28 states with four or fewer Covid deaths, 15 with zero deaths, 40% of population now been tested

The blaring Yahoo headline from yesterday at 3 p.m., as the Dow Industrial average fell more than 700 points:

Let’s not just believe Yahoo’s version of reality and instead review the real numbers.

But I have to be very careful. The eyes of Verizon (my internet provider) may be watching!

Verizon owns Yahoo, AOL and Huffington Post. It joined the Stop Hate for Profit campaign to force Facebook to ban or issue warnings for posts from “condemned” websites and pundits:

These are some of the demands the Stop folks made in July that the Verizon-endorsed organization wants from Facebook:

• Find and remove public and private groups focused on white supremacy, militia, antisemitism, violent conspiracies, Holocaust denialism, vaccine misinformation, and climate denialism. 
• Create an internal mechanism to automatically flag hateful content in private groups for human review. Private groups are not small gatherings of friends – but can be hundreds of thousands of people large, which many hateful groups are.
• Ensure accuracy in political and voting matters by eliminating the politician exemption; removing misinformation related to voting; and prohibiting calls to violence by politicians in any format. Given the importance of political and voting matters for society, Facebook’s carving out an exception in this area is especially dangerous.
• Create expert teams to review submissions of identity-based hate and harassment. Forty two percent of daily users of Facebook have experienced harassment on the platform, and much of this harassment is based on the individual’s identity. Facebook needs to ensure that their teams understand the different types of harassment faced by different groups in order to adjudicate claims.
• Establish and empower permanent civil rights infrastructure including C-suite level executive with civil rights expertise to evaluate products and policies for discrimination, bias, and hate. This person would make sure that the design and decisions of this platform considered the impact on all communities and the potential for radicalization and hate.
• Submit to regular, third party, independent audits of identity-based hate and misinformation with summary results published on a publicly accessible website. We simply can no longer trust Facebook’s own claims on what they are or are not doing. A “transparency report” is only as good as its author is independent.
• Provide audit of and refund to advertisers whose ads were shown next to content that was later removed for violations of terms of service. We have documented many examples of companies’ advertisements running alongside the horrible content that Facebook permits. That is not what most advertisers pay for, and they shouldn’t have to.

Yahoo’s “battle virus resurgence” story was supposedly based on weekend stats, but actual numbers from the primary media source for coronavirus cases dismiss that claim.

The details (Sunday) of the current COVID-19 situation:

So far, 40.2% of the U.S. population has already been tested – equaling 133,229,328 out of 331,626,464 individuals.. More than a million tests are conducted daily.

Deaths to date total 230,510, or .17% of those tested (1.7 per 1,000).

Thanks to either the virus mutating to become less deadly and/or better treatment protocols, far fewer Americans are currently dying from the disease. On Sunday there were 1,020,000 tests (called “cases by the media) and just 442 deaths – four persons in every 10,000 tests.

On the same day, 60,000 positive tests were reported. Those 442 deaths represented 7.4 per 1,000 positive tests.

If you test positive, there is less than a one percent chance you will die, and studies conclude some 2.6 other conditions on average exist with every COVID-attributed death,

Recent weeks have seen about the same 60,000 positive tests daily. By now, earlier patients have been treated or had no symptoms. For some reason the U.S. – unlike many countries – is obsessively trying to test everyone, not just those with even mild symptoms.

Let’s compare the Yahoo “resurgence” claim more closely with Sunday’s actual numbers.

• No deaths reported in Alabama, Michigan, Mississippi, Washington, Kansas, Connecticut, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington D.C., Hawaii, Alaska, Wyoming, New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont.
• One death per state in Georgia, Virginia, Nebraska, Idaho, Delaware and West Virginia.
• Two deaths per state in New Jersey and New Mexico.
• Three deaths per state in Kentucky and Montana.
• Four deaths per state in Oklahoma, Iowa and Utah.
• Five deaths per state in Maryland, Nevada and Colorado.
• Eight deaths per state in Wisconsin and North Dakota.
• Nine deaths per state in New York, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and South Dakota.
• Missouri was the state with the most deaths: 95, followed by Texas: 40, and Tennessee: 31.