How To Deal With Coronavirus Part 3: Tell The Legacy Media To Just Shut Up

It is time--past time--for the legacy media to accede to Dr. Drew Pinsky's advice and shut up about coronavirus. Too many people in the legacy media are more interested in scaring the hell out of people and have no interest in providing useful information. If they are not going to perform actual journalism they should stop talking and let people calm down.

Enough with the hype. Enough with the hysteria. Enough with the fear porn. Enough with the misinformation, disinformation, and Chinese-style propaganda.

Practical Solutions Only, Please

When there is a crisis, media focus must be on solutions which are feasible. Extreme rhetoric like this drivel in The Atlantic is a pastiche of half-truths and delusion--and warrants exactly that level of contempt. We cannot "cancel everything", nor should we try.

While many workers can "work from home", a great many more cannot. Factory workers must be on the factory floor if they are to be paid. Warehouse workers and store clerks must clock in somewhere if they are to perform their jobs. Plumbers, carpenters, construction workers, teachers, nannies, maids, lawn maintenance people, janitors--these people cannot "work from home". Endless prattling on about such notions tells these people they either do not exist or do not count, messages that should be soundly rejected at every turn.

Further, every conference that is canceled represents lost wages, lost jobs. Every business closure takes money out of someone's wallet. When two-thirds of millennials--perhaps even two-thirds of all Americans--live paycheck to paycheck, taking away a paycheck is not something anyone should do blithely.

Ignoring the human cost of such "solutions" is nothing short of monstrous. Solutions are about saving lives, not sacrificing them.

Worst of all, such solutions do not work. They certainly did not work in China. If we are to believe the official numbers (which we shouldn't), China had approximately 450 cases in Wuhan when the city was quarantined on January 22-23. The cases continued to spread throughout Wuhan and throughout China. That was proven scarcely a day later, when China expanded the range of the quarantines. As I said at the time, "More cities will be locked down before this is over", and within two weeks, some 400 million Chinese were under some form of lockdown.

South Korea tried similar methods to contain the disease, instituting a massive testing program and quarantines of epicenters such as the city of Daegu. Yet by February 21, the number of cases was still increasing by leaps and bounds, and a week after the Daegu quarantine, South Korea had over 3,000 cases.

Mass quarantines once a disease has taken hold simply do not work. The suggestion to just "cancel everything" simply does not work. We have seen the proof of this unfold before our very eyes.

Continuing to argue for them is silly and counter productive. Let us have no more of such nonsense.

Chicken Little Hysterics Do Not Help

In the same vein, the steady diet of fear porn that the legacy media has chosen to put forward in lieu of journalism is beyond absurd. What purpose is there in assembling a panel of self-appointed "experts" to proclaim that COVID-19 is the most "daunting" disease of the past 50 years--particularly when it is not true? At this point in the 2009 Swine Flu Pandemic, the CDC estimated there had been 1 million cases of H1N1 in the United States alone, yet COVID-19 is the most daunting?

As difficult as it may be for the self-annointed experts to admit, the world has other problems than COVID-19. In East Africa and Asia, an invasion of desert locusts of truly Biblical proportions is threatening crops--and the food security--of hundreds of millions. Even before COVID-19, China was facing a real challenge of food security, owing to the damage done to their swine herd by African Swine Fever--"pig Ebola". These issues have not gone away simply because the legacy media has decided to splash COVI D-19 headlines all over the front page.

COVID-19 is not the apocalypse. The legacy media needs to stop portraying it as if it is.

Be Angry, Not Afraid

Instead of fear and panic, if there is an emotional response that is appropriate to the COVID-19 pandemic it would be outrage. People should not be fearful, they should be angry.

Consider Italy's situation: On March 8, they reported 5,883 cases of coronavirus, and 233 deaths. Some 10% of those cases required critical care. Yet 6000 cases and 600 critical care patients was sufficient to destablisize the entire healthcare system of the province of Lombardy, which has roughly 16 million people. 600 patients and the healthcare of 16 million has been thrown into the hazard.

How does that happen?

The answer is dreary, depressing, and familiar: cutbacks and lack of spending and investment in infrastructures. In 2000, Italy had approximately 268,000 hospital beds. Today it has around 193,000.

If Italy had the hospital infrastructure of 20 years ago, would it be facing the economic ruin of quarantine today? We can never know the answer absolutely, but the question is one that should be asked, and asked again, until politicians and business leaders get uncomfortable enough to do something about the awkward answer.

The politicians claim we are "unprepared" for this disease. What they forget to mention--and what the legacy media has failed to point out--is that no nation even attempts to be prepared for a disease such as COVID-19. The people most fearful of our lack of preparedness are the same people whose duty it has been to prepare us.

