Columnist: About all those who tested positive, ‘So what?’

FPI / August 11, 2020

The "grim" numbers are blared out by the major media on a 24/7 loop. The latest number of people who tested positive for covid.

Washington Times columnist Cheryl K. Chumley on Aug. 8 noted some of the latest headlines:

"Five people who attended a meeting with Florida’s governor test positive for coronavirus, President Donald Trump’s national security adviser and campaign staffers test positive for COVID-19, several St. Louis Cardinals baseball players test positive for the coronavirus."

"But — and this is a serious question — so what?"

Chumley noted that "if this were a virus by a different name, if this were a different political climate, if this were a different White House administration with a different commander-in-chief ... test positives wouldn’t raise national eyebrows."

Take the flu for example. The CDC estimates that between October 2019 and April 2020 there were between 18 million and 26 million flu medical visits. There were some 740,000 flu hospitalizations, up to 56 million flu illnesses and up to 62,000 flu deaths.

So, Chumley asked, "where was the quarantining these past flu season years? Where were the face masks? The executively ordered closings of businesses? The forced shut-downs of churches? The complete shuttering of normal, in-person school days?"

"The coronavirus, by daily-updated CDC count, has reportedly claimed the lives of 157,631 — we think," Chumley noted. "We don’t really know because the test kits have been faulty; the reporting from hospitals and clinics and medical professionals, often suspect. And the media have been all over the map in getting to the truths about the conflicts of interest and big vaccine money and politics that have definitely influenced how this COVID-19 response has been played by government."

Whatever the numbers of say, "simply testing positive is meaningless. It’s only the fatalities that matter — it’s only the percentage of those who test positive and die, versus those who test positive and recover that matters," Chumley wrote.

So what is the big difference now? Why panic every time someone tests positive, even though the fatalities hardly show the need for such panicky reporting?

"Simple. There’s an election coming, and Democrats have no candidate to beat Trump. It’s not that the coronavirus is infecting Americans and taking lives in greater degrees, with greater intensity than, say, the flu in past years. It’s that politics have infected the coronavirus response and stolen Americans’ capacity for common sense," Chumley concluded.

Free Press International