March 5, 2020 --

The New York Times, March 2, carried a story how the coronavirus is viewed through a "partisan lens."   

The article, however, seemed to find more partisanship among Trump supporters than from Democrats, in that conservatives, for partisan purpose,  had labeled "Democrats 'the Pandemic Party.'"  But  the Times did not have to look elsewhere for evidence that the conservative perception was, in fact, accurate. The paper's March 1 editorial was titled "Global Pandemic Warnings Ignored." Stated in the editorial's ninth paragraph was this assertion:  "A global pandemic is all but certain, but there are many unknowns." 

How did the Times propose these unknowns be dealt with successfully? 

So far as LPR can tell, the paper proposed criticism of the Trump administration for not doing enough, and, in that regard, called for lots more federal spending to deal with...the unknowns."

Meanwhile, Mark Zandi, , an economist for Moody, was quoted on a CNBC program, February 28, as predicting that the coronavirus situation can lead to a recession and be "a significant threat to [President Trump's] re-election."   Mr. Zandi was said to have predicted that the odds of a pandemic had increased to forty percent.   

LPR has a hunch that for this economist (as well as most media outlets), a pandemic is presently defined as the lowest number of people who may be afflicted with a deadly  virus sufficient to thwart Mr. Trump's re-election, where, previously, a pandemic was defined in terms of an illness taking millions of lives, as was the case with "the Spanish flu of 1918."

(LPR  acknowledges that the Times story, March 1, near the end, included the observation of  Darrell Scott, a  black pastor in Cleveland, and a Trump backer, that  "'the Democrats are politicizing something that we should all be uniting to fight'....")