b'Editorfer both relief of our fear of the virus and boiling anger that we have sunk the U.S.as the seasonal flu, and that a large percentage of us might have already had it and economy unnecessarily, is that the sickness and mortality rates are also exponen- not known it, we should all feel pretty damned stupid for sinking our economy trying tially lower than we have been told.to hide from it.The real pain, the pain that has absolutely no direct connection whatsoeverWe really hate to say that some in the news media, along with some elected of-to the coronavirus, is only beginning, and far more Americans will suffer from aficials who promoted and enforced shutdown policies, fear the embarrassment that crashed economy than from the diseaseinfinitely more. If the current shutdownwould come with fewer U.S. deaths from Covid-19 than the seasonal flulest we for-of the U.S. economy continues for much longer, in weeks we will be asking, Whatget the inexpert pandemic forecasters who warned of millions of deaths in the U.S. virus? Poverty, homelessness, hunger and crime will dwarf Covid-19 in the Unitedand are in the process of permanently losing their credibility on these matters. While States. The statewide shutdown in Texas by Governor Greg Abbott, closing schools,Fox News was predictably in the bag for Trump, defending his actions while ignoring bars and restaurants and canceling all major gatherings, first impacted Austinshis salesmanship, liberal networks CNN and MSNBC could not resist their impulse annual South by Southwest music and film festival, delivering a roundhouse kick toto accuse Trump and several outspoken Republicans of racism for using terms like the Central Texas economy along with the jobs that came with the festival. China Virus and Hunan Viruslabels both networks used in describing the out-The U.S. has shed over 20 million jobs in less than a month. Retirement ac- break while it was still a regional story in Asia. In the next breath, of course, they counts and the publicly-owned wealth of our industrial base has lost 25% of itscompare it to the Spanish Flu, that didnt even come from Spain!value. U.S. GDP is projected to go from growing at 3%, to plummeting by 30% inThe general level of Idiocrasy that the Covid-19 crisis has given rise to is truly one quarter. The American economy has never, not even going into the Great De- embarrassing. Trump repeatedly mentioned a French study in which a 70-year-old pression, crashed so hard and so fast, all at once.anti-malaria drug, hydroxychloroquine, was used to treat coronavirus patients with Most of the people who have lost their jobs were at the bottom end of theencouraging results. Twenty-six patients received the drug in tandem with azithro-income scale, which means their situations became immediately desperateand the vast gulf that exists between the income classes has never been so shockingly glaring in any of our lifetimes. We have truly not seen anything like this, and it was 100% preventable at all levels.The very concept of locking down as much of the American population as pos-sible should never have been considered an option. Italy did it, and they dropped like fliesso lets do that. Sweden didnt do it. South Korea didnt do it. The likely result is that the United States of America, through its sensationalized news me-dia and overreactive elected officials, who were bewildered and unprepared and whose public health consultants have proven inept, could be marking the begin-ning of our end as the worlds last economic and military superpower. Were about to be an average country.Rome ruled their known world for 500 years but eventually fell.Covid-19 was never a threat to wipe out America, but our reaction to it might.HISTORY SHALL REMEMBER US NEITHER FOR STABILITY NOR GENIUS.We will survive this, most of us at least. Before Hurricane Harvey, this publication was a tourists guide to the Coastal Bend. When the storm wiped out more than half of our advertisers, and most of our readers were no longer coming, we had no choice but to broadly expand our audience by publishing content that we localsInside the Chinese lab in Wuhan where really cared about and were interested inand I think we did. Our first issue asCovid-19 is suspected of originatingThe Coastal Bend Magazine, published at the end of 2017, featured the experience of many of our neighbors on Mustang Island suffering and surviving Harvey. So, inmycin, and one died, one turned out to not have Covid-19, three went into intensive a very real way, that difficult time is saving our business now. care, and three dropped out of the study. Twenty of the patients, including the three The people we Americans have put in charge have failed us in ways none of uswho went into ICU, recovered from the disease, and although the study was too could have made up in our wildest imaginations. Those wise men who conceivedsmall to be considered anything but anecdotal, the results were encouraging to a the U.S. Constitution, though flawed, understood the requisites for a free and fairPresident in need of good news to report to the people. A Democratic legislator from society, led by a government of the People. The one and only profession that isMichigan, Representative Karen Whitsett who is from the Detroit area, became ill expressly empowered in the Constitution is The Press, the Fourth Estate, and theand a Covid-19 test was administered. Just as the positive result came back, she had reason is because politicians lie, cheat, steal, and screw up all the time, and theycrashed. It went from the headaches being severe to fluid building up in my lungs, can in no way be counted on to police themselves. The Press is our check. to sweats breaking out to the cough and my breathing being labored, Whitsett said. So much of the behavior we have seen by national news media during thisIt all happened in a matter of hours.crisis, which lead most local news media by the nose, is a violation of the trust weFeeling desperate, Rep. Whitsett implored her doctor to prescribe hydroxy-should expect to have in them. All news media downplayed the threat Covid-19 waschloroquine, and her husband was dispatched to retrieve the prescription. Within to the U.S., but Fox News flipped about a week later than the others, taking theirhours, she was in full recovery. The elected Democratic official appeared on multiple signals from the White House. Trump was criticized for repeating what the mediaTrump-friendly news outlets to give credit to the President, saying, If President had stopped saying two weeks earlier, that the seasonal flu kills tens of thousandsTrump had not talked about this, it wouldnt have been something that would be ac-of people every year, and so this was no more of a threat than that. Althoughcessible for anyone to be able to get right now. Although there is no medically prov-Covid-19 is a new virus, and largely an unknown thanks to the worlds misplacedable correlation between her recovery and the drug, the result encouraged many.trust in the Chinese government, he may turn out to be right. In 2017-18, the fluNot among those were, predictably, far-left political commentators like Mi-season was the worst in 40 years, with 80,000 dying of influenza or complicationschaelangelo Signorile and Rachel Maddow, who ignored Rep. Whitsetts story and from the disease. Now that it is becoming apparent that Covid-19 is as contagiousconcentrated on the lack of public support for use of the drug now, before clinical TheCoastalBend.com THE COASTAL BEND MAGAZINEFEATURED: The Stories that Mattered 21'