Far Superior to Anti-Trump Media’s Portrayal
Real COVID-19 Numbers Expose Massive Lie the Media’s Been Feeding Us
By C. Douglas Golden , WESTERN JOURNALISM Published April 18, 2020
You know the media spiel: Our response to coronavirus has been among the worst in the world.
Just look at The New York Times on April 11: “He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus.” Or look at it on April 13: “Trump’s Slow Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic.” On April 14: “Criticized for Pandemic Response, Trump Tries Shifting Blame to the W.H.O.”
This is a pretty steady drumbeat, both in news coverage and opinion pieces. (I have trouble telling them apart when it comes to The Times, though, and I think their editors do, too.) The basic gist of it is this: The Trump administration caught the virus late, has mismanaged the response since and has tried to divert America’s attention elsewhere.
According to John R. Lott Jr., the noted conservative economist and political commentator, that’s entirely wrong. In a situation where no one knows precisely how to manage a pandemic, he says, the United States’ response has actually been world-class.
In a piece published Wednesday at Townhall, Lott argued that media outlets were misreading statistics, and not just in terms of neglecting to put things in per capita terms.
“Many use the number of deaths as a measure of how the U.S. is faring relative to other countries, but that is extremely misleading. It would be the same comparing the number of rapes in Sweden and the United States,” Lott wrote.
“For example, while Sweden had 5,960 rapes in 2014, the United States had 84,767. But does that mean that a woman was more likely to be raped in the United States? Hardly. The United States has about 33 times more people living in it than Sweden. Sweden’s rape rate per capita is more than twice the rate in the United States.
“It makes no more sense to compare the number of Wuhan coronavirus deaths in the U.S. versus other countries than it does to compare rape rates. But looking at the death rate also isn’t perfect,” he continued.
In addition to that, Lott stated that because coronavirus was almost certainly introduced into different countries at different times, useful comparisons are difficult.
“The length of time of exposure to the virus also matters, and different countries faced exposure at different times. A country that has had been the chance to expose people over months is going to have a lot more potential deaths than a country where exposure has just taken place over a few days.”
For instance, take Germany. Even The New York Times ran an article which praised the job that Germany was doing: “A German Exception? Why the Country’s Coronavirus Death Rate Is Low.”
However, if you take the number of days since the first recorded death of coronavirus and look at the percentage of the population that’s died, the United States comes out better than Germany does. The first coronavirus death in the United States was on Feb. 29, while the first death in Germany was on March 9. In coronavirus terms, that’s nearly an eternity.
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Here is a good briefing from a state (Ohio) that is planning to begin opening up on May 1.:
https://www.fox19.com/2020/04/16/watch-live-gov-dewine-give-update-states-coronavirus-response/
Correction: my source was hopkinsmedicine.org., not “com.”https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/coronavirus/coronavirus-disease-2019-vs-the-flu
“COVID-19: Approximately 154,789 deaths reported worldwide; 37,079 deaths in the U.S., as of Apr. 18, 2020.*
Flu: 291,000 to 646,000 deaths worldwide; 12,000 to 61,000 deaths in the U.S. per year.
The COVID-19 situation is changing rapidly. Since this disease is caused by a new virus, people do not have immunity to it, and a vaccine may be many months away. Doctors and scientists are working on estimating the mortality rate of COVID-19, but at present, it is thought to be higher than that of most strains of the flu.
*This information comes from the Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases map developed by the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering.” This is a quote from the hopkinsmedicine.com site.
What is fascinating about this report from the John Hopkins medical school, which has been awarded the contract from WHO and CDC to monitor coronavirus cases worldwide, is that their own experts admit that they don’t know that COVID-19 is more deadly than the flu. Only that is thought to be more deadly thanmost strains of the flu. I wonder which strains they think are just as deadly as COVID-19.
Be that as it may, the entire entire “international community” has imposed severe restrictions on personal and business freedom throughout the world, without even knowing that the novel coronavirus is more deadly than the flu, an illness that has been causing epidemics for thousands of years. The worldwide lockdown was a decision based on ignorance, not knowledge. Never before in history has such far-reaching repressive measures been imposed worldwide. Yet the governments that imposed them did not have any hard evidence that they were necessary. Human history’s worst rush to judgment.