Believe it or not, despite the horrific response to the coronavirus by Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio, the United States has done pretty well… especially compared to what experts were predicting in the early weeks.
Back in March, the attending physician of Congress and the Supreme Court, Brian Monahan, told the U.S. Senate that he expected 70 million to 150 million people in the U.S. would contract the coronavirus.
Here’s the report from NBC News:
The attending physician of Congress and the Supreme Court, Brian Monahan, briefed Senate staff on Tuesday afternoon in a closed-door meeting and said that he expects 70 million to 150 million people in the U.S. will contract the coronavirus, two sources tell NBC News.
The meeting didn’t include any senators but was for administrative staff and personnel from both parties. Monahan briefed staff on how they can keep healthy and ways to prevent the virus from spreading, including not shaking hands, advice that is not being followed by some senators, as we’ve seen this week.
In addition to getting briefed on prevention and treatment, staffers asked questions, including if any travel restrictions should be put in place for members. On international travel, Monahan said members should not go if they don’t have to, whereas for domestic travel, no restrictions have been put in place.
Fast-forward five months, and we’re only at five million cases.
Instead of the narrative being “We succeeded in flattening the curve,” we’re being told the United States is losing the war against the coronavirus. Axios declared this a month ago when we were at 3.1 million cases.
We literally went from catastrophic predictions warning us of overwhelmed hospitals and about a third of the population being infected, to just five million cases. Axios noted at the time of Monahan’s estimate that it was “in line with other projections from health experts.” Obviously, we know more about the disease now than we did in March, but when multiple experts were saying a third of the population would be infected and we’re at 1.5 percent, isn’t that cause for some celebration?
The number of COVID-19 infections is also less than one-tenth of the number of infections of H1N1 (swine flu) during the 2009 pandemic (60.8 million) despite the fact that COVID-19 is four times as infectious as H1N1. That speaks volumes about how much better the pandemic has played out despite expert predictions and previously celebrated pandemic responses that were far worse.
If Barack Obama or any Democrat had been president during the coronavirus pandemic, and everything played out the same in terms of the number of cases and deaths, the media would be painting it as a success because we beat the expectations of the experts.
Sadly, the media has a different agenda because Donald Trump is president.
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Matt Margolis is the author of the new book Airborne: How The Liberal Media Weaponized The Coronavirus Against Donald Trump, and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis
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