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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…”