COVID-19 is a stark demonstration of just how badly governments and elected officials--and the army of bureaucrats they appoint--have failed each and every one of us. As Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson has pointed out (Tucker being one of the few bright lights in a very dim constellation of legacy media entities), they have lied to us, again and again, and brought us to this precipice.

Will any of them answer for their dereliction? Unlikely.

That should disturb us. That should enrage us. That should motivate real change for the future. I can only pray that it will.

Testing Does Not Contain Anything

South Korea and Italy have proven one thing beyond all doubt: Testing everyone and their cousin for COVID-19 does little to slow the spread of the disease. For all the claims of the "experts", the numbers are beyond dispute. There is not one country where testing has led to any form of "containment"--not China, not South Korea, not Italy.

This is largely due to the late start both China and the world has had in confronting this disease. By the time the WHO announced it was shipping 250,000 test kits to 70 labs worldwide, the disease had already had two months head start--a fact which made WHO Director General Tedros' blather about a "window of opportunity" to contain the disease a cruel joke. WHO has pushed the notion of "containment" despite the evidence of the numbers showing that containment is not happening and has never happened, and it has pushed this notion despite the overwhelming evidence that China instead tried to cover up the outbreak.

Yet to keep the "containment" myth alive, the experts remain obsessively focused on these coronavirus tests, as if somehow the tests are the solution, that the tests will magically stop the disease.

The tests will not. The tests cannot.

Yet the hyperfocus on testing regimes which failed in South Korea and which failed in Italy continues to be all the rage among the legacy media and the class of self-annointed "experts" who feel it is their job to make every case seem like the second coming of the Black Death.

Disease testing is a vital diagnostic tool for treating the individual patient. There is no doubt about that. But to pretend still at this late date that deploying batteries of tests in an effort to test everyone and their cousin is anything but a waste of precious resources is absurd. Testing individuals is, by its very nature, a game of constant catch-up. You cannot block anything from behind; you must get in front of something to stop it, and that includes COVID-19. Chasing after every suspected case of disease will never stop a disease. If John Snow had thought that way in 1854, London would still be suffering from cholera today.

COVID-19 Is Not A Medical Crisis, But A Resource Crisis

While it may sound heretical to say, the sober truth of coronavirus is that, much like the cholera outbreak in London in 1854, or the typhoid fever outbreaks in Cuba after the Spanish-American war, the crisis is not a matter of treating disease but of marshaling resources and educating the public. The 1854 cholera outbreak in London was addressed by the very non-medical remedy of replacing a contaminated water pump, and Dr. Walter Reed's historic investigation into typhoid fever established that deficiencies in sanitation were the primary factors driving the disease.

The demonstrated capacities of coronavirus to spread via fecal contaminations and airborne aerosols show that overcoming the disease is less a challenge for the pathology lab and more a challenge for ordinary society. People are being called by the disease to become more rigorous in their hygiene, and society is called to be more rigorous in sanitation. We must become a cleaner species.

Yet the clearest evidences that coronavirus, like other epidemic diseases, will be resolved by non-medical approaches, are the twin realities that public health agencies already track coronavirus along with the array of other diseases which present with "flu like symptoms", and that our public health "experts" seem oblivious to this data their own agencies gather, as exemplified by Dr. Tedros' stated inability to chart the progression of the disease. When the head of WHO is unable to read a map, it is safe to conclude the WHO will be of little use in confronting this disease.

Since the doctors and other "experts" are unable to even use their own tools and data sets, and seem unwilling to talk in terms of practical solutions, it falls to the rest of us--non-medical lay people--to ride to the rescue.

Italy is both the warning and the clue, as indeed was China. The challenge is not the pathology of the disease, but a community's ability to treat the sick. It is inexcusable that 600 critical care patients can bring a modern nation's healthcare system to its knees. It is appalling that a city such as Wuhan, with a population of 11 million, was overwhelmed by a mere 850 coronavirus cases. These realities should not happen--and they do not need to happen, not if we are as wealthy and resource-rich as we like to believe we are.

While vaccines will take time to develop--too long to be useful during this pandemic--and while anti-viral therapies have not produced a magic bullet, resource limitations are a problem the modern industrial society is particularly well equipped to resolve. New beds can be obtained, new hospitals and structures can be built. Resources can be shifted to where they are needed, and we already know when and where those needs arise, because we already gather that information. Where there are resources in abundance, patient outcomes improve markedly. Where resources are scarce, patient outcomes become highly problematic.

