Corporate Media's Christmas Gift: More COVID Fear Porn

With cold and flu (and COVID) season in full swing, we should not be surprised that the corporate media is trying desperately to resurrect the Pandemic Panic Narrative, once again pushing the canard of hospital systems filled to the brim with COVID patients.

Nearly 30,000 people currently in the hospital have tested positive for Covid-19, according to the CDC, up 30 percent since Thanksgiving — with New York, Arizona and New Mexico among the hardest hit.

“The situation in the hospitals is grim,” said David Scrase, secretary of the New Mexico Health and Human Services Department. “The death toll from this very serious virus continues to go up and really, hopefully, will create a sense of urgency in individuals and families to think about getting access to vaccines and also to treatments, should you test positive for coronavirus.”

30,000 people in hospital sounds like a lot of sick people—until you remember that figure is the number of people in hospital across the entire country, and that the US population is somewhat north of 338 million. 30,000 people out of more than 338 million is just not a lot of people.

Yet what is even more disappointing about the corporate media’s reflexive return to COVID fear porn is that the CDC’s own data does not show an even remotely “grim” situation anywhere, not even in a “hardest hit” state such as New Mexico.

Why let facts and data get in the way of a perfectly good narrative?

The first fact to remember when evaluating the corporate media’s rather less than perfectly good narrative is that COVID deaths remain heavily tilted towards the older patient demographics.

If you’re young and healthy, your chances of dying from COVID remain somewhere between slim and none.

The second fact to remember is that, according to the CDC, not a lot of people are dying from COVID.

Only about three counties in Arizona are reporting more than 24 COVID deaths in the past week. Even “hardest hit” New Mexico is reporting substantially fewer COVID deaths.

Less than 25 people dying from COVID in any given county is simply not a lot of people. Especially when in most weeks nearly twice as many people are dying from pneumonia and influenza like illness than from COVID.

If the COVID death toll is “grim”, surely the pneumonia and influenza death toll is even more so—and yet the corporate media seems oblivious to even the occurrence of pneumonia and influenza deaths.

The next fact to remember about the less than perfectly good corporate media narrative is that, as one might expect with only 30,000 out of 338 million people in hospital with COVID, the percentage of hospital resources being used by COVID patients is not very much.

No county in “hardest hit” New Mexico had more than 50 people hospitalized last week with COVID. And New Mexico’s experience is by far the norm nationwide.

A corollary to this fact is that few counties have even 15% of their ICU beds occupied with COVID patients.

85% of counties in the United States have 7% or less of their total ICU beds occupie with COVID patients.

If you’re in an ICU ward in the United States, more than likely you are not a COVID patient.

Outside of the ICU, the hospital statistics get even better, as very few counties nationwide have more than 10% of staffed hospital beds occupied by COVID patients.

Any hospital filled to the brim in the US is filled with something other than COVID patients.

The final fact to remember is that all of the foregoing data comes courtesy of the CDC. The federal alphabet agency that has taken point in promoting the Pandemic Panic Narrative from the outset is the same federal alphabet agency publishing the data that reveals the Pandemic Panic Narrative to be a pile of horse hockey large enough to solve next year’s global fertilizer crisis.

The data does so little to support the Pandemic Panic Narrative that even the CDC cannot find a way to distort and contort the data into something ominous and actually capable of inducing fear of COVID. The reality of the CDC data is that it makes plain that there is neither a pandemic nor a reason to panic.

Media bias is nothing new and nothing surprising. Media bias exists everywhere—even All Facts Matter is filled with my own particular biases. There is no true objectivity anywhere in journalism, and we should understand that there can never be any true objectivity. Journalists are people, and people always are going to bring a measure of bias to any reporting that is done.

Yet a lack of objectivity is not the same thing as a lack of common sense, or a lack of logic, or even a lack of a connection to reality. At this point the efforts by the corporate media are simply unhinged, lacking common sense, logic, and a connection to reality.

SARS-CoV-2 is a real virus; COVID-19 is a real infectious respiratory disease and influenza like illness. It has a real capacity to cause sickness and death.

However, even if SARS-CoV-2 is somehow a worse pathogen than respiratory syncytial virus or Influenza A, it is still not a major public health crisis at the present time. It is not a pandemic, and there is no reason to panic.

The Pandemic Panic Narrative is dead. The corporate media would do well to leave it that way.