MSNBC is spiraling out of control in this pandemic.
I just turned off “The Last Word” tonight, after Lawrence O’Donnell led the hour with an explicitly false narrative.
He was doing a typical “personal interest” piece about an NYC medical worker who was infected some time ago. As I understand Mr. O’Donnell’s story, that worker tested positive and then stayed home in isolation for several weeks until he recovered. When he recovered, he “heroically” returned to work.
Mr. O’Donnell make very big deal about how “courageous” it was for this worker to “risk his life” in returning to work “even after suffering and recovering from the virus” (all this is paraphrased, the piece isn’t yet available on youtube).
The trouble is, the last part is total unadulterated rubbish. That worker is immune from the virus for at least a few weeks or months, probably longer. The worker did not risk ANYTHING by returning to work.
Mr. O’Donnell, like the rest of the mainstream media, is more interested in presenting a George-Washington-And-The-Cherry-Tree cartoon than actually reporting the actual news.
One of the most important graphics that needs to be presented along with the infection and fatality curves is the RECOVERY curves. That’s important because the portion of the population that has been infected and recovered is at least temporarily immune. It is through the growth of that segment that America as a whole acquires herd immunity. In the absence of a vaccine, herd immunity is what prevents this virus from killing all of us eventually.
That population is now starting to grow (thankfully). It will track the infection curve, delayed by about five weeks, because it takes about that long to recover. It will be about the same shape and about a hundred times larger than the fatality curve, delayed by about two weeks, because it takes about three weeks for the disease to kill those who are vulnerable.
It feels very much like the media is more interested in promoting its sky-is-falling hysteria than the more nuanced truth.
Medical workers who have recovered from the corona virus are a KEY part of our ability to eventually overcome this pandemic. The media should be talking about that, and isn’t.
A few weeks ago, Rachel Maddow did a major segment contemptuously trashing the White House when it announced that the two Navy hospital ships would be arriving in NYC and LA “in a week or two”. She did a long piece talking about how they were out-of-service with no crew. She hammered on Mr. Trump for “lying” about the ships. Less than ten days later, both ships arrived as promised. So far as I know, Ms. Maddow has not broadcast an on-air apology or even admitted that she was mistaken.
I expect Fox News and Breitbart to lie, distort, and fill their time with propaganda. I have higher standards for CNN and MSNBC. It seems to me that one of the most important things we all desperately require during this pandemic is honest and responsible reporting.
We are not getting that from MSNBC.
Both of them usually know what they are talking about and are quick to make corrections when warranted, but I have abandoned my usual habit of watching MSNBC primetime over the last couple of weeks since they all seem to have jumped on the sky is falling bandwagon regarding COVID-19 and my psyche just can’t take that.
There is SO much investigative reporting that they could be doing, and instead they repeat the same tropes over and over. It appears the Sanjay Gupta is on-air at CNN virtually around the clock. Each evening, while I’m looking for actual news, what I find instead is CNN running variations on “Ask the Doctor”, while MSNBC is running endless repetitions of “You aren’t going to believe how bad it is”.
As a micro-example, the inability of getting tests and ventilators into the hands of those who need each has been a staple of each day’s “news” for at least six weeks now.
I have yet to see even ONE piece that attempts to follow up on that. Where are the bottlenecks? Who, in government, is responsible for issuing whatever orders or directives are needed? Did they do so? Do the needed items exist yet? Where? Are they at the manufacturer awaiting shipment? Are they in-transit? Are they accumulating at distribution points?
Why isn’t Steve Kornacki showing us detailed maps, updated in real time, showing how many tests and ventilators are in each precinct? Where are the nationwide heat maps showing where supplies are and where they are needed?
In the aftermath of both Katrina and Maria, there was widespread reporting of severe water shortages during the crisis. A few months later (in Puerto Rico a few YEARS later) large warehouses filled with cases of lost and forgotten bottled water were found and reported on.
Surely SOMEBODY at either CNN or MSNBC can pursue the supply chain of corona tests and find out where they are. SOMEBODY can surely identify specific bottlenecks that can be removed once publicized.
