The time has just come. And of course the party was celebrated as it fell: The USA exceeded the mark of 500,000 corona deaths and although the new European President Joe Biden managed to ensure this from the first day he took office by requiring a mask and a phone call with Angela Merkel That America's corona situation is no longer the most pressing problem for the German media, in this case popped up again comparative horror. Half a million dead since the pandemic began. 500,000 Americans who have died after being infected with the coronavirus. Trump's failure! For the last time. How good that you, dear readers and dear public viewers, do not live there!
The bizarre USA-Luxembourg comparison
From the first month of the pandemic onwards the major German media compared the situation in Luxembourg, the Czech Republic or in Germany with that overseas. There were always more infected people there. More deaths. Even more than anywhere else in the world. At least in those ominous "absolute numbers" that made it easy to portray even the temporarily apocalyptic situation in Belgium as comparatively funny. Only around 20,000 people died there. In the USA, as of today, 25 times as much.
That the US population is 30 times the size of Belgium wasn't a point. While the European media, shaken by horror, reported the reaching of every hundred thousand deaths in the USA with horror, there were no such reports for the EU thanks to Europe's far-sighted and tactically clever statistical policy.
Both the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the European Directorate-General for Statistics Eurostat meticulously avoided creating any corona statistics on EU-Europe. All information that the ECDC collected and disseminated related to its member states, including Norway, initially Great Britain. There were and are not exclusively EU-related statistics. Neither one institution nor the other answered questions about why this is done in this way.
The advantage of ignorance
Anyone who wants to know who is ahead in the race, whose intermediate results are reported by the "Tagesschau" only when the USA set a new record and "Joe Biden mourns 500,000 deaths" (Der Spiegel), has to do the unheard of - for the German media. Do your math by yourself.The truly shocking findings: Ast the moment the US had half a million corona deaths to complain, the EU was long past this point. As early as the second week of February, the number of pandemic victims had risen to 515,000 - higher than the number in the US, which only reached 500,000 two weeks later.
The dead in the EU remain unmourned
What a mastery in information management, however, it reveals that the EU death day passed unmentioned for half a million! The progressive community of the still 27 EU states with the 428 German newspaper editorial offices, 72 community channels, 1,800 news websites and 921 people magazines are working in a caring and targeted manner, so that they mourn the distant American corona deaths with Joe Biden. But accept collectively and in silence that the EU's corona victims are not being discussed at all? Where else "Germans among the victims" is the established call to arms in all typewriter gun positions in the republic?
But as sad as the German media are about the many, many deaths in the USA, they are silent about the deaths in the EU. Not even the fact that neither Ursula von der Leyen nor Angela Merkel, not Emmanuel Macron and also not the federal long-term mourning commissioner Frank Steinmeier ever crushed a tear when 100,000, 200,000, 300,000, 400,000 and recently the 500,000 victims were reached relevant.