The Wuhan coronavirus is “dying,” but the media aim to keep it alive — and are killing our economy in the process. This is essentially the message of a physician who proclaims, citing hard data, “We have nearly won the fight against COVID.”
The mainstream news never fails to pound home the message that COVID-19 is “spiking” in much of the country, places such as Texas, Florida, Alabama, Arkansas, Utah, California, Georgia, and Colorado. The idea is that letting people resume their normal lives — allowing freedom — is a mistake and that some “lockdown” rules may have to stay in effect until there’s a “cure” (i.e., almost forever).
Yet Dr. Jess Jones, writing at American Thinker Tuesday, stated that the “spikes” are mainly due to ramped-up testing; moreover, the “increased COVID hospitalizations” statistic is deceptive, he avers, as evidenced by how ventilator and Intensive Care Unit use are not increasing.
What’s more, an increased-infection pattern without rising mortality is actually a good thing.
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Dr. Jones begins by citing the below, which is basically a graphic version of the first part of the mainstream media’s (MSM’s) message:
This sound-bite species of disease data, showing more than a doubling in virus positives over a three-month period, can be scary enough taken alone. But the second part of the MSM’s message, also presented graphically by Jones (below), completes the picture of doom:
Yet the above, showing a hospitalization increase during the last month’s “reopening” period, is an incomplete picture — and a deceptive one.
The truth is revealed by three more graphs (all courtesy of Dr. Jones), with the first below:
Striking. As evident above, the rate of positives increase (<200 percent) greatly lags behind the rate of testing increase (≈650 percent) during the three-month span. In raw numbers, the positives increased from ≈25,000 to ≈42,000 while the tests administered increased from 100,000 to ≈650,000.
This result is even more startling because, writes Dr. Jones, the data “include contact tracing campaigns instituted by each state that should dramatically increase the positive rate by targeting everyone whom positive cases came into close contact with.”
Yet there’s still more good news. Consider the graph below, which shows that while Wuhan virus hospitalizations have increased, the number of such patients using ventilators or ICU beds has actually remained flat or decreased:
Explanation? While some may assume we have better treatments available (and we may, to an extent), Jones explains that hospitals have now resumed normal business, are bustling, and are testing everyone who comes in for any reason. Additionally, as the Conservative Review pointed out, hospitals may count “anyone who tests positive as a COVID-19 patient … even if they came in for chest pains or trauma.”
(Note also that “hospitals do get paid more for COVID-19 related cases,” reported CBS8 in May — and what you subsidize, you get more of.)
Moreover, physician and ex-congressman Ron Paul just reported that Texas had in late May started recording “probable” Wuhan virus cases as actual ones, which obviously would inflate the numbers. There’s reason to believe this practice is common in other states, too, do note.
Also significant, of course, are the mortality figures. And they have, in fact and thankfully, continued to drop markedly from a late April/early May peak, as Jones illustrates with the graph below:
In other words, plaguing us more than the pandemic is media propaganda.
Speaking of which, the MSM also ominously speak of “hospitals nearing capacity.” But offering perspective on this was radio host Mark Griffith, on whose show I appeared on Wednesday. Griffith, whose wife is in the healthcare business, told me that hospitals must operate at nearly full capacity to survive financially. His assertion was that the MSM are characterizing a business status quo as a Wuhan-virus woe.
But the bottom line, Dr. Jones sums up, is that government “critics who have long used insufficient testing as their rallying cry against Trump are finally getting the testing they asked for, only to use selective bits of it to stoke more fear.”
This results in lockdowns’ perpetuation even though studies show that not only don’t these measures save lives — they actually cost lives. In fact, Sweden is doing just fine managing the virus despite never having locked down.
Realize, too, that an increased infection rate coupled with low mortality is a good development. It helps us establish the only thing that eliminates a coronavirus from a population: herd immunity.
Of course, this could have been achieved far earlier if we didn’t have herd hysteria, induced by an MSM more dangerous than any disease currently plaguing man. Lies kill.
Image: JONGHO SHIN/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
