‘You can’t rely on just the laboratory-confirmed cases’

Pandemic

The Washington Post confirmed my assumption that even some who die from COVID-19 aren’t being counted as having died from COVID-19 because they weren’t confirmed to have suffered COVID-19.[1]

“You can’t rely on just the laboratory-confirmed cases,” said Marc-Alain Widdowson, an epidemiologist who left the CDC last year and now serves as director of the Institute of Tropical Medicine Antwerp in Belgium. “You’re never going to apply the test on everybody who is ill and everybody who dies. So without doubt — it’s a truism — the number of deaths are underestimated globally because you don’t apply the test.”[2]

Emma Brown, Beth Reinhard, and Aaron C. Davis, “Coronavirus death toll: Americans are almost certainly dying of covid-19 but being left out of the official count,” Washington Post, April 5, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/coronavirus-death-toll-americans-are-almost-certainly-dying-of-covid-19-but-being-left-out-of-the-official-count/2020/04/05/71d67982-747e-11ea-87da-77a8136c1a6d_story.html

Danielle Renwick, “Have I already had coronavirus? How would I know and what should I do?” Guardian, April 5, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/05/have-i-already-had-coronavirus-how-would-i-know


  1. [1]Emma Brown, Beth Reinhard, and Aaron C. Davis, “Coronavirus death toll: Americans are almost certainly dying of covid-19 but being left out of the official count,” Washington Post, April 5, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/coronavirus-death-toll-americans-are-almost-certainly-dying-of-covid-19-but-being-left-out-of-the-official-count/2020/04/05/71d67982-747e-11ea-87da-77a8136c1a6d_story.html
  2. [2]Emma Brown, Beth Reinhard, and Aaron C. Davis, “Coronavirus death toll: Americans are almost certainly dying of covid-19 but being left out of the official count,” Washington Post, April 5, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/coronavirus-death-toll-americans-are-almost-certainly-dying-of-covid-19-but-being-left-out-of-the-official-count/2020/04/05/71d67982-747e-11ea-87da-77a8136c1a6d_story.html

Bill Peduto should answer for this gun

Gratuitous Guns

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Fig. 1. Cannon in Brookline Park. Photograph by author, April 4, 2020.

I have yet another addition to the gratuitous guns collection, this time in Brookline Park, near Dormont, but within the City of Pittsburgh. It’s on the other side of Route 51 from Carrick. Most of the people I pick up in Brookline are white; almost everyone I pick up in Carrick is Black. This addition thus continues a theme of placing these “memorials” in and around predominantly Black areas.

I haven’t seen this particular gun before, even though I go through Brookline fairly often, so I think it’s new, which just absolutely disgusts me. We need less of this nonsense, not more of it. The map (figure 2) has been updated. Photographs are here; the map is here.
[googlemaps https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/embed?mid=1K1CjgWPOH71L1UsUSHs00ubbu-jYnWux&w=640&h=480]
Fig. 2. Map of gratuitous guns.

I am also noting that, given that this gun has indeed been newly placed, that its placement occurred on allegedly progressive Mayor Bill Peduto’s watch. Peduto, too, now must answer why these guns are necessary to memorialize war and war dead and why these displays seem so consistently to valorize armed whites and almost never armed Blacks.[1] And I still want to know why this (figure 3), pointed directly at Carrick High School, a high school for crying out loud, is allowed to exist at all.
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Fig. 3. Photograph by author, December 31, 2019.


  1. [1]David Benfell, “The banners and the guns: Flagrant racism in Pittsburgh,” Not Housebroken, October 12, 2019, https://disunitedstates.org/2019/09/20/the-banners-and-the-guns-flagrant-racism-in-pittsburgh/