Yet Again, the Media’s Covid Narrative Doesn’t Add Up

If one were to go only on what one reads or sees in the media, one would think it’s the spring of 2020 all over again. The headlines are filled with stories of overcrowded hospitals, overwhelmed medical personnel, and predictions of people dying in parking lots waiting for medical care. The news articles generally quote a staffer of some kind at various hospitals and then leave it at that.

Article by Ryan McMaken from Mises.

It’s difficult to know what to make of these stories. After all, we heard very much the same thing during March, April, and May of 2020. Local governments were building makeshift hospitals in conventions centers—yet they went unused. Memphis’s overflow hospital was closed down after an entire year of never housing a single patient. In late 2020, after months of media reports that New York hospitals were utterly overwhelmed, Andrew Cuomo announced New York hospitals “were never overwhelmed.” Colorado built a 2,200-patient overflow hospital. It was never used. Last spring, a $17 million overflow facility in Houston was dismantled without ever being used.

Now we’re being told that this time, they really mean it and hospitals are on the verge of overflowing.

Yet, according to data from Johns Hopkins, most of these cases may be overstated. In Texas, for example, where hospitals have been a subject of countless recent stories about overflowing ICUs, the state is a long way from reaching its earlier peaks of 2020. Moreover, Texas is now staffing fewer ICU beds overall. The story is the same in Georgia, that supposed home of an “experiment in human sacrifice” where officials were among the first to end stay-at-home orders in 2020. Indeed, it’s clear most of the country—regardless of the state’s use of mask mandates or stay-at-home orders—remains well behind previous peak levels.

One outlier in terms of hospitalizations, however, is the state of Florida. Numbers in Florida do appear to be closer to previous peaks that most other states, and ICU usage is now larger than what it was during the summer of 2020.

Why is this?

According to many reports from the corporate media, this must be because the state’s governor is Ron DeSantis. Because of his connection to the Trump movement, the media has predictably focused on DeSantis and his policies as alleged drivers of rising covid cases in Florida. The preponderance of media articles about Florida are careful to mention that the state’s governor Ron DeSantis has opposed mask mandates, vaccine passports, and stay-at-home orders.

The implication, of course, is that DeSantis’s opposition to these measures has somehow caused today’s rising number of hospitalizations.

This connection is so tenuous, however, that even Philip Bump at the Washington Post—who clearly is no fan of DeSantis—admits it’s unclear what’s behind Florida’s rising numbers. Florida may be an outlier in terms of new hospitalizations, but it’s not an outlier in terms of policy. States that have been relatively laissez-faire on covid, like Georgia, Texas, South Dakota, and Nebraska have not seen trends similar to Florida.

Moreover, Bump notes that Florida has higher vaccination rates than many states with both fewer hospitalizations and fewer new covid deaths. Florida isn’t an outlier in terms of vaccinations. Nearly 50 percent of the population is fully vaccinated in Florida—California is at 53 percent. Floridians are vaccinated at higher rates than is the case in Utah, Texas, Indiana, Ohio, and South Dakota. Yet these other states all have fewer cases of new deaths and hospitalizations, per capita:

Something makes Florida exceptional here: These numbers are hazy enough (thanks to reporting periods and the lags in case and death counts) that one can certainly cobble together a case that there’s some other factor at play than indifference from state leadership. And, in fact, something else may be the problem. It’s hard to say.

Moreover, even with the current surge in hospitalization in Florida, the state may still never catch up with states like New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts in terms of total covid deaths per million. As of August 11, Florida is still twenty-sixth in the nation in terms of total deaths per million, at 1,870. New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts still top the list with 3,003, 2,797, and 2,629 deaths per million respectively. There is also evidence that the current increase in covid cases—and the “delta surge” in general—has already peaked.

So here we go again – the narrative doesn’t lend itself to easy explanations. States with long-lasting lockdowns, covid restrictions, and even mounting vaccine “incentives” have still been hit harder that more laissez-faire states in many cases, even after the virus has had eighteen months to spread well beyond the borders of the initial hot spots.

But for anyone who can remember the media narrative eighteen months ago, the current story will seem quite familiar. Hospitals are overflowing. But if we heed the diktats of the regime’s technocrats, we’re told, things will markedly improve. Those places that refuse to take orders from Washington will have many times more death, illness, and economic destruction. The facts never backed up this story in 2020. Twenty twenty-one isn’t shaping up to be much different.

The Dangers of Speaking the Truth Diminish If We Work Together

It’s becoming harder and harder for patriots to ignore the deep suppression of truth that’s happening in America today.

In all of my years in journalism, I have never received as many threats or been attacked by big companies like Google and Facebook as I have in 2021. I’d say that ever since we started covering widespread voter fraud, government-endorsed Pandemic Panic Theater, vaccine cover-ups, Critical Race Theory, and the various Neo-Marxist and Satanic agendas at play, I’ve been targeted more in months than the entirety of my life prior.

Speaking the truth is getting harder with so much censorship and suppression rampant. Prior to 2020, I was not a “conspiracy theorist” or an “anti-vaxxer,” but if there’s one thing the onslaught of exposed lies have taught us in the last 18 months, it’s that we cannot take what we’re told by the “arbiters of truth” at face value. There’s an agenda behind every message, a narrative driving every story, and a series of gigantic cover-ups designed to keep the masses in the dark.

This is why we’re building a network of news outlets that are willing to go against the narrative and expose the truth. We need help. We’re establishing strong partnerships with like-minded news outlets and courageous journalists. Even as Big Tech suppresses us, the honest messages they’re trying to quash are finding their way to the eyes and ears of patriots across the nation. With the help of new content partners like The Epoch Times and The Liberty Daily, we’re starting to see a real impact.

Our network is currently comprised of nine sites:

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I’ve said much of this before. From time to time I reframe this request for assistance by taking the most relevant message of the day and adjusting the story accordingly. We’ve discussed this network in previous articles. Now, it’s time to talk about help. First and foremost, we need financial assistance detailed below. But we could also use more writers who are willing to volunteer their thoughts for the sake of spreading the message. Those who are interested should contact me directly.

As far as money, we’re looking better than we have in the recent past, but we are currently experiencing a gap between revenue and expenses that cannot be overcome by click-ads and MyPillow promos alone (promo code “NOQ” by the way).

To overcome our revenue gap and keep these sites running, our needs fluctuate between $2200-$7800 per month. May, 2021, for example, was amazing and we almost broke even. June, revenue was sluggish at best and we had to make up a big difference out of our pockets. But we’re not just trying to get out of the red. If and when we start getting enough contributions to expand, we will do just that. Very few get into journalism to try to get rich and we’re definitely not among those who do. Our success is driven by spreading the truth, profitable or not.

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