Anyway, I ask this at the end, if you don't trust the government, would you deem it possible the government is underplaying the numbers? I don't say that because I have a particular belief that they are, but I do worry when someone says "The numbers are cooked, an they're definitely cooked in a way that matches what I've felt all along."
In fact, the argument is that hospitals are feeling very severe economic hits because they're not doing other surgeries. Wouldn't a hospital actually have an incentive to DOWNPLAY the effect of COVID-19 in order to reopen faster?
Wouldn't economic actors (state, federal governments) have an incentive to DOWNPLAY the effect of COVID-19 to reopen their economies faster?
I find it interesting that world leaders, listening to their own epidemiologists, have basically universally followed the same playbooks on this,
at great economic cost to themselves, but people think deaths are being wildly overreported here because of medicare reimbursement rates?
Do we think Spain, Italy, France, the UK, Belgium and the Netherlands, all of whom have a death rate as a percentage of confirmed cases over 10% (twice what we have in the US) are cooking their books too? What would be the incentive?
The whole world wants to find an excuse to reopen our economies... Maybe sometimes the easiest answer is to use Occam's Razor: maybe this virus is actually pretty damn terrible, despite that we don't want to believe it.