It’s an ongoing media theme: every day, the mainstream media and politicians continue to sell COVID-19 fear and hysteria.
Yet, nearly absent in their reporting are the hard facts and scientific data, as we have continually reported in recent issues in the Trends Journal: the vast majority of those dying from the virus are elderly people who are chronically ill and those suffering from obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, and long-term lung ailments, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
On 29 April, some 70 residents died at the state-run Soldiers’ Home in Holyoke, an elder care facility in Massachusetts. So far, this is the deadliest toll at a long-term care facility in the United States.
According to Joan Miller, a nurse who works at Soldier’s Home, there had been a severe staff shortage. “Veterans were on top of each other. We didn’t know who was positive and who was negative and then they grouped people together and that really exacerbated it even more,” she said.
In New Jersey, 62 died at the Paramus Veterans Memorial Home and another 50 at the Menlo Park Veterans Home.
In New York, 55 have died from the virus at the Long Island State Veterans Home.
Again, it is important to note that only a small fraction of those dying at certain eldercare homes are being reported.
Indeed, as we reported in last week’s Trends Journal, a Wall Street Journal article from 22 April stated the virus has killed over 10,000 residents of long-term care facilities (such as nursing homes), but 27 states have not yet reported their data on nursing-home related COVID-19 fatalities.
Included among those states not providing complete data is Washington, where the virus first struck in the U.S. One out of five of its nursing homes was hit by the disease, and more than 200 deaths have been linked to those facilities since early April.
The Kaiser Family Foundation, an America non-profit organization focusing on national health issues, has reported that 27 percent of COVID-19 deaths in 23 states occurred in nursing homes and long-term care facilities.
F.U. Who?
On 23 April, Dr. Hans Kluge, European regional director of the World Health Organization, revealed that more than 50 percent of all COVID-19 deaths in Europe have occurred in nursing homes and long-term care facilities. This information has been ignored by the mainstream media.
This information has been known for weeks. On 30 March, an article published in the medical journal Lancet reported: “Covid-19 kills an estimated 13.4% of patients 80 and older, compared with 1.25% of those in their 50s and 0.3% of those in their 40s.”
As for Italy, where COVID-19 panic news fears first spread outside of China and sparked the lockdowns throughout the western world, while deeply buried in it’s full page story, the New York Times even noted yesterday that “The average age of those who died of Covid-19 there [Italy] was around 80.”
Evidence also indicates that children and the young demographic are far less vulnerable to the virus. According to CDC data, in the U.S., only 1.7 percent of nearly 150,000 infections were found in people below the age of 18.
Makes You Cry
The mainstream media carefully avoids providing information concerning the vast majority of coronavirus victims. Recently, a story was reported about the death of an angelic, five-year-old African-American girl who died of the virus in Detroit Michigan:
“The numbers are low until it’s your child:
The coronavirus can be deadly for children, too.”
Absent from this Washington Post story are two very significant facts: 1) Michigan has the country’s highest COVID-19 death rate, and 2) economically depressed Detroit is the epicenter of that state’s virus outbreak. West Michigan news outlet WWMT was more accurate in its reporting: “Experts also said the virus is hitting poverty stricken and more marginalized communities harder.”
It is tragic that this child, or any child, should die of the virus. But the people of America deserve to know that as of 21 April, when the Washington Post ran that story, there were just two deaths associated with the virus in America of children between the ages of one and five… out of 23.2 million children in that age group.
TREND FORECAST: More than 100 countries continue to keep schools shut down, affecting some 840 million children. Beyond the difficulties of parents balancing work schedules, finding affordable childcare services, etc., one of the greatest megatrends of the 21st century has been born: “Interactive U.”
As the Trends Journal has been reporting since the outbreak of this pandemic, from grade school through graduate school, the COVID crisis has created demand for a whole new world of “Interactive Online Education.”
Trends are born, they grow, mature, reach old age and die. “Interactive U,” the online trend Gerald Celente predicted in his 1996 book, “Trends 2000” is now reality and a part of our culture.
For On Trendpreneurs® and visionary investors, designing and funding a new education curriculum to replace the outmoded 19th century Industrial Age one invented by the Prussians will not only reap enormous financial rewards, it will vastly improve individual skill sets.
And, while we do not provide financial advice, we forecast that leading companies designing advanced Interactive U online educational systems will be at the forefront among competing high-tech corporations.
TRENDPOST: While virtually ignored on broadcast media and rarely in the press, we have noticed that in Associated Press coverage of the coronavirus, included are these two sentences: “For most people, the coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms. For some, it can cause severe illness such as pneumonia, or even death.”
Rarely, if ever, in the mainstream media, it is ever mentioned that, “For most people, the coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms.” Instead, they concentrate on the “For some” who die.
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