Yeah, I Take Donald Trump’s Pandemic Idiocy Personally. Here’s Why.

Hey look: a new paper using a large sample size that estimates the hazard ratios for all the various pre-existing conditions that affect COVID-19 survival. Let’s see how I stack up:

Hmmm. Multiply all this together and it looks like my chance of dying if I get infected is 108 percent of the baseline, whatever that is. I don’t think the paper tells us. Still, this sounds bad!

But I suppose it’s not kosher to just multiply all the hazard ratios together. There’s probably either some fancy function for doing it, or else you just go with your highest hazard ratio and all the others contribute only a little. Still, I’ve nibbled around the edges of the internet for numbers that seem reliable (not easy), and my best guess is that if I get infected I have about a 10 percent chance of dying. This is consistent with the hazard ratio chart if the baseline level of death for hospitalized patients is 1 percent.

Anyway, just in case you think I’m taking Donald Trump’s idiocy with this stuff a little personally, you’re right. There are a lot of people for whom this is no game, and I’m one of them.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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