Death, misery, economic dislocation, lines for food banks, national sports outages, rumors and hoaxes, layoffs: Finding good-news stories during the novel coronavirus pandemic takes a great deal of effort. And yet! A new survey by the Pew Research Center finds that 49 percent of adults say that keeping abreast of the pandemic “doesn’t change my emotions.” For those folks, the Erik Wemple Blog recommends two stories. Patch.com reported on nearly five-month-old Jay-Natalie La Santa, who died of the coronavirus this month at Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in the Bronx. “We just knew she was going to pull through, everything was looking great,” the girl’s father, Jerel La Santa, told Patch. “And then when it happened, it just happened spontaneously. There was no warning, no levels in her blood that could have led to it …. everything was in a perfect spot and it just happened.” Meanwhile, the New York Times wrote about Madhvi Aya, a 61-year-old Indian immigrant who worked in the ER of a Brooklyn hospital. She got the virus and ultimately succumbed to it, dying alone. What preceded her passing were heartbreaking text messages with her husband and 18-year-old daughter, Minnoli. One passage from the story: Even after her mother died, Minnoli still texted, trying to stay connected. “I miss u,” she wrote before going to bed that night. When she woke the next morning, Minnoli texted, “Thank you for coming to me last night in my dreams.” We won’t fault the mass of fellow Americans who report little emotional impact from coronavirus news. A great deal of the coverage, after all, has hovered over breakdowns in the U.S. public health infrastructure, to the extent that such a thing exists anymore. Another focus has been the White House briefing room, where President Trump has made news again and again with his bogus pronouncements of hope, quack cures and other rantings about China or testing or his wonderful colleagues. An analysis by The Post of many briefings found that Trump “has offered little in the way of accurate medical information or empathy for coronavirus victims, instead focusing on attacking his enemies and lauding himself and his allies.” On Tuesday, Trump fielded a question from a reporter about whether he’d spoken to the families of coronavirus victims, outside of the well-known case of a friend who’d lost his life to covid-19. “Well, I have many people. I know many stories, I’ve spoken to three — maybe, I guess, four families — unrelated to me, I did,” said Trump. “I lost a very good friend. I also lost three other friends, two of whom I didn’t know as well, but they were friends and people I did business with.” Americans received White House encouragement early on to filter this crisis through their trusty political lenses. Then-acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney told attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in late February: “Why didn’t you hear about it? What was still going on four to five weeks ago? Impeachment, and that’s all the press wanted to talk about,” said Mulvaney. “So while real news was happening, and we were dealing with it in a way that I think you folks would be extraordinarily proud of and that was serving the nation extraordinarily well, the press was covering their hoax of the day because they thought it would bring down the president. The reason you’re seeing so much attention to it today is that they think this going to be what brings down the president.” History — which is to say, the past two months — has been inimical to those remarks. There’ve been plenty of such attention-draining incidents of incompetence, too, whether it’s hyping hydroxychloroquine as a treatment, riffing about light and disinfectants as instruments of internal medicine or issuing absurd statements about the imminence of normal life. Which is to say, stories about human suffering have real competition. Somehow, seven percent of survey respondents reported feeling “better emotionally” after updating themselves on coronavirus news. (43 percent report feeling worse.) Now that’s a crowd that the Erik Wemple Blog would like to interview. Perhaps they’re fixated on Fox News’s optimistic and frequent reports that hydroxychloroquine presents a promising treatment for covid-19. Speaking of which, Pew found that “more than half of adults ages 65 and older (56 percent) say they have heard a lot about hydroxychloroquine” — a conclusion that squares with the graying audience of Fox News. And finally, a ray of light: According to Pew, a good chunk of respondents identifying as Democrats (39 percent) and Republicans (35 percent) said they’d turned to news sources not on their usual menu for updates on the coronavirus. If nothing else, perhaps the coronavirus will derail the rutting of the American news mind. Source
