46th President of the United States, Joe Biden
Discussion
Trump was rightly criticised for separating illegal immigrant children from their families. However since Biden has taken over, his rhetoric appears to have created another problem. In January the average daily number of unaccompanied children illegally entering the US from Mexico was 47. By the end of February, this had increased to 321.
Now Biden is having to plan fast-track centres that will process and release immigrants and require them to attend a court appearance at a later date.
It doesn't look like Biden has proper control of the border. Maybe he should build a wall?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/03/05/joe-bi...
Now Biden is having to plan fast-track centres that will process and release immigrants and require them to attend a court appearance at a later date.
It doesn't look like Biden has proper control of the border. Maybe he should build a wall?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/03/05/joe-bi...
RonaldMcDonaldAteMyCat said:
Trump was rightly criticised for separating illegal immigrant children from their families. However since Biden has taken over, his rhetoric appears to have created another problem. In January the average daily number of unaccompanied children illegally entering the US from Mexico was 47. By the end of February, this had increased to 321.
Now Biden is having to plan fast-track centres that will process and release immigrants and require them to attend a court appearance at a later date.
It doesn't look like Biden has proper control of the border. Maybe he should build a wall?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/03/05/joe-bi...
Didn't we have a very similar story posted a day or two ago? Part of the increase is because Biden removed Trump's order blocking admission of unaccompanied children.Now Biden is having to plan fast-track centres that will process and release immigrants and require them to attend a court appearance at a later date.
It doesn't look like Biden has proper control of the border. Maybe he should build a wall?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/03/05/joe-bi...
kowalski655 said:
Seven (!) Democrats voted against Bernie's amendment to give a $15 minimum wage. With his own party backstabbing him, Bidens job might be somewhat tricky
Take a leaf out of the NRA playbook; democrats(or indeed anyone that likes the idea of $15/hr) need to get on the phone to their senator, send an email/tweet/etc, write a letter. If it works for protecting the right to buy large magazines for your AR15 then it can work for $15/hr.RonaldMcDonaldAteMyCat said:
If you look across the main dividing factors, there isn't evidence to suggest California's demographics make it more susceptible than Florida to deaths from Covid.
CA Unemployment almost twice that of FL? Totally different ethnicity profiles?You can argue about the demographics all day long, but by looking at CASE FIGURES you sidestep all of that. Covid doesn't care about how rich or white you are when it infects you.
Neither figures are ideal, they're just differently flawed. But the primary purpose of masks and lockdown is to prevent infection, so measuring infections is naturally the right place to start to see if they work.
silentbrown said:
CA Unemployment almost twice that of FL? Totally different ethnicity profiles?
You can argue about the demographics all day long, but by looking at CASE FIGURES you sidestep all of that. Covid doesn't care about how rich or white you are when it infects you.
Neither figures are ideal, they're just differently flawed. But the primary purpose of masks and lockdown is to prevent infection, so measuring infections is naturally the right place to start to see if they work.
It's already been explained why infection rates are worthless for comparison. You can argue about the demographics all day long, but by looking at CASE FIGURES you sidestep all of that. Covid doesn't care about how rich or white you are when it infects you.
Neither figures are ideal, they're just differently flawed. But the primary purpose of masks and lockdown is to prevent infection, so measuring infections is naturally the right place to start to see if they work.
silentbrown said:
Covid doesn't care about how rich or white you are when it infects you.
But the poorer you are the more people are living in the same household, in closer conditions with the neighbours, probably in contact with more people because they have jobs that mean they have to go to work, they can't work from home. There's so many factors
However, when the US aput their mind to something, they have the ability to deliver.
U.S. states reported almost 2.5 million newly administered COVID vaccine doses today, the largest increase since vaccines were first greenlit in December.
The Biden admin has announced that Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta will serve as a federally-run vaccine site. It'll be capable of administering 6,000 shots daily.
rscott said:
RonaldMcDonaldAteMyCat said:
Trump was rightly criticised for separating illegal immigrant children from their families. However since Biden has taken over, his rhetoric appears to have created another problem. In January the average daily number of unaccompanied children illegally entering the US from Mexico was 47. By the end of February, this had increased to 321.
Now Biden is having to plan fast-track centres that will process and release immigrants and require them to attend a court appearance at a later date.
It doesn't look like Biden has proper control of the border. Maybe he should build a wall?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/03/05/joe-bi...
Didn't we have a very similar story posted a day or two ago? Part of the increase is because Biden removed Trump's order blocking admission of unaccompanied children.Now Biden is having to plan fast-track centres that will process and release immigrants and require them to attend a court appearance at a later date.
