Creating Pandemic Panic: A Simple Meat-and-Potatoes Recipe

A laboratory staff places a vial containing a sample collected for coronavirus testing at a hospital in Mumbai on Sept. 16, 2020. Indranil Mukherjee/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

While many things elevated the COVID-19 pandemic from mere disease into a world-altering narrative—statistics, media hype, the visuals of masking, lock-downs, etc.—the saga essentially rested on two basic metrics: Determining the scale of the outbreak measured predominantly by PCR tests and “COVID deaths” driving understanding of the disease’s severity as captured through death certificates.