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It’s not just the Hunter/Joe Biden foreign collusion story the media is giving a pass to. Coronavirus cases are also not being reported correctly, reports Holman Jenkins in the WSJ. How can Americans use good sense about Coronavirus when they are being fed false information?
From previous research, Holmen Jenkins reports:
- 80% of people with flu symptoms don’t seek medical help.
- 95% with cold symptoms also don’t seek help.
So far, there have been 150 million total tests given in the U.S. Sound like a lot? Well, it’s not, explains Mr. Jenkins. Not when 330 million Americans can be negative one day and infected the next.
To Recap:
- 160 million Americans aren’t vaccinated, unlike the flu, against the new virus.
- No one, school age and beyond, has resistance from previous encounters.
- Local hospitals face a COVID challenge two or three times more than the annual flu challenge because so many more of us are susceptible.
- There’s the non-negligible risk of a severe reaction when an immune system encounters a virus it hasn’t encountered before.
What our science-illiterate press does not understand, confirmed cases might be data, but they are not a sample in any meaningful scientific sense, offers Mr. Jenkins.
Not to be dramatic, but when I refer to a conspiracy of silence, I really mean a mosaic of misrepresentation required by a certain mood. Our press this week reported, with hair on fire, that confirmed cases exceeded nine million. Would its hair be more aflame or less if it acknowledged true cumulative infections are likely between 50 million and 100 million?
A realistic picture would suggest tens of millions of Americans have encountered the virus without fuss. It would suggest the death risk for any individual is flu-like—as Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, and many other experts have been telling us since February.
Our politicians have had to become realistic about withholding their interventions unless and until hospitals become overwhelmed. For many of us, especially the young, it makes no sense to impoverish our lives to suppress COVID.
When Joe Biden calls this running up the white flag, he’s prepping you to believe that Donald Trump could have stopped COViD and now a President Biden is stuck with a mess. Whoever is president next year will need to introduce more realism than this into the discussion as a vaccine rolls out.
Meanwhile, we will re-mask as Americans respond to information. Barhopping will be curbed and social distancing will continue.
“Some herd immunity may kick in to help with the winter surge.” But as Mr. Jenkins notes, Americans are battling the virus, “while being fed a colossally distorted picture of the epidemic and its progress by an incompetent and sociopathic press.”
