Thanks Andre for a coherent and rational article during this time of mass hysteria caused by an irresponsible sensationalist mass media and governments the world over that have totally mishandled the present problem. We’re continually told that covid-19 is far worse than ordinary flu (which the media can’t sensationalize because we’re used to it) and spreads more quickly. Yet in the three months (or more) since the virus began to spread, reported worldwide infections are a tiny fraction of annual flu infections. The death rate is still far lower than the worldwide death rate each year from flu. While the mass media delights in terrifying people with the latest cumulative death toll (as I write, under 30,000) it carefully avoids mentioning the fact that the annual death toll from ordinary non-scary flu can be as high as 650,000.

Yet we don’t shut down the world each year in order to combat flu.

Because we’re herd animals that automatically conform to group norms, it doesn’t take much to get us all stampeded into mass hysteria, at which point the human brain’s modest capacity for reason shuts down entirely. Now that billions have been worked into a frenzy of fear it will be exceedingly difficult for any semblance of reason to re-establish itself.

Sadly, the people who are already paying the highest price for our collective insanity are those who can least afford to bear the costs: those in developing nations who live day-to-day on a pittance, dependent on global supply chains and life as normal in order to avoid rapid starvation. We’re sacrificing untold millions of people across Africa and Asia in order to boost the ad revenues of mass media organizations and further enrich the despicable creatures who run them. This is stupidity at the largest imaginable scale, yet we’re all embracing it uncritically because that same mass media has successfully manipulated information in order to terrify us out of our wits.

Not a great day for homo sapiens.