For what are obviously partisan reasons, the media are desperate to stay focused on the coronavirus death count, even though there is not much that can be done about those deaths.
The media “guardians” at both CNNLOL and the far-left Washington Post are demanding the media stay tightly focused on death-death-death. But other than to exploit those deaths for political purposes — you know, pretending every death is President Trump’s fault, scare people into staying home, bully governors into keeping their states closed so we enter a Great Depression and elect Rapey Joe Biden to save us in November — this is all, well, pretty stupid and not a little anti-science.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news… But there’s not much we can do about the China Virus. I know nobody wants to hear that. I know we all want the disaster movie we’re living through to end in an American triumph. But that is almost certainly not going to happen, at least not in the foreseeable future.
Let’s put away the politics and bullshit and look at this like clear-eyed adults who respect science and human nature. To begin with…
Government’s pretty much done everything it can, and did so pretty successfully… In other words, everyone who required health care got the healthcare they required; the health care system didn’t crash; the public is well-informed about what’s necessary to avoid infection…
So what the hell else are we supposed to do?
COVID-19 is a contagious virus with no vaccine, no cure, and none coming in the foreseeable future — if at all.
Again, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the China Virus is a new fact of life and will be, maybe forever.
There are really only three ways out of this: 1) If there is no cure, we can lockdown forever, 2) we can lockdown for the year or five years until there’s a vaccine, or 3) We can go on about our business in the hope the miracle that put an end to the Spanish Flu and Hong Kong Flu saves us.
The Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918… Did you know there’s still no cure for that? In some form, it’s still out there. What saved future generations was either the virus mutating into a less lethal strain after its third wave in 1919, but before its fourth wave in 1920, or it was herd immunity — or it was some combination of both. Either way, the Spanish Flu is still around.
Before it was over, worldwide that sucker infected 500 million, and anywhere from 50 to 100 million died, including some 500,000 to 675,000 Americans.
In 1968, the Hong Kong Flu hit, killing one to three million worldwide and around 100,000 here in America. The Hong Kong Flu is still out there infecting people every flu season.
No one’s arguing we surrender. Of course the government and private industry should continue to seek therapeutics and a cure, just the like we do for heart disease, cancers, deaths by car accidents, and the next strain of flu…
In 2017, 80,000 Americans died of the flu… The regular flu.
Wash your hands, don’t touch your face, social distance (when possible), wear a mask (if you don’t feel well)… What else does the media want Trump to do? What else does the media want the rest of us to do?
Are we really going to shut down our country forever over a virus?
Are we really — and for the first time in history — going to keep the healthy quarantined forever over a virus?
Using fear porn straight through to November, does the media truly intend to hype each and every coronavirus death as though it’s a government failure, as though it’s Trump’s fault? Probably, but fear porn and the stress and isolation that come with it include their own health risks and death count.
Anywhere from 250,000 to 440,000 Americans die each year from medical errors. If the media really care about saving lives, they should start focusing on those, because those deaths are actually preventable.
My overall worry is that the only way out of this ends up being herd immunity, and then we discover the ultimate death toll ended up being higher than it needed to be because we refused to bite the bullet as early as we should have.
Trump isn’t helping. Instead of telling us the truth, which is Government can’t do anything else without a vaccine, so you need to wash your hands and go back to work, he keeps promising vaccines that may never come and therapeutics that might never work. He needs to urge us to move on. Instead, he has us waiting on a miracle.
And we also need to acknowledge the death toll of not returning to normal, the death toll of massive unemployment and economic devastation, the death tolls of increased suicides, drug use, and depression.
Again, if we’re going to put bullshit aside, it really is time to move on and accept the coronavirus as an unfortunate fact of life, wash our hands more often, and get back to normal.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
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