At the risk of sounding like a broken record, 2020 has been one tough year. Every month I go to write a newsletter, I take a look at what I wrote the month before. For most of this year, I have been writing about COVID-19 cases and how it has affected our health, our society, and our economy. Last month, I wrote that COVID-19 cases had crossed 25,500,000 globally and taken over 850,000 lives1. In early October, those numbers have increased to approx. 34,500,000 confirmed cases and over 1,020,000 fatalities1. I know that some are saying that these numbers are inflated or that the deaths were from something else. I just don’t see how that is actually the case. COVID-19 has been terrible for the Global Economy. Countries like Brazil, who did not prepare for the pandemic, and who’s leader described it as a “little flu” have been some of the hardest hit2. You have to ask yourself, why would a country with a government who has downplayed this since the beginning, report millions of cases and over 140,000 deaths? Why would they dig mass graves if the numbers aren’t real? If anything, one could argue that Brazil hasn’t reported as many cases, hospitalizations, and fatalities as they have actually had. Having the economy of Canada shut down has been extremely tough and very frustrating. I don’t know if our local governments have handled it correctly. All I can say, is that after hearing from clients who have lost friends to this virus and clients who have had family members get very, very sick from it, I just can’t agree that this isn’t a serious pandemic. It’s certainly no “little flu”.
We are now just weeks from what will likely be the most important US Presidential Election in history. This time, not only will we not know who will win this until after the big vote, we won’t even know who won until days later. There will be a major delay in counting all of the votes and that will mean this election cycle will be even more strange and confusing than 2016. Polling in swing states continues to show a Biden lead3 but we just won’t know until later in November. Will the recent debates matter? Will information on Donald Trump’s poor financial situation matter? Will there actually be enough excitement for a Joe Biden presidency to get people to the polls? We just don’t know. What we do know, is there will be a lot of misinformation before Nov. 3rd. There are sources that I like to use to fact check claims made by candidates and their supporters. I’m going to leave you with some links here. I have also been using a site called Media Bias/Fact Check which can tell you how biased your news sources are. In the world of Social Media, I have found these sites extremely helpful! I’ll urge you to take a look at them and add them to your bookmarks. In Trump vs. Biden, you will certainly need some serious Fact-Checking!!
- FactCheck.org: https://www.factcheck.org/
- PolitiFact: https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/
- Media Bias/Fact Check: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/
Wishing you sanity throughout the election and the pandemic,
Bryce A. Borden
Edit: After sending out my Newsletter for Compliance Approval, it was announced that Donald Trump himself had tested positive for COVID-19. I’m sure by the time my readers get this, everyone will have seen the image of the President being airlifted to Walter Reed General Hospital. It was later revealed that President Trump did in fact need oxygen and was quite sick with the virus. A number of other members of the administration also tested positive so it appears that COVID-19 has penetrated the White House. We wish them all the best in this struggle and hope that it will be a wake-up call to the United States as to how serious this virus can be.
1Worldometer – https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
2Euronews – https://www.euronews.com/2020/04/06/a-little-flu-brazil-s-bolsonaro-playing-down-coronavirus-crisis/
3Real Clear Politics – https://www.realclearpolitics.com/elections/trump-vs-biden-top-battleground-states/
