[spookthesunset]

I absolutely adore when publicly available data sourced from government agencies gets downvoted.

Since March of 2020 any kind of statement suggesting covid isn’t as bad as some make it out to be is met with fierce vitriol. The number of times I’ve been called “dangerous” for posting well sourced data that clearly shows the IFR of covid is not 1-2%…

It’s as if people believe that any good news will result in others “not taking this serious”. They must feel that everybody needs to be scared stiff of this thing all the time… the result is the average person thinks if they catch covid they have a 10% chance of dying, which for most age groups is like 1000x off[0].

It’s super evil, really. If people were better informed about the risk profiles of covid, how many would have sacrificed a year and a half of their short life? Wouldn’t that imply that forcing this “new normal” crap by scaring the daylights out of people is a tad misguided and perhaps very