Millions more Americans have been infected with SARS-CoV‑2 than are considered “confirmed cases,”* at rates ranging from 6/1 (Connecticut, early May) to 24/1 (Missouri, late April), making the fatality rate of COVID-19 much lower than feared.
Unfortunately, we cannot trust our news sources to be forthright about this.
The “death count” had been the pandemic’s repeated headline for months, Dr. Ron Paul noted yesterday, “all of a sudden early in June the mainstream media did a George Orwell and lectured us that it is all about ‘cases’ and has always been all about ‘cases.’ Death, and especially infection fatality rate, were irrelevant.”
There’s a reason for this re-focus. Since peaking in April, deaths, you see, “had decreased by 90 percent and were continuing to crash. That was not terrifying enough so the media pretended this good news did not exist.”
And the case number increases do look ominous, despite being almost innocuous: “This is not rocket science: the more people you test the more ‘cases’ you discover.”
And that is not the only change of spin regarding the pandemic, as Jeffrey Tucker dramatized on Twitter:
“Flatten the curve!”
“What does that do?”
“Pushes infections to the future”
3 months later
“There are new infections!”
“What should we do?”
“Flatten the curve!”
At Mr. Tucker’s stomping grounds, the American Institute for Economic Research, Gregory van Kipnis wrote last month that the “most frightening aspect of the coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) epidemic in the US is that it brought about exaggeratedly heightened fear of death.”
We have something to fear from the virus and its attack upon the respiratory system, but we have more to fear from fear itself.
That staple of propagandistic media.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* A confirmed case is of a patient who has seen a doctor for symptoms of the disease and has tested positive with the diagnosis seconded and logged by scientists associated with a national health agency.
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