For anyone who was expecting to live through some sort of global apocalypse, somewhere between The Seventh Seal and The Walking Dead, the Xi plague must surely be turning out to be a bit of a fizzer in most respects.
Although in keeping with Orwell’s note on “negative nationalism”, the fashionable conceit that declares ‘my country, always wrong’, the left-‘intelligentsia’ are morbidly celebrating the United States’ infection and death toll, the fact is that both are remarkably low. In raw numbers, yes, they might seem high, but in a country of 300 million people, they’re well at the lower end of the developed world.
The United States has had about 20,000[ deaths], nearly half in and around New York City. That may seem like a lot, but let’s put that number in perspective. In the first place, the annual fatality rate in the US for the seasonal flu is anywhere from 25,000 to 80,000. Second, it is by no means clear whether those 20,000 fatalities really count people who died from the effects the new virus (pneumonia, mostly) or merely people who, already serious ill with something else, died having also been infected by the virus.
Going by the hysterical predictions of the “experts”, there should be millions of dead in the U.S. by now. They should be trudging their tumbrils through the city streets, shouting, “Bring out yer dead!” Hospitals should be war zones, with corpses and hideously ill alike spilling out the doors.
But that’s conspicuously not happening. Hospitalisations are falling and the gigantic field hospitals, set up to cope with the predicted avalanche of sick and dying, are being dismantled without ever treating a patient. The legacy media were forced to falsely re-use footage from Italy to even pretend that New York’s hospitals were a battlefield.
What has been most notable about the impact of the Chinese virus in most countries is the devastating impact of panicked decisions by governments and bureaucrats – even as they remain aloof from the social and economic carnage they are unleashing.
In Australia, millions of people suddenly out of work – for being supposedly “non-essential” – crashed Centrelink’s computer system. Sixteen million in the U.S. have filed for unemployment benefits within a month.
Sixteen million people suddenly discovered that whatever their livelihoods were, they were deemed “non-essential” by other people whose putatively “essential” job is determining what is essential and what is not. Why is it, one wonders, that the bureaucrats who get to say what is and what isn’t essential never seem to find their own endeavors declared “non-essential”?
The megalomania of the bureaucratic elite hasn’t stopped there.
On Friday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the President’s chief advisors on the hastily assembled “Coronavirus Task Force” suggested that Americans might soon be required to carry a certificate of immunity before being allowed to mingle freely among their fellows. This echoes an idea floated by Bill Gates that would require people to have “digital certificates” attesting to their status as vaccinated Americans.
Recently, a video surfaced that shows no fewer than seven policemen dragging a rider off a bus in Philadelphia because he wasn’t wearing a mask. At Easter in Kentucky, police were ordered to record license plate numbers of people attending church services and to turn the numbers over to local health departments[…]In Michigan, Governor Gretchen Whitmer has gone on a banning spree. It is now illegal to buy a baby car seat from Walmart, to drive between two residences that you own, or to buy seeds to grow your own food. Soon, one wag suggested, she might try banning travel between two rooms of your own house.
Don’t even tempt them.
The panic over the Wuhan flu is a textbook case of the principle, enunciated by Barack Obama’s advisor Rahm Emmanuel, that you “never want a good crisis to go to waste.” Emanuel helped Barack Obama weaponize the government against freedom in the aftermath of the financial meltdown of 2008. The Dems and their megaphones in the media are trying to do the same thing now in the face of the spread of the Wuhan Virus[…]
This is not to say that the Chinese virus isn’t dangerous, or doesn’t pose an especial threat to certain vulnerable groups. But the Black Death or the Spanish Flu it ain’t.
But the (over?) reaction of the political-media elite has much of the world teetering on the abyss of another Great Depression, not to mention the “Dark Valley” of authoritarian repression that accompanied it.
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