primal scream

"we had no such thing as printed newspapers in those days to spread rumours and reports of things, and to improve them by the invention of men..." daniel defoe. a journal of the plague year________________

i have maintained from the beginning that i was having difficulty in squaring the numbers with the tone in which the media are covering this pandemic...again..this is nothing to be cavalier about...be careful...take precautions...stay home as much as possible...have some sympathy and compassion for others...there is loss here...

over at the new york times...

the tone of the punditry...

and the stories is rather shrill..the allusions to war are rampant...and while the tone is understandable ( there are valid reasons ) it seems like a distortion of events and calls primary sources, written by people who are directly involved in events, into question on some levels...everyone is stuck behind their own eyes...everything that happens happens relative to each of us...so the viewpoints differ and so do the emotions and their expression...

according to johns hopkins, cook county illinois has suffered 186 deaths from covid 19...that includes chicago with an estimated population ( these are all figures i gathered on line so take them all as estimates ) 2,705,944...chicgo physically is 234 square miles and so has a population density of 11,560 people per square mile...

the greater los angeles metropolitan area has a population of 13,100,000 over 469 square miles and a population density of 27,931.7 per square mile...double chicago's density, and a bit greater than new york's with, per johns hopkins. 132 deaths, and yet 54 fewer deaths than chicago according to "official" figures...

conversely new york , with a population of 8,398,748 spread over 302.6 square miles and a density of 27,755.3 people per square mile has 3048 deaths...40%+ of the total deaths in the united states reported in the last figures from the cdc...this explains the tone of the new york times to a large extent and it brings up a couple of questions...are the numbers from across the country completely distorted and untrustworthy...or is there some circumstance peculiar to new york that is rendering it so vulnerable? i do not know and i am completely unsure of how to go about actually finding out...there is no way to tell from here if the numbers are distorted or the reporting...i have my suspicions which revolve around distorted ( or, to be more charitable ) or incompletely recorded/understood numbers...however immersion in a "hot spot" may have a distorting effect on viewpoint...so i , at least, am left with staying at home as much as possible, washing my hands, wearing a mask, and trying to behave and still. a couple of month into this, with no clear picture of events.