Remember last spring and early summer? When New York’s catastrophic mismanagement of the Covid pandemic led to a national scandal that humiliated Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill “Squiggy” DiBlasio?

Of course not. The media tamped it down. With a contentious election already underway, Big Media and Big Left didn’t want any splatter getting on the Democrat nominee, whoever that was going to be.

But it was horrible; both New Yorks, state and city, had death rates that still dwarf the rest of the country. Over 10% of all nursing home residents died in a matter of mere weeks. The city was a charnel house. One nursing home left a few dozen bodies in a n un-refrigerated U-Haul, and hospitals were, as related by an endless stream of morose NPR stories, overwhelmed (even as a Navy hospital ship rode, almost empty, at anchor in the harbor, lest President Trump garner any credit whatsoever).

Big Left rallied around the inept Cuomo, spending nine months treating him as a saint walking among us, as an epidemiological Omar Bradley smiting the viral foe from the field, plumping up the sales for Cuomo’s absurd public health “how to” book, putting him up for an Emmy Award for his televised appearances.

Until the inauguration.

Now that Democrat are in charge, Cuomo’s stock has fallen faster than GameStop.

Seems weird?

Not at all. Cuomo is not popular on the hard left that is currently in vogue in DC. He’s too centrist. The progressive wing of the party hates him – and Mayor Squiggy has aspirations in Albany and (absurd as it seems) DC.

Two theories, not mutually exclusive:

All The Facts That Fit The Narrative: It’s verging on being a Berg’s Law – modern media “fact checking” is largely a matter of making sure Democrats get all the credit for the true stuff. Cuomo was a hero – until Big Left wanted him out of the way.

Which is not in any way discontiguous with the other theory:

Try To Find A Pickaxe In Albany. I Dare You: I think it’s a purge on the left. The “progressive” wing, which controls everything in DC (including, let’s be honest, the “Moderate” Biden – wants their slightly-too-moderate bete noir out of the way. While Cuomo’s presidential odds were likely slim and none, he certainly has a powerful bully pulpit within the party.

Well – had one.

This past week, in my observation, has been almost perfectly stage-managed – with the news of the whistleblower coming out while the Governor was in an audience with Biden.

Why? I addition to being a “moderate” (yep, you read that right – Cuomo is like Phyllis Kahn) wart on the Democrat party’s butt that can be excised, making room for more acceptable “Progressives” for the nation’s third-or-fourth-most powerful, but certainly most prestigious, governorship, it also allows Democrats to claim the “credit” for getting “justice” for all the seniors that died…

…even though conservatives owned the story from the beginning.

Like Stalin ordering Trotsky’s murder, this purge – with able assistance from the media that is giving itself leg and lip cramps kissing Biden’s ass – serves all sorts of purposes for Big Left.

Badda bing.

Where have you gone, our #UmbrellaMan?

The Star/Trib turns its lonely eyes to you:

In a city ravaged by leftist violence several times in the past year, we’re going to focus, hard, on finding the dozen doughy ex-Libertarians, sitting in their parents basements, who identify as Trumpo-Anarchists.

In related news, Germany, expressing alarm over a 1939 attack on a border radio station, is concerned about potential Polish aggression.

Last summer, on my show, I interviewed a guy – an engineering professor – who had a side project, mathematically modeling the progress of the Covid pandemic.

His assertion – that somewhere between 5-10 times as many people had been infected as the testing showed – because “getting tested” was at best a self-selecting set of subjects (if, at that time, they could get tested at all) and most people were asymptomatic, or had limited symptoms.

The numbers were plausible – and the limited symptoms part resonated with me. I barely talked myself into getting an antibody test. My symptoms were fairly minimal – a fever for about a day, a nasty cough for a few more, basically the bronchitis I get every couple years. Were it not for a rash on the back of my hands, I might have just skipped the whole thing. The antibody test showed I’d had Covid, in late March or early April – consistent with the symptoms I did have.

Here’s the deal – the modeler and I considered it good news. With viruses, all other things being equal and acknowledging there’s a lot we still don’t know about Covid, recovering from an infection gets you, if not immunity, at least resistance, at least for some period of time. And even limited immunity and enhanced resistance is a huge thing; the common cold is largely shrugged off by most Westerners, but it was frequently lethal to natives when Westerners traveled to places where the people had never had exposure to it. The difference between a lethal pandemic and the sniffles was a few (or few dozen) generations of having had it and survived.

The modeler’s advice? Everyone who wasn’t under sixty and/or in relatively decent health should protect themselves accordingly until a vaccine came out; everyone else should “play spin the bottle, and power through the infection as fast as possible”.

Having “Survived” a mild case, I’ll recuse myself from the games.

And that particular modeler is not the only person to have found these results.

Shrieking Ninnies In Expensive Suits – which was why I was a little surprised not only to see this story from National Public Radio’s “health” beat reporters, about a study from Columbia that reached precisely the same factual concusion that Covid had infected 5-10 times as many people as we thought…

…and not just that they thought it was seriously ground-breaking news (emphasis added)…

The model has not been published or peer-reviewed yet, but lead researcher, Jeffrey Shaman, an infectious disease specialist at Columbia University, shared the data exclusively with NPR.

…when my lil’ ol’ talk show covered this exact same conclusion eight months ago…

…but the conclusion these “elite” “journalists” reached:

…[the model] gives a much more complete — and scary — picture of how much virus is circulating in our communities…The model’s conclusion: On any given day, the actual number of active cases — people who are newly infected or still infectious — is likely 10 times that day’s official number of reported cases.

So let’s recap: a model that is:

• Unpublished
• Not peer-reviewed
• Reaches a statistical conclusion that is “news” only if one’s sense of credentialism has eaten whatever journalistic inquisitiveness one might have had

…is presented not only as “new” news, but as bad news.

Now, during my brief, not very successful career as a reporter, one thing I did do well was ask questions – which used to be a key qualifier for journalists.

And I have so many of them, reading both the study and the “elite” journos at NPR’s take on it.

• Given that the number of deaths and serious hospitalizations are a reasonably known quantity, and their numbers has been broadly tracking with known infection rates, and we presume that this discrepancy is not brand new, doesn’t that mean the disease is on 10-20% as fatal as we thought?
• Again assuming that the infection rates have always been ahead of testing, doesn’t that mean an order of magnitude more people have been infected, and (remember, we know the death rates) recovered, and thus are at least partly immune or resistant? Isn’t that good news (except of course for the number of immune people getting scarce vaccines, and also the fact that our government response seems to be discounting natural immunity entirely?)
• Wny, in fact, does this story ignore the natural/herd immunity implications of numbers like this?

This sort of “reporting” is neither science nor, if my various bosses, teachers, editors and mentors were to be believed, journalism in any sense other than “providing PR for an authioritarian narrative”.