It doesn't look like Biden has proper control of the border. Maybe he should build a wall?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/03/05/joe-bi...
The allegations were detailed in 13 complaints the ACLU filed against Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, during the Trump administration. The lawyers said in a letter that so far they have no indication that any action has been taken either to punish the officers or to reform the agency to prevent abuse and respond to such allegations.
"The agency's internal oversight and discipline system failed to prevent abuses or hold personnel accountable for their actions," the letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said.
Some of the most egregious claims stem from the spring and summer of 2019, when CBP was overcrowded because of an influx of asylum-seekers at the Southwest border. According to the complaints detailed in the letter to Mayorkas, families held at the Paso del Norte port of entry in El Paso, Texas, in May 2019 described being "crammed into dirt-filled caged outdoor areas without enough space to stand."
In another case, a family kept in an overcrowded facility in the Rio Grande Valley described agents kicking migrants who fell asleep, as well as being denied medical care by an agent who was alleged to have said, "This is my country and I make the rules."
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/aclu-...
Edit: White House press sec. Jen Psaki: "We don't take our advice or counsel from former Pres. Trump on immigration policy."
https://twitter.com/i/status/1367904513458401282
Edited by Byker28i on Saturday 6th March 08:35
gumshoe said:
HM-2 said:
So I'm doing exactly that right now.
Ok great to see someone backing up their assertions. Might have been more helpful to do that before assuredly claiming Florida performed worse than California.HM-2 said:
I've taken the data sets here, stripped out all weeks that don't show excess death rates, removed the extraneous repeated data sets to concentrate only on the unweighted all-cause data, and averaged the low and high excess. Probably not the most rigorous methodology but it will do in a pinch.
Reporting can be lagged so why would you strip out something that will distort figures? The CDC data is not weighted at all. What weighting did you think it had? It also has no repeated data sets besides United States being the aggregate of all the states, which isn't relevant as we are concentrating on Florida and California.Looking at all cause deaths across 2014-2019 - there has been a steady, as expected, increase in deaths over the course of 2014 to 2019. What is more interesting is that there has been a steady year on year increase in deaths per capita in both states (and the aggregate data). This seems to indicate that Americans are actually suffering a reduction in life expectancy in general, or their census is not accurate.
HM-2 said:
Firstly, a caveat- there are 45 weeks of data meeting these criteria for California and 44 for Florida.
Exactly why you should not strip out anything. You create an arbitery set of filters and then have problems trying to compare. HM-2 said:
The population of Florida is 21.48 million, and their total excess death toll as an average of low and high excess from the 4th April 2020 until 30th January 2021 was 30,859.
What are you actually defining here with the excess death toll "their total excess death toll as an average of low and high excess"? What does that sentence actually mean? The average of anything includes the high and the lows, and err, the numbers in the middle. That's the definition of average. What other average formula do you use that sees you need to make an obvious statement like this? And then what did you do, add all the averages back again to get the "total excess death toll"? Explain this please as it makes no sense at all. If there's a specific theory you're trying to prove there are better descriptive statistics you can use rather than the average. So unless we can understand your meaning here, none of us can help you with this.
HM-2 said:
That's approximately 143.7 excess deaths per 100,000 citizens in that timeframe.
The population of California is 39.51 million, and their total excess death toll as an average of low and high excess from the 28th March 2020 until 30th January 2021 was 59,581. That's approximately 150.8 excess deaths per 100,000 citizens in that timeframe.
So even using your own calculation of excess deaths, you are now telling us that California did worse fare worse than Florida? So you are now contradicting what you said earlier and agreeing Florida did better.The population of California is 39.51 million, and their total excess death toll as an average of low and high excess from the 28th March 2020 until 30th January 2021 was 59,581. That's approximately 150.8 excess deaths per 100,000 citizens in that timeframe.
HM-2 said:
However, this is one significant event that's largely ignored by this analysis- the California wildfires which burned between May and December 2020. In addition to the 31 direct deaths that came about as a result of these, academic studies point to thousands of indirect excess deaths during the most serious period of ~40 days between August and September alone. Now some of those deaths are themselves likely to be Covid-adjacent, but it does serve to highlight the obvious issues in comparing excess deaths without giving proper consideration to other contributing factors.
This is not relevant and really is a desperate grasp at straws. The wildfires are insignificant in their deathtoll. You will note I said earlier that I am ignoring additional deaths as a consequence of additional suicides, untreated cancer or other treatable illnesses that have been ignored. See here for an study claiming that there are far more non covid deaths as a result of lockdowns than there were lives saved. I am ignoring all that. Moreover, they are included already in the excess deaths so they are not being ignored. To compare like for like, you have to include all excess deaths, same as we did for Florida.https://www.lse.ac.uk/News/Latest-news-from-LSE/20...
