Last Thursday, upon hearing that the World Health Organization had said there would be a 3.4% death rate from the coronavirus, the president said, “I think the 3.4% is really a false number.” He said he had a “hunch” the actual number is less than one percent.
Of course, the Left, the Democrats and social media went into overdrive criticizing him. Who knew so many experienced virologists had the time to comment on Twitter? Must be no dangerous virus out there right now.
As per the president’s claim, The Spectator, a British magazine that is the best written periodical in the world, had this to say: “Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College was on the radio on Thursday making exactly this point. Referring to the outbreak in Italy he said: ‘for every person who dies we think there might be 100 or over 200 people infected.’ If he is right, that would give a death rate of one per cent or less—exactly as Trump has claimed… The US president is not wrong to call out those who seem to delight in making out that it is a grave threat to civilisation.”
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The president and certain others are keeping their heads while some in the major media intentionally inflate the numbers to create panic, encourage impulse buying, and try to cause political damage to Trump. In fact, the media is morbidly entranced by the virus.
It’s the same phenomenon those of us who grew up in South Florida saw every hurricane season. We called it “weather porn.” Television stations and the Weather Channel would raise an almost salacious alarm over a storm many miles away off the coast of Western Africa. New residents and tourists would panic and buy out Home Depot, the grocery, and, in those days, Radio Shack. We longtime residents, who had been through several storms, would take common sense precautions and go about our normal business.
That’s what the president is doing and we are lucky to have a man in office who is calm under fire. The alternative, as we are seeing in the Democratic response to the coronavirus, is not at all pleasant to contemplate.
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