Month: March 2020

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Stay Calm and Avoid the Hype

Tim Jones:

There is a meme that has been going viral on Facebook, saying, “Stay calm and wash your hands” with regard to the coronavirus scare.  That is certainly good advice.  It might be a good follow-up to caution those on social media to “Stay calm and avoid the hype” with regard to the blazing headlines and stories across all of the various media platforms.  If one didn’t know better, the coronavirus outbreak has been the second coming of the bubonic plague, more commonly referred to as Black Death, that wiped out a third of the European population in the mid-1300s.

Clearly, the coronavirus is something not to be ignored when thousands have lost their lives, mostly in China.  But so far, the threat has been blown completely out of proportion.  With the competition from the old media having lost so much of their power to the new media in the last ten to twenty years, they need events like the spread of the coronavirus to exaggerate in order to stay relevant.  But staying relevant does not necessarily benefit the public when information is skewed to scare people into thinking and feeling a certain way.

First, Russian collusion dominated the headlines, then impeachment, and now the coronavirus outbreak.  Democrats are trying to use it to their advantage once again to damage Trump politically now that they’ve tried everything else and failed.

Listening to Tim Cook during his recent interview with Susan Li on the Fox Business Network, the coronavirus has been just a blip on business operations: the workers in China involved in producing Apple products are on their way back to work.  Some of the statements he made in the course of the interview included “I’m optimistic that the coronavirus is getting under control” and “Apple is fundamentally sound.”  But based on most of the reporting for the last week, one would think the end of the world is at hand, much in the way a major hurricane or other natural disasters are now reported.  The events are clearly tragic for those affected, but they will shortly come to an end, and life will go on.  The coronavirus, too, will pass, with the vast majority of people unaffected.

A local NBC affiliate serving northeast Ohio, WKYC, broadcast a story, “Stay Vigilant, Not Scared,” that went against the grain of the majority of stories on the subject by talking about how the coronavirus outbreak is not a pandemic and how people have survived many health scares in the past that have been similar in nature, particularly the SARS and MERS outbreaks, and the risk is extremely low, and the flu remains a bigger threat to Americans.  Dr. Drew Pinsky, a noted addiction specialist who was ousted from CNN because of his conservative-leaning point of view, echoed and amplified this sentiment to a broader audience on the YouTube channel Daily Blast Live.  Rush Limbaugh highlighted Pinsky’s statements on the Daily Blast podcast during his Friday broadcast.  (A transcript of the segment from Limbaugh is here.)  The following comment is from the transcript, where Dr. Drew puts the current outbreak into context with regard to normal influenza:

PINSKY: We have in the United States 24 million cases of flu-like illness, 180,000 hospitalizations, 16,000 dead from influenza.  We have zero deaths from coronavirus.  [The number has since gone up a little. —ed]  We have almost no cases.  There are people walking around out there with the virus that don’t even know they have it, it’s so mild.  So it’s going to be much more widespread than we knew.  It’s going to be much milder than we knew.  The 1.7% fatality rate is going to fall.  Where was the press during the Mediterranean Corona outbreak, where the fatality rate was 41%?  Why didn’t they get crazed about MERS or SARS?  This is an overblown press-created hysteria.  This thing is well in hand.  President Trump is absolutely correct.

Even an editorial in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine put the coronavirus outbreak into its proper perspective:

[T]he overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.

Even an American who caught the virus while on a cruise ship wrote for the Washington Post what it was like to have it and described it as not all that terrible.  Certainly, no one wants to get it, but it doesn’t sound nearly as dangerous to a person’s health or as lethal as it’s been portrayed.  From the article “I have the coronavirus. So far, it isn’t that bad“:

I am in my late 60s, and the sickest I’ve ever been was when I had bronchitis several years ago.  That laid me out on my back for a few days.  This has been much easier: no chills, no body aches.  I breathe easily, and I don’t have a stuffy nose.  My chest feels tight, and I have coughing spells.  If I were at home with similar symptoms, I probably would have gone to work as usual[.] … [M]y treatment has consisted of what felt like gallons and gallons of Gatorade — and, when my fever rose just above 100 degrees, some ibuprofen.

