Viral Insanity

There are so many things wrong with the picture the media is painting of the coronavirus pandemic¹, we almost don’t know where to begin. A new virus, causing mild to no symptoms in approximately 80% of the people it infects, is very slowly making its way around the US. The other 20% of infected people have symptoms and outcomes almost identical to the flu – a viral companion our population has lived with for a very long time. However, according to the media, the situation is analogous to a high-speed train that has gone off the tracks and is moving at maximum velocity directly toward where you live. Its wide path of destruction along the way is leaving you no escape route. You’re doomed.

How did there come to be such a preposterous disconnect between what is actually happening in the physical world around us, and what we are being told is happening? Are we all in the middle of a massive media-driven psychology experiment?

For brevity’s sake, we will refer to the coronavirus throughout this article by its official name COVID-19. We’re not trying to be science snobs – just want to save some word space.

The hype and panic level for this virus at this moment far exceeds that of any previous disease in our lifetime. And that list includes Legionnaires, AIDS, MERS, SARS, Swine flu, and Ebola. Are we to believe that the communication to the public about the seriousness of all those other diseases was irresponsibly inadequate? With COVID-19, have we finally evolved to a higher intellectual plane where our current level of intense concern and draconian preventative actions for a new flu-like virus are not over-hyped, but are as they should be? If so, how can we intellectually reconcile this newfound hyper-concern for COVID-19, when we consider the current flu season as “normal”? Does no one realize that over 40 million people a year in the U.S. contract influenza?

The numbers associated with the COVID-19 reporting so far just don’t add up. The media and politicians are playing tricks with math, which is unfortunately all too easy to perpetrate on a large swath of the U.S. population. The most reasonable mathematical conclusion comes nowhere close to what the headlines (or many disease “experts”) are saying. There are the numbers we know about and then there are predicted numbers. The numbers with the greatest degree of accuracy right now are how many people have died of COVID-19. Causes of death are taken very seriously in this country and are usually recorded accurately. On the other hand, COVID-19 is a virus where the vast majority of those who get it fully recover, often with mild symptoms. This number (how many have it or have had it) has a high probability of being inaccurate. If you got mild cold-like symptoms that went away after a day, something you’ve experienced many times before, would you even know (or care²) it was COVID-19? And more importantly, would cases like this ever be recorded in the national or worldwide database of confirmed cases of COVID-19 with the same accuracy as a death from COVID-19? Almost certainly not. That means there are likely to be a lot more mild cases of COVID-19 than are confirmed. So far the number of people documented to have COVID-19 in the US is astonishingly small for all the hype. As we write this, there are less than 1,700 cases out of 330 million people in this country – 0.0005% of the population.

Leaping well beyond reasonable precautions, canceling major events with large crowds is now being done more out of political correctness than any kind of common-sense logic. The NBA cancelling their basketball season is a prime example of this lunacy. The news that one player on the Utah Jazz had contracted COVID-19 was released just minutes before the start of a game with the Oklahoma City Thunder. The infected player wasn’t in the arena at the time. The game was immediately canceled, and all the fans were sent home. Shortly thereafter, the NBA decided to cancel the entire season until further notice. The affected player, all-star Rudy Gobert, said he felt strong and well enough to play that night. For those of you who follow sports (even just casually), it is a well-known fact that many players, especially the big stars, often play when sick. In fact, the game announcers glorify this as an act of bravery by letting us know that the affected player is being given intravenous fluids during the game, usually at half-time. This presumably allows them to keep performing at a high level until the end of the game. And it is far from unheard of for half or more of an entire team to contract whatever malady one player has during the season. Even that still doesn’t stop the team from playing. It is simply a part of the game. Until now that is.

 In another laughable sports overreaction, officials for the Players Championship golf tournament (which had already started), decided to send all the fans home but let the players continue the game by themselves. Then, a day later, they decided to cancel the whole tournament even though there was no crowd in attendance. Without fans, the largest “crowd” in any one spot during the latter stage of a pro golf tournament is four people (two players and two caddies). Groups of four are either on the tee or the green and are many feet apart from each other most of the time. There might also be a rules official around, but he is usually at a distance.