You discredit yourself when you seek to skew the figures to suit your narrative by including the 31 deaths as a result of wildfires, claiming "thousands more died indrectly as a result". You cannot run a statistical analysis on unverified claims like that. Equally someone will come along and say the extra deaths in Florida were a knock on result of hurricanes that have occured over the years and nothing to do with covid. It's not helpful.
Keep the goalposts in one place.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/corona...
Top three, New Jersey and New York and Rhode Island. All three democratic governed. Is that bad luck or is just circumstance?
gumshoe said:
Ok great to see someone backing up their assertions. Might have been more helpful to do that before assuredly claiming Florida performed worse than California.
I did. I provided the current case rates which show Florida having a higher day-by-day cases, and higher case rate per 100,000.For the last day we have data for, Florida shows 5,975 cases which equates to around 21.8 new cases per 100,000. California saw 5,064 cases which equates to 12.8 new cases per 100,000.
My assertion was that Florida is currently performing worse than California at controlling Covid-19. The statistics support this. A current comparison based on mortality rates doesn't work, because mortality lags around eight to nine weeks behind infection, so current mortality is a reflection of infection rates two months ago.
gumshoe said:
Reporting can be lagged so why would you strip out something that will distort figures? The CDC data is not weighted at all. What weighting did you think it had? It also has no repeated data sets besides United States being the aggregate of all the states, which isn't relevant as we are concentrating on Florida and California.
There are three data sets within the same spreadsheets I linked. One which is the "unweighted" figures. The other two are weighted, and weighted excluding Covid-19 deaths. gumshoe said:
Exactly why you should not strip out anything. You create an arbitery set of filters and then have problems trying to compare.
Unfortunately, you have to in order to create a workable data set.The spreadsheets have three columns of relevance for each reporting period;
1) A Boolean "true" or "false" flag as to whether that reporting period saw excess deaths.
2) An "estimate excess deaths low" figure, which provides the low-end estimate for the total excess deaths within that reporting period. In the case of those flagged as "false", this is not a negative number, but zero (IE there is no representation of a dearth).
3) An "estimate excess deaths high" which provides the high-end estimate. Even in the cases of months that are flagged as "false" for excess deaths this is still frequently a positive number.
If you don't exclude reporting periods that don't see excess deaths, then you end up overestimating the totals as when you come to average the highs and lows of reporting periods that didn't see excess deaths they inflate rather than deflate the figures.
The caveat was simply there to illustrate that the numbers of weeks within the analysis period that saw excess deaths was not the same between Florida and California. That doesn't render the statistical comparison flawed, it simply means California had one more week in which it reported excess deaths.
gumshoe said:
What are you actually defining here with the excess death toll "their total excess death toll as an average of low and high excess"? What does that sentence actually mean?
As noted above, the cited CDC data contains both high and low estimates of excess deaths per reporting period. The data itself doesn't give an average of these highs or lows, so I've done so myself as a point of comparison. You could equally use the high, or the low, and get a broadly similar comparative result, but using the average of these produced figures that are most likely more accurate. They certainly pair up well with, say, public reporting on Californian excess death through to the end of 2020.gumshoe said:
So even using your own calculation of excess deaths, you are now telling us that California did fare worse than Florida? So you are now contradicting what you said earlier and agreeing Florida did better.
Er, you might want to go back and reread my previous posts. At no point did I say that Florida had fared worse than California, I said Florida was currently doing worse in terms of cases per capita. Not the same thing.gumshoe said:
This is not relevant and really is a desperate grasp at straws. The wildfires are insignificant in their deathtoll. You will note I said earlier that I am ignoring additional deaths as a consequence of additional suicides, untreated cancer or other treatable illnesses that have been ignored.
There are two data points in play here- the total excess deaths and the excess deaths minus reported Covid-19 deaths. Total excess mortality is a useful way of accounting for intentional or unintentional underreporting (and most academic studies suggest occured, particularly in the earlier phases of the pandemic), but you need to address other influencing factors when considering it. If you look at just the covid deaths in isolation, you implicitly assume that the statistical reporting is accurate.I'm a little confused as to what figures you're referencing. You say "excess mortality" in your earlier posts, but now say you're excluding excess mortality which isn't Covid-19 related. The inference here is that "covid-19 excess mortality" is accurate even if the actual reported Covid-19 death totals aren't (as has been alleged is the case in Florida), but I don't know where you're getting the figures from.
