By Rich Lowry
Friday, May 22, 2020
It’s not March anymore.
The coronavirus has taken a heartbreaking toll on
Americans, but the course of the virus is not the same as it was a few months
ago. We are on the other side of the curve. There are encouraging signs all
over the country, and no early indications of a reopening debacle.
The question now is whether the media and political
system can absorb good news on the virus, which is often ignored or buried
under misleading storylines.
The press has a natural affinity for catastrophes, which
make compelling viewing and good copy. The pandemic is indeed a
once-in-a-generation story. So, the media are naturally loath to shift gears
and acknowledge that the coronavirus has begun to loosen its grip.
Meanwhile, progressives and many journalists have
developed a near-theological commitment to the lockdowns, such that any
information that undermines them is considered unwelcome, even threatening.
This accounts for the widespread sense that no one should say things have
gotten better . . . or people are going to die.
Usually, when it is thought the public can’t handle the
truth, it is a truth about some threat that could spark panic. In this case,
the truth is information that might make people think it’s safe to go outside
again.
Almost all of the discussion about reopening is framed by
worries that we will reopen too soon, not that we might reopen too late. That
is literally unthinkable, even as we have entered a new phase.
As data analyst Nate Silver pointed out the other day,
the seven-day rolling average for deaths is 1,362, down from 1,761 the previous
week and a peak of 2,070 on April 21. That’s still much too high, but the trend
is favorable.
Testing capacity, such a concern for so long, has really
begun to expand after hitting a plateau for weeks. Testing nationally on some
days has been in the high 300,000s or over 400,000. The issue in some states
now is not capacity, but actually finding enough people to test.
Scott Gottlieb of the American Enterprise Institute notes
that the positivity rate, or percentage of people testing positive, has
continued to fall throughout May.
The reopenings could certainly still go awry, but so far
there is no clear indication of it. Cases are still falling in Austria,
Denmark, and Norway, despite those countries’ being relatively far along on
reopening. Denmark has been mystified why it is almost five weeks into
reopening and hasn’t yet seen increases in infections.
The press has often, out of sloppiness or willfulness,
tried to create negative news around the reopenings. CNN tweeted last weekend,
“Texas is seeing the highest number of new coronavirus cases and deaths just
two weeks after it officially re-opened.” As Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics
pointed out, the seven-day rolling average of new cases had indeed been
trending up, but the seven-day rolling average of the number of tests had gone
up, too — which would naturally turn up more cases.
The key indicator is the positivity rate, and it was down
in Texas.
A North Carolina TV station tweeted, “Breaking News: NC
sees largest spike in coronavirus cases since pandemic began.” That referred to
800 new cases over the past 24 hours on May 16. But tests had been going
sharply up and the positivity rate trending down.
Headlines noted that Florida recorded 500 new cases in
one day. It generated fewer headlines, and perhaps none, when Governor Ron
DeSantis explained that the state had received a dump of 75,000 test results,
yielding the 500 new cases, for a minuscule positivity rate of 0.64%.
It’s not as though we haven’t had a cataract of
unassailably legitimate bad news over the past few months. We’ve been
experiencing a wrenching public-health crisis and a steep recession on top of
it. There shouldn’t be a need to obscure favorable trends. We can handle the
truth.
No comments:
Post a Comment