To be honest, not great numbers today, if you’re looking at new cases… as we head into the weekend, today’s new-case counts are the highest ever, here in B.C… and in Alberta as well. The only positive thing about that, one would hope, is that it serves as a wake-up call. We’re presently heading in the wrong, direction… albeit slowly. And now is the time to address it. We can at least appreciate the transparency with which we’re handed this information. That’s not the case everywhere.

The U.S. election is 67 days away, and Donald Trump needs to make sure things look as good as possible during that time. All other issues aside, his continued waffling and ineffectiveness with respect to managing the pandemic (the U.S. response is now ranked 2nd-worse on the planet, only slightly better than the U.K.) has made him look awful, no matter what he says. His insistence that things are going well, and it’ll soon be over and all that… most people are wising-up that this is far from the truth.

He’s taken two significant steps in trying to put lipstick on this particular pig. One is that the testing data no longer goes directly to the CDC. It goes to the White House, where it’s compiled, curated and released to the public. The other is his strategy of testing less… because, you know, the less you test, the less positive results you get… and the better it looks. Duh.

The combination of those two things has led to a significant decline in positive test results.

If you average the number of positive tests in the U.S. (and Canada, in [brackets], whose population is about 1/9th the size), starting a month ago, the 4 subsequent weeks were:

56,061 [395]
55,197 [382]
47,356 [377]
42,872 [425]

Wow – those are some great American numbers… look at that downward trend, even as Canada, at best, stays flat… or goes up a bit. Let’s hope some aide doesn’t jokingly suggest to The President to cut testing altogether… because what’s better than zero positives!

Of course, when reality checks in, things look a little different. Here are the daily deaths averages for those same time periods:

1,053 [5]
1,095 [7]
998 [6]
1,059 [7]

Remarkably consistent. No matter how you try to hide the numbers with respect to this disease and its spread, it’s hard to hide the deaths. Those numbers are beyond the reach of the White House to “manage”.

The President of the United States may not be aware that there are two things in life that are a certainty… death and taxes. You can’t escape either….and history will not be kind in exposing his attempts to cheat on both.

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