I’ve Stopped Reading the News

Is it just me, or is everyone regurgitating empty words?

Is it obtuse or ignorant to say that everything that isn’t death toll reporting just feels like empty, useless words? Outside of raw case numbers, is all the rest not commentary, tangents of those affirmations of mortal finitude?

It’s life and death. Everything else doesn’t matter.

I rather read text messages and local Instagram pages reporting about people I know or who my friends know who’ve passed away, local figures that really meant something to me or my loved ones or my community. That’s where there’s a story. Humans of New York nails that. They put faces to the struggle. Are we not exhausted of speculations, tips, regulations, predictions, restrictions? Those who purport to extrapolate their ideas as solutions to this very massive crisis?

These headlines exemplify what I’m talking about:

A vaccine could take decades because the virus is very structurally similar to HIV, for which a vaccine has not been discovered. Except you have no idea, you’re not a fortune teller.

Researchers at Oxford University have developed a vaccine set to release in four months. Except they haven’t, have they. That news would travel faster than the virus itself.

New York is opening in phases, slowly in…