A MEDIA-DRIVEN COVID PANIC

Vax-slashed risk still low even as cases increase

ONE of the most underrated aspects of human behavior is how much expectations dictate our perceptions of reality. Largely because none of us has ever dealt with a pandemic before and, therefore, we have no experience on which to draw comparisons, this has been particularly true when it comes to dealing with the coronavirus.

Since the beginning of this nightmare, the news media have done a horrible of job of providing muchneeded context and perspective to the COVID data that have driven so much of our lives for the last year and a half. This has been especially the case with regard to the recent hysteria over the “Delta variant” causing a large spike in the daily number of positive tests, both here in America and in many other places around the world.

As someone who has previously written that COVID is effectively no longer a “pandemic,” I admit surprise and concern at just how much and how quickly the case numbers have increased in the United States in the last few weeks. It’s now clear, contrary to the data trends of the previous four months and even current inaccurate claims made by President Biden, that the vaccines do not fully prevent you from testing positive for the virus, but rather mitigate the symptoms.

The news media’s obsession with daily case numbers has always been, at best, misguided, and, at worst, malicious. When the history of the destruction of this oncegreat nation is finally fully written,

I believe the news media and public-health “experts” transitioning from hospitalization/death numbers to daily positive tests as the primary COVID data point will be seen as one of the final nails in the coffin of our formerly free society.

This is not just because there is evidence that the most prominent test is flawed, with the CDC just recommending it be dumped because it can’t even differentiate COVID from influenza. (It should also be noted that weekend reporting in many states has become so lax that the data collection itself helps facilitate exaggerated midweek “spikes.”)

We seem to forget that when the positive test first became the news media’s metric of choice, there were no vaccines, and we had very little communal immunity. In theory, everyone who tested positive was at least somewhat vulnerable to a very bad outcome, even though, in reality, 98 percent of those in that group recovered.

Now, well over half the nation is at least partly vaccinated (with at least another 10 percent having some — possibly even better — level of immunity from having previously contracted the virus), so the focus on daily positive tests, without at least some critical context, has become totally absurd. One, because even the current “case” numbers are not THAT bad, and two, because there is no indication as of yet that hospitalizations/deaths are going to get to “emergency” levels, which, it cannot be stated enough, is the ONLY standard when direct government intervention is remotely justified in a supposedly free country.

We are now averaging over 45,000 new positive tests per day, more than triple the number when it reached our low about a month ago. This sudden increase is understandably alarming, especially without any perspective, which most of the news media have very little incentive to provide. For instance, late in the “swine flu” of 2009-2010, America was averaging 57,000 cases a day (down from the yearlong average of 190,000) and the spread at that time was not considered to be at “pandemic” levels.

Yes, positive COVID tests have increased, but they have done so in a very similar seasonal pattern, even on a state-by-state basis, to what happened in the summer of 2020. The numbers are still much lower than at the height of that summer spike, and dramatically less than the worst of the winter wave, which once had us at 250,000 new cases a day with no vaccines, and yet without our health-care system reaching levels of grave danger.

Thanks apparently to the those vaccines, this rise in positive tests has not yet caused a dangerous increase in hospitalizations, and absolutely no rise yet in the number of people currently dying with

COVID (though expect that to begin to change, at least marginally, in the next week or two). In fact, for more than a month now, based on the seven-day average, Americans have had a less than a 1-in-a-million chance of dying with COVID on any given day, and currently here in California, daily “COVID deaths” are just barely outpacing automobile deaths (which, it should be pointed out, end the lives of people much younger and healthier on average than COVID does).

In short, unless the perceived effectiveness of the vaccines is one of the greatest frauds of all time, we are currently in no danger of seeing numbers that once again threaten to cause a catastrophe in our health-care system, which was the entire justification for the government usurping endless dictatorial powers due to this emergency. But here is where the purveyors of fear have masterfully won the expectations game, even when the facts indicate that they should have lost it.

The notion that cases were not going to significantly rise, especially among younger people, during a summer when most of America is back to “normalcy” and eager to make up for lost time is mystifying. If all restrictions had been lifted and there had been categorically no negative change in the data, it would have been a devastating blow to the already highly