Based on all of the media coverage, one would think the apocalypse has arrived.  The coronavirus outbreak will further damage their credibility by making dire warnings that essentially everyone needs to be prepared to avoid his imminent demise.  Even Tucker Carlson has been snookered and bought into the hype.  This has been surprising coming from someone who spots and exposes media cons on a regular basis. When all is said and done, it will be one more case of crying wolf and further hasten the extinction of the mainstream media as a credible source of information.

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Journalism

Anti-Trump media outlets MSNBC and the New York Times spread the false story that Fauci was being muzzled by Vice-President Pence. “I have never been muzzled ever and I’ve been doing this since the administration of Ronald Reagan, I’m not being muzzled by this administration,” Fauci said. Watch.

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On the coming election

Kurt Schlichter:

“…It is not a bad idea to take your opponents seriously, and anyone who gets a major party nomination can theoretically win. But if you look at someone like Bernie Sanders, a crusty anti-American weirdo who wants to take your money and give it to his doofus supporters, and you have to imagine that next year at CPAC, with Trump safely re-elected and the House back in our hands, we will be wondering what the hell the Democrats were thinking nominating Marxist Mondale.

Lots of Dem-leaning voters fashionably despise the president and enjoy their progressive posing, but Sanders actually believes the nonsense he’s spewing. He totally would take their doctors and SUVs, jack up their taxes, and hand them the bill for other people’s kids’ Oppression Studies degrees. Liberalism is all fine and dandy with them until they have to actually live it. Get ready for even more secret Trump voters as folks with fading “I’m With Her” stickers on their Teslas walk into the voting booth with their still-strong 401(k) numbers on their minds and flip the lever for The Donald.

Those folks probably would have been perfectly happy to submit to the furry shackles of the soft fascism of Soda-Banning Frodo. Bloomberg would keep their status and wealth intact and if the price is their freedom, well, okay. Some people are just pathetic submissives. And they might have the chance to sell out their liberty for a little fake security because the Democrat establishment totally gets that Sanders is not only a loser at the top of the ticket but his gooey commie ichor will trickle down defeat all the way to the bottom of the ballot. So, mark my words – they are going to try to steal the nomination that Sanders is winning fair and square and toss it to the tiny tycoon who will open his massive wallet and make it rain to make that happen.

And while many Sanders-inclined suckers will obediently obey the command to vote for the malignant dwarf in November, a bunch of Bernie Bros, Bernie Bro-ettes, and Bernie Gender Indeterminates will refuse to play. Neither can’t-idate can fully consolidate the Dems while Trump has the entire Republican Party behind him, save a few cruise-shilling hacks who lurk in the MSNBCNN green rooms impersonating conservatives.

This is no done deal, but all the talk about how “Bernie is really a dangerous opponent because reasons” is a bit much. Trump is going all-in already on his campaign, and that’s good, but simmer down. These Democrats have huge flaws that could lead to a McGovern-like wipeout…”

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Genetic Analysis Suggests Coronavirus Has Been Spreading In Washington State For Weeks

Allahpundit:

“…Not a surprise given the news yesterday that one person there has died of the disease and two more, a teenager and a woman in her 50s, are presumptive positives. A fourth man from Washington was diagnosed with COVID-19 in January after traveling in China near Wuhan; he’s now completely recovered, but God only knows how many people he may have infected at the Seattle airport or elsewhere in the community before he was diagnosed. Flu researchers in Seattle sequenced the genome of the strain of coronavirus in the man who died and compared it to the strain in the man who was diagnosed in January. Were they distinct? Or were they related, which would be circumstantial evidence that the strain had spread through the community via patient one en route to patient two?

They’re related, per a local scientist.

…there are “a few hundred current infections” locally. Another researcher who models disease told the Times that he’d expect anywhere from 150 to 1,500 people to “have either been infected and recovered or currently are infected now.” One thing I’m keen to know but haven’t seen in any of the reporting about this today is whether there’s been an uptick in hospitalizations lately in Seattle and/or Snohomish County for respiratory illness. Are people coming in with COVID-19 and being mistakenly diagnosed with the flu or pneumonia?

