Coronavirus: Newspapers Should Simply Tell the Truth.

How dare The Washington Post publish a story showing that some cases of the dreaded coronavirus are mild.

Don’t the editors know that their job is to whip the public into a frenzy over this thing? To spread fear and hysteria? To blame the president for every case in the US and every death?

That was the reaction to a first-person story published in last Friday’s Post by a man who’s infected with COVID-19 and not very sick. Headlined, “I Have The Coronavirus. So Far, It Hasn’t Been That Bad: My Treatment Has Largely Consisted Of Drinking Gallons and Gallons of Gatorade,” Carl Goldman detailed his journey from his berth on the Diamond Princess luxury cruise ship to the University of Nebraska where he is staying in isolation until he tests negative for the virus.

Irate readers demanded that the paper remove Goldman’s account from its website. Some said they were cancelling their subscriptions over it. Others posted venomous and sarcastic messages to the infected writer for daring to tell a story that didn’t fuel the national hair-on-fire narrative.

His is simply one man’s account of being infected with the coronavirus and finding the disease to be less severe than a cold. One day earlier, I’d read a feature in USA Today about another American - on the same cruise - who was infected with the coronavirus and finally on the mend after a severe bout of pneumonia.

Both stories are true. Shouldn’t both be told?

Goldman wrote that his symptoms are so mild that if he were at home with this ailment he wouldn’t skip work.

I am in my late 60s, and the sickest I’ve ever been was when I had bronchitis several years ago. That laid me out on my back for a few days. This has been much easier: no chills, no body aches. I breathe easily, and I don’t have a stuffy nose. My chest feels tight, and I have coughing spells. If I were at home with similar symptoms, I probably would have gone to work as usual.

Goldman made no claim about what the virus is doing to other patients. He’s aware that several thousand people have died of the same virus he has, and that tens of thousands of others have been sickened.

No one knows how many other people are infected, but may be completely asymptomatic, which makes the death rate for this new virus unknowable at this point.

Yet the feverish anger this piece has generated is something to behold.

In fact, if you read the comments with The Post piece - 4,400 of them - you may be shocked, as I was, at the number of people furious at the paper for simply publishing Goldman’s story. Get a load of some of the hate:

Shame on The Washington Post.

I’m canceling my subscription. 

Lucky you (Goldman). Pity the two percent who drop dead didn’t share your outcome.  Let’s see...Doctor Trump and assistant Pence have assured us that we have nothing to worry about.  It’s like the common cold!  Hmmm...if there’s universal exposure with a 2 percent fatality rate, we could be looking at 6 to 7 million dead.  I can only hope they’re in the South and mid-west where washing your hands is so elitist.

Have you considered visiting DC or attending a Trump rally?

WaPo should pull this article.  

So glad the writer is feeling much better than the 3,000 who have died from the disease thus far.

Really irresponsible journalism WaPo.

What in the world is the value of this article? To instruct us of the existence of glib, irresponsible people?  I think we already know that!

Stunning.

Instead of feeling reassured that perhaps the coronavirus is not a death sentence, these seething ghouls were livid.

The blowback was so ugly that The Post changed the headline at least once to shut them up. Last time I checked, editors had added two words to the headline: “I Have The Coronavirus. So Far, It Hasn’t Been That Bad FOR ME.” (Caps are mine.)

Some Post subscribers - you know, the intelligentsia in our nation’s capital - seem to be invested in this disease being portrayed only as deadly and unstoppable.

That’s as scary as the virus itself.