When 73-year-old President Donald Trump suggested he would move to Phase 2, disbanding the Coronavirus Task Force, the media groaned, no longer enjoying the chance to attack Trump at his daily press briefings. While the press wants a voice to criticize the White House, no one in the mainstream media wants to give Trump and 60-year-old Vice President Mike Pence any credit for the incredible mobilization of U.S. resources to manage the crisis. What’s left in the media are only empty complaints about insufficient testing and contract tracing, blaming Trump for not waving a magic wand to stop the stubborn virus from continuing to spread with no end in sight. What frustrates the media most is they don’t understand infectious disease pandemics, looking to Big Brother to stop the natural course of the disease. Trump’s media critics only want to blame him for not doing enough.
Members of the press call Trump’s suggestions that the novel coronavirus leaked out of Wuhan’s Institute of Virology a conspiracy theory, buying Chinese Communist propaganda that it occurred naturally from bat-infected animals jumping to human-to-human transmission. It’s astonishing that the U.S. press can’t fathom that the Chinese Community Party lies about everything, for the date-and-time of the outbreak, to numbers of infected citizens and deaths. U.S. and British intel agencies believe China’s recorded estimates of cases and deaths are some 50 times what’s reported by Communist authorities. Yet the U.S. media has no problem accepting feeble Chinese explanations for how the whole mess started. China’s Communist Party has been waging a fierce propaganda campaign to prove the virus occurred naturally to minimize China’s growing liability for worldwide death and destruction.
Liberal media push the idea that it’s premature to reopen the country’s economy, despite Depression-era levels of unemployment, homelessness, hunger, poverty and disease. When National Institutes of Health Chief Infectious Disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci urged Trump to order the country to “shelter in place,” he had no idea what it would do to the U.S. economy. Whatever dangers from the novel coronavirus with 1,314,640 cases and 78,250 deaths in the U.S., those numbers aren’t going to mitigate much by continuing extreme distancing efforts. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo reported May 6, that 66% of new admissions to New York hospitals came from people “sheltering in place.” What that data shows, at this point of the infectious disease cycle, is that “shelter in place” orders no longer give the same benefits in terms of reducing viral spread, Covid-19 cases and mortalities.
Yet the media report what an abysmal failure Trump’s response to the U.S. coronaviurs epidemic. It didn’t matter how many people were tested, how much Personal Protective Gear [PPG] or ventilators supplied, Trump hasn’t stopped the U.S. outbreak of SARS CoV-2. Governors around the country have gotten the message from infectious disease experts that “shelter in place” order are no longer needed in most parts of the country, dependent on the age and physical condition of residents. Damage from the virus no longer outweighs damage from unemployment, loss of health care and lack of resources to survive. Applying extreme mitigation efforts including “shelter in place,’ Fauci and State Department epidemiologist Dr. Deborah Birx didn’t consider the fallout from closing the U.S. economy. With Depression-era levels of unemployment, economic recovery won’t be easy.
With 78,250 U.S. deaths and climbing, there’s nothing the White House Coronavirus Task Force can do to change the course of the epidemic. However it ends, up growing numbers of SARS CoV-2 cases and deaths can’t stop ordinary American from going back to work. There’s no evidence that continuing “shelter in place” orders will save more lives, watching more damage to the U.S. economy. Proposals in Congress sponsored by 78-year-old Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to pay every American worker $2,000 per month isn’t likely to gain much traction, especially given the trillions spent on trying to make unemployed workers whole. At some point, the U.S. press must get with the program, whether premature or not, that the economy must open back up. Warnings posted for elderly or citizens with dangerous underlying health conditions to continue “sheltering in place” can help mitigate more infections and deaths.
At this stage of the novel coronavirus epidemic, it’s time for the media to stop playing politics and back the inevitable move to get the country back to work. Instead of complaining or blaming the White House for a lack of testing and contact tracing, American workers need to know they can return to work without the current fear. Recent polls indicate that workers are afraid to go back to work, largely because the media has exaggerated the risks. No one knows for sure whether returning to work, shopping, restaurants or other public venues will result in more Covid-19 cases or deaths. What’s known for sure is that not reopening the economy will result in more unemployment, hunger, poverty, disease and death, not to mention suicides and eventual anarchy. Whether admitted to or not, the U.S. is stuck with the novel coronavirus for the foreseeable future, with or without new treatments and vaccines.
