PANIC!
The current SARS COVID-2 pandemic has prompted most world governments to implement very drastic measures to curb the spread of the virus and surprisingly, most of the population of the world has quietly accepted a reduction in their liberties without much questioning. The outbreak is deemed a crisis by the world authorities, and the media has been very prompt at helping governments in their quest for acquiescence to the new rules. It is quite amazing how the global establishment has managed to control the majority of the population, billions of people have had their lives and livelihoods disrupted to comply with what the media assures us is “what everyone should do”.
As a believer in the extreme danger of the climate and environmental disaster we have provoked, I have been criticized very often for not being optimistic enough about the future. I have always considered that the media is at fault for humanity’s refusal to deal with the climate crisis; their lack of serious and repeated reporting about it precluded the formation of an early consensus for action. Defenders of the media’s role usually retorted that media audiences do not like to hear negative news and the truth about our climate situation would cause panic.
What we are seeing with SARS COVID-2 is completely unprecedented: the media is proving that they have a great talent for creating panic when they want; their audiences are equally capable of accepting overwhelmingly negative news without a question. The media is creating panic by reporting wild speculations as facts and misusing statistics to create a fear effect without putting them in the appropriate context. Contrary to what many people had told me, the key isn’t that people don’t want to hear negative threatening news, what matters is to be part of the ‘correct”group that the media has defined as the most rational and proper. Even though these speculative statistics cause fear and suffering in the audience, most people don’t question their validity or truth value.
A good example of the panic-causing media is an article that appeared in the New York Times on the 22nd of March about how New York City has roughly 5% of worldwide cases, the world’s hot spot for SARS COV2. This number isn’t put into context and its vagueness is meant to cause panic. The article proceeds to give the’ frightening’ numbers for New York on that day: population 8,5 Million, 16,687 cases, and 150 cumulative deaths. This gives a mortality percentage of 0.88, lower than the flu, which is 1. In a normal day with no pandemic, New York City has 420 deaths on average and the latest peaks in deaths caused by SARS-COVID-2 have an average of 218 per day. All this is still well within the normal for flu-related deaths on any year.
If we look closer at the 5% quoted in the above article we find that it is quite meaningless because we don’t have a sure way of measuring the total number of cases. A very small percentage of the 7.53 billion people on Earth are being tested; for the most part, tests are available for famous people and seriously ill patients admitted to the hospital, usually in industrialized countries. In the US, New York is the state that has been testing the most, while the testing in the rest of states, even California, has been quite spotty. If you don’t have a reliable number for total world cases, a percentage of an unknown is meaningless. The lack of informed context for that 5% betrays a sensationalist aim with panic as a result.
From the above numbers, the article goes on about the dire implications regarding mortality rates for the area. To calculate the mortality rate we need an accurate recording of tested cases and compare those with the number of deceased. The testing is very important not only regarding its accuracy but also in defining the segments of the population being tested. The accuracy of the test most used, the PCR or Polymerase Chain Reaction, was implemented in a rush without following the usual protocol that ensures high accuracy. The tests produce many false positive and false negatives, creating a worse problem for calculating an accurate mortality rate.
Regarding the testing strategy, on one end of the spectrum, you have Burundi, whose president was asked why his country was the only one in Africa without any cases. He answered that the reason was simple, Burundi had not tested anyone. On the opposite side is Iceland, the country that has conducted the widest screening of any other country, testing people not just when they go to the hospital feeling sick, but a normal swath of the population. Iceland has about 1,586 cases, 39hospitalized, 13 in the ICU and 6 deaths. The Icelandic strategy of testing people at random gives a very low mortality rate for the country, about 0.37. The high level of control in Iceland which correctly a death only for people who have been diagnosed with the virus, allows for a very accurate calculation of the danger of SARS COVID-2, which is much lower than the flu.
Iceland’s accurate approach that correlates with low mortality can be compared with Italy, the country with one of the highest mortality rates of about 5%. The difference is quite staggering, but it shows what a difference does panic and a biased testing approach can do. To begin with, Northern Italy, the area most affected in the country, has the worst air pollution in Europe with a high incidence of respiratory problems every year. The bulk of the testing in Northern Italy is being performed on already critically ill patients, which even in a normal year are quite numerous in the area.
The true fatality rate calculation is supposed to be the portion of those infected who die, what Iceland does, not the deaths from identified positive cases, which is what Italy and other countries with high mortality rates are doing. Most deaths involve very ill patients who end up with pneumonia, and if you use their numbers for the fatality rate you are calculating an incorrect overly high reading, helping to create panic and hysteria. Iceland has the correct mortality rate for the virus since it is using the portion of those infected who die for their calculation.
