Rather than going down the rabbit hole

of trying to determine how many countries there are on planet Earth, let's just say somewhere between 194 and 206.  As of today, 28 February 2020, 61 of these countries reported at least one person among its populace infected with SARS-CoV-2.

That is 30% to 31% of the countries officially recognized by some governing body (like the United Nations or the International Olympic Committee).  Not a majority, but certainly nothing to sneeze at.

At some point, the W.H.O. needs to call this a pandemic.  Not because I said so, not because 30% of the nations on this earth said so, but because it seems like a silly game to keep denying something on a technicality.  A pandemic doesn't mean "instant death" - You can have a pandemic of obesity, or a pandemic of people wasting their time playing video games, or looking for "Chuck Cunningham" on TMZ.

Clearly, in this particular case, COVID-19 doesn't mean instant death.  In an open society with adequate medical care, it might mean 2 deaths out of 100, similar to the number of deaths each year from prostate cancer.  But it does mean an infection the world's population hasn't seen before, a disease that people would like to know how to respond to.  And they can't get that information if that information is being withheld.  If prostate cancer deaths in the U.S. suddenly spiked, would this be information: (a) the newspapers should withhold, for fear of scaring people or (b) information vital to asking and finding out why?

The Colorado newspapers need to make it easy to find out how many cases of COVID-19 have been tested for, and how many results have come back negative.  At the point positive cases start being confirmed, these same newspapers need to make this information available.  Immediately.  Both in print and online.  Not to foment panic, but to allow citizens time to prepare, and make educated choices: (a) should I attend that concert next Friday at the Fillmore, packed nose to jowl with 1000 other people or (b) should I wait until that artist cycles back through Denver next year?  This is no longer a patriarchal society, or a gerontocracy.

Search the Estes Park Trail-Gazette website for "coronavirus".  Three articles include this word, two of which relate to the common cold or decades-old SARS news.  How informed are we?  How informed does one article, after 84,000 cases worldwide and almost 3000 deaths, make us?  How much background knowledge or breaking news is our local news media providing to a town of 6500 plus, with 3.7 odd million toting their baggage along every year?  Search for "coronavirus" and "Colorado" on Google.  Then substitute South Dakota, or Iowa, or Nevada, and see how much better those neighboring and near-neighboring states are doing keeping their citizens informed than the Colorado press.  Do they think we are stupid?  Illiterate?  Or are they just lazy, or masking lazy by patronizing?

Panic ensues from a lack of information, not an abundance of it.  Our citizens deserve a welter of information.  Now.  Not when the outbreak has already crashed over us in waves.  Remember, this is not rabies, or mad cow, or amoebic encephalitis, with an untreated death rate approaching 100%.  Most people can get over this, and many people could avoid this, if they just knew when and where it was.  Stop hiding information in your desire to "protect" us.  Governments have toppled for less, and this is nothing to topple a government over.  It's just an upper respiratory infection that leads to complications in people with immunosuppression or underlying lung disease.

We have three weeks.  Again, this is not like "We have three weeks to prepare for the worst catastrophe in human history", just "we have three weeks to see how we are going to handle an infectious disease the spread of which can easily be prevented by good information, rapid testing, and self-quarantine."

Are we that stupid?  Does our local press think we are that stupid?  While we do our jobs of staying healthy, the local press should do their jobs of comforting the afflicted, afflicting the comfortable, and reporting the news.  Not hiding the news.  Reporting the news.

Let's be careful out there.