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The American media is not handling the Covid situation the way it should.

Their country is full of people who insist on blithely ignoring that there is a real epidemic at all.

In a strange way, this almost makes sense. Most people don’t equate statistics to their daily lives. Their reality revolves around what they see, and what they can feel. To them Covid isn’t a big deal to them. They are not being allowed to see it.

It should be the job of the media to make the pandemic real to the American people.

They should be sending crews into hospitals that are collapsing under the weight of the exploding contagion.

The same lack of coverage was characteristic of American news during the Second World War. It was felt that citizens wouldn’t be able to handle images of dead American service men, and so none made it into any newspaper, newsreel, or magazine until the February 15th edition of Life magazine.

That was more than 14 months after American entry into the war. The result of people seeing images of American service men dead on a Pacific shore was a stiffening of resolve regarding the war, rather than the reverse.

Why are heart-rendering images of the Covid pandemic so few and far between? Is some similar strange kind of logic being applied, or is it courtesy to the struggling health care workers, or patients, or is it cowardice towards entry into that dangerous environment by news personnel. I can’t imagine that it is due to physical fear, as news people are forever putting themselves into war zones and places where disaster has struck.

Whatever the motivation, it is misguided. People need to see the reality that currently exists in some places so that they can extrapolate that reality into a real possibility for their own situation.

Let them see what is happening, so they can understand what can happen.