The Other McCain

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COVID-19: Metrics in a Time of Plague

Posted on | April 6, 2020 | 1 Comment

 

Perhaps you didn’t notice, but since Sunday, Fox News has dropped their habit of framing the screen with graphics showing the worldwide and nationwide totals of coronavirus cases and deaths. Perhaps some executive at the network came to the same realization I’d had for several days, namely that this Death Watch theme was . . . not helpful.

In mid-March, when Americans were first coming to grips with this pandemic — schools were closing, daily briefings, etc. — network executives got the idea that we needed these numbers constantly on our screens, to scare people and make them take “social distancing” seriously. Having accomplished that mission, however, they must have decided that their Death Watch motif was driving home-bound audiences crazy. We’re all trying our best to maintain a sense of optimism, and having these numbers omnipresent on TV news was not conducive to that effort. And, I argue, these weren’t even the most important numbers:

Turn on your TV, and cable news will show you a chyron with the cumulative total of known COVID-19 cases in the United States. That number increases daily, by a simple process of addition, but that’s not the number which matters most in terms of coping with the pandemic. What matters, from the perspective of avoiding a crisis that overwhelms our health-care system, is not how many people are infected with the coronavirus, but rather the number of patients hospitalized. As tests for the Chinese virus have become more widely available, a majority of people who test positive — more than 80 percent in some states — are never hospitalized. Earlier projections of a system-crashing crisis have so far been proven false, but the media refuse to acknowledge the failure of the doomsday prophets and their computer-generated pandemic models.
It feels unfair to point this out, at a time when health-care workers in the hardest-hit areas of the country like New York, Detroit, and New Orleans are struggling to keep up with a surging number of COVID-19 cases, and the daily death toll continues increasing. More than 1,300 Americans died from the virus Saturday, concluding a week in which U.S. deaths totaled 6,232. . . .

Read the rest of my column at The American Spectator.




 

Category: American Spectator

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One Response to “COVID-19: Metrics in a Time of Plague”

  1. Day 14 lockdown. - Dark Brightness
    April 6th, 2020 @ 7:50 pm

    […] Perhaps you didn’t notice, but since Sunday, Fox News has dropped their habit of framing the screen with graphics showing the worldwide and nationwide totals of coronavirus cases and deaths. Perhaps some executive at the network came to the same realization I’d had for several days, namely that this Death Watch theme was . . . not helpful. […]