And if there *isn’t* an uptick (yet), what conclusion should we draw from that? Note what the researcher said, that some Washingtonians may have been infected and recovered already, all on their own without medical assistance. An ER doctor in Massachusetts made the case in Slate yesterday that undetected community spread of coronavirus contains a major silver lining: It suggests that many cases of the disease just aren’t serious enough to warrant a doctor’s care, which means the death rate may be a lot lower than we think…

…If, hypothetically, 500 people in Washington have contracted the disease and only a handful have been sick enough to need care and only one has been sick enough to die from it, then we may be looking at a death rate of something like 0.2%, in line with the good ol’ flu. That’s the “good news.” The bad news is that lots of asymptomatic carriers obviously means the virus can spread quickly, and anything that spreads far enough will earn a large body count even with a low death rate. There may be many thousands of children in China who’ve contracted the disease and whose healthy young immune systems have successfully nuked it, but not before passing it along to mom and dad. Or, worse, to grandma and grandpa, for whom the death rate is much higher.

Which brings us to the other ominous coronavirus news out of Washington state yesterday:

Washington state reported on Saturday the first death in the U.S. from the new coronavirus, the first health care worker to be infected with the disease, and most worrying, the first known outbreak in a long-term care facility.

At a nursing facility in Kirkland, Wash, approximately 27 of the 108 residents and 25 of the 180 staff have some symptoms, health officials said during a teleconference with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Authorities report that some among them have pneumonia.

An outbreak at a facility for senior citizens or the chronically ill would be the worst-case scenario for small-scale spread. Stay tuned on that. In the meantime, a professor of health policy offered a helpful reminder on Twitter this morning that we should expect to see a huge “jump” in U.S. coronavirus diagnoses soon. That’s not because the disease suddenly began spreading rapidly overnight. Rather, it’s because we’re about to start ramping up more effective testing for it in patients and will no doubt detect many cases that have already been there for days or weeks.

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Media, Virus, and Panic

“…Both online news and search interest show the same upward trajectory beginning Jan. 21, but news coverage increases faster and does not peak until Feb. 2, two full days after the searches peak. News mentions of masks surge again on Feb. 21, but it is not until two days later that searches experience a similar surge. In turn, television news mentions of mask sales do not increase dramatically until Feb. 26, the day after web searches began surging rapidly.

Putting this all together, the graphs above suggest that the media’s wall-to-wall coverage of the coronavirus outbreak played a measurable role in driving public attention to the virus and likely worsening behaviors such as panic buying. The television media appear to have been late to the game, picking up on both the virus’ spread and the shortages of masks long after they were stories.

Most importantly, the strong association of coronavirus coverage with Donald Trump in the U.S. and the economy globally suggests the outbreak is being contextualized as a political and economic story — delivering a dose of panic in the process — rather than a public health emergency that requires clinical and dispassionate reporting…”

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On Trump Administration response to Coronavirus

Miranda Devine:

“…It’s a unique set of characteristics showing that President Trump understood early the need for decisive measures such as travel restrictions on China, which he imposed in January.

Yet, for that sensible decision — in defiance of the World Health Organization — he was criticized by Democrats such as Joe Biden as xenophobic, and by China as racist.

“This is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria and xenophobia — hysterical xenophobia — and fearmongering,” said Biden the day after the travel restrictions were imposed.

CNN ran a story warning that “the US coronavirus travel ban could backfire” and have the effect of “stigmatizing countries and ethnicities.”

The Chinese Communist Party’s official mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, called the ban “racist.”

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned it would increase “fear and stigma, with little public health benefit.”…

…At the press conference with Trump on Saturday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the highly respected head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, praised the “original decision that was made by the president” . . . [that] prevented travel from China to the United States.

“If we had not done that, we would have had many, many more cases right here that we would have to be dealing with.”

Trump’s travel restrictions began on Jan. 31. Australia and Singapore instituted their own travel limits the next day. Trump’s move bought valuable time to slow the spread of the virus and ease pressure on the nation’s health system before a vaccine is developed — which experts believe is at least 18 months away.

But that hasn’t stopped the barrage of fake criticisms, including that Trump had left the nation dangerously unprepared to cope with a pandemic by cutting funding to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Not true. The CDC’s programming budget increased from $7.2 billion in 2019 to nearly $7.7 billion this year, the Associated Press fact-checking unit reported. Trump had proposed a cut, but Congress rejected it.

It’s reprehensible for the Democrats to make political hay by blaming Trump for the coronavirus or, as a New York Times op-ed piece called it, “Trumpvirus.”…”

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Doug Santo