Justifying Re-Lockdown

MSNBC addressed the national decline in new cases. The trend was ‘downwards,’ an on-air host admitted, but the ‘numbers were still horrible.’ That MSNBC would define any numbers as ‘horrible’ was a foregone conclusion; the issue is where those numbers are heading. In light of that downward trend, it was time to trot out what was then the media’s favorite doomsday prediction. The US is facing the ‘darkest winter in modern history,’ the MSNBC host reminded viewers, quoting the former director of a federal biomedical research agency, who had testified at a House subcommittee hearing two days earlier. 

On May 17, the New York Times crushed its competition with the most audacious effort yet to turn good news into bad. ‘NEW CASES IN US SLOW, POSING RISK OF COMPLACENCY,’ read the lead headline in the print edition. Sub headlines further limned the gloomy picture: ‘TRAJECTORY UNCERTAIN,’ ‘Spikes Feared As the Very Steps That Curbed the Virus Are Lifted.’ Do not stop being fearful, in other words. While the virus risk may go down, complacency risk replaces it, leaving us as threatened as before. The only proper posture is to shelter in place permanently. 

The body of the Times’s story drove home the dangerous new reality. The nation had reached a ‘perilous moment,’ the paper alleged, since businesses were reopening ‘despite the risk of a resurgence.’ So it is ‘perilous’ when cases rise, and ‘perilous’ when they fall. One of the Times’s preferred epidemiologists, Columbia University’s Jeffrey Shaman, conceded that the decline ‘is something good to see.’ But what we are also seeing, Shaman said, is a ‘lot of places right on the edge of controlling the disease.’ The fact that some jurisdictions are registering sharp case declines while others are registering less or no decline is hardly a reason for fear. Differing points on the curve at any given time are to be expected.

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