Conrad Black generates fire and fury over Twitter with column suggesting that kids return to school

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      When I noticed this morning that former publishing baron Conrad Black was trending on Twitter, I initially thought he must have died.

      But that wasn't the reason.

      He's trending as a result of a National Post column claiming that the novel coronavirus crisis "shows no signs of remotely approaching a scale that justifies the emergency measures that have been taken".

      He pointed out that there have been 37 COVID-19 deaths from 3,800 identified cases in Canada, which has a population of 38 million.

      "The public health system is sufficiently sophisticated that if there were significantly more fatalities from this cause, they would have been identified, even if our testing capacity is inadequate to be confident that there is not a larger number of infected people," Black wrote.

      Later in the column, he insisted that children should return to elementary schools because the danger to them is minimal and social-distancing measures in classrooms could contain the spread of the coronavirus.

      That caused the Twitter eruption. Here's just a small portion of the responses:

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