AP featured image
A medical staffer watches from a tent at one of the emergency structures that were set up to ease procedures at the Brescia hospital, northern Italy, Thursday, March 12, 2020. Italians woke up to yet further virus-containment restrictions after Premier Giuseppe Conte ordered restaurants, cafes and retail shops closed after imposing a nationwide lockdown on personal movement. For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus had some less than kind things to say about the media’s behavior when it comes to its reporting of COVID-19.
Appearing on Fox News, Marcus said that the media had done a “wonderful job in frightening America” about the pandemic, specifical people in his age range:
“My age bracket is really the problem. If we take care of my age bracket, that is 70 or above, I think that we can end a lot of the problems that are out there,” Marcus told the “Ingraham Angle” on Monday. “People that are 70 or above have to be so careful because you are compromised in many different ways. But we’re only a small portion of the population and we’re closing down everybody, in addition to the schools.”
Marcus commended Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp for reopening their economies.
“What they did is a perfect example of thinking and understanding that people needed to get out the house, needed to start their businesses again, needed to go to work again,” he said. “But there are bureaucrats all over the country in the blue states that are still closed and god knows when they’ll open. Those people up there, they are still struggling and it is desperation time for many of them.”
Marcus’s point about states continuing shutdowns in the face of new information and the desperation of the people is poignant. States who have released lockdowns such as Georgia and Florida are both seeing drops in cases while simultaneously restarting their economies and getting people back to work.
Meanwhile, the media refuses to cover the increasing number of suicides and overdoses, choosing instead to focus on what-if scenarios and scaremongering over questionable numbers. This puts too many people into a state of fear and causes them to advocate for decisions that we will be trying to fix for years to come.