Good news on Covid goes unreported by journalists of the left. By Chris Mitchell.
Separating domestic [Australian] pandemic numbers out to before and after Omicron reveals some interesting facts about the variant and its predecessors here.
On December 1, there had been a reported 211,654 cases and 2011 deaths since early 2020.
By [January 26], case numbers had blown out to 2.29 million and deaths stood at 3,230. So, an extra two million cases and 1,200 more deaths, all compressed into less than two months.
As doctors have noted, it is likely many more people during the Omicron wave have been infected than the reported total. Most will have been people who remained asymptomatic.
Yet even using the official federal department of health total, the fatality rate stands at 0.14 per cent across the pandemic. Over the past two months that rate is about 0.06 per cent. …
So many people have now had Omicron that Australians are waking up: this is not the catastrophe many journalists are pretending. Many of us have seen family members and friends test positive only to be fit and well again a day or two later. It might not be the vibe in newsrooms, but at the dining tables in country NSW where I spent the silly season, it is what people are saying.
While the sheer numbers of cases have produced high absolute numbers of hospitalisations and deaths compared with previous waves of the virus, there has been far too little media focus on the good news: that for healthy vaccinated people, especially those who have had a third booster shot, Omicron is not much of a threat.
Australian journalists are 110% behind the narrative and the bureaucratic ruling class (which is represented in parliamentary politics by the Labor Party and the Greens):
How then to judge the extreme hostility to Morrison of “lockdown luvvie” journalists who insist he is personally responsible for a “let it rip” strategy that is destroying the nation’s health system and needlessly killing Australians? …
Many journalists who had tweeted support for every Covid restriction, however ill-advised, by the Andrews and Palaszczuk governments during 2020 and 2021, have avoided highlighting the high infection numbers, hospitalisations and deaths in Victoria and Queensland since the states’ reopening. Only Morrison is blamed.
Yet while turning a blind eye to infection rises in the two Labor states that have opened, they continue to heap praise on WA Labor leader Mark McGowan for keeping his state shut to protect his citizens.
This is blatant politicisation of the pandemic by journalists of the left. It is no different from the politicisation of Covid by some medical professionals who just bat for team Labor. Every journalist and every doctor had known for months the national agreement was to open up and learn to live with Covid.
The unreported reality:
The truth is, despite obvious mistakes, Australia has done better than most of the world. We have moved up the Worldometer global table since Omicron and last Friday sat at 29 because case numbers have risen tenfold. But the nations near us on the table in total infection numbers all have much higher death totals than the 3000-odd recorded in Australia.
On the key deaths per million indicator, we sat at 128, Switzerland at 1,457, Japan at 147, Portugal at 1,941 and Israel at 913. … [US 2,713, UK 2,279, Canada 889]
Yet on Ten’s The Project and on much of the ABC, Australia’s pandemic performance is reported as a disaster. High-profile journalists continue to advocate for harsher restrictions. …
Journalists have known for at least 18 months that most people recover from Covid and those who don’t are overwhelmingly the elderly and those with severe comorbidities. Such deaths are a tragedy but the fact remains the average age of all Covid deaths here before Omicron was slightly higher than average life expectancy of 82.9 years. …
The media focus on Covid does not help the lives of the vast majority of Australians for whom better diets, more exercise and less alcohol and tobacco would be the most beneficial changes they could make.
All media reporting in Australia is filtered through the lens of “does this help the left”. Many inconvenient facts are filtered out.
