[vokep]

https://www.abc10.com/article/news/verify/covid-deaths-car-c...

There's at least one widely known case specifically a motorcycle accident listed there, which due to being widely known was corrected.

This comes down to how you fill in unknowns in your model of the world, many seem to be just trusting authoritative reports. I would like to trust official reporting, but direct knowledge via peers involved in various industries has proven to me or at least created a confident opinion that trusting things at face value is absurd and a near guarantee of inaccurate conclusions. Its amazing how many seem to experience Gell-Mann amnesia in regards to this sort of thing.

Since there's only one public report of this which easily is found on google (which is what I linked), I'd assume such extreme (decapitation) false labeling of cause of death is not so common. However cases of elderly who had multiple conditions being reported as covid deaths appears likely as a fairly massive distortion of the reported death count. The motorcycle case just serves to show how extreme that can get, you've got to ask just how a report like that even occurred, and also note that it seems to only have been corrected after public scrutiny. (I can't be sure it was corrected due to public scrutiny, but I'm leaning towards that since explanation of how it was corrected is dismissive and vague, no clear suggestion that it would have been corrected if not for publicity of it, seems an easy extra few words to add if it were the truth)

I can understand if this way if thinking isn't yours and if accepting official numbers is preferred, but what I can't understand is the absolute certainty that any other perspective is wrong.

[invisible]

Public health is complex, and it's a bit tough for us to "agree" that it's "okay" to have different, looser perspectives on how to manage a pandemic. If 50% of the population decides that COVID-19 is fake and that nobody is actually affected at all, then we would have no power as a society to do anything about pandemics.

[vokep]

Agreed that it is complex and I understand it is a bit tough, which is part of why I think the authoritative perspective should not disappear or be entirely disrespected, but would best be toned down. I would trust the CDC or WHO far more if they demonstrated themselves to be organizations I could trust. To me, that starts with being honest instead of carefully chosen lies expected to be "most effective" at controlling people to do the right thing. I have faith in the long term that this will be learned by these organizations and they will get better, but for now I don't see it as rational to accept at face value anything coming out of them that has any wiggle room of interpretation.

The rest of the population that believes things you believe are crazy, are not crazy, but just working with different information. There's cases of some beliefs which pretty much exclusively crazy people believe (mass gangstalking for example) but that's pretty easy to identify and has very direct correlation with mental health conditions. The way to fix this is to treat people as the rational agents they are and allow them to make their own choices. For now it seems myself and others who question authoritative sources on what reality is, have to almost default to "what the authority says is probably lies" because that seems to be true.