Huge Disconnect Between American Public’s Perception and the Reality of the COVID-19 Crisis

July 16, 2020 (EIRNS)—“The United States is being ravaged by a deadly pandemic that is growing exponentially, overwhelming health care systems and costing thousands of lives, to say nothing of an economic recession that threatens to plague the nation for years to come,” Reid Wilson wrote in the July 15 The Hill.

“But the American public seems to be over the pandemic, eager to get kids back in schools, ready to hit the bar scene and hungry for Major League Baseball to play its abbreviated season. The startling divergence between the brutal reality of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the fantasy land of a forthcoming return to normalcy has public health experts depressed and anxious about what is to come. The worst is not behind us, they say, by any stretch of the imagination.”

The article then goes on to quote some of those experts:

“It’s an absolute disconnect between our perceived reality and our actual reality,” said Craig Spencer, a New York City emergency room doctor who directs global health in emergency medicine at New York Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center. “To look at the COVID case count and the surge in cases and to think that we can have these discussions as we have uncontrolled spread....”

Not surprisingly, the liberal The Hill takes the very real problems to spin their coverage to go after President Donald Trump: “A failure of national leadership has led us to a place where we are back where we were before, no national testing strategy, no national strategy for supply,” said Kelli Drenner, who teaches public health at the University of Houston. “States are still on their own to scramble for reagents and swabs and PPE and all of that, still competing against each other and against nations for those resources.”