Covid-19 coronavirus: Donald Trump’s laughable excuse for the scale of US outbreak
NZ Herald headline
Given the amount of US TV news I watch, how did that one get past me? What’s he said now that warrants being called a “laughable excuse”? Maybe it’s something new that I’ve missed; let me take a look.
A Newspaper labels it “COMMENT” and it’s by a Sam Clench on news.com.au
Donald Trump has come up with a new excuse for the astonishing scale of his country’s coronavirus outbreak.
It’s not a good one.-“Don’t forget, we have more cases than anybody in the world. But why? Because we do more testing,” Mr Trump told workers at a medical supply plant in Pennsylvania yesterday.
“When you test, you have a case. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing we would have very few cases.
“They don’t want to write that. It’s just common sense.”
The author immediately launches into derision; you can almost see the gleeful, self-satisfied look on his face
“If we didn’t do any testing we would have very few cases”.
This is a stupid statement. It is not “controversial” or “bizarre” or “unconventional”, or any of the other words we traditionally use to sanitise the absurd things that come out of Mr Trump’s mouth with such depressing regularity.
It is just pure, weapons-grade stupid.
It’s like saying that if you don’t use pregnancy tests, you’ll never have a baby. Or that if police stop investigating murders, the amount of crime will drop.
If the United States tested fewer people, it would still have the same number of cases. The government would just have no idea where they were, and therefore no capacity to contain them. The virus would be allowed to spread undetected.”
If there’s anything that ranks as “weapons-grade stupid” here, it has to be the opinion of Sam Clench, possibly superseded by news.com.au and A Newspaper for bothering to fill space with such garbage.
Without getting into the fact that Trump is right (the more you test the more results you’re going to have) and that the incoherent nonsensical analogies about pregnancy and murder are so pathetic they don’t warrant challenging, let me say this:
“Opinion” pieces or “editorials” have always been a legitimate way of creating interest and stimulating curiosity or discussion around news. Debate and freedom of expression are healthy: a way to thrash things out and sometimes, come to better, more informed opinions. This piece of clumsy, almost inarticulate nonsense serves only to show the astounding level of the author’s stupidity and inability to form and deliver a sound argument, and delivers NOTHING factual.
Clench starts with the premise that the scale of the Coronavirus outbreak in the USA is “astonishing” but doesn’t explain what it is that is astonishing. Is it the 1,507,773 recorded cases? From a population of over 331 million, that would make it less than 0.5% so you’d hardly call that astonishing. Maybe it’s the 90,113 deaths? Well that comes out at less than 0.03% so probably not that either.
Maybe the answer is in some more of Mr Clench’s misinformation
“Now the US has 1.4 million confirmed cases of the virus, more than five times as many as Spain in second place. Its death toll is 87,000, more than twice as bad as Britain’s”
Let’s be clear, the numbers change by the minute so at the time of writing, the figures I’m using are more current than his at the time of his writing but that doesn’t make much of a difference. Spain is indeed second to the USA in terms of recorded deaths (27,563), and as a percentage of Spain’s population of 46,754,778, the death rate equates to 0.06%.
I guess that makes Spain’s per capita death rate twice that of the USA and Mr Clench’s comments “weapons-grade stupid”.
Promotion beyond one’s abilities maybe?
Should have stuck to fetching mail and fixing printers and should spend more time eating and none at all writing.
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