Epidemiologists created faulty lockdown models. The media promoted fear. Politicians assumed worst-case scenarios, and big tech suppressed dissenting views. This is how people’s fears grew disproportional to reality and how seemingly short-term lockdowns stretched into months.
As of May 20 the CDC estimates that coronavirus has an overall infection fatality rate of 0.26%. The CDC further estimates that people under age 50 have a 99.97% survival rate.
COVID-19 hospitalizations dropped 38% within three weeks of reopening in Georgia. Some schools in Montana and Idaho have been reopened for weeks with no drama. Wisconsin had all of its lockdown restrictions struck down by the state Supreme Court on May 13 and 10 days later hospitals there were treating around 400 known COVID-19 patients across the entire state of 5.8 million people.
New York City has had fewer than 100 total deaths from COVID-19 cases without preexisting conditions.
If any of this sounds surprising, you’re not alone, and it’s probably a result of the reporting bias most of the media has adopted during this pandemic. I understand the media needs to create sensation for more clicks and advertising money, but some outlets have displayed such an imbalance in reporting that they can no longer be taken as an impartial source of information.
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The media were also ready to promote a sense that society was about to collapse while suppressing a call for calm. When Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conti said, “These days, I have been thinking about the old speeches of Churchill -- it is our darkest hour but we will make it†-- he was comparing Italy’s COVID-19 situation to the unfolding collapse of Western Europe in 1940.
Such a statement was not only a crude exaggeration but also an insult that downplayed Italy’s own dark chapter of horrifying war crimes during World War II. But COVID-19 is Italy’s “darkest hour†and the media just goes along with it? Compare this to the Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who tried tweeting to get his message out to his citizens, only to have it deleted by Twitter for sharing dangerous ideas, including the following statements:
“What I have been hearing from people is that they want to work.â€
“What I have said from the beginning is that ‘we are going to be careful, the over-65s stay at home.’â€
“If it continues like this, with the amount of unemployment what we will have later is a very serious problem that will take years to be resolved.â€
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In addition to suppressing or simply ignoring dissenting views, the media also downplayed positive news. In early April, Stanford conducted the first official seroprevalence study in the United States and showed Santa Clara County likely undercounted coronavirus cases by a factor of 54 times. That also means the county may have overestimated the virus’ fatality by 54 times. However, this potentially very positive news was downplayed.
In Santa Clara County itself, a local paper ran the headline “COVID-19 warning about pets†over an article discussing CDC recommendations to keep pets away from strangers, even though there hadn’t been any meaningful data showing pet-to-human transmission taking place. Tucked in the upper corner was a smaller but immensely important story reporting that “Stanford researchers have estimated that the [COVID-19] death rate in Santa Clara County is about 0.12% to 0.2%.â€
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The media should have more strongly questioned faulty academic models, unrealistically high fatality rates, lockdown efficacy, shifting goal posts, and the suppression of dissenting views by big tech. Had it done so, our public policy disaster may have been averted, or at least curtailed, potentially saving even more lives in the long run.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/05/28/how_media_sensationalism_big_tech_bias_extended_lockdowns_143302.html
