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But, he’s in the arena, so I will pile on anyway
Salvador Rodriguez:
MATT MARGOLIS:
When President Trump said this week that the United States had done more testing than South Korea, USA Today was quick to fact-check his claim by pointing out, “The United States population is more than six times the size of South Korea’s. On a per capita basis, South Korea is testing far more of its citizens than the U.S.” In this case, the media attempted to use a per capita comparison against Trump. CNN and MSNBC each made similar fact-checks.
On Thursday, the New York Times made a big fuss over the fact that more than 81,321 Americans have been infected with the coronavirus, which is “more cases than China, Italy or any other country has seen.”
According to their report, the United States, following “a series of missteps” is now “the epicenter of the pandemic.”
But, is it really?
China’s confirmed cases topped out at around 80,000, but, as PJM’s Victoria Taft noted, China reportedly stopped conducting tests in order to show the world they’ve contained the spread of the virus. So, comparing any country to China at this point is useless, but why wasn’t the case numbers adjusted to show them on a per capita basis, the same way the media pounced on Trump about testing?
Well, let’s take a look and see why.
Here are the top six countries by confirmed cases (based on the case numbers from the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University as of 2:30 pm ET March 27) in descending order:
Now, here are the top six countries by confirmed cases per million people (based on population numbers from the CIA World Fact Book) in descending order:
Well, isn’t that interesting? The United States’ confirmed cases per capita is the lowest of the top six countries affected by the virus. Now, there are some who would argue that the United States testing lags behind that of other countries. If we want to assume that there is a discrepancy in testing between countries and that selection bias in testing undercounts the infection rate, then the number of coronavirus deaths is a more accurate way of measuring the impact of the pandemic in each country. So, let’s look at total confirmed deaths in descending order.
Germany looks pretty good compared to everyone else, doesn’t it? But, let’s look at confirmed deaths per million people in descending order, to see how that changes things:
Interesting indeed! Germany and the United States have significantly better coronavirus death rates per capita than Italy, Spain, Iran and France. A lot better. This is why the media avoids per capita measurements for confirmed cases, but conveniently remembered when it wanted to fact check Trump’s testing numbers.
The media wants you to believe that the coronavirus in the United States is spiraling out of control the way it did in Italy. Fact check: it isn’t…”
https://twitter.com/gator_crusader/status/1242503999347134473
John Hinderaker:
“…I have updated this chart a number of times, based on data from the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control, and will continue to do so. It shows, for one thing, how far COVID-19 has to go before it equals the average seasonal flu mortality, worldwide. If I had to predict, I would guess that it will eventually reach the average level. Will it get to 2x the average number of flu deaths, worldwide? Looking at current trends, I don’t see how that will happen. But time will tell.
Likewise in the U.S. You still can’t see the bar for COVID-19, but it is there: 994 deaths so far, per the CDC, compared with 61,000 caused by the flu virus just two years ago. The Wuhan virus might equal or even exceed that total, but it is hard to forecast that at this point. And anyway, the 2017-18 flu deaths barely merited a news story, let alone a radical, economy-destroying shutdown. What has changed?
Even if the U.S. death total eventually amounts to, say, three times the toll of the flu just two seasons ago–around 180,000 dead–what is the justification for the extraordinary measures our governments have taken, which are in the process of crushing our economy?…”
Mollie Hemingway:
“…When polls showed that President Donald Trump was receiving unusually high marks for his handling of the Coronavirus pandemic, the first stage of grief the media went through was denial…
…The political media have been working extremely hard to craft a narrative that the spread of the coronavirus was essentially the fault of the man they had blamed for all other ills in recent years. How could the people not accept that narrative, particularly considering that most everyone in the media was pushing it?
Things got worse when additional polls showed Trump receiving high ratings at the same time that the media received poor ratings. A brand new Gallup study — “Coronavirus Response: Hospitals Rated Best, News Media Worst” — was particularly bad news. When Americans were asked about nine different institutions and political leaders, they gave majority approval to all but the media. President Trump has a 22-point net approval rating while the media’s net approval rating was negative 11 points. The RealClearPolitics approval average for Trump was its highest during his entire presidency.
In response, the media were angry and depressed and began blaming his press conferences. Their theory seemed to be that the more Americans saw Trump, unfiltered, they liked him and the more Americans saw the behavior of the media, they didn’t like it. This flies in the face of what many in the media assumed for years. They pushed for daily White House press conferences so that they could have the opportunity to be on camera and pressure the Trump administration. Now that they had daily press briefings with the president, no less, they weren’t happy. It was a weird response for a group of people whose ostensible job is to simply report the news of the day…”
Kurt Schlichter:
“…The list of zeros must begin with the media, as if that’s a shock. If you were expecting anything but garbage from our media, you have not been paying attention for, oh, the last half-century. Like its establishment masters, the press was freaking out because the Democrat candidates were a collection of mutants and nothing they threw at Donald Trump could stop him, not emoluments, not taxes, not chicks, not Russia, not Ukraine, not Upper Volta, nothing. And then…the Chinese flu. Yeah, that was it! Yeah, that would totally get Trump! Yeah, instead of dealing with the bogus impeachment, Trump should have been rebooting Contagion, though when he cut Bat-Soupland off from direct air travel the smart set called him “racist.”
