Rage Against the Machine

I recently wrote about my frustration with opinion, frequently wrong, masquerading as news. Since then the media has provided two almost perfect examples to illustrate that point: the coverage of Vice President Joe Biden’s Democratic primary bid and the coverage of the coronavirus pandemic.

According to segments of the media, Sen. Bernie Sanders was the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic Party — even though the primary process is barely underway. The voters of Super Tuesday disagreed. It really wasn’t that hard to see it coming.

News flash for pundits. Even though the early primary states of Iowa, Nevada and New Hampshire share the distinction of being a long way from your desks they are not broadly indicative of the public mood out in other places far from your desks. You’d all know that if you got out more.

Most of the country is pretty sick of President Trump. Even people who like some of what he’s done (like me, occasionally) are fed up with what you have to be willing to accept to go along with any good that he does. The last thing that many voters want is another Donald Trump on the left.

Where Trump plays on resentment of elites and immigrants to fire up his base, Sanders plays on resentment of the wealthy and large companies to fire up his. In fact if you interchange the words “billionaire” with “borders” it’s kind of hard to tell which one of them is talking.

Super Tuesday is pretty good evidence for that proposition that voters have little appetite for either.

Onto the coronavirus scare. Before writing this I spoke with doctors and other medical professionals. I searched the web for information from quality sources such as the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and others.

The information that you need to understand coronavirus takes a bit of digging to get to, and you have to have a bit of sophistication to parse it for what’s significant and what’s not, but it’s worth the effort.

If that sounds doing the job that the news media is supposed to do, that’s absolutely right.

The coronavirus, this one Covid-19, is an example of things that make me want to drive a railroad spike through my knee. There is a distinct possibility that nearly everyone on the planet will eventually be infected with Covid-19. The kicker is that most of us will likely never even know it.

Covid-19 is a virus like those that cause colds and flu and other respiratory ailments. The interesting things about Covid-19 are it’s adaptability and ease of transmission. The human genome rewrites itself over scales of tens of thousands of years, this little strand of RNA over a timescale of weeks.

When President Trump insists that a vaccine will be available very soon he’s wrong. The panic over the lack of a vaccine belies some hypocrisy. Many of the same people yelling for this vaccine don’t get a flu shot anyway. If you are one of those people shut up and go wash you hands.

According to the WHO the mortality rates for Covid-19, based on what we know so far, are around 3%. But you have to be careful with that number which is based on data released by Chinese researchers using questionable methodology. No one that I spoke with in the medical community believes this number is the last word.

Bear in mind that the regular flu has killed over 16,000 individuals in the U.S. so far this season. If the mortality rate of Covid-19 were 3% we’d likely be seeing a much higher death rate from it given how highly contagious it is known to be.

Tests for coronavirus are currently not widely available (South Korea appears to have the best testing program to date). Generally the way we find out that someone has coronavirus is because they become very sick and then get tested.

Even if you have faith in the Chinese data it’s better to say that about 3% of folks known to have Covid-19 succumb — but even then generally due to some underlying condition that made them vulnerable.

Rates of smoking in China are very high and perhaps this also has an effect in a seemingly high mortality rate in this study.

It appears that most healthy individuals infected with Covid-19 have little more than the symptoms of a cold or flu and many are completely asymptomatic. Fewer of these people have been tested and that skews the mortality statistics upward. If testing were widespread the mortality rate would almost certainly drop — perhaps being less than that of the current flu.

The real story here isn’t coronavirus, we’ve seen them before, it’s why testing for pandemic illness isn’t ready in this country. Every healthcare professional I spoke with alluded to a nearly broken public health system in the United States. The testing kits for Covid-19 are currently difficult to get and very expensive. There are stories of people getting bills in the thousands of dollars for a test — something that insurance typically does not pay.

That’s not what you get from cable news though. I keep hearing over and over from cable news hosts and non-medical guests that Covid-19 is 30 times more deadly than the flu (mortality rate of around 0.1%) and that we’re all in peril. That’s dangerously misleading.

Whenever one measures anything there is some inherent uncertainty that accompanies the measurement. In this case the uncertainty in the mortality rate of those infected with Covid-19 is huge.

When you do computations with measurements you have to do so in a manner that accounts for the uncertainty in the numbers. Simply stated the mortality rate from Covid-29 could be anywhere from 3% to 0.03%. One of those is much more problematic than the other.

Should you be concerned about Covid-19? Yes. It currently meets the requirement for being a pandemic. We don’t know more than we do know so vigilance is wise.

Should you be sufficiently panicked to purchase masks from Amazon (at a dollar a pop) that don’t do anything to prevent you from bacterial infection, much less viral infection? Should you panic if you have a cold? Should you begin hoarding food, ammo and supplies and dump all of your stocks for gold? No, no, no. And that’s no matter what cable news and graduates of the University of Facebook Medical School are telling you.

I apologize to the 40% of the news-consuming public I just described.

Yeah, President Trump is every kind of idiot there is and he’s bungled our response to this just like he screws up everything else. Don’t like that? Get off your butt and vote in November. But I think that he might actually be onto something when he advises against panic. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while. I think that he’s more right than wrong about remaining calm even if his reasons are transparently selfish.

You are probably not going to die of Covid-19 — now or ever. When your time comes it will probably be due to something related to cardiovascular disease, and you’ll check out in a hospital bed surrounded by your loved ones at a ripe old age.

What coronavirus should be is an opportunity for us to test and tweak our public health system. To science the heck out of our response to pandemic threats.

Oh wait, we threw science overboard when we elected the current knucklehead in chief. My bad.

Don’t take my word for any of this. Do your own research. Ask your doctor. Visit the websites of the organizations I listed above. Do what the news media should be doing for you instead of sensationalizing this and screwing it up like they do so many other things.

Associated Press and Idaho Press or Club award-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, consultant and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time happily raising children, llama farming, riding mountain bikes and motorcycles and playing guitars.