Coronavirus Week 112B: Blame Jessica Wildfire?

I'm coming closer to unsubscribing from Jessica Wildfire's "OK Doomer" Substack. I saw it via one of her Medium posts a few months back, and signed up for it, just by email address, though, not my direct Substack account of my own. Her Medium stuff's gotten a bit more uneven since then, and her Substack lives up to its title, not just as a play on "OK Boomer," but on its own. 

She's at least gotten close to playing footsie with scientism and with antivaxxerism both in a recent post. She believes COVID has caused an uptick in car crashes, is going to cause an uptick in plane crashes, talks about SADS without actually looking it up (and an antivaxxer nutter channels the head nutters on that issue in comments) — for the facts, I linked to Orac in a comment, and also, in apparently expecting science to "answer everything," confuses science and scientism. Her Medium stuff isn't so bad, which is why I clicked to actually subscribe to her Substack. But, the last three or four posts, starting with claiming monkeypox can spread asymptomatically (it does, technically, but it's not the normal, contra her implications), and ignoring there was a monkeypox outbreak nearly 20 years ago, got me started.

Besides, contra her, contra others, and contra my tentative blog post of a couple of weeks ago, on COVID, re Worldometers, this IS really not more than a blip. It may be a big blip, not a small one, but I'll still call it a blip. Daily new cases are somewhat higher than they were at the START of summer ago, even with CDC pivoting away from case-based metrics, tis true. But, the bulge is smaller than the late-summer one of one year ago, and appearing to go back down.

Death rate? Even lower than it was at the bottom of the dip early last summer. What that means, if we have a lower death rate even though we have a moderately higher case rate, is clear. COVID is becoming less deadly. About one-fifth as deadly, per rough estimates. It's a partial herd immunity from a mix of vaccines and boosters, plus infections in both the vaccinated and unvaccinated. 

For more background, as I blogged a couple of weeks ago and as numbers continue to support, COVID is becoming less and less deadly. That's especially true if the "cases don't matter" have trickled down to local hospitals, as I also blogged a couple of weeks ago.

And, while I will admit the major media isn't perfect, titling the whole post as "media gaslighting" even while you engage in scientism is no bueno in my book either. And, no, contra your subheading, respectfully, with a post like this, you're not a "slinger of hard truths."

For more on how bad this tenure-track college prof is, see Part 1 and Part 2 of an in-depth overview.