Former NYT reporter Alex Berenson rips ‘death counts’: ‘The overall effects of [COVID] have essentially been impossible for the avg. person to see without a microscope’

The overall effects of this epidemic have essentially been impossible for the average person to see without a microscope. Hospitals are not overflowing. Bodies are not piling up in the streets. Most of us will never know anyone under 55 (65? 70?) who has died of #Covid.

But instead many people feel like the world is ending? Why? More than anything else, it’s the obsessive – almost sordid – fascination with death counts, updated in real time and presented without context (average age of victims, how many people generally die in a year, etc)…

Why are we counting deaths this way? We’ve never done this for any other illness. Never. And there are lots of reasons, but maybe the most important is that we’re doing this largely because we can – because the technology now exists to aggregate these counts almost instantly.

And then both conventional and social media are blasting out these figures not just every day but every second – from the @cnn deathmeter to @nytimes heatmaps to everyone screaming on Twitter. True story: at this point #SARSCoV2 worldwide is slightly worse than a bad flu year…

And the 700,000 people it has killed worldwide are less than half the number who have died or traffic accidents OR diarrhea OR tuberculosis this year, less than 2% of all deaths.

There has never been anything like this before, but not because of the virus.