On March 31, the Center for Disease Control reported two disturbing facts. Number one: Covid was the third largest killer in the United States in 2020. It was only surpassed by heart disease and cancer. Number two: because of covid, life expectancy in the United States dropped a year. Yes, thanks to covid, you are likely to live one year less. A staggering setback. From 1959 to 2014, life expectancy in the United States rose by ten years as our medicine, public health measures, and technology gave us greater control over our lives. But in 2020, life expectancy fell back to what it was in 2006. Thanks to covid. In reality March 31st’s CDC news was a tale of two covids. Those on the right are inclined to think that if covid is only the third leading cause of death, then it’s much less catastrophic than we’re being told. And many of those on the right believe that radical democrats have exaggerated covid in order to prep us for the self-imprisonment of a totalitarian state. In fact, Republican outlets like WND and Swamp Watch proclaimed loudly at the end of March that radical left wingers were using covid as an excuse to pull off a full-scale socialist revolution in the United States right now under our very noses. Mask wearing and shut- downs, they said, are signs of our submission to dictatorship. On the other hand, if you are Rochelle Walensky, the Democratic head of Joe Biden’s Center for Disease Control, you live with a very different covid.
In a March 29th White House briefing, Walenky dropped her script and admitted she was terrified. She came near tears over her recurring sense of what she called “impending doom.” Why? Because as both Walensky and dr. Anthony Fauci point out, in the history of the covid pandemic, every plateau in deaths and infections has led to a surge, a tsunami of new deaths. And we are now experiencing a plateau of the very sort that leads to surges, to viral tidal waves. What drives Walensky to the brink of tears is the simple fact that If we throw away masks and social distancing too soon, we could become like Brazil, where the conservative president, Joao Bolsonaro, disdains mask wearing and shutdowns. That presidential disdain has had apocalyptic consequences. In Brazil, nearly 4,000 people are dying of covid every day[i] That’s four times as many as are dying of covid here, and we in the USA normally have the highest covid daily death toll[ii] in the world.[iii] What’s more, if you get sick, Brazil’s hospitals are too full to take you in. And hospitals are out of vital supplies like oxygen,[iv] which you need desperately when covid cuts off your ability to breathe. In the USA, states like Texas, Wyoming and Mississippi[v] are opening up and discarding mask mandates, giving the covid virus exactly what it wants—more opportunities to infect and kill humans. These states are using precisely the looseness about masks and public gatherings that has made Brazil a medical nightmare, a land of Covid apocalypse.
Let’s go back to Laura Ingram’s old argument that the covid virus is just another flu. According to the statistics revealed by the CDC today, you are at least eight times more likely to die of covid than you are to die of the flu. What’s more, America’s total covid death toll of 552,000 is rapidly closing in on the number of American deaths in all of the major wars of the 20th century combined. And the 20th century’s wars were the bloodiest in history. What’s more, our covid public health measures–masking and social distancing–have stopped the flu in its tracks this year. So please do what Dr. Rochelle Walensky and Dr. Anthony Fauci are pleading with you to do: mask up, maintain social distance, and isolate. The lives you save might be those of the people you love the most. Including your very own.