by Vasko Kohlmayer, Lew Rockwell:

According to recent polls, 75 percent of Americans worry about their communities re-opening too soon from the corona lockdowns. More than eight in ten say they are likely to stay home if there is a new spike of cases in the area where they live. And by a margin of almost four to one, most Americans believe the U.S. economy is being reopened too quickly rather than too slowly.

These figures indicate that the majority of us believe we are in the midst of a dangerous epidemic. The levels of anxiety and fear have reached such a high pitch that an earlier survey found that many Americans thought that extreme measures – such as complete closure of K-12 schools and most businesses – were justified to mitigate the threat posed by the coronavirus disease.

But is this fear justified? Is this virus really so dangerous that we need to shut down large portions of our society and dramatically curtail our engagement in everyday activities? What is the actual risk of harm and death posed by this pathogen to an ordinary healthy individual?

It may come as something of a surprise, but this kind of information is not very easy to come by. This is remarkable to say the least given that so much has been said and written about the various aspects of this crisis. We read the frightening headlines, hear about the death and case counts and listen to heart-rending individual stories of those sickened by the virus. But we almost never come across articles or reports that would present hard data or objective metrics which would indicate the actual level of danger posed by the virus to the average person.

Since the mainstream media do not do their job in this regard, those who want to know have to do some research themselves. When you conduct internet searches, you can, indeed, find considerable amount of raw data. Most of it, however, is presented in technical manner and therefore not easy to understand by the layperson. But there are some places where such information is presented in a way that can be readily understood by most people. One such place is a page on Wikipedia titled Mortality due to COVID-19.

One, of course, always needs to be cautious when getting information from Wikipedia. To begin with, the data presented there is often less than rock solid. Secondly, it is well known that Wikipedia tends to suffer from a leftist bias. This has been stated by – of all people – Larry Sanger, one of Wikipedia’s co-founders. Sanger recently posted a lengthy article titled “Wikipedia is Badly Biased” in which he documents the online encyclopedia’s tendency toward distortion and inaccuracy due to its leftward bent.

In our case, however, Wikipedia’s bias can be to our advantage, since it essentially serves as a safeguard to keep us from underestimating the seriousness of the threat posed by COVID-19. This is because the Left’s overall inclination so far has been to overstate the danger to the maximum extent possible. The motivation for this is quite obvious. The greater the perceived danger, the better the chances of havoc in the American economy and society. This, of course, diminishes the re-election prospects of Donald Trump for whom, as Sanger points out, Wikipedia seems to harbor a special dislike. We can, therefore, reasonably assume that Wikipedia’s editors and writers are likely to interpret the data which they use as the basis for their work on COVID-19 in a way that would magnify the danger rather than the other way around.

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