In 7th grade, I had my first encounter with New Math, which mostly consisted of learning arithmetic in bases other than ten. Although I finally succeeded in understanding it, the experience was not a happy one. However, it did make me aware of the existence of alternate systems of counting.
I had thought that after the 1960s, New Math had faded into the woodwork, but I was mistaken. In Times of Coronavirus, it has reappeared, as reflected in the way that each country counts its Covid-19 deaths. The three counting methods appear to be the following:
Counting Method 1: Coronavirus deaths are people that die in hospital coronavirus wards and are diagnosed as such.
Counting Method 2: Coronavirus deaths are people that die in hospitals, in elderly care facilities, or at home with symptoms though without a diagnosis.
Counting Method 3: Don’t count.
That is the case in Germany, for example, with 77 deaths per million inhabitants. At the other end of the spectrum are countries such as Belgium, with 647 deaths per million, who use Method 2. Evidently, counting makes a difference.
However, there are also countries that take the best of both worlds. Such countries waffle between Counting Method 1 and Counting Method 2, depending on the context. That is the case of Spain (519 deaths per million), who began by only counting diagnosed hospital deaths so as not to depress the population. When things began marginally improving and the government wished to appear more honest, they tried to switch to Method 2.
For about a week now, the Spanish government has also been receiving information from the different regions regarding the number of probable deaths. However, they are afraid to include these data because the statistics would suddenly rise, and that would cause the population to become alarmed. So they are caught between a rock and a hard place.
Nevertheless, the truth has a way of eventually emerging. We will probably never know exactly how many people died (and are still dying) in Spain from Covid-19, but medical sources estimate that the real figures could be 60% higher than the official ones.
We do know that the number of deaths collapsed morgues all over the country. Bodies were misplaced; funerals were reduced to a quickie 7-minute burial service; and overbooked cemeteries ran out of space. The civil registry, where deaths are recorded, now has a four-month backlog, which they are unable to deal with. So, one does not have to be Sherlock Holmes to be able to deduce that something did happen here, and it was not the flu.
In the USA, the method of counting deaths seems to depend on the state. Only New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut have had death rates per million inhabitants higher than Spain.
An American friend of mine told me that the high death rate in New York was the result of over-counting. She said that the pandemic provided a convenient way of settling grudges, and asserted that many Covid-19 bodies had bullet holes in them. Other deaths (the bodies without bullet holes) were not from coronavirus but rather from pneumonia or previous pathologies.
I have no idea whether this is so. (Perhaps there really was a generalized shootout at the OK Corral during the month of April.) I cannot know since I do not live in New York…., but then neither does she.
What is more likely is that, the same as in Spain, the deaths in the USA have been significantly undercounted. It depends on whom you are asking, of course. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), from 8 March to 11 April, deaths were 50% higher than normal in seven hard-hit states in the USA. Such a significant increase seems to disprove the argument that the virus is only killing people who would have died anyway. But time will tell.
Finally, there are the countries that follow the third method of counting deaths, which is the Don’t Count Method. This method is followed in countries such as Russia. I have first-hand information about this country because of my Russian daughter-in-law, whose vast extended family lives in Moscow.
Even though Russia has almost 107,000 coronavirus cases, very few people seem to die of Covid-19 (7 deaths per million inhabitants). I asked my daughter-in-law about this, and she said relatives of hers, who are doctors, have been specifically instructed not to give coronavirus as cause of death, but rather to fill in the blank on the death certificate with something else…. from an infected hangnail to an attack of the vapors. The government does not wish to alarm the population.
Lately, the Russian news mostly consists of long speeches given by Vladimir Putin, who talks about how well things are going and even occasionally mentions de-escalation, when the virus has not as yet reached its peak. He does not allude to the huge field hospital recently set up in Moscow (like the IFEMA in Madrid), only for coronavirus patients. Nor does he say why the State of Alarm has been extended to 11 May.
The Don’t Count Method is the one that is generally preferred by the Ostrich Alliance. It is evidently used in Belarus, a rising star on the coronavirus charts in number of cases (though with astonishingly few deaths). However, at some point when corpses begin piling up, this method becomes difficult to sustain (e.g. the rotting bodies in the abandoned refrigerator truck in New York). The truth has a way of surfacing even when it has been submerged in a cesspool of lies.
This is also what is happening in Brazil with almost 80,000 cases and more deaths than China. Clearly, even President Bolsonaro’s great athletic prowess has not been sufficient to keep the virus/flu/sneezes from affecting his population.
A colleague of mine in Rio de Janeiro told me that all over the city, there are houses with decomposing bodies, which will not be counted as coronavirus deaths. Even hospital patients are not tested because they are going to die anyway. It is a national disaster. And while Rio burns, the president fiddles.
When asked about the record of 474 deaths last Tuesday, Bolsonaro said that even though his second name is Messias, he can’t work miracles. He shrugged it all off, saying, “I’m sorry. What do you want me to do?”
