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The lefist media would have you believe otherwise, but the coronavirus will not wipe out life as we know it the United States.
So says a level-headed assessment of the virus from Roy Pomeroy at Real Clear Science, as well as the latest report from the Centers for Disease Control. Indeed, it’s unlikely the virus and accompanying flu will infect or kill anywhere near the number of people that garden-variety annual flu viruses do.
So why has the leftist media hit the panic button? According to some, it’s to give the Democrat presidential candidate a weapon with which to beat Trump, and perhaps, slow down the roaring stock market. In other words, to hurt President Trump.
The Latest
CDC’s latest reports offers these two statements about coronavirus, also known as COVID19:
• For the general American public, who are unlikely to be exposed to this virus at this time, the immediate health risk from COVID-19 is considered low.
• People in communities where ongoing community spread with the virus that causes COVID-19 has been reported are at elevated though still relatively low risk of exposure.
So far, CDC says, 10 states have reported 43 cases resulting in 17 hospitalization and two deaths. Those figures do not include those who contracted the disease overseas.
Although “it’s likely that at some point, widespread transmission of COVID-19 in the United States will occur,” that “sobering” assessment of the “grave pathogenic threat,” as Pomeroy observed, is no reason to panic.
Pomery reported that “the number of cases in China is already falling significantly” and that “vast majority of cases are mild, and the death rate is likely lower than reported.”
More importantly, Pomeroy added, “the world already survived another pandemic just ten years ago.”
Between April 2009 and April 2010, there were approximately 60.8 million cases, 274,304 hospitalizations, and 12,469 deaths in the United States alone! Globally, it likely infected between 700 million and 1.4 billion people, resulting in 150,000 to 575,000 fatalities. While this loss of life was tragic, more than a decade later, many scarcely remember Swine Flu. The same will hopefully happen with COVID-19.
And yet those figures did not approach the infection or mortality rates of, again, garden-variety seasonal flu.
“Widespread transmission” of those viruses occurs annually. The 2018-2019 flu season in the United States alone, CDC reported, ended with 35,520,883 cases that sent 16,520,350 to the doctor, another 490,561 to the hospital, and another 34,157 to the cemetery.
Almost all those who died, 91.4 percent, were older than 50 years, and 74.8 percent were older than 65.
Worldwide, the flu kills up to 650,000 people, some estimates say.
The Media
Yet the leftist media are suggesting Trump is ignoring a major threat to humanity in general and American in particular.
Trump’s germophobia, xenophobia, and persecution complex had coalesced into a message: This overblown scare will soon be a memory.
As much as we’d all like for that to be true, the coronavirus doesn’t seem to be cooperating just yet. Late Friday officials in the three West Coast states announced three new cases, none of which could be explained by overseas travel or contact with someone who had traveled overseas, the New York Times reported.
“If we were worried yesterday, we are even more worried today,” Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told the Times. “Now we have to ask: How widely, really widely, is this virus out there?”
The New Yorker reported that Trump is not only a weak sister on the coronavirus, offering only an “anti-globalist response to a global coronavirus” but also a public health threat himself because he “has worked tirelessly to limit funding, dismantle teams of experts, and interrupt nearly any strategic-planning initiative necessary to defend the country against the type of inevitable biological assault that we now face.”
“Trump’s coronavirus strategy faces new scrutiny after second US death,” warned CNN.
“The White House coronavirus task force is expressing ‘great concern’ there will be more person-to-person transmissions of the disease after two deaths on American soil — a message that strongly contrasts with President Donald Trump’s earlier rosy forecasts about the situation,” the hate-Trump network continued.
“Coronavirus crisis underlines eight of Trump’s failings as a leader,” another CNN headline claimed.
Yet the data suggest that coronavirus isn’t anything close to a crisis: 43 cases, 17 hospitalization, two deaths.
Why are the media bashing Trump? A headline in the New York Times provides an answer: “A Virus Spreads, Stocks Fall, and Democrats See an Opening to Hit Trump.”
Look at the numbers. Look at the reporting. Draw your own conclusion.
Image: Naeblys via iStock / Getty Images Plus
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