Meanwhile, has everything ELSE stopped happening? Has the DoJ stopped protecting people close to Mr. Trump? Has the Trump administration stopped trying to manufacture dirt on political opponents? Has Rudi Giulianni stopped distributing dirty Russian mob money to GOP stalwarts like Lindsay Graham and Devin Nunes?
Our fabled “free press” appears to be doing nothing except wallowing in hysteria and sentimental pap.
Now I have an image in my head of Steve Kornacki flailing his arms and talking excitedly in front of a map showing the progression of the corona outbreak. I’ve watched him enough that I could probably to a decent impression of him!:)
The Navy ships are apparently pretty useless for COVID patients.
The health care worker is pretty heroic to me. This is the American version of the Chernobyl engineers going in without any protective equipment to save the rest of the planet. We are out of masks. Even a well endowed network like Partners is violating all sorts of protocols regarding patient and staff protection to triage for this explosion of cases.
N95’s are only be rationed to nurses who have confirmed Covid patients on their floors and they are expected to reuse them in violation of protocol. I’ve scrounged masks from friends of friends in NYC who have 3-D printers, my brother had some leftover from a painting project, and our own Peter Porcupine sent us a couple more. Another friend from high school has some in her basement I’m picking up Monday. But really this isn’t the best America can do.
Its like when the Soviets has to ration rifles on the Eastern Front. So my wife’s brave going back to work under those conditions. Braver than I am fiddling with Zoom at home. I guess we should be grateful we are both essential, now that my brother and her father got laid off. Lay offs will only get worse.
NO! NO! NO! You are being carried away by hysteria. This is a VIRUS, not bits of radioactive material that remain lethal for millennial.
This virus is hazardous ONLY to those who have no immunity to it. It is causing a pandemic because it is a novel virus (a mutation of some previously existing strain) Because it is novel, nobody has immunity to it — UNTIL THEY RECOVER FROM IT!
Your comment exemplifies why this hysteria is so evil. You are well-informed and well-intentioned and STILL get it exactly wrong!
We already know from other experience with different strains of the corona virus that EVERYBODY who fights it off gains immunity, that’s how we recover! We don’t know how long that immunity lasts — sometimes weeks, sometimes months, sometimes a lifetime.
Yes, it is very likely that mutations of this deadly strain will emerge, the last time I checked two had already been identified. The second was more contagious than the first and much less lethal. This is quite common — the common cold is usually a corona virus, and comes in many flavors.
There will likely be seasonal waves of this virus, a bit different each year, just as there are seasonal waves of the flu (not a corona virus, but still a virus). We still need to learn about what the long-term picture will look like — that will come later.
What we do know is that anyone who recovers is NOT at risk from being infected again and cannot infect others.
It is just CRIMINAL that our media are not educating us about basic virology like this.
So wife mentions thati there isn’t enough evidence to say they recovering Covid patients have an immunity to future sickness. It seems like the poor male nurse in Brooklyn who passed away in his early 40’s got it once, got it a second time, and died. So while I agree with your common sense assessment, I defer to her expertise on these questions.
We can obviously hope that early exposure and recovery ensures immunity, but we cannot be certain of that. I still think both the lack of PPE protection and the resilience of those going to work everyday without said protection is something to both lament in the former and celebrate in the latter. This is one of those news stories that is really hitting close to home for me right now.
It happens occasionally. Every once in a while you hear of a chicken pox repeat too, maybe if the first case wasn’t that strong. Also keep in mind that there may be technically different, but very similar viruses. Even the “common” cold only feels common because the symptoms are identical, but in reality each time you contract it you are contracting a different virus.
I’ve seen several pieces about research suggesting that when scientists compare sequences of the very oldest common-cold viruses that we have to sequences of common-cold viruses in circulation today, they see strikingly little variation over that 20-30 year period.
That suggests that the corona virus family mutates much less frequently than the influenza virus. The latter changes so dramatically that a new vaccine is needed each season.
