Today’s Fearmongering Hyperbole Filter

Headline from the Wall Street Journal, a “conservative,” Republican-leaning pile of establishmentarian crap that pretends to be a newspaper: “Virus Toll Climbs as Trump Sees ‘A Lot of Death’ Ahead.”

A lot of death ahead. Yeah, I see that too. In fact, if I look into my crystal ball, I see roughly 7.5 billion deaths ahead — that is, my expertise allows me to predict that every single person now living on this planet is going to die at some point. So I have to say Trumpolini has a point there.

But here’s the fearmongering hyperbole I wish to note, a direct quotation from the WSJ’s opening crap sandwich (aka sentence):

Confirmed coronavirus cases shot past 1.1 million globally, with the U.S. firmly at the center of the global pandemic and bracing for the country’s hardest weeks.

Can you believe it? Confirmed cases — globally — have “shot past” 1.1 million! We’ve never seen a global flu-like virus spread this quickly, and globally, to this extent, infecting so many law-abiding global citizens, and therefore requiring so much global government crackdown to bring the insane amount of globally contagious spreading under control. I mean, that 1.1 million — in barely four months! — is just way beyond the normal range of contagion for any normal flu-like virus — isn’t it?

Well, sure it is — as long as you deliberately avoid mentioning this number: 40 million. That’s roughly the number of Americans — just Americans — who contract the common flu every year. And of course that number, too, is typically reached within a relatively limited number of months, which people back in the innocent, coronavirus-free good old days used to refer to as flu season.