The correct calculation of the mortality rate became even more difficult in the US since the CDC updated its official guidelines on March 24th. The new rules for coding COVID-related deaths are as follows: “any death where the disease “caused or is *assumed* to have caused or *contributed to* death is declared a SARS COVID-2 death. Confirmed lab tests are not required…” This means that any death of a person who has symptoms that can be assumed to be from the virus, can be counted in the SARS COVID-2 mortality rate, even without a test. According to Professor Walter Ricciardi, advisor to Italy’s health minister, this generous way of counting SARS COVID-2 deaths is what Italy had been doing to get its phenomenally high mortality rate. This being done in most countries with high mortality rates.
This wrong attribution of mortality to just the SARS COVID-2 virus is evident in the case of playwright Terrence McNally, whose recent death was attributed to the virus by the media. In reality, he was an 80-year-old man with a history of lung cancer and chronic respiratory disease, who was vulnerable to the viral load of the flu season every year. By attributing a normal death during flu season to a vilified virus shows how intent is the media on creating panic.
The media’s fear-mongering is causing more problems than it solves because the panic mode prompts a sharp increase of chronic illness sufferers rushing to the ER with any cold or mild fever. This creates crowded conditions that augment the cross-contamination with the viral cocktail of the season, leading to higher probabilities of deaths; without the panic, the deaths would be considered the normal toll of viral activity during the winter months. The panic about the crisis is also causing the discontinuation of treatments of cancer and other patients, increase their risk of death. According to Michael Levitt, Chemistry Nobel Prize winner from Stanford University, the current death toll in Italy is about 10% of the deaths caused by the flu during the winter of 2016–2017 and the whole panic response is greatly exaggerated.
The media and the governments of most countries seem intent on creating panic and though they insist they have the science, they aren’t even putting their statistics in context. This virus can be a little bit more infectious than the usual viral load of the season, but no worse than the influenza pandemic of 2009. Does anybody remember such panic about the bad flu in 2009? No, yet it happened. The H1N1 influenza pandemic of 2009 was first identified and reported in California on April 18, 2009, and subsequently spread to the rest of the world. The World Health Organization and the CDC both declared the virus a pandemic because of its slightly increased infection rate and spread worldwide. By June the pandemic was subsiding and was mostly gone, the only places where they noticed a slight problem were a few summer camps that had to implement rules to increase hand washing and cleaning of surfaces. By October there was some re-infection that didn’t spread much and the pandemic was finished by April 2010.
Though this pandemic killed between 250,000 to 550,000 people worldwide, the media didn’t report the frightening daily numbers accompanied by inaccurate speculations about future mortality rates. There was not either any sensational reporting about actors coming down with the H1N1 or young people dying too young of the bad flu. In conclusion, a slightly more dangerous scenario than usual in 2009 wasn’t considered a disaster, while a similar one in 2020 is; the only difference is how the media and the governments have chosen to handle it.
Confirming the lack of rationality in enforcing lock downs through the promotion of panic and negatively biased statistics, is the example given by countries like Sweden, Iceland, Japan, Singapore and South Korea, who have refused a lock down and instead have followed a rational approach that doesn’t include panic. This has led to far fewer cases and deaths, which is what you would imagine the whole world wants. Japan recently changed its policy to a lock down, based on what the media deems a “tragic” situation; if you look at the numbers you find that the number of cases in Japan until now is 3,654 with 85 deaths. This is certainly not a huge mortality rate meriting the whole disturbance of lives and the economy.
In sharp contrast to the hyped current panic, the reality of climate change has solid science behind it and there is plenty of cumulative information available. The state of our planet is a true crisis that is lurking behind this pandemic hyped by the media. If you look at a graph of CO2 concentrations in our atmosphere we notice that we crossed above the safe level of 300ppm in 1923. Even after all the emissions of WWII and the subsequent globalization in the mid-1970s we were still not that far from that safe level, with about 328ppm. After that, the CO2 concentration shot up to a stratospheric concentration of 416,5ppm in early March of this year, making it clear that we are in trouble.
According to Andrew Glikson, Earth and Paleo climate scientist from Australian National University, CO2 is currently having a yearly increase of 2–3ppm which is much higher than the one caused after the asteroid impact that eradicated the dinosaurs (0.18 parts per million CO2 per year) and the thermal maximum 55 million years ago (0.11 ppm CO2 per year).
The greenhouse gas concentration in our atmosphere is like the vitals for a human. Decades-long research and the development of atmospheric physics and chemistry since the 19th century have concluded that there is a direct correlation between greenhouse concentration in the atmosphere and warming of the planet. This, in turn, creates all sorts of feedback mechanisms that turn the Earth’s climate capricious and increasingly unable to support human survival. Our planet has been with a high fever for a while and though we are experiencing some of the effects, few people are aware of the gravity of the situation.
Adding to the fever of the planet is methane, a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. If you look at 800,000 years of concentrations in the atmosphere, you find that we left the chartered territory in the late 19th century. This gas has continued a similar trajectory as CO2 and it having dangerous spikes thanks to the effects of global warming on the Arctic. The Arctic has been warming disproportionately more than the rest of the world, creating a worrisome loss of ice and permafrost melting that allows for the methane under it to escape, compounding our greenhouse problem.
The most powerful gas in the deadly triad is Nitrous Oxide, which started passing the threshold of correctness at the end of the 19th century but it shot up in a sharp needle in the early 20th century once the Haber-Bosch process for manufacturing nitrogen-based fertilizer allowed for the so-called “green revolution” in agriculture. Its extreme use disturbed the nitrogen cycle on Earth increasing the concentration of this gas in the atmosphere as never before.
These dangerously elevated concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased the Earth’s temperature causing the disturbance of atmospheric and oceanic currents, creating capricious climate swings that preclude the correct functioning of agriculture and human prosperity. The Earth’s fever test results don’t cause many problems for Earth itself, but they do make life increasingly difficult for the survival of humans and most species.
Nobody could deny that the survival of our species and others should be a priority for humans. If we accept that we belong to the most scientifically-based culture in history, we would have to admit that these worrisome concentrations in the atmosphere merited wide reporting by the media. If the media would have also explained the feedback mechanisms and the negative connotations for our survival since at least the 1970s, there would have been an earlier consensus for action and possible reversal of the problem.
From the middle of the 1970s, there was already a small consensus among scientists about the climate disaster that was unfolding. The energy crisis at the time prompted President Jimmy Carter to install solar panels on the White House and to recommend a personal reduction in energy use, by lowering the heat and wearing a sweater at home. The media laughed at him, ridiculing him for attacking the American dream of excessive consumerism. The lab tests of the Earth were already out of whack in the 70s, and the energy crisis could have been a good opportunity to tell people about the blind race to the bottom of eternal growth and its effects on our survival.
The sacrifices needed decades ago to curb the greenhouse emissions were as unthinkable then as a lock down of almost the whole world would have been just a few months ago to us. Yet, thanks to the power of mainstream and social media to influence people, most people are now willing even to reinforce the drastic measures to the current perceived threat. The effects of climate change that will overwhelm us soon thanks to our lack of awareness and delayed action will cause real disruptions to our food and water supply, turning whole areas uninhabitable and producing unprecedented numbers of refugees. Unfortunately, the media is not interested in accurately reporting about the massive threat that climate and ecological disaster presents to our survival, but instead has chosen to elevate a very normal threat to the level of rampant hysteria.
Why does the media, knowing the power they have over the population, agrees to cause panic with this pandemic but not with the one in 2009, or even less with the real threat to our survival, the climate disaster? The answer lies in the media’s corporate allegiances that preclude them from accurately informing the public. The media is owned by 6 corporations and their reporting is molded to suit the interest of corporations and the political establishment that caters to them. Their decision to pump up or diminish a threat can only make sense if it makes sense to a powerful corporate establishment.
Cui Bono, who benefits from this unprecedented media-induced mass hysteria? The current insistence on the high moral value of draconian lock downs of whole countries is causing intense suffering for the most vulnerable people in each country and even many who are usually prosperous but are getting deep into debt with the loss of economic activity. In the meantime, the super-rich are taking advantage of the situation by forcing bailouts from the government and getting even richer. It is safe to deduce then that moneyed interests are the culprits in their aim to increase the wealth transfer from the poor and moderately wealthy to the super-wealthy. As confirmation of the strong links between world business interests and the current situation, there is the partnership announced on March 11, 2020 between the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organization to establish the COVID Action Platform for Business; on that same day that the WHO officially declared SARS COVID-2 a pandemic. The crisis response that causes suffering to most people in the world is considered as a business opportunity for the elites.
The damage done will cause more deaths caused by psychological and economic distress than the much-hyped virus-related mortality that the media bombards us with. This unprecedented response to an exaggerated normal threat is hurting most people in the world. The authoritarian measures that have been implemented thanks to a media-created panic constitute a bad omen for the increase of absolute control by elites in the future. It is time to put our thinking cap back on and notice the difference between a threat that the media has pushed for the benefit of the few, and the big threat of climate disaster that will severely affect us all, but the media barely mentions.
