Facebook, Fake News, and COVID-19

Bob Young
2 min readJan 12, 2021

On Facebook today, someone I know wrote that ordering Americans to wear masks and limit non-essential public gatherings is an attempt to make us a socialist nation. There are so many problems with the craziness of this claim that it’s hard to know where to start, but this is important, so I’ll try.

Screenshot from worldometer website showing global COVID-19 stats

Here are today’s statistics from worldometer (see link at the end of the article).

  1. COVID-19 is a global problem, not just an American problem. Any claims that make COVID-19 look like some sort of an American conspiracy are patently false.
  2. Today, more than one third of the active COVID-19 cases on the planet are in America. In case you want to argue, “Well, we have more cases because we have a larger population,” look at point 3 below.
  3. In terms of “Total Cases per Million of Population,” America ranks number 7. The six countries with more cases per million are, in order: Andorra, Gibraltar, Montenegro, San Marino, Czechia, and Luxembourg. No leading world nation is failing at controlling this pandemic like we are.
  4. As of today, 1 in 862 Americans has died with COVID-19.

CONCLUSION: When people look at you in the grocery store like you’re an idiot for having your mask below your nose, it’s not because they want to make America a socialist state. It’s because they want…

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Bob Young

CISO, Director of Information Security, and Security Consultant. Also, I wrote some books that have nothing to do with IT. http://www.amazon.com/author/bobyoung