Worth clicking over for the whole thing
Brian C. Joondeph, M.D.:
“…COVID-19 data are and have been all over the map since this entire mess gained steam earlier this year. It has gotten to the point that any “numbers” presented as news are suspect at best and fraudulent at worst.
Is this media incompetence or malpractice? Ignorant or deliberate?
Fox News ran a constant side bar in the early days of the pandemic, with U.S. death counts, much in the way cable news business shows run a ticker of the Dow or S&P 500. How morbid, but it provided fodder for media talking heads to run around like Kevin McCallister in Home Alone, waving their arms and screaming in panic.
Now that death counts are dropping to the point that they blend in with normal birth and death statistics, the media have predictably pivoted to case counts as their new hair-on-fire statistic to stoke fear, keep the economy shut down, and hopefully banish their nemesis back to the land of Mordor, also known as Mar-a-Lago.
Context includes what defines a positive COVID test. Is it an actual positive antigen test result or a presumed positive case? Some counties in Texas were classifying a neighbor or co-worker of a test-positive case, suffering from a cough or sore throat, as having COVID, even without an actual test.
This could result in 10 to 20 additional reported positive cases based on only one actual case. Antibody test-positive individuals, having previous, but not current active infections, are also positive cases. That would be like classifying retired military members as active duty.
Context also includes asking whether these individuals are symptomatic or not. We never test asymptomatic individuals or contacts of those with the seasonal flu. In fact, most with the flu treat it symptomatically until they get better, and do not get tested unless they are sick enough to journey to the hospital. Asymptomatic individuals exposed to someone with the flu certainly don’t get tested. Why then is there such a push for COVID testing? Unless the goal is inflated numbers to fuel a media narrative and damage President Trump.
Congressional candidate Jessi Melton tweeted about a friend of hers who went to a lab for a COVID test but couldn’t wait for the test and left, receiving a call later telling her she tested positive. Numerous labs in Florida are only reporting positive test results, not the negatives, giving the impression that everyone in the state is infected with the Wuhan virus.
Total cases are interesting but largely irrelevant without context. And context is anathema to most journalists and media outlets, who prefer the opposite approach, with out-of-context snippets and soundbites, as they did last week with White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnaney…”