Of all the sporting world overreactions to COVID-19, the pièce de résistance has to be the closing of Mount Everest. That’s right – the whole mountain is closed (we never knew you could “close” a mountain). Mount Everest has been “open” during every other outbreak of disease, virus, germs, nuclear catastrophe, asteroid impact, zombie apocalypse – everything. Until now. Yep, so far as Mount Everest is concerned, COVID-19 is the worst calamity in human existence.

Much like climate change, almost all the public discussion about the consequences of COVID-19 has completely transitioned from the scientific realm into the political realm. Any genuinely new scientific facts on COVID-19 now traverse a labyrinth of political and marketing filters/amplifiers before being deemed newsworthy. Scientific specialists who once had control of the information flow have now been replaced by politicians and pundits supported by the media juggernauts. The narrative now is panic – it sells. There is no room left for science. At this point in time, the only thing COVID-19 represents to politicians is opportunity, especially for those politicians who dislike the President. We are immediately reminded of the callous remark from President Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel to a group of CEO’s at the height of the 2008 financial crisis – “…you never want a serious crisis to go to waste…”. How else can anyone explain why Congressional Democrats tried to include rule changes within a COVID-19 relief package to potentially allow federal funding for abortions?

The President acted early on in January by barring people from China, or anyone who had recently been to China, from entering the U.S. At that time there were only 13 known cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. (11 from travelers). Trump’s action was criticized by the World Health Organization as a policy that would “unnecessarily interfere with travel and trade”. Really? Now, more than two months later, are we to believe the current number of known cases in the U.S. would be no larger than it is if that January travel ban had not gone into effect? We suppose whatever logic the WHO used for their criticism of Trump’s travel restrictions on China back in January is also now being used by the Democrats to justify their disagreement with Trump’s new travel restrictions from European Union countries.  Common sense says that since COVID-19 is currently spreading the fastest within EU countries, there is a high probability of European travelers bringing it here to the U.S. Are the Congressional Democrats and the WHO trying to tell us that whatever benefit results from eliminating travel restrictions outweighs the risk of spreading the virus faster in this country? Apparently so. In that case, how bad can COVID-19 really be?

Then there is the absurd debate on how much federal money to spend on COVID-19 and where that money should go. The President was willing to spend $2.5 billion on assistance for COVID-19, but Congress said it wasn’t enough. They wanted him to spend more than 3 times that amount. When he agreed and then also requested a temporary suspension of federal payroll taxes to help middle and lower-income families (like Obama did to great fanfare in 2011 for the financial crisis) Congress balked. First it wasn’t enough, then it was too much. Just business as usual for the anti-Trump politicians. COVID-19 is simply the newest weapon they can wield to attack the President. We must presume that under a hypothetical President Biden, Congressional Democrats would get everything they’re asking for and in all the perfect amounts. This would of course mean no travel restrictions at all would be in effect and our southern border would be far more porous then it is presently. In that reality, we would have exponentially more COVID-19 cases then we have at this point. It’s as if the Democrats and the media not only don’t want COVID-19 to go away, they want it to be worse.

At a similar point in the climate change debate, at the peak of media and political hype, climate change began being referred to as an “existential threat”. Is this the next milestone for COVID-19? I guess we’ll know it’s really, really bad when it finally graduates to existential status.

We have great sympathy for the many Americans who have been frightened by the endless, agitated, chorus of angsty admonishments and doomsday prophecies. Ditto for those few Americans who have become significantly ill from this virus.

We feel nothing but amazed dismay and antipathy toward the politico-journalistic coalition. They have irresponsibly cast themselves in the real-world version of Chicken Little for political gain and profit. Yes, there is a new virus in town, but the sky is not falling.

¹The basic definition of the word pandemic is: “occurring over a wide geographic area”. In the present COVID-19 context however, the media has imbued this word with additional meaning. The narrative created by the media when they use the word pandemic is more like – “A virulent disease, causing suffering and death all over the world”.

²Beyond the concern, as with any viral illness, to minimize the chance of transmitting it to others, especially a high-risk person.