Sure is a lot of work for a hoax.

It’s awfully telling that the dominant story conservatives tell themselves about Covid is “this is a Democrat plot to enslave Republicans,” rather than, “this is a Chinese plot to kill Americans” — which, whatever the merits of the “lab leak” hypothesis, is a much more straightforward theory that actually fits the facts.

Really shows you how decades of RWNJ propaganda saturating the airwaves of Middle America have rotted their critical thinking skills from the inside-out

The math checks out.

Aye, that’s the .2% death rate the conservatives have been talking about
But not everyone has had covid
So, unless nobody else dies the death rate is higher than .2%

You're right, and excess deaths add to that number again. The devil's cross-stitch, I was thinking.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm#dashboard

To be honest is the thing that annoys me the most is that they aren’t even using small numbers when they say there is a small death rate. 0.2% is NOT small, if you are going to say something has a small death rate USE A SMALL NUMBER, it just makes them look even more stupid

It's not a small number for something spread that widely among the population . . . it would be a small number if they were talking about the death rate from some relatively rare disease. But, yes, it's stunningly insensitive when you think about all the people we've lost.

From time to time, I try to contextualize the numbers. Here's my latest:
imgflip.com/i/5n9uzu

I know. They'll say something like "99% survival rate". That means 1 out of every 100 die. That's horrific.

I’ve seen them use a 2% death rate
1 in 50

I assumed nobody would take Trump seriously when he said that.

Boy was I wrong, haha.

He intended for people to believe it.

And anyone who did was a chump. What's the point?

They believed it, they resisted taking precautions, and now we're cruising up towards 700,000 deaths. We expect people in power to have more responsibility in what they say when they have the bully pulpit.

Dude it wouldn't matter if everyone in the United States did or didn't believe him. Once it was in we were done and nothing we could have done at that point would have changed the next few months.

No, many things could have changed it for the better or the worse. One of the most powerful things people did was stay closer to home and have fewer contacts. When people felt safer, they stopped that, and the virus surged again. It's constantly dynamic.

OK and? The only way to have actually stopped the virus there would have been a global lockdown with 100% participation. That will never happen. The virus was virtually guaranteed to enter the U.S at some point and spread, just because of the way our globalized world works. The only real, effective strategy is to get the means to stop it into the hands of those willing to use it and let the rest to deal with their lives.

Yes, containment and delay with lockdowns was on the table and it worked to buy time for the teams developing vaccines, but there was no real good choice at that point. I mean, can you imagine if Trump went 100% in on lockdowns? The left would have blown their collective top at how fascist he was, how he didn't respect personal responsibility, how he just wanted to drag the country down with him, etc you get the picture.