Have you noticed something missing from the home page of your local news outlet in the last couple of days?
COVID-19 has gone MIA.
If not quite totally vanished, the coronavirus is certainly fading from the front pages. No more apocalyptic headlines about “cases” and “infections” which usually mean … not very much.
A year ago, it was the greatest threat to humankind since the Black Death. Now it’s on the verge of becoming just another seasonal virus.
What could possibly have changed over the last couple of days to reduce a yearlong torrent of unhinged, fact-free hysteria to a mere trickle?
We all know the answer to that question: Trump is gone. There is no longer any upside to promoting the panic because 45 is no longer president.
Mission Accomplished!
Any bad news now belongs to Dementia Joe. Ergo, no bad news.
Just as “the homeless” disappear whenever a Democrat takes office, along with rising gas prices or drone bombing of “wedding parties” in terrorist states, seldom will be heard a discouraging word about COVID-19 until further notice.
If you doubt that the air is rapidly deflating out of almost a year’s worth of breathless hysteria in the alt-left media, just Google “New COVID-19 cases decline.”
Here’s a small sampling over the last 72 hours:
From CNN: “New Covid-19 cases declined 11% after hitting a peak last week.”
Wall Street Journal: “Newly Reported U.S. Coronavirus Cases Decline Again.”
National Panhandler Radio: “Current, Deadly U.S. Coronavirus Surge Has Peaked.”
At least until the mid-term elections, when the Democrats will be needing to ramp up mail-in voting yet again, because it worked so well in November in the rotten boroughs where voter turnout sometimes exceeded 100%.
That’s why Big COVID is hedging its bets just a bit, allowing such future potential horrors as “mutant strain B.1.1.7” to start warming up in the bullpen — just in case.
This is nothing new. Recall how Big Pharma didn’t announce that the vaccines were ready to go until Nov. 5, when it was too late to benefit Trump.
Let’s go state by state: “COVID death rate steadily declining in CA … (Utah) Rolling 7-day average continues to declin e… Ohio: Hospitalizations continue to decline …Covid-19 Cases Continue to Decline in Wisconsin … New Cases Continue to Fall in New Mexico … Erie County’s COVID-19 cases decline … (TN) COVID cases in state down 27% last week … (SD) Covid-19 hospitalizations fall below 200 … (LA) NOLA Public Schools’ COVID-19 case decline.”
And so on.
Is there anything Joe Biden can’t do? When does he get the Nobel Prize for medicine?
On Wednesday, Biden signed an executive order requiring mask usage on federal land. Then he immediately left for the Lincoln Monument, where he was photographed … not wearing a mask.
Remember when Slow Joe called Trump “an absolute fool” for not wearing a mask? That was then, this is now.
More a century ago, H.L. Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore, exactly summed up how COVID-19 would be used by the Democrats:
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
Even Gov. Charlie Baker’s amen chorus in the Boston media seems to be drifting away. Where were the lachrymose press conferences this week? No “friends” of the governor struck down?
You’d think he’d want to herald the fact that Massachusetts cases “were down 27% from the week before.”
But they don’t want to tamp down the hobgoblin hysteria. That’s why the state’s daily COVID-19 dashboard is now almost totally indecipherable. That was, after all, the point. When in doubt, obfuscate.
But here are the state’s latest statistics: 13,547 Massachusetts deaths, of which 7,817 have occurred in the nursing homes regulated by Gov. Parker’s own Department of Public Health.
Nationwide, Massachusetts has the highest per capita nursing home death toll, with one of every eight residents in them dead over the last 11 months.
Overall death rate: Massachusetts remains number three with 199 deaths per 100,000, trailing only New Jersey (231) and New York (213).
In the last two weeks, 753 Massachusetts residents over the age of 70 have died, of whom 545 were over the age of 80.
Among those under the age of 40, nine perished.
Yet the state remains locked down, our economy in shambles. For what? The election is over.
By the way, a couple of days ago, the official U.S. death toll reached 400,000. If Donald Trump had been re-elected, rest assured that 400,000 figure would have represented a “grim milestone,” or more likely a “GRIM MILESTONE.”
But now that there’s a Democrat in the White House, grim milestones are verboten. They’re as extinct now in the mainstream media as “fact checkers.”
Instead, the 400,000-figure was observed with such anodyne verbs as “Passes,” “Exceeds,” “Eclipses,” “Surpasses,” or, my favorite, from NBC, “Joe Biden Consoles Nation.”
COVID-19? Nothing to see here, folks, move along.