I think the public is scared enough. But apparently the press doesn’t think so.
They play with the statistics, picking and choosing the most alarming measure among them in order to further panic the people and the better to criticize Trump. It is no challenge at all to find such MSM articles; they are legion, and using Google to research almost any aspect of COVID will conjure up reams of them.
Right now, of course, the favored number is confirmed cases, particularly in NYC. They are “soaring” or “skyrocketing” – and yes, they certainly are. But as anyone who’s been following this should know, it is obvious that as testing has become more ubiquitous and comprehensive (although it still has a way to go), the number of diagnoses will go way up.
This means that we are doing more testing. It doesn’t mean that the change in the number of confirmed cases before and after this burst in testing reflects the actual rate of change in the incidence of COVID in the population. It’s been going up for quite some time, of course, but we really don’t know how much or how many people have been infected or when they became infected.
And yet now all we hear about is how bad the US is, because we now have the highest number of confirmed cases in the world (see this). What’s left out of these reports? Almost everything else. Just a sampler:
—China is probably lying about its number of cases.
—The US is nowhere near having the highest number of cases per capita. Comparing absolute numbers in different countries without correcting for population means nothing, and one doesn’t need advanced math to realize that. Look at the cases per million numbers here, and you’ll see that the US has one of the world’s lowest rates (at the moment, anyway), not the highest at all. That will change and go up, of course, as testing continues. But it’s the more important statistic than sheer number of cases, although neither tells us very much right now.
—Then there’s deaths per million. It’s a figure that means more, because it’s less dependent on the vagaries of mass testing (although it still does rely on proper testing of the very ill and dying, of course). On that measure, the current figure for the US is extremely low, similar to Germany which is considered to be doing very well. But this is not a number in which the media is especially interested because it’s nowhere near as effective for its uses.
—The number of serious and critical cases, which is another important measure, is more difficult to compare because I’ve noticed that these numbers change very slowly and I think countries update them at a snail’s pace. So I don’t rely on them much. But for what it’s worth, right now the US has 2463. You can look at the chart and crunch the numbers yourself; as I said, the figures are very unreliable because for many countries they don’t seem to change for weeks. Take Germany, for example, a country that is reported to have only 23 serious or critical patients but which had 37 new deaths today and 61 the day before, and yet for both days the number of serious or critical patients has been stuck at 23. Clearly, that last figure has no relation to reality.
In the last couple of days, I’ve been talking on the phone more than usual. A couple of people I’ve spoken to have made casual references to the “fact” that Trump hasn’t done much of anything – or didn’t do much of anything for a long long time – to stop the coronavirus from taking hold. I don’t usually talk politics with these people unless they bring it up, but since they brought it up, I said “Actually, he did.” And then I mentioned a few things, mostly the China travel restrictions back in late January, and the naming of the task force at the same time.
What I say to them doesn’t make much of a dent. I am almost certain most of them got these ideas from the relentless hammering of the MSM with the theme that whatever Trump has done it’s not enough, or wrong, or too much. And the press does this because most people don’t have the time (and/or the inclination) to find out whether it’s true or not.
I’ll just take one example of this coverage and let it stand for the whole. My selection is purely arbitrary: this “analysis” by Stephen Collinson of CNN entitled “Trump touts great success as US becomes world’s worst virus epicenter.” Really, you don’t have to read much more than the headline to conclude “What a dummy Trump is, and a dangerous one at that, not only stupid but dangerously stupid.” In addition, of course: “The US is the nation on earth most afflicted with this pestilence.”
And plenty of people probably read only the headline, as CNN knows full well.
Who is Stephen Collinson? Well, he’s a White House reporter who specializes in opinion pieces about how awful Trump is. He appears to be a Brit in his late forties who went to university in Scotland, and his academic background is in English and English lit. He then went straight into reporting.
The piece starts this way:
As America became the epicenter of the global coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump downplayed the escalating national crisis.
[ADDENDUM: Please see this Twitter thread for another example, this one from the NY Times about about ventilators. At one point in the thread, you can read this:
It’s not hard to understand “the point of trying to drive panic with stories that are so misleading – and, frankly, so easily checked” if one keeps the following in mind: they are writers of propaganda, and they believe they can fool many of the people much of the time. A lot more people read the Times than ever see the fact checks of the Times, and the writers and editors on the paper are well aware of that fact.
Also, many people have weak math skills, and even if they see the fact-checks, the corrected numbers don’t have nearly as much meaning as the original emotional descriptions from the propagandists of the MSM.]
