In this week's (3/14) issue of my local newspaper - a free weekly that many older folks and those with children in school rely on for coupons and sales, local information they need, etc - the front page story, above the fold, was coverage of a county official meeting concerning the county response to Covid. The meeting was March 10th.
The main speaker's main points were that the county was well prepared for Covid, that there were more deaths from the flu than from Covid so far, that "the media" was "over-reporting", that the successful handling of H1N1 in 2009 was reassuring, and that - quote -
"We have been here before. It was all hands on deck with public health nurses. We responded and we learned a lot. We did it successfully." (referring to the H1N1 response in 2009).
Words such as "hysteria", "fear", "widespread panic", appeared throughout - always describing reactions to media coverage of Covid, never reactions to governmental incapability or misrepresentation.
The single accompanying and easily comprehended illustration, in the meat of the article, was not of Covid factors or any Covid related data. It was instead a graph of "influenza associated" deaths broken down by week (season), State wide, over the years 2010 - 2018. It clearly shows that influenza has killed many people each winter since the more lethal strains took hold in the State (around 2012). What few Covid numbers appeared in the article were buried in the prose, where the exponential ramping (among other features) was difficult for the less numerate to see, and the issues surrounding the lack of testing in the US were completely omitted.
It's probably too late to walk all that back and catch up - outside of a better than average State government we're going to be riding on luck around here.
I mean, do most people go through a freakin' roll a day? How?!
Families with sick children; old people with bowel and nausea issues; rural septic systems that can't handle bleach or ink, stronger and higher lignin paper, or heavy laundry demands; city dwellers for whom laundry is a heavy expense in time and labor as well as coin - there are some legitimate stockpilers.
My house buys on sale in bulk routinely to save money and shopping trips (as well as forestalling inadvertent shortages) - been doing that for years. It has many more uses than asswipe.
