The new panic lie: Increased coronavirus hospitalizations and cases in the southwest

The health “experts” and the media propagating viral panic porn think people like us don’t understand arithmetic. They think they can manipulate headline stories warning of increased cases of COVID-19 in order to push more lockdowns, ignoring all the ways that more cases are being discovered, while the percentage of positive tests, new hospitalizations and deaths, and the lethality of the virus are all waning significantly.

“Arizona’s COVID-19 spread is ‘alarming’ and action is needed, experts warn,” read the title of an Arizona Republic article on Wednesday. Yahoo News breathlessly warned about a “spike” in all the southwestern states.

As is always the case, there is a grain of truth that is hugely distorted by numerous obfuscations of important facts and context. The truth is that new hospitalizations of people coming in for serious coronavirus infections are actually extremely low. What they are actually counting are the extra people coming in for all of the delayed health care caused by the lockdown.  But thanks to universal testing in hospitals, they are discovering more asymptomatic cases than ever before, which had nothing to do with the original purpose of the hospital stay. Thus, they are blaming the fallout of the lockdown on the easing of the lockdown!

It’s not that the virus doesn’t exist any more, it’s that it has either become less potent, has already attacked those who would otherwise get seriously ill from it, or a mixture of both. This is why Dr. Donald Yealy, the chair of emergency medicine at UPMC, who’s been responsible for 30,000 tests in Pennsylvania, recently observed that those with the virus appear to be carrying lower viral loads and aren’t getting as sick from it as they did in March and April.