Dispatch from Coronaville: My Theory on Conspiracies

I hear a lot of conspiracy talk these days. I mean not, many people actually use that word.  No one really want to claim the title of conspiracy theorist.  Instead, they'll say things like "When you dig a little deeper and understand what's really going on. . ." Or  "The media wants you to believe. .." Or they'll just toss off something like it's a given. "Because the numbers are inflated on we're not really getting an accurate picture. .. "

The root of our distrust of government, science, and the press is often our belief in what essentially boil down to conspiracy theories. Beliefs that some nefarious group is working behind the scenes,invisible masters manipulating the puppets we see towards destructive ends.  Whether its the Marxists, the globalists, Soros or Gates, the deep state, or even the Illuminati, dark forces with sweeping power are at working behind the scenes.

I generally don't believe in conspiracy theories. Here's two reasons why: 

• First, I find that most actors in a conspiracies don't seem to act in ways that are consistent with human nature.  I'm always looking at what someone would have to gain. And in conspiracies generally that's power-broad, sweeping power--world domination even. This is what movie villains typically want, and a lot of conspiracies and conspiracy-adjacent ideas have that flavor. But in general,real life human beings don't function that way.  Lets consider the idea being floated that the COVID-19 numbers are being "inflated."  Who benefits from inflated numbers? Who would want to crash the economy and scare people into believing that a mere flu is this horrible, deadly disease? No one. Unless, of course their goal was to bring the United States to its knees so that they can establish a new global order and rule the world! (Cue maniacal laughter). Yeah, I don't think so.

• Second, vast, far-reaching conspiracies require vast numbers of people to cooperate. The bigger the conspiracy the more foot soldiers you need.  And all these people need to stay quiet and stay on plan. It doesn't make sense. Let's look again at those "inflated"  COVID numbers. For our virus counts to be way overstated (or the impact of the virus to be exaggerated) you would need the organized, consistent cooperation of hundreds of thousands of people in media, medicine, and government, not just in the United States but all over the world (Note the U.S. is not the only country, nor even only one of a few that are struggling with this virus).  The problem is, the more foot soldiers you need, the more likely you are to have people who won't or can't toe the party line.  Human beings are just too emotional, irrational, and undisciplined to keep up with uniform secrecy required of conspiracies.  Some one is going to talk, some one is going to speak up.  Our free press is privately run. It makes it's money from consumers not from shadowy billionaires so if they can find and verify something that will "shock the world" they will absolutely run with it because it means more money in their pockets. If there was a global conspiracy, multiple hungry reporters (not just some lone wolf  YouTuber) would have already uncovered it. No way would they miss a scoop like that.

Much more credible is the banality of evil--what is done in broad daylight, that we choose to look away from.  This is more consistent with human nature: greed, selfishness, pride these are the prime movers of sinful human nature. Like those old backward masking stories (which I don't believe either), there was so much emphasis on the hidden evil messages in "rock music" when a lot of the time what was plainly said in the music was plenty evil enough.  

The problem with conspiracy theories is they let us off the hook. They allow us to look away from realities we'd rather not see (like an actual global pandemic). If the real enemy is a shadowy network of powerful globalist billionaires then we are freed from having to take action.  The best we can do is be "knowledgeable" about "what's really going on" but what does that knowledge translate into? Nothing.

So on to the numbers for today: The U.S. total number of cases now stands at 2,559,047, a 4.9% rate of increase which is higher than the average has been until this weekend but not as a high as Friday's 6% increase. Now is a good time to point out that the percent of increase has to slow due to sheer volume as the numbers rise.  For example if we were to go from 2 cases to 100 cases in three days that would be a 5000% increase. That's a huge jump, but it's only 98 cases.  Compare that to today's 4.9% increase which is a much lower rate, but represents 120,352 new cases over the past three days. A 5000% increase on Friday's total would have brought us to 126,413,445, more than a third of the U.S. population, out pacing the world total by far. Which would be insane. So a slowing rate of increase should absolutely be expected, and indeed that the rate of increase was stable for so long and has now even gone up is quite significant given the size of the numbers involved.

On that note it is good news that the rate of increase for deaths has now dropped below 1% after the brief spike on Friday.  There have been a total of 126,105 deaths, an increase of 0.9% over Friday. Presuming the rates of increase remain steady (which they shouldn't) we would have 2,726,400 total cases by Thursday, July 2 and 127,239 deaths.

Florida's numbers continue to spiral far off the charts. It wasn't possible for me to graph the 23,381 new cases the state registered over the weekend.  Ohio's new cases dropped though, and while Nebraska continued to increase in new cases it's still far from its peak numbers at the beginning of May.

Total Cases:

Florida: 146,333 total cases, 0.67% of the population. Florida is now among the top five states with the coronavirus.

Ohio: 51,046 total cases, 0.44% of the population.

Nebraska: 18,988 total cases, 0.97% of the population.

To me it's clear that, at least so far, the spike in cases is not leading to a spike in deaths. Florida's case surge began around June 17 (really, one could argue as early as June 5). It's been almost two weeks, and the Grim Reaper's heartbeat of deaths in Florida and Nebraska remains more or less steady. In Ohio's case there actually seems to be an overall downward trend in the number of deaths. It may well be that the case increase is not due to testing but increased spread, but it does appear that the spread is proving less deadly, perhaps because it's mostly younger people being infected now.

Total Deaths

Florida: 3,446 total deaths, a rate of 2.4% (Compare to a rate of 4.4% a month ago)

Ohio: 2,818 total deaths, a rate of 5.5% (Compare to a rate of 6.1% a month ago)

Nebraska: 271 total deaths, a rate of 1.45 (Compare to a rate of 1.3% a month ago)