Arrogant liberals in the media have enjoyed pointing to other countries with low coronavirus infection numbers. Their point was something along the lines of, “See? They got it under control, and we haven’t, and it’s all because of Trump!”
The funny thing is, it often happens that a few days later, the country they are extolling sees a surge in case numbers.
If we weren’t talking about a virus that has killed more than 1.5 million people worldwide, it would be funny.
South Korea is the latest in that pattern.
The New York Times on Thursday reported that South Korea has seen an explosion of coronavirus cases across the country in recent days, which authorities are not sure they can keep from spreading until a vaccine becomes available for the population. That’s not expected until March.
“Previous waves [of infections] included mass clusters that health officials were able to target and trace,” the New York Times reported. “The current wave spread through numerous small clusters that erupted in nursing homes, hospitals, saunas, bars, restaurants, music halls and factories, most of them in the Seoul metropolitan area, but also in towns farther away.”
Na Seong-woong, a deputy commissioner of the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, told the paper that “the current wave is neither temporary nor regional, but steady and nationwide. and that there isn’t “one central cluster that we can shut down with a focused testing and isolating campaign.”
That’s a lot like what pretty much the rest of the world has seen, even if at one point we were told that South Korea was doing everything right and we dummies in the United States, led by President Trump, were doing everything wrong.
The New York Times could hardly contain itself back in March, heralding South Korea as a model of the appropriate government response to a pandemic.
“As global deaths from the virus surge past 15,000, officials and experts worldwide are scrutinizing South Korea for lessons,” the paper said at the time. “And those lessons, while hardly easy, appear relatively straightforward and affordable: swift action, widespread testing and contact tracing, and critical support from citizens.” For emphasis, the New York Times noted that, “For all the attention to South Korea’s successes, its methods and containment tools are not prohibitively complex or expensive.” That glowing tribute came under the blaring headline, “How South Korea Flattened the Curve.”
Why can’t we do it like the Koreans?!
It turns out that, just as we knew all along, unless a country’s government is willing to wipe out its economy completely, throw tens of millions of people into poverty, and prepare for years of high unemployment numbers, a highly contagious, airborne virus will do what it’s programmed to do — spread.
This is not unlike what has happened in Europe. Germany was supposedly doing all the right things to shut down the virus while Trump and Republican governors were doing moronic, ignorant things, such as moving workers back to their jobs and businesses.
The New York Times, back in April, showered praise on Germany because of the government’s “level of engagement and a commitment of public resources in fighting the epidemic.” Then October came around, and positive cases skyrocketed. On April 4, when that New York Times story was published, Germany was averaging a little over 5,000 new cases per day. As of Thursday, it’s averaging more than 20,000 per day.
It’s no one’s fault. Viruses spread, and humanity is limited in what it can do to stop them. If the media hadn’t been so deeply invested in making the pandemic political and turning it into Trump’s fault, they would have been telling you this truth all along.