How might these things be done? One approach is the Chinese approach of slapping a hospital building together in ten days and pray no one notices how badly the roof leaks. A more pragmatic approach might be to utilize existing building technologies for things such as temporary buildings, and modular buildings, to quickly expand hospital bed capacities. Such solutions might not be glamorous, but there can be no doubt they would be better options than the Italian solution of doctors deciding to play God with who gets treated and who does not.

The managerial reality of every office building in America is that it is cleaned nightly. Those cleanings need to emphasize the use of strong disinfectants. One hopes they already are.

For the average person, the guidance is simple: "wash your damn hands!" Too many people--far too many adults--are not diligent in this one simple practice. It was this lack of personal hygiene that turned typhoid fever into a minor epidemic in Cuba, as Dr. Reed's investigation documented quite ably. The close quarters of the Diamond Princess was likely a factor in the disease' rapid spread throughout that ship from a single infected patient. The denser a population the more difficult hygiene and sanitation become, and the more necessary.

None of these things are revolutionary, nor even innovative. The personal protection measures for individuals outside of the healthcare setting are the same as they have been for dealing with influenza for decades: clean surfaces, do not sneeze on people, and hand hygiene. As novel as the coronavirus is, the truth of the disease is we already know how to combat it. It may not be the flu, it may not be exactly "like" the flu, but the weapons for defeating it are the exact same weapons we use against the flu. Even the doctors tell us this every time they remind us to wash hands.

There Is No Protecting The Wallet

While we can address the realities of the disease, it will be much harder to address the inevitable economic fallout. There is no escaping the fact that China shut down virtually the whole of its economy to confront coronavirus. Even if other contries could replicate China's draconian police-state methods, the economic fallout from such disruptions are beyond human comprehension. Now Italy is attempting similar measures, and one can only imagine the impact of Italy's quarantine measures in the Eurozone.

One of the inescapable truths revealed by the coronavirus pandemic is that a globalized, highly integrated world economy is an extremely brittle and fragile creation. 94% of the Fortune 1000 have supply chains that rely on China--each and every one of them was disrupted by China's lockdown. Less than a month after Wuhan was quarantined, other countries began seeing production facilities idled for lack of parts. That China has remained largely on lockdown even now has spooked financial markets, producing an apocryphal "Black Swan" event which could precipitate severe and lasting disruptions throughout the world's economy.

Even if every person in China returned to work tomorrow--which so far has not happened--the world economy will not quickly shrug off all the effects. Even before the foolish recommendations of clueless academics to "cancel everything", people everywhere are facing lost wages and lost jobs, and businesses are facing closure and bankruptcy. How many jobs will be lost and how many business will go bust is as yet unknown, but there will be some, and the longer these disruptions continue the more there will be.

Few in the legacy media have even touched on this aspect of the pandemic, despite the reality that it is by far the largest and the most far reaching. The legacy media would rather magnify hysteria, promote fear porn, and trigger mass panic than provide either sound reporting or thoughtful analysis on the ripple effects from the quarantines as they spread around the world.

All Of This Was Preventable

As the reader will undoubtedly realize, I am venting an extraordinary amount of spleen. Yes, I am angry. I am frustrated. I am angry and frustrated because none of this needed to happen. Every part of this outbreak, from the first accidental release of the disease from the Wuhan Institute of Virology to this week's historic market routs, could have been prevented. Every bit of the hysteria generated by the legacy media did not need to happen, and every run on a Costco, every fight over toilet paper, was entirely preventable. None of this had to happen.

Had China taken lab safety more seriously, this disease might never have escaped into the wild. Had China not lied about the disease in December, other countries might have known to take more proactive measures--a month of strict flight screening in January and the disease would have had far fewer chances to spread. Had the Federal Reserve not appeased the investment world with constant money printing and asset price inflation for the past 12 years, we would not be stuck in an asset bubble that has already likely popped.

With this disease, everything that has happened, at every turn, is something we know--or should have known--not to do, yet have done anyway. We know how to fight this disease, we know how to track this disease, and yet this disease is getting the better of us all.

As an engineer, I am accustomed to celebrating efficiency and deploring waste. When I look at the wreckage being celebrated by the legacy media, I find there is little to do but shake my head and ponder "what a waste".

If the legacy media cannot be bothered to turn the conversation towards practical solutions, they would best serve us all by silence. If the self-annointed "experts" cannot come down out of their ivory towers and contemplate the entirety of this crisis, its height, width, and depth, they would serve mankind best by sticking to their test tubes and electron microscopes and finding a vaccine or a cure for this disease. When talking about coronavirus talk about solutions or do not talk at all.

We have no choice but to deal with coronavirus. There is no doubt that we will, for humanity is nothing if not stubbornly resilient in the face of such challenges. The legacy media can do its part by just shutting the Hell up.