ROGER SIMON: Nashville’s Government Lied About The Coronavirus — Does Everybody?
For good and bad reasons, my adopted hometown of Nashville can’t stay out of the news.
The good: Ben Shapiro, Jeremy Boreing and the gang from The Daily Wire are moving their successful conservative media company here for reasons similar to mine. They no longer “love LA.”
They considered Texas but opted for Music City because of the number of “creatives” here. (If you watched Wednesday night’s Nashville-based Academy of Country Music awards, you could see that in action.) Welcome, guys!
The bad: Like many cities across this nation, Nashville’s government has been extremely peremptory—and it now seems worse than that—in its dealings with the pandemic.
Its mayor, John Cooper, issued what amounted to diktats restricting most social activity in a town that relies heavily on tourist income. They were particularly punitive toward the popular honky tonks on Lower Broadway. The owners screamed bloody murder but got little or no response.
Now we know why: Nashville Metro lied. The coronavirus figures for those same honky tonks (country music bars) were nowhere near what the city had said or implied they were in order to keep them shut or semi-shut, Fox 17 Nashville revealed in a series of private government emails uncovered by the station.
The coronavirus cases in the honky tonks were next to zero.
Mayor Cooper is shaping up as a national villain, similar to New York’s infamous Bill De Blasio. (More in a moment)
This should not just be local news, or even national. It should be international for what it tells us about the virus.
Restaurants and bars may not be nearly as dangerous locales for the transmission of the novel coronavirus (known here as the CCP virus) as we have been told. In fact, they could possibly not be very dangerous at all, since the instances of the virus associated with them appear to be minuscule.
That has implications for every city in the world and every country. The hospitality industry has been decimated, in many places, almost beyond repair. Tourism has been wounded globally, possibly terminally. Ditto the airline industry. Tons of employees in virtually every nation have lost their jobs.
You know who hasn’t lost his job? Nashville Mayor John Cooper. Maybe do something about that?
You may recall, I’ve said that trust is the most important thing in public health. I don’t think our leaders have taken that responsibility seriously enough.
ANOTHER UPDATE: So a reporter for the Tennesseee Lookout is saying that there’s less to this story than meets the eye, because he got the numbers about the paucity of Covid cases in bars and published a story back in August. But I agree with his respondents that the story isn’t just the low numbers — although that’s news that, though reported in the Lookout, wasn’t noticed by many — but that the Mayor’s office was actively trying to keep it quiet.
So there are two stories: One is that the city’s own numbers don’t justify closing the bars, which shold be enough to support a lawsuit that will get the closing orders overturned. The other is that the Mayor’s office’s own emails show they were trying to keep this quiet, so as to maintain an order that wasn’t supported by the science in which we’re all exhorted to believe.