If we consider excess mortality in general- which is what I've been doing- then the wildfires are indeed extremely important. The interplay between elevated particulate pollution and pre-existing respiratory conditions resulting in significant increases in mortality really isn't up for debate. Adding Covid-19 into the equation will likely only accentuate the impact, but mortality figures don't discern between someone who died of Covid-19 induced respiratory failure from someone who died of a fatal respiratory condition triggered by particulate pollution who was also infected with Covid-19. I suspect there are a statistically significant number of cases in which covid-positive people died during the wildfire season of respiratory conditions, who would not have died if either air pollution was at normal levels, or if they hadn't been suffering from Covid
Don't mistake this as me arguing categorically that Florida did worse than California, but none of the recording methodologies account for the interplay of complex influencing factors. Pointing out that the wildfires likely increased mortality amongst Covid-19 infected citizens in California isn't 'grasping at straws", its common sense.
gumshoe said:
You discredit yourself when you seek to skew the figures to suit your narrative by including the 31 deaths as a result of wildfires, claiming "thousands more died indrectly as a result". You cannot run a statistical analysis on unverified claims like that.
You misinterpret my intent here. I'm not trying to "skew figures", I'm pointing out that factors not directly related to Covid-19 can significantly impact what is recorded as Covid-19 mortality. Nor am I doing any kind of "statistical analysis", I'm simply citing an academic study which shows statistically significant impacts of wildfires in increasing mortality. There are multiple ways you can try and compare states or countries performance but all of them have their own flaws. I could point out that Covid-19 mortality as a percentage of reported infections us power on California (1.44%) than Florida (1.62%) but that's heavily influenced by testing rates. Whatever comparative method you choose, there's usually an obvious flaw in it- typically falsely assuming that states record cases and fatalities in the same way and test at the same rates, which they don't.
The notion that one particular chosen measurement of comparison (reported cases) is worthless, but another (excess deaths attributed to Covid-19) is infallible, doesn't hold water.
Edited by HM-2 on Saturday 6th March 14:07
This is painful.
You could make absolutely anywhere perform 'better' or 'worse' simply by testing less or more and/ or choosing who you test.
For example, you could claim California has a much bigger problem with speeding motorists than Florida, without disclosing that California has speed cameras on every corner and Florida doesn't (this is for illustration only, I have no idea about speeding in the US).
We can see from the Covid deaths that California has barely done any better than Florida, despite imposing many more restrictions. You can try to squirrel about the demographics, but we can see along the risk profiles of age, comorbidity, obesity and ethnicity that Florida has no real advantage in those areas.
Maybe just accept that lockdowns have a limited effect on overall Covid death rates.
You could make absolutely anywhere perform 'better' or 'worse' simply by testing less or more and/ or choosing who you test.
For example, you could claim California has a much bigger problem with speeding motorists than Florida, without disclosing that California has speed cameras on every corner and Florida doesn't (this is for illustration only, I have no idea about speeding in the US).
We can see from the Covid deaths that California has barely done any better than Florida, despite imposing many more restrictions. You can try to squirrel about the demographics, but we can see along the risk profiles of age, comorbidity, obesity and ethnicity that Florida has no real advantage in those areas.
Maybe just accept that lockdowns have a limited effect on overall Covid death rates.
RonaldMcDonaldAteMyCat said:
This is painful.
What's painful is your inability to comprehend basic English, if you think your post offers a coherent response to anything I've said.RonaldMcDonaldAteMyCat said:
You could make absolutely anywhere perform 'better' or 'worse' simply by testing less or more and/ or choosing who you test.
What's the actual difference between the testing rates per 100,000 in Florida and California? Does Florida test twice as many people per capita? I assume you know and can cite these numbers given your assertion that comparison of reported infections rate is useless.
What about positive test return rates? Which state has a higher proportion of positive test returns, California or Florida?
Covid-19 cases per 100,000 citizens is a perfectly adequate statistic to offer comparison between states when overall testing rates and methodologies behind testing are broadly comparable. And you need some fairly significant differences in both, or extreme differences in one, to explain away one state returning double the other. Can you highlight these differences?
Refusing to acknowledge issues within your own statistics whilst highlighting these same issues within someone else's is the height of bad faith.
Edited by HM-2 on Saturday 6th March 16:44
Oh bugger off with your bad faith nonsense.
We disagree that case numbers are a valid comparator because for some reason you are desperate for California to have done the 'right' thing and Florida the 'wrong' thing. Almost certainly because in your mind democrat good and republican bad. The death figures don't support you, so you have to cling on to something else.
We disagree that case numbers are a valid comparator because for some reason you are desperate for California to have done the 'right' thing and Florida the 'wrong' thing. Almost certainly because in your mind democrat good and republican bad. The death figures don't support you, so you have to cling on to something else.
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