not horseshit but it's horseshit

From my email response to a friend:

I'm pretty sure you don't mean that the virus itself is horseshit, but that the response to it may be overblown in places?  There are certainly spots in the country where it's killing huge numbers of folks, like NYC and causing a problem with overloading the available bed space, like down in Dougherty County around Albany here in Georgia.  Savannah Court Nursing Home here in Greene County definitely has multiple cases, and some of them may die.

With that caveat, what is horseshit is the media treatment of this pandemic.  Short on facts, long on speculation and doomsday scenarios, with a liberal sprinkling of politics, the media has almost completely failed to keep us informed with anything approaching what we need to deal with it.  I'd include the CDC and the FDA among those agencies who have failed us as well.  The CDC was late and has been inconsistent.  The FDA dragged its bureaucratic feet on approving a test for the virus and we are still paying that price.

What I saw happen was that first, the media blew this thing up because they were certain it would hurt Trump's reelection chances.  However, the fact that the virus was a real threat and people really started dying tripped up that narrative thread.  By the time the media stories stampeded people into a panic, it was too late.  They had lost control of the story and it no longer served their purposes.  At a time when the strategy might have been more nuanced with an emphasis on isolating vulnerable old people and everyone else just being careful, the panic had already set in.

And so the response became "shut it down," an overly blunt instrument.  The truth is that there is a lot of uncertainty about this thing and what it can do.  But nobody wants to honestly report THAT because it serves no agenda.  The agenda driven reporting of this (and damn near every other story for that matter) does a terrible disservice to our country.  It means that a lot of people who don't trust the media don't believe the virus can harm them.  It also means that other people who swallow media whole believe we're living through the last days on planet earth.  Neither of those things is correct.

This is a bad thing, a cause for concern, but not, I think, a cause for panic and overreaction.  Measured, thoughtful reporting would have helped us make better choices, but it's too late for that now.  We have to live within what's happening now, deal with the reality rather than wishing it were different.  I still like the strategy of that link I sent you the other day of suppress, then test, trace and isolate.  Unfortunately, it's too late for that, though we might still get a variation of it.

I don't see any way that this virus doesn't eventually pass through the entire population.  That's a reality that I also don't see reported very much.  Given that that's gonna happen, what's the best way to deal with it?  That's what I want to know.  In other words, what happens AFTER we flatten the curve, as the saying goes?  The virus doesn't just give up and go home, never to be seen again.  I see it coming back this November and that makes me worried for my parents and others who manage to not be exposed during this first wave.  What protects them next time?  Shutting down the country again is not an option (and shouldn't have been an option this time, IMO).