I’ve been trying to find the right words for how I’m feeling about recent events in society. I just heard of a great concept that describes it; catastrophizing.
Catastrophizing is when someone assumes that the worst will happen. It’s an irrational thought and a cognitive distortion that prompts people to jump to the worst possible conclusion. When a situation is upsetting, but not necessarily catastrophic, people may still feel like they are in the midst of a crisis.
Catastrophizing can generally take two different forms: making a catastrophe out of a current situation and imagining a tragedy happening in the future. It’s engaging in an irrational thought process the leads us to believe something is far worse than it is.
In the cases below, I see constant catastrophizing. It’s undoubtedly prevalent on social media, but mainstream news outlets are hell-bent on constant perpetuating the never-ending apocalypse.
Take a look at this tragic story about Danielle DiCenso on April 15:
33-year-old nurse from Wellington dies after being exposed to COVID-19
Danielle DiCenso was a mother, a sister, a friend, a dog lover, and a traveling nurse working at Palmetto General Hospital.
Her husband, David, says that she loved her job and loved to help people, but had begun experiencing some anxiety in March about going to work.
"She was scared to go to work," DiCenso remembers.
He says Danielle came home with horror stories about treading patients with COVID-19, but most horrific of all, she said she was not given proper personal protective equipment, like a face mask to wear at work.
"She went to work one day and they didn’t have a mask for her," he said.
David says Danielle began experiencing coronavirus symptoms in late March and she suspected she had it, but her test came back inconclusive and she thought she could fight it off at home.
Sound horrible, doesn’t it? The horror stories, the anxiety, not having a mask!!! The catastrophizing from this media outlet is out of control.
There was an update to correct the story on July 29:
Autopsy shows Wellington nurse died of kidney infection, not COVID-19
A report from the Palm Beach County Medical examiner obtained by CBS12 News shows that a young Wellington nurse believed to have passed from COVID-19 was never infected with the virus at all.
The report shows that 33-year-old Danielle DiCenso died from "complications of acute pyelonephritis," otherwise known as a kidney infection.
DiCenso was quarantining at home when she died suddenly in her sleep. Before she passed away, DiCenso was tested for COVID-19 after she was reportedly exposed to the virus at work.
Her husband, David DiCenso told CBS12 News that the young nurse was not given proper PPE at her job at Palmetto General in Hialeah. He said she began experiencing coronavirus symptoms in late March, and her test came back inconclusive.
Inconclusive? What does THAT mean? Was it negative or positive? So the panic about COVID wasn’t really about COVID after all. Why did the media report the story this way?
This isn’t the only report that was misleading:
From the report above:
A 60-year-old man who died from a gunshot wound to the head.
A 90-year-old man who fell and died from complications of a hip fracture.
A 77-year-old woman who died of Parkinson's disease.
These are some of the deaths in Palm Beach County recently, and incorrectly, attributed to COVID-19 in medical examiner records.
The CBS12 News I-Team uncovered several examples in Medical Examiner reports of people counted as a COVID death who did not die of COVID.
We requested a list of all COVID-19 deaths in Palm Beach County from the Medical Examiner's office and received a spreadsheet of 581 cases.
Each person on the spreadsheet is someone who tested positive for COVID-19.
In each case line, the person's cause of death and contributing causes of death are listed, if there are any.
The I-Team found eight cases in which a person was counted as a COVID death, but did not have COVID listed as a cause of contributing cause of death.
"I think it is completely misleading," said Rachel Eade, a Palm Beach County resident who has been researching the same issue.
"We need to remove those cases that are not COVID exclusive, and we need to be giving people that information," said Eade, who is one of the plaintiffs suing Palm Beach County for its mask mandate.
She said of the 581 deaths on the spreadsheet, only 169 deaths are listed as COVID without any contributing factors.
I wrote about another misleading story HERE:
85 infants under age 1 tested positive for coronavirus in one Texas county.
We currently have 85 babies under the age of one year in Nueces County that have all tested positive for Covid-19," said Annette Rodriguez, director of public health for Corpus Christi Nueces County.
"These babies have not even had their first birthday yet. Please help us stop the spread of this disease."
She did not provide additional details on their conditions.
That last sentence is all you need to know. It’s irresponsible for a news outlet to report this without following up. It’s even more reprehensible that Twitter would make this a trending story. It appears as if people read headlines and rarely read details.
The truth was a little more complicated:
On July 18, Nueces County Judge Barbara Canales issued a statement in which she clarified that the figure presented by Rodriguez referred to all positive tests among children aged under 1 year since March, rather than the number of currently active cases among children of that age:
“On Friday, July 17, during a press conference, a spokesperson mentioned that 85 infants under the age of one had tested positive for coronavirus. This number reflects the cumulative total of positive tests for infants under the age of 1 since the beginning of testing in mid-March, which has resulted in 8,171 positive test results.
“For context, the spokesperson was using that statistic to illustrate that no one is naturally immune to this virus. While the elderly and those with existing medical conditions are at greater risk of illness and death, anyone can get the virus, from the elderly to infants, and without regard to race, gender, or economic status. The number was used to illustrate this point. However, without this context, stating this number during our press conference led many to believe that we had a sudden surge in infants under the age of one testing positive. We have NOT had a sudden surge of 85 infants testing positive.”
That clarification provided the basis for CNN’s claim, in its headline, that “85 infants under age 1” had tested positive for COVID-19 in Nueces County.
The level the media will stoop to be sensational is demoralizing.
Pay attention in the next few weeks how media outlets will cover kids going back to school and college. They will make it seem as if every kid and teacher is going to wind up dead. I feel they are licking their chops in these newsrooms, hoping to report a 2020 version of a Jim Jones Guyana massacre.
Has anyone in the media looked at what schools are like in other countries? Maybe every kid isn’t sick or dead. Maybe none are.
Sports teams. Watch how the stories get reported there too. After we get through the next three weeks of back-to-school gloom and doom, there might be NFL catastrophizing, and hopefully, we will get through all of the big unknowns. The death and case rate will keep declining overall, and the only thing left to discuss is Trump and Biden.
It’s all so exhausting, but I don’t give into it. I am living my life to the fullest and reminding myself that life is short. Go out and make the most of the life you have. It’s a vast, beautiful world out there. Stop reading such horrible news and internalizing the negative. It’s only going to make things worse. Most of the time, the stories aren’t always accurate. There are all kinds of reports like the one above. Social media keeps spreading misleading stories. So why waste time reading news that is, um, fake.
Clayton Craddock is an independent thinker, father of two beautiful children in New York City. He is the drummer of the hit broadway musical Ain’t Too Proud. He earned a Bachelor of Business Administration from Howard University’s School of Business and is a 25 year veteran of the fast-paced New York City music scene. He has played drums in several hit broadway and off-broadway musicals, including “Tick, tick…BOOM!, Altar Boyz, Memphis The Musical and Lady Day At Emerson’s Bar and Grill. In addition, Clayton has worked on: Footloose, Motown, The Color Purple, Rent, Little Shop of Horrors, Evita, Cats, and Avenue Q.