Project Veritas somehow managed to get a CNN executive to admit that they used COVID-19 trackers to induce fear, because fear sells. For almost a year, they had their case and death counters up on the screen 24/7. As I don't watch much CNN, I'm not sure if they are still doing that, but my guess would be that, now that Donald Trump is no longer president, they don't need to keep people living in fear of orange man killing them all. Still, I don't know, so don't take my word for it.
CNN may no longer be inducing panic with their tickers, but our president*, despite the fact that he's fully vaccinated, is still wearing one, and sometimes two masks. Last week, he had a video climate summit and wore a mask... on a video call. No other world leader felt it necessary to wear a mask on a call where the participants were all in another country. I'm guessing ours is still trying to play up the pandemic, even though, by any sane person's best guess, he doesn't need to be masked up all the time.
The New York Times also wants to keep the panic porn alive and well with this article on Friday: How COVID upended a Century of Patterns in U.S. Deaths
It starts out with this line:
"The U.S. death rate in 2020 was the highest above normal since the early 1900s — even surpassing the calamity of the 1918 flu pandemic."
Then they share this little graph:
Which clearly makes it look as bad as they wanted it to. Later on they shared yet another graphic which kind of undercuts what they said, but it wasn't at the top of the page, so likely most of the public won't ever see it, and trust me, no major media source is going to publish past the first graph.
Clearly, we didn't really break the pattern of the 1918 Spanish Flu. Not even close. But then we got this tidbit:
Combined with deaths in the first few months of this year, Covid-19 has now claimed more than half a million lives in the United States. The total number of Covid-19 deaths so far is on track to surpass the toll of the 1918 pandemic, which killed an estimated 675,000 nationwide.
There are other charts as well, but you can get a graph to say anything you want depending on how you input the data. The fact is that little paragraph is widely misleading, in that it attempts to equate our current pandemic with the Spanish flu of 1918. Except you can't not really. The US population was one third of what it is now. So I did some number crunching.
If COVID is on track to kill as many people as the Spanish Flu did, accounting for population differences, the numbers would have to be this:
US Population 2020: 330,222,422
Positive Cases: 92,462,278
Deaths: 2,034,170
But this is the current information:
US Population 2020: 330,222,422
Positive Cases: 31,883,289
Deaths: 565,272
So no, we aren't anywhere near the Spanish Flu, which was far more virulent (10% verses 28%) and more deadly (1.7% verses 2.2%).
So even if CNN is backing off their panic porn (once again, I have no idea), the Times is keeping it alive, along with our President* who is vaccinated and still acting like the end is near.
**This took me all of 20 minutes, to find the data, do the math, and then put it in a blog. The Times must really think we're idiots.
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