"Two things are true at the same time: Wuhan Coronavirus should be taken seriously as a public health danger, and Democrats and the media are trying to weaponize it for election purposes.
In September 2009, I caught Swine Flu during the semester when I was at Cornell in Ithaca. It was brutal.
For the first time I understood how the flu could kill someone.
It went straight for my lungs. It felt like someone parked a truck on my chest, and I had high fever. I was lucky to be able to get to a doctor before it became really bad and was given Tamiflu and the types of inhalers people with asthma use to keep my lungs open. I needed refills on the inhalers, and I’m convinced they kept me alive.
The good news was that I lost 15 lbs. in two weeks, and fit into clothing I hadn’t fit into in years. The bad news is that I almost died to get there, and gained the weight back in a month.
I was not alone. 700 people at Cornell contracted Swine Flu by September 2009, whereas the much larger Syracuse University an hour north had only 5 cases, showing how unpredictable the spread was.
A Cornell student with a preexisting respiratory condition died.
...The Swine Flu statistics were staggering, according to this CDC publication:
The (H1N1)pdm09 virus was very different from H1N1 viruses that were circulating at the time of the pandemic. ...From April 12, 2009 to April 10, 2010, CDC estimated there were 60.8 million cases (range: 43.3-89.3 million), 274,304 hospitalizations (range: 195,086-402,719), and 12,469 deaths (range: 8868-18,306) in the United States due to the (H1N1)pdm09 virus.
The NY Times reported on October 24, 2009 that 1,000 people already had died in the U.S....
...There was a sense of panic with the Swine Flu, but nowhere near the hysteria we are seeing now regarding Wuhan Coronavirus, certainly not at this early stage.
But I do remember that then, as now, Democrats and the media tried to blame Republicans, specifically spreading false claims that Republicans had prevented funding pandemic preparations (sound familiar?). I wrote the prior April 2009, when Swine Flu first emerged, how the media was misrepresenting the preparedness, The Truth Is The First Victim Of Swine Flu.
There is a big difference between then and now.
It was not an election year.
Obama was in his first year of his first term.
Trump is in the fourth year of his first term, so the Wuhan Coronavirus media frenzy combines real panic with hyperventilated anti-Trump news coverage.
It was not an election year.
Obama was in his first year of his first term.
Trump is in the fourth year of his first term, so the Wuhan Coronavirus media frenzy combines real panic with hyperventilated anti-Trump news coverage.
Two things are true at the same time: Wuhan Coronavirus should be taken seriously as a public health danger, and Democrats and the media are trying to weaponize it for election purposes.
MSNBC’s @esglaude Jr. on the Coronavirus: “This may be Donald Trump’s Katrina.”@NicolleDWallace: "Let’s just lean into that for a minute … this has the makings, structurally, of the same kind of moment”
The coronavirus is Trump’s Chernobyl—a growing catastrophe in which the government response is deadly because Trump is more worried about protecting the myths that define his alternative reality than protecting vulnerable people who will die. My column: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/…
Prepare, but don’t let the media panic you."
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