1. Just as the medical establishment has made us sicker, the press has made us vastly stupider about Corona

Anyone who ignores the news and judges solely on personal experience, will have far more sensible ideas about Corona than routine consumers of mass media https://twitter.com/eugyppius1/status/1342789633445408768

2. The press has always been truly terrible at science reporting, but Corona marks a new low even for them

Since the spring, they have covered corona research hardly at all. The tone of this research has become far less alarmist since early days when we knew nothing

3. The press only cares for alarmist stories. Thus they report rare cases of reinfection, but hardly mention all those studies showing schools do nothing to drive the pandemic

Old, falsified concerns are never withdrawn. New ones are added whenever possible.

4. This accounts for the extremely unhinged fears of Corona enthusiasts, among them a lot of credentialed medical professionals

These people believe the virus lives for weeks on surfaces; that it has crazy high fatality rates; that kids infect olds; that masks will protect you

5. These and most of the other fantasies are the early hypotheses that justified lockdowns. They must be maintained in amber, so long as lockdowns themselves continue

But, if the press doesn’t report on the science, what does it cover?

6. Aside from routine attacks on politicians who urge moderation or voice anxiety about the economy, they have one game:

They play the centralised disease statistics like a pipe organ, to maintain a constant state of alarm

7. All of our countries track the pandemic via a handful of blunt & stupid statistics:

The number of new infections, the number of Covid ICU patients, the number of dead, r-naught, and so on.

Whichever one of these is currently the worst or on the rise makes headlines

8. The others, if they are flat or declining or less impressive, get sidelined

Thus, for example, substantial excess mortality was hugely reported after the 1st wave in the US; in Germany excess mortality goes largely unmentioned, because we will have very little if any so far.

9. By serially reporting on infections, ICU patients & deaths, the press leaves its readers with next to no idea of what is going on

Outbreaks are waves, with shapes, but press reports only on the steepest part of the curve, as it manifests successively in their different stats

10. They are so eager to show you “exponential growth,” they play the same tape over & over:

Sudden rise in infections, 2 weeks later a bump in ICU occupancy, 2 weeks later spike in deaths.

This is all, in fact, the same event; but it is reported as three separate disasters

(11. This deliberate disjointed myopia is also why press were able to engage in hysteria about rising summer infections, without ever acknowledging that these infections had become untethered from mortality & hospitalisations.)

12. In truth, infections rise according to logistic functions. These look exponential for a short time - in the case of corona, generally a period of days- but they soon approach a maximum value.

Thereafter, corona recedes.

11. The false premise is that cases will continue to increase forever until something is done.

Thus the press always thinks the apocalypse is around the corner for Sweden. Things are going up! Nobody is doing anything about it! They will keep going up forever!

12. But the lesson of Sweden, and Florida, and others, is that they don’t keep going up.

For each outbreak, there is a natural limit. We are not an ideal gas. Not everyone is in contact with everybody else. Local conditions don’t favour infections all the time

13. The press, in all of this, merely advocates corona suppression. Their reporting demands more extreme corona policies, it defends these policies with grim news once they are implemented, and it criticises any attempt to relax containment

14. In this they have become remarkably parallel to the scientists, who since March have also functioned as containment advocates, with selective, carefully calibrated research programs, inflammatory public statements, and flimsy models to justify extreme policies

15. An ongoing consequence of the nationalist victories of 2016 (i.e Trump, Brexit), is close alignment among media, scientists and the political establishment. All three elite factions now work to establish & enforce the same one-dimensional consensus throughout the West.

16. The scientists, the media and the politicians, are not even trying to provide an accurate image of the Corona pandemic.

They are purveyors of a simulacrum of corona, that they have calibrated to justify their policies.