to many cases being mild enough to be ignored by people in everyday life. But not to the point that more than 80% would be seen as asymptomatic.
This is article is nearly 2 months old, but doesn’t look out of date where it matters. It gives weight to the conclusions that Rose makes above, i.e. we might have to live with it, even though it will put millions of people in the ground sooner.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/02/covid-vaccine/607000/
Another thing that will likely be thrown into the mix is blood plasma therapy, it was used to treat the Spanish Flu a century ago, it’s something that’s being worked on in several countries and which likely will reach the treatment stage very soon. Perhaps even the production of Covid-19 antibodies outside of the body will be possible.
Sorry about so many consecutive posts here.
Cuomo has announced a substantial antibody testing program in NY next week, this will be far more accurate than the Santa Clara antibody study due to the far higher rates of the infection in NY. False positives, if they’re happening, will make up a smaller fraction of positive tests (assuming a similar rate of false positives). My expectation: A million to a million and a half of those in NYS have had the infection.
Andrew_W wrote: “NY has after all already had 17,600 deaths, …”
New York’s numbers are known to be padded, thus bogus and unusable for any analyses.
Death rates also fail to include asymptomatic members of the population, as few are identified or tested. Not only are New York numbers unreliable for putting in the numerator, the denominator is known to be incorrect, too, so rate figures are known to be wrong. Conclusions based upon them are unreliable, no matter what conditionals are applied to them.
Andrew_W’s assumption that NY is 10% of the way to herd immunity is just that, an assumption. The conclusion of 160,000 NY deaths cannot be taken seriously. It also violates the numbers provided by the experts, who have also proven themselves unreliable.
However, if we used Andrew_W’s logic and the experts’s numbers, we would conclude that NY is far, far more than 10% of the way to herd immunity.
Edward, everyone is just working on the uncertain information available and interpreting it as they see best.
So your criticisms are valid against any numbers or opinions offered by anyone on the current details and future spread of this disease.
As you point out, depending on the weight you place on whether or not published NY death numbers are “padded” and high or low because they “fail to include [many] asymptomatic [deaths]” is at best a guesstimate. My method assumes death counts are close to correct, that death rates as a percentage of all cases are in the range of 0.8 to 2% in Western countries, which is itself based on countries that have what I think is extensive quality testing. I use the time between peak cases and peak deaths in a population to get an idea of how big the lag is between diagnosis and death (there appears to be a correlation with the percentage of positive test rates, with countries with lower positive test rates having a bigger gap between those two peaks, up to 14 days with countries with high positive test rates having a shorter period between the peaks, often 6 – 7 days).
After doing those simple sums numbers that make sense to me pop out. To me my method makes sense of countries having fatality rates of 1% (Australia) or 5% (US) or 13% (Italy) using just current deaths/current cases.
I like my method because I think it’s a lot less subject to confirmation bias, and there’s a lot of ideologically motivated people wanting this pandemic to have qualities that would be convenient to their ideology.
You want to poke holes in my method, good for you. As I said; you can poke holes in anyone’s method, the uncertainties are there for everyone to deal with.
if we used Andrew_W’s logic and the experts’s numbers, we would conclude that NY is far, far more than 10% of the way to herd immunity.
Which experts? I’ve seen ranges for asymptomatic rates from experts that range from less than 50% to almost 99%, and there’s the problem of when is a case truly asymptomatic? I’m certain a lot of people with minor symptoms choose not to seek a diagnosis or are unable to get one, which is also going to have a lot to do with the local situation. I’ve come to the conclusion that in many European countries (but not Germany where testing has been extensive and used for track and trace) about 1/2 of symptomatic cases (mostly very mild cases) go undiagnosed.
Andrew_W,
You wrote: “As you point out, depending on the weight you place on whether or not published NY death numbers are “padded” and high or low because they “fail to include [many] asymptomatic [deaths]” is at best a guesstimate.”
How many asymptomatic deaths do you suppose were deaths due to Wuhan virus? Any? If someone does not get sick from the virus, do you think that he can die from the virus? Dying with the Wuhan virus is different than dying from it.
However, your quote of what I said added words that completely change the meaning. Are you intentionally misunderstanding what you read, or does this come to you naturally?
“My method assumes death counts are close to correct,”
For New York data, we already know that this is an unreasonable assumption. I have complained about your New York conclusions.
“I like my method because I think it’s a lot less subject to confirmation bias,”
Except that your method still uses known incorrect denominators, therefore the conclusions cannot be correct enough to pay any attention to. Since your conclusions support your basic biased argument (whether or not it is ideologically motivated), using these incorrect and low denominators actually is confirmation bias.
“Which experts? I’ve seen ranges for asymptomatic rates from experts that range from less than 50% to almost 99%,”
Oh, good lord. I cannot believe that you did not understand that we are rearranging your equation and numbers in order to find the asymptomatic number based upon inputs from the experts that you yourself rely upon. Are you pretending to misunderstand just to troll?