My understanding is that, with some exceptions of course, our frequent infections with a common cold reflects the huge variety of corona viruses accumulated over a long period of time rather than the mutation rate of any individual strain.
In that sense, my understanding is that current research confirms your final sentence.
So is the cold a form of corona, and if so does that mean we may get away with a one-time rather than annual vaccine? If so that seems promising since we treat colds as just part of life.
We don’t know how long antibodies persist after infection, and we don’t know how long they remain effective.
The research does look promising, but it’s still very early in the game.
There is some risk associated with anything we do in situations like this. I’m not asserting that there is zero risk.
I’m saying that your comparison to “the Chernobyl engineers going in without any protective equipment” is way, way, way over the top. It is more like firefighters entering a structure to ensure that a blaze is extinguished before declaring the event “over”. Of course there is risk — nevertheless, the likelihood is that that risk is very very small.
I don’t challenge your wife. Instead, I’m saying that EVERY health care worker takes a risk each time they come in contact with any patient suffering from a contagious disease. Of course we need PPE, we need that for any and every health-care worker. A nurse checking in on a patient who may be infected by dozens of pathogens faces as much or more risk as from treating a COVID-19 sufferer.
It is criminal that we lack PPE for ANY health care worker treating ANY patients.
It seems to me that an assertion that there is no immunity from this virus leads to the conclusion that it is wrong for a health-care worker to agree to work without PPE. We know that our most extreme shortage is or will be a shortage of qualified staff to accompany the thousands of new beds being built., In the context of that staff, if there is no immunity than we must be MUCH more conservative in what exposure we allow for each of those workers.
I suggest that the stronger argument is that most experts agree that:
1. There is almost certainly immunity for some period of time
2. The period of likely immunity may be as little as a few weeks to an entire lifetime.
3. Rigorously correct information about all this won’t be possible until we have much more data and until we have had time analyze that data.
I don’t in any way demean any health care worker, including your wife. It is the relentless sentimentality of the media that I criticize.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the media was chock full of stories about “fearless” fire-fighters who “heroically” ran up the stairs of the burning towers to rescue trapped victims. Those pieces were accompanied by similarly numerous pieces about Muslims, terrorism, and speculated covert groups of revolutionary terrorist “cells” scattered through America. The result was that we collectively tied ourselves in knots while our government plunged us into an eternal “war on terror” that was little more than an embodiment of pure fear. Of course, that war on terror also enriched a small handful of people including the then Vice President.
Our society has certain roles — firefighter, police officer, health care worker, military enlistee — that are explicitly more dangerous than other roles. Men and women who choose to fill those roles hopefully do so in full awareness of those risks.
I think we all owe every health care worker our respect and admiration in this time, We owe the same to each and every grocery-store bagger who faces similar risks every day without PPE and who did not knowingly choose a risky profession when taking a minimum-wage job at a local grocery store.
I hope that our own johntmay is doing well — I haven’t seen his byline in awhile.
I also think we should demand that our media personalities like Mr. O’Donnell focus rather more about reporting actual information about things that are actually happening and rather less on feel-good mythology about chosen “personal interest” stories.
Here is an example of the current research being aggressively pursued by researchers. This piece is very technical, and so the conclusion is couched in technical, rather than lay, terms (emphasis mine):
I think this is saying that this patient’s immune response to SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) was robust and effective. I think it is suggesting that newly-infected patients who show this response are likely to have “better clinical outcomes” — more research is needed.
A virus is not at all similar to dangerously radioactive material — there are no atoms splitting apart and emitting high-energy particles that destroy tissue and cause cancer. This virus does not appear to be similar things like HIV that are difficult or impossible to recover from without medication.
This is a common cold virus that has mutated to produce more severe respiratory issues in some patients. It is no more and no less than that.
Health care workers who have been in infected and have survived (which will be about 99 out of 100) almost certainly have immunity to this virus for a few weeks (yes, of course this needs to be verified by research). Those are likely very likely to be key to our eventual recovery from this pandemic.