In the last four weeks, the number of new cases each day of COVID 19 infections have fallen in the USA by about 40%. The number of people in the hospital due to the virus has dropped big time as well. In fact, when we had the early summer spike in new cases, the hospitalizations never rose as much. That is because many of the new cases were asymptomatic or low symptom cases caught due to the avalanche of new testing. In New York City yesterday, the percentage of tests that came back positive was less than one quarter of one percent. That means only 1 test out of 400 showed a viral infection. That's less than the margin of error. In other words, if one tested 400 people who were not infected, there would still be a few whose tests would come back with false positive readings. It may be that essentially no one tested positive in New York City. (Of course, there can be false negatives as well, so we really don't know.) On top of this, in all the states where there was a big increase in cases in early summer, the declines in cases and hospitalizations have been dramatic. For example, in Texas, there is almost a 50% decline in the number of folks in the hospital due to COVID.
All this is great news. If the trends continue (and we will just have to wait and see on that), we could be getting to the point where the big outbreak in the USA is coming to an end. The USA which for a long time had more cases than any other country, is now third after India and Brazil in the number of daily new cases (and we have many multiples of the numbers of tests). Other countries are also moving close to the numbers in the USA.
So if there's all this great news, why isn't there more coverage of it? If you watch the news, the latest big story was about how results of COVID tests are too slow in being reported. Supposedly, people are waiting more than 4 days to get results. That too turned out to be a lie. The two biggest labs doing tests (Labcorp and Quest) reported that high priority tests (those for people with serious symptoms) have a one day turn around time. They further said that the other tests were being reported back, on average, after two days. Then there are hundreds of thousands of tests done on the machinges that give results in 15 minutes or less. While the initial four day wait claim got big coverage, the actual facts were hardly covered at all. And why is there no big celebration in the media of the huge decline in people suffering from the virus in the hospital? Shouldn't the fears of the American people be dealt with by telling them the truth.
The answer is that the media wants people to be frightened. That lets them (and their Democrat allies) blame President Trump for the virus. How many times have Biden or Cuomo or Schumer or Pelosi told us that Trump had no strategy for testing? The USA went from having the capacity to do a few hundred tests each day to actually doing over eight hundred thousand tests each day, but that means nothing to these fear mongers. People with symptoms basically get their test results within a day while the rest get them in two days on average, but the fear mongers falsely claim it takes four days in order to keep people fearful.
A pandemic is not a political opportunity. America deserves the truth not phony stories designed to stir up fear.
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