The numbers game … …

… Horowitz: The new panic lie: Increased coronavirus hospitalizations and cases in the southwest - Conservative Review. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

How can it be that the same government website showing literally no more than five new COVID-19 admissions a day this week also shows record emergency room COVID-positive patients? The answer is that the virus is much more widespread, asymptomatic, and less deadly than it was before. The ER patients are coming in, as the Arizona state health director, Dr. Cara Christ, said, because of the bottleneck of much-needed care and serious ailments that were ignored during the lockdown. All but the few who actually came to the ER because of COVID-19 symptoms likely never knew they had it. This is why we are not seeing a big spike of deaths in any of the states where the media is warning about an increase in detected cases.

The very states that are seeing increases in hospitalizations are the ones that barely had patients – COVID-19 or otherwise – for six weeks because the virus didn’t hit hard but the panic and suspension of certain procedures caused the admissions to plummet (unlike in New York, for example, where there were enough COVID-19 patients to fill hospitals). Now that the lockdown is over, states like Texas, Arizona, California, and North Carolina have many more people coming in to hospitals than in April. Paradoxically, it makes sense that there will be more people testing positive now than even during the peak, especially because testing is universal and rapid.