A poll released Sunday from NBC and the Wall Street Journal shows that there is a huge disparity between Democrats and Republicans about how seriously to take the Coronavirus. Seventy-nine percent of Democrats say that they believe the worst is yet to come, compared to only 40% of Republicans. Sixty-one percent of Democrats say they have stopped attending large public gatherings, while only 30% of Republicans say the same.
How do you explain this? Fox News.
The best medical advice: Don’t watch Fox News.
An friend of mine on the mainland watches Fox News. Sunday, I learned that she and her husband went to Cabo, Mexico, for a four-day vacation this past week. When she returned, she was one of those who had to wait hours, crowded in the airport, waiting to be screened. Do I think any virus got transmitted in that airport crowd? Probably! Did she go because she watches a network that thinks its primary goal is to get President Donald J. Trump re-elected? Probably!
Like a hostile alien invasion — all humanity has to work together to beat this thing. But Fox still thinks its mission is to cover up Trump’s failures and make him look good no matter what he does.
It’s not just regular people like my friend who are being deceived by Fox News. Oklahoma’s Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt tweeted a picture of himself and his children at a crowded restaurant on Saturday. Republican Rep. Devin Nunes went on Fox News Sunday, encouraging people to go to local restaurants and pubs despite the warnings of health officials.
Many papers, including this one, have felt the need to “print all sides” of the coronavirus issue, that is, print what NIAID Director Anthony Fauci says and print what pandemic-deniers like editorial cartoonist Mike Shelton and columnist Dennis Gregory say. This is insane! The first responsibility of a newspaper is to print the truth, and if they know that someone is lying and they print it as “just another opinion,” they are complicit in that lie. With politics, this is often of little consequence. With coronavirus, this is deadly.
So, who can you trust in a pandemic?
If you want to do your own evaluations of the facts, you can now go to a website that publishes research papers online before they are peer-reviewed and published in scientific and medical journals. This is called “pre-review publication,” and can be crucial in a fast-moving catastrophe like this. Here is the link: https://www.medrxiv.org/search/coronavirus
If deciphering medical jargon is not your thing (I love it!), I suggest listening to people who have a track record of telling the truth. Fauci has been an honest source of information since the early days of the AIDS epidemic. The CDC is another good source. Flatten the Curve has a lot of good practical advice (https://www.flattenthecurve.com).
Above all, don’t get sucked into complacency by an administration hell-bent on covering its own inadequacies. Stay home. Contribute to the slack in the health care system by staying well. That system is soon to be very overstressed. Flatten the curve — spread out the timeline of the disease so the health care system has more time to prepare. More on these concepts next column.
Matt Binder was a science and medical reporter from 1983-97. He is now an after-school science teacher at Waimea Middle School.