A word of advice to members of the press: Try not to sound so excited when you report that the United States allegedly has more known COVID-19 cases than any country in the world.
Cheering the reported data just so you can take a victory lap around the White House is a particularly bad look, especially as the matter involves the suffering and death of your countrymen.
On Thursday, the U.S. coronavirus case count surpassed 85,000, according to the pandemic tracker maintained by Johns Hopkins University. This means the U.S. supposedly has the most reported cases of any country in the world.
I say “supposedly,” because if you believe the numbers reported out of China, boy, have I got a bridge to sell you. This is not a knock against Johns Hopkins. It is doing great work with the data it is provided. Rather, this is to say only that we have no reason to trust figures prepared by Chinese Communist Party officials. For starters, when it comes to the coronavirus pandemic, they have lied every step of the way. Second, as my Washington Examiner colleague Phil Klein notes, the numbers reported by Beijing are unbelievable.
Chinese officials claim new coronavirus cases have increased by only 1,782 since late February. There is no way this is accurate, especially considering China itself said new cases jumped from 920 to roughly 80,000 between Jan. 23 and Feb. 29.
Until we have clearer and more reliable figures from China (or Iran for that matter), there are only two things that members of the free press can say about reported infections in the U.S.: The number is too high, and China is lying. Furthermore, the data are not adjusted for population size. The U.S. has 5.5 times as many people as Italy, and so it would have the equivalent of more than 400,000 cases if its caseload were scaled up to the size of the U.S. population.
But leave it up to members of our vaunted Fourth Estate to trumpet unreliable data with sensational, misleading headlines and commentary.
“The U.S. Now Leads the World in Confirmed Coronavirus Cases,” reads a headline published by the New York Times. Its subhead adds, “Following a series of missteps, the nation is now the epicenter of the pandemic.”
The New York Times report, which dedicates a lot of space to praising Beijing’s response to the outbreak, never once entertains the possibility that China’s numbers are less-than-accurate.
CNN published a similarly flawed report titled, “US has more known cases of coronavirus than any other country.”
“The United States Has The Most Confirmed Coronavirus Cases In The World,” read the headline on a HuffPost report that also accepts the ludicrous notion that China’s numbers have remained essentially flat since late February.
In the world of news commentary, things are no better.
“Who’s the shithole country now?” GQ correspondent Julia Ioffe asked of the U.S. on Thursday evening.
Her remark is a reference to when President Trump in 2018 reportedly referred to Haiti and African countries by the same description. In response to Ioffe’s gleeful promotion of the U.S.’s coronavirus milestone, the answer is: China. China is the shithole country that created and spread this pandemic.
“USA now has more Coronavirus cases that any country in the world,” tweeted MSNBC host and former Trump hype man Joe Scarborough, careful to include no fewer than six siren emojis in his tweet.
The MSNBC anchor added in a follow-up tweet, quoting the president: “‘We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.’ -Donald Trump, January 22nd.”
You sure showed him, Joe! And all it took to land this devastating blow was 85,000 infected and 1,200-plus dead people in the U.S.
Then there is CNN’s reliably dimwitted Jim Acosta, who tweeted, “The US has just passed China, a country four times larger In population.”
His attempt to put the coronavirus data into perspective works only if you are stupid enough to believe the figures reported out of China, which Acosta apparently is.
The number of cases in the U.S. is too high. That is a fact. But America is not quite “No. 1” or “the epicenter of the pandemic,” despite what our overeager and shamefully naïve news media may say.
