Coronavirus: The only thing spreading “exponentially” is fear

Kit Knightly

Shall we start off this little overview with some cold hard facts? Not the ones about death rates, and the flu, and clinical diagnosis. We’ve done that. A lot.

No this is just simple maths; There are, according to official estimates, fewer people with coronavirus today, than yesterday.

That has been true every day since February 17th.

Here’s a graph showing global “active cases”:

Here’s a graph showing the number of daily new diagnoses with the number of daily recoveries:

Here’s a graph showing the daily change in death rate vs the daily change in recovery rate:

To sum up, according to official estimates, every day for over two weeks, fewer people have the disease, a smaller percentage of people are dying of the disease and MORE people are recovering from the disease.

Nobody in the media is talking about this.

Instead, we constantly see “coronavirus cases reach 95,000” in the headlines, without adding the corollary that 54,000 of those people are already better.

When the media aren’t ignoring the less-than-intimidating statistics, they’re trying to re-purpose them. The Atlantic recently published an article literally headlined Greece, where only 31 people have even been diagnosed (nobody has yet died).

California, ever a panic waiting to happen, is declaring a state of emergency over their 53 cases. One man has died, he was old and had “underlying health issues”. But still…emergency.

There’s money to be made in panic, of course. The IMF and World Bank, ever the harbingers or harmony and not at all opportunistic vultures, are ready to ride in on a white horse:

the International Monetary Fund and World Bank issued a joint statement saying they stood ready to help the worst affected countries by providing “emergency financing, policy advice, and technical assistance”.

Some good old “emergency finance” will help out any country that needs to protect itself from disease. Don’t worry, you’ll have it paid off in a few decades. Maybe.

In America, the same Senate so frequently asking Bernie Sanders how he intends to pay for his healthcare plans, just approved 8 BILLION dollars in emergency spending for the coronavirus. For those of you interested, that’s 56 million dollars per infected US citizen.

From what we know of bloated US government contracts, this money will be filed through lobbyists to medical supply and emergency measures companies, on whose board a surprising number of current and/or former senators sit.

In Italy, 7.5 billion Euros is being “made available” for “families and businesses” affected. The question of how much goes to families, and how much to businesses, is a key one. One the media will probably never answer.

And behind all of that, the authoritarians, mouths watering, drip poison into the public ear:

Harsh measures horrify civil libertarians, but they often save lives, especially when they are imposed in the early days.

That was in the New York Times.

Any coronavirus ‘lockdown’ would initially be voluntary

Adds The Guardian (they don’t say how long this “initial” voluntary period will last).

The Atlantic goes further, laying out plans to mitigate the “worst case scenario” covering information:

A single trusted source should inform the public what we know about COVID-19, what we don’t know, and what we’ll do to find out what we don’t know.

Emergency powers:

Congress must provide the FDA with the authority needed to prevent and mitigate medical supply-chain disruptions.

And quarantine:

Social distancing may become the norm, as governments and organizations close schools, halt mass transit, and cancel sports, entertainment, religious, and political gatherings. People could be quarantined in their homes, medical facilities, apartments, or dormitories.

It’s clear a certain type of person is in love with the world this lie-stoked fear will enable them to build. In some ways, they have already won.

The public is long past accepting social media companies working hand-in-hand with the state to block “misinformation” and “boost” official sources.

Further, even if the virus continues to decline, the powers that be – and their talking heads – will simply claim (as many already are) that China’s total authoritarian control saved lives.

That’s the real campaign here. A power play for draconian social control in the name of public health. For now, as the Guardian helpfully reminds us, it’s voluntary. But the implied threat behind that is obvious: As things get more serious, that will change.

After all, this is just a virus – and a comparatively minor one – if we’re happy to see our governments take draconian measures to halt this…what about more significant threats?

Why don’t we treat the climate crisis with the same urgency as coronavirus?

…asks Owen Jones in today’s Guardian. He is not alone.

Well, maybe one day soon we will Owen. Won’t that be nice.