The media swear they’re the ones on the side of science and that they have no interest in making the pandemic political. Yet they’re utterly incapable of contextualizing the coronavirus in a way that isn’t intended to keep the public in a constant and unjustified panic.
CNN on Thursday aired a segment meant to dispel several “misconceptions” about the coronavirus, including, TV doctor Sanjay Gupta said, that young people are fully exempt from anything virus related.
“Misconception No. 1: Only older people are affected by the virus,” said Gupta in his most authoritative voice. “The fact is, everybody’s been impacted in some way by the virus.”
Note that he said, “impacted in some way.” Well, yes, I still don’t directly know of a single person to have gotten sick or tested positive, but I have had dental appointments canceled, and I have been forced to wear a mask in a fitness center that’s completely empty, so I’ve been “impacted.”
But Gupta went on to suggest that young and healthy people have every reason to fear succumbing to COVID-19 to the same degree that older, less healthy people do. “While older people are much more likely to die if they’re infected, younger people are by no means immune. There have been over 840 COVID-19 related deaths in young people under the age of 30. At least 850 children, 17 and younger, have been hospitalized.”
Setting aside that Gupta offered up no examples of anyone believing themselves to be “immune” from the virus, it might have been helpful for him to add a little bit more information to his very ominous figures.
As of Thursday, we have seen close to 7 million confirmed cases of infection in the United States. If 840 people under age 30 have died, that is a grand total of .01% of the infection total.
I know we are, for some reason, never supposed to compare the coronavirus to the flu (even as every health expert worries that medical professionals will confuse the two this winter), but children age 5-17 made up .6% of flu-related deaths in the 2018-2019 influenza season.
Does this mean healthy young people have nothing to worry about? Obviously not. It means they should do what they should have always been doing, which is to practice good hygiene and, for now, follow the guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help limit the spread of the new virus. An infinitesimal risk, after all, is still a risk.
But what it also doesn’t mean is that we should pretend all risks are created equal. They’re not. Working through the pandemic should literally mean working through it. The media should not be demanding that we all remain paralyzed in a state of shock, waiting for an elusive cure that will likely never come, or some vaccine that will take months to distribute.
Most of us, first and foremost the young and healthy, can continue mostly normal operations with minimal risk of falling severely ill. For others, the calculation might be different.
That’s not a political point. That’s a scientific point.