Yeah. Uh huh. M’kay.
And when the virus got going, the media decided that it should provide critical information to help people cope with the crisis, information like the freshly-minted notion that identifying a virus by its place of origin is racist. That was super-helpful and not-at-all-frivolous nonsense. Oh, and blaming Trump because mental defectives decided to gobble fish tank cleaners – without mentioning the fish tank cleaner part.
Someday, an expert is going to write the definitive book on the modern American media. That expert will be a proctologist…”
MATT MARGOLIS:
“…Despite claims by the mainstream media and the Democratic Party that the United States was “ill-prepared” to handle the coronavirus pandemic and that actions by Trump administration made us vulnerable, the United States was actually ranked the best-prepared country in the world to handle a pandemic in a study by Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (JHCHS) published in late 2019.
The United States’ Global Health Security Index score was 83.5/100, the highest overall score of 195 countries. The United Kingdom came in second with a score of 77.9. Italy, which has experienced significant difficulties in handling the outbreak in their country, scored 56.2. Iran, which is also struggling to handle the pandemic, scored 37.7.
The Trump administration has been the target of a significant amount of misinformation being disseminated by the Democrats and the mainstream media designed to undermine confidence in the administration’s handling of the pandemic, including false reports that Trump “dissolved” the White House pandemic response office and that Trump cut funding to the CDC and NIH.
Despite these false reports, Trump’s approval ratings have improved in the past few weeks, and his response to the pandemic has the approval of 60 percent of Americans, according to the latest Gallup poll.
The Global Health Security index “was developed with guidance from an international panel of experts from 13 countries, with research by the Economist Intelligence Unit. More than 100 researchers spent a year collecting and validating publicly available data,” the Washington Post reported last year…”
Walter Russell Mead:
“…That a majority of the electorate is this deeply alienated from the establishment can’t be dismissed as bigotry and ignorance. There are solid and serious grounds for doubting the competence and wisdom of America’s self-proclaimed expert class. What is so intelligent and enlightened, populists ask, about a foreign-policy establishment that failed to perceive that U.S. trade policies were promoting the rise of a hostile Communist superpower with the ability to disrupt supplies of essential goods in a national emergency? What competence have the military and political establishments shown in almost two decades of tactical success and strategic impotence in Afghanistan? What came of that intervention in Libya? What was the net result of all the fine talk in the Bush and Obama administrations about building democracy in the Middle East? . . .
On domestic policy, the criticism is equally trenchant and deeply felt. Many voters believe that the U.S. establishment has produced a health-care system that is neither affordable nor universal. Higher education saddles students with increasing debt while leaving many graduates woefully unprepared for good jobs in the real world. The centrist establishment has amassed unprecedented deficits without keeping roads, bridges and pipes in good repair. It has weighed down cities and states with unmanageable levels of pension debt.
The culture of social promotion and participation trophies is not, populists feel, confined to U.S. kindergartens and elementary schools. Judging by performance, they conclude that people rise in the American establishment by relentless virtue-signaling; by going along with conventional wisdom, however foolish; and by forgiving the failures of others and having their own overlooked in return.
The blame game playing out over how the president has handled the coronavirus epidemic reflects the dynamics of this struggle. Mr. Trump’s establishment critics want a narrow fight over the dismal trail of bluster, evasions, missed opportunities and failed predictions that marked the president’s approach to the virus earlier in the year. Like many criticisms of Mr. Trump, these arguments against him are by and large correct and significant and it is part of the proper job of a free press to make them.
However, Mr. Trump’s supporters are not comparing him with an omniscient leader who always does the right thing, but with the establishment—including the bulk of the mainstream media—that largely backed a policy of engagement with China long after its pitfalls became clear. For Americans who lost their jobs to Chinese competition or who fear the possibility of a new cold war against an economically potent and technologically advanced power, Mr. Trump’s errors pale before those of the bipartisan American foreign-policy consensus.
The establishment’s massive, decadeslong failure to think through the consequences of empowering Communist China and creating a trading relationship that, among other things, left the U.S. dependent on Beijing for pharmaceuticals is a much less excusable and more consequential error than anything Donald Trump has done in 2020—and it has a direct bearing on the mess we are in…”
