This week’s dumbest narrative

There have been a lot of media stories lately that essentially say “jurisdiction X is reopening its economy, and Covid-19 cases soar.” Examples here, here, here, and here. CNN:

America marked that grim death toll Monday as almost every state has made plans to partially reopen some businesses, something critics fear might contribute to an increase in the daily reports of fatalities.

Of course reopening the economy “might” — we would say will — “contribute to an increase in the daily reports of fatalities.” If reopening didn’t increase fatalities, wouldn’t that be powerful evidence that the lockdown didn’t make a difference? How do you write a story with a paragraph like CNN’s without, at least, suggesting that?

There is another problem, which is that we still do not understand why cases are rising. Indeed, several of the linked stories above fairly suggest that increased testing might be revealing more cases that are there, rather than reflecting a true increase. We don’t know. We are still tip-toeing through the dark house.

Our own hometown paper, the Austin American-Statesman, yesterday published two stories in the same print edition that, taken together, were particularly egregious. The first story made much of Texas reporting more than a thousand new cases a day over the weekend for the first time since late April, and appeared to pin the blame on re-opening:

It’s been 10 days since Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the gradual reopening of Texas businesses amid the coronavirus outbreak. Saturday and Sunday marked the highest infection rate since the May 1 reopening order, which allowed all retail stores, malls, restaurants, movie theaters, libraries and museums to reopen at 25% capacity.

The reopening ignored benchmarks recommended by federal health officials as precursors to reopening businesses. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggested that states show a reduction in cases for at least 14 days, dramatically boost testing, and track people with confirmed infections and those they come into contact with.

Got it. Texas ignored the benchmarks, reopened, and now it has more cases. Which we were going to have if the lockdown made any difference at all, but never mind.

Then, next door in the same Statesman print edition (but reprinted from the Dallas Morning News), there is this story, which begins:

Tarrant County reported 423 cases of coronavirus Sunday in a federal prison outbreak that led to the highest one-day increase in a North Texas county’s tally since the pandemic began.

Got that? The Statesman slyly connected Texas reopening against federal guidelines with new cases surging, and in the same print edition published another story that said that 423 of those cases came from one federal prison in Dallas, reported in a one-time batch because “of lags in reporting.”

Both of these omissions — the implications if cases don’t increase after reopening, and the true source of the weekend’s case increase in Texas — are as obvious as the nose on an editor’s face, yet the Statesman pointed out neither.

It would be so refreshing if the media, which claims prestige and nobility because “democracy dies in darkness” and such, actually illuminated, especially when the topic involves, as the pandemic does, tremendous uncertainty for leaders and citizens alike.