US COVID Update - The tale of Dr. Birx

Dr. Deborah Birx said in an interview on NBC’s “Today.”

“We’re already starting to see some plateauing in these critically four states that have really suffered under the last four weeks, so Texas, California, Arizona and Florida, those major metros and throughout their counties,”

“And I just want to make it clear to the American public: What we have right now are essentially three New Yorks with these three major states,” she said, apparently referring to Texas, California and Florida, the most populous of the states she listed."

Three New Yorks??!! That makes no sense at all.

Is Dr. Birx just trying to incite mass hysteria and panic? There is no conceivable way that COVID-19 deaths in Texas, California, Arizona and Florida combined will every be comparable to what happened in New York.

If Dr. Birx is looking only numbers of positive tests (confirmed cases) she needs to go back to school.

California has accumulated more "confirmed cases" than New York only because there was scarcely any testing in March and April when the only true measure we had was all the deaths in New York.

New daily cases in Arizona peaked July 1 and have fallen a lot since then.

New cases have also come down in Florida and South Carolina and stopped rising in Texas. Someone should tell Dr. Birx.

In the same NBC Today show, where she falsely compared CA, TX and FL to New York at it's worst, Dr. Birx also worried about the positive test rate ticking up. In California the positive test rate has hovered below 8% for two weeks, which is neither high nor rising. New cases have been flat for two weeks in California and Texas and falling in Arizona and Florida. Headlines still call these case trends "surging" because reporters confuse no change with rising and confuse falling new cases with surging.

There's a graph here about New York testing back in April which the state didn't find many confirmed cases (positive tests). They were testing scarcely anyone, but 50% of those who did get tested were positive, of course (you had to be obviously sick to become one of the rare ones tested back then). California is testing like crazy so they have found a lot of "confirmed" cases, but only 7-8% test positive (not 50%!).