COVID fearmongering and falsehoods are back in liberal media
Zachary Faria
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You can tell that renewed COVID restrictions are going to be difficult to stave off once again because liberal media outlets continue to peddle COVID fearmongering to their audiences, no matter how untrue the claims they are repeating happen to be.
A Washington Post news (not opinion) piece in the education section of the site illustrates this dynamic perfectly. With three bylines and one more reporter contributing, the Washington Post laments that “A few schools mandated masks. Conservatives hit back hard.”
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The piece is full of fearmongering while downplaying the return of COVID restrictions. Conservatives “have seized on the issue” even though the schools returning to these restrictions “are the exception.” According to the outlet, “experts worry people are more susceptible to getting the virus” because most people haven’t received updated booster shots. The piece also tries to imply that a tweet from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) about mask mandates led to threats against a school in Maryland.
Then come the falsehoods.
The first is the claim that “Mask mandates were instrumental in controlling the spread of the coronavirus during the peak of the pandemic.” This is nonsense. We know that mask mandates did not slow the spread of the virus to any appreciable degree. States that continued to implement mask mandates throughout the pandemic still saw surges the same as states that did not. Recent studies show it is dubious that masks themselves even did anything to slow the spread, let alone mask mandates.
The second claim is even more head-scratching. While lamenting that Republican governors discarded mask mandates in 2021, the Washington Post claims that “surges of the deadlier delta variant flooded hospitals with severely ill young and middle-aged adults in the summer of 2021 and the highly transmissible omicron variant tore through communities.” (Emphasis added).
The purpose of that claim is clearly to scare readers into complying with future mandates.
Hospitals supposedly were “flooded” with young people as the virus “tore through communities,” and therefore, you should be afraid of it happening again. The problem, of course, is that this is also nonsense. For one, hospitalizations actually hit a low point among all age groups in June and July of 2021. Secondly, daily hospital admissions for people under the age of 30 peaked at 6.3 in January 2022, far below what any reasonable person would consider to be “flooding” hospitals.
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And most importantly, those are only hospitalizations where people merely tested positive for COVID. As my colleague Tim Carney detailed at the time, the metric to be counted as a COVID hospitalization was “a positive virus test within 14 days of hospitalization for any reason,” therefore, “at least some of these COVID-19-positive hospitalizations, perhaps most or nearly all, in fact, are hospitalized not even ‘with COVID,’ but after COVID-19.” (Emphasis original).
This level of fearmongering and outright falsehoods are completely detached from reality. The Washington Post’s “reporting” is simply reaffirming irrational COVID panic and passively defending a return to mask mandates and any other restrictions that are coming back down the pipe. Whatever it is, it is not accurate, and it certainly is not real journalism.