[stellar678]

It would be great if people writing articles like this (I hesitate to call them journalists these days) could take the time to provide more context.

According to the county dashboard, Alameda County had 2,564 cases on May 20, 2 days after Tesla reopened: https://ac-hcsa.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html...

With a population of 1,671,000, that means about 0.15% of Alameda County residents had been diagnosed with covid-19 at that point.

So we could reasonably expect 15 cases out of the 10,000 employees at Tesla's factory.

Why the breathless article about 2 cases?

[radioactivist]

While I agree the article doesn't properly contextualize the number, that's not really the right comparison.

Alameda county has had 2564 cases in total since March (up to May 20th) -- so you'd have expected 15 employees to have tested positive for COVID since March. This is a very different statement than 2 of its employees have tested positive shortly after it re-opened.

Loosely one might compare it to those that tested positive in the week of May 20th, which, according to your link, is about 400-500 new cases (about 5x fewer than the cumulative total). So you might reasonably expect something like ~3 cases if you assume the Tesla workers had the same positive test rate as the general population of the county.

[pathseeker]

>Why the breathless article about 2 cases?

Because articles are now written to confirm people's preconceived notions. Articles that confirm your biases are more likely to be shared than articles which don't.

[mistermann]

I honestly wonder if this writing style is conscious and intentional though, or rather un(sub)conscious and accidental.

Look at comments in forums...in that case, people have no profit motive, although they do have a "get upvotes" motive (so, virtue signalling is a legit motive, to some degree, but one notion to consider is that people very often no longer discriminate between that which is concrete factual and that which is inferred (imagined) "factual". If you look for it, you'll see that this behaviour is everywhere.

[pathseeker]

Oh, it's likely not conscious by the author. The most convincing of these one-sided views are the ones written by people who are "true believers" in their agendas.

Don't tell authors to take extreme stances, just ensure that stories get assigned to the ones that have strong views about the topic.

Even better, let the authors themselves decide what to cover. They will pretty quickly focus on their pet political propaganda and produce the click bait needed to drive eyes.

[mistermann]

That actually makes a lot of sense....the desirable qualities for a journalist in 2020:

a) good/popular writing style

b) an ideologue in subjects that have high ideological "weight" in the population

Honesty, accuracy, fact checking, nuance, all of the traditional desirable attributes for journalists are now not only not required, but extremely undesirable.

And depending on the particular organization (say, a relatively reputable organization like the NYT), the only thing you need are editors who can proofread the article before publishing, replacing explicit assertions with a variety of weasel words, a big chunk of which could likely even be automated to insert suggested edits that just need a manual review.

[WetBurd]

The original article is by a writer of the Washington Post. If this doesn't count as journalism, I struggle to find examples that do.

The journalist spoke with two workers within the production facility. "One of the workers said a supervisor confirmed two positive cases to a group at the Fremont-based seat assembly facility" This is an example of just one supervisor confirming two positive cases. It is likely that there are many more.

Furthermore, "But because Tesla restarted production a week earlier, there could have been cases that were never reported to the county because Tesla was “not required to directly report known cases” before the agreement, county officials said."

[twblalock]

> The original article is by a writer of the Washington Post. If this doesn't count as journalism, I struggle to find examples that do.

That's a fallacious appeal to authority if I've ever seen one. The Washington Post and most other newspapers publish plenty of crap in addition to serious journalism, and they aren't above publishing clickbait to drive ad revenue.

[WetBurd]

What publication would you say does qualify as journalism in this case?

[twblalock]

It is not about the publication. Articles published by any publication, by any author, need to be evaluated on their own merits.

[WetBurd]

My point still stands. The author of this article: - conducts interviews with primary sources and provides direction quotation in the article. - reports on number previously unknown to the public - provides historical chronology of events so readers can understand

I ask again, what would be required for this piece to "count as journalism"?

[stcredzero]

If this doesn't count as journalism, I struggle to find examples that do.

I also struggle to find examples that do count, nowadays. Most of what I see is "narrative pushing."

[nwienert]

We’re they confirmed not positive before it reopened?

Otherwise, this literally means nothing.

[rad_gruchalski]

It means there is coronavirus at the Tesla plant. To give an example which way it goes: in Poland, the virus appeared a few weeks ago between coal mines workers. Yesterday there was a decision to temporarily shut 12 coal mines down.

[Anon4Now]

> It means there is coronavirus at the Tesla plant

Possibly. The employees could have contracted the virus outside work.

[rad_gruchalski]

Yup. But they brought it into the factory. No? Or am I missing something?

[Anon4Now]

From the article:

> the company had reported several cases of the coronavirus, and the employees affected were told to stay home.

I'm self-employed and my little software company took a sharp hit with the pandemic. Not being one to wait until all the money runs out, I took an "essential job" stocking groceries at the nearby Walmart. Every day, before employees can enter the store, they are screened. In the time I have been there, several employees failed the screening and were sent home. Two of those turned out to have the virus.

Tesla and other employers have similar screenings, so unless the employees lied about being symptomatic, they should not have been among the workforce. Add to that, the CDC just announced findings that non-symptomatic spread of the virus was very rare.

[nwienert]

Were they actively infected or immune with antibodies already when they started?

[WetBurd]

I wouldn't go so far to say it "means nothing".

If they were confirmed not-positive before the reopening how come this information was not publicly made available beforehand? If they weren't tested and then went back to work during the reopening, doesn't this indicate a lack of diligence in screening returning employees?

In any case the main issue is that Musk reopened the plant against local authorities' wishes and thus the consequences of such action should be held under scrutiny.

[nwienert]

The employees were and are free to do as they wish.

The main issue for you, perhaps, is violating authorities “wishes”. Wishes, because in fact it wasn’t illegal.. freedom of assembly gives us that, we aren’t in wartime, and until tested in court those local orders are just recommendations that need be judged in court... where they’d be struck down.

Not that they weren’t good common sense at the time, but the coronavirus very clearly now is not only a smaller risk than we thought, but also only specifically a risk to very certain vulnerable groups who are easy to identify.

If you are so worried about authorities’ wishes, I wonder what you think of the protests? Do you think the authorities’ wishes were generally right in the case of George Floyd? Should the protestors have been rounded up for violating wishes and causing massive risk? Seems you care a ton about people not dying from the virus, so I’d assume so.

[twblalock]

In a free and democratic society it is the authorities who need to be held under scrutiny.

I get that the government needed to react quickly and impose emergency measures. But now that things have calmed down, we should apply the same standards to business closures that we do to everything else: governments must justify why a business cannot reopen, must apply the rules consistently and fairly to every business, and can be challenged when they don't live up to those obligations.

[pathseeker]

>The original article is by a writer of the Washington Post. If this doesn't count as journalism

It doesn't matter where it came from. Some publications just have different ratios of biased crap and the biases are different depending on the institution.

[m0zg]

You mean Bezos Post? The newspaper owned by Jeff Bezos, towards whom Elon Musk very publicly shows no love whatsoever? It's like believing everything Bloomberg writes about Bloomberg. :-)

[devtul]

"Alameda County's Tesla to resume operations despite 0.15% infected"

Here is a more precise but still infuriating headline.

[jhowell]

> Why the breathless article about 2 cases?

If I worked at Tesla and came to find out about positive tests in this manner, in an environment with what appears to be a more rapid return to work inclination, I might breathlessly express my concern to as many as would listen.

I don't find that offensive.