Along the lines of what emtee is saying, I get news feeds each day, and if not every day, then every other day there's something like this:
https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/coronavirus-pandemic-09-01-20-intl/h_b2168384e6d0848acc82ef10d2bdef80Trump is full of garbage on a lot of COVID information, but on this, he's right. This "ramping up" is being delivered as something to be feared (following the delivery of this information, the article says "Only two other countries in the world have over 1 million reported Covid-19 cases -- Brazil and India. But there's a bit of good news for the US, according to health experts.") but this is actually likely due just as much to better testing and more knowledge on identifying those with the disease, not necessarily malfeasance.
And I read another article this morning that I cannot find now (a trend I've noted a fair amount recently): The article was extremely critical: it noted the US had 22% of the world's cases (it's actually 24% as we speak) but only 4% of the population. The implication of course, is that we're severely deficient in our response to COVID, falsely comparing us to every other country no matter how big, small, isolated, or not. It then cited the Brazil and India numbers. NOWHERE in the first five paragraphs (I counted) did it even mention China. China is currently
38th on the list of total cases, with 85,058. Per 1 million pop, that's 200th in the world. 200th! Out of 215! The US is not the worst in terms of population adjusted figures; we are 10th in cases per 1 million pop, and 11th in deaths (this is actually an improvement from two weeks ago, when we were 9 and 10 respectively). If you extrapolate out China's "true" cases, using the same percentage of "cases/1 million people" as the US (not unreasonable), you get over 27 MILLION cases, or more than the entire world so far, COMBINED. That certainly changes our "percentage of the world cases (dropping it to just over 10%); still more than our percentage of the world population, but a lot more in line with our place as a business and travel hub (
our travel economy was a $1.8 TRILLION industry in 2019, largest in the world in absolute dollars.)
I get it - eyeballs, viewers, readers - but why is it so darn hard to just present information, instead of making EVERYTHING a political statement or advocacy piece. Something I have asked repeatedly: why can't we be allowed to draw our own conclusions? Does the press not realize that for all of Trump's nonsense about "FAKE NEWS", when they publish things like that and people - reasonable people, not people prone to conspiracy theories - dig in and find things that don't add up, it just adds to their faltering credibility?