LETTER: How many will admit they were wrong?

As we approach the one-year mark of the beginning of the worst pandemic in over a century, I am looking back at the false rhetoric that was so blatantly spread on the internet, on social media, on opinion TV, and among friends and family that the coronavirus was just a bad flu or a big, overblown hoax, concocted and fabricated by those dastardly Democrats who were just trying to scare everybody and make Donald Trump look bad.
Certainly, there were plenty of non-thinking people willing and ready to lap up the misinformation and factual corruptions originating from Trump’s White House that the virus was well under control and that it will magically disappear by Easter 2020 or by Memorial Day. Even to this very day, I have heard from people, who certainly should know better, that not all of the 400,000-plus really died from COVID-19, and that the hospitals and doctors were faking the data for financial profit! As my PCP commented at my last visit, a coronavirus death doesn’t really mean much unless a victim of the disease is a beloved relative, a dear friend, a trusted co-worker or a good neighbor.
As it stands today, we are two-thirds of the way to reaching the death toll that our nation suffered during the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918-21. Predictions are that we will lose a half-million souls sometime in February. If our country would have continued on with the Trump administration’s inept and incompetent management, we could have easily surpassed the 650,000 deaths of 100 years ago. I am compelled to ask these burning questions: How many virus deniers are now clearly ready to admit that they were duped by Trump? How many are willing to admit they were just plain wrong in their denial of the seriousness of this pandemic? How many put their political party affiliations over and above medical science, and were willing to chime in with the denigration directed toward our nation’s very best epidemic specialists as being alarmists and false prophets of doom?
What say you now, you misguided, misinformed and bamboozled citizens?
Ronald J. Yamka
Canonsburg