patrick.net

As I write, the rate of increase of new cases of the CCP virus seems to be stabilizing in many places, including early hotspots like Washington and California. What’s growing exponentially across the country are unemployment claims, which last week suddenly shot up from a historic low. There were more than three million new claims. This week the number is 6.6 million.

Network newsmen are doing their best to impersonate the protagonist of Edvard Munch’s painting ‘The Scream’. Hysteria, not accuracy, is the order of the day. A case in point was the footage aired by CBS that purportedly depicted the chaos of an overrun hospital in the US. Only after the network was called out did it admit its ‘mistake’ in airing footage from an Italian hospital. When Donald Trump said that he was sending hospital ships to help busy hospitals in New York and Los Angeles, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow scoffed that it would takes weeks and weeks to deploy them. They docked and were open for business a few days later. Much of the media would heartily second California governor Gavin Newsom: the coronavirus pandemic, he said, is an ‘opportunity’ to implement a leftist agenda. ...

But remember, 2.8 million people die every year in the US. The seasonal flu hospitalizes hundreds of thousands every year and kills anywhere up to 80,000. Overall deaths this season are actually down because of the coronavirus: people are not out and about as much, so fewer have died. In one sense, then, it has been a lifesaver. The panic surrounding it, on the contrary, has been a lethal assault. It’s too soon to say what the fatality rate of our insane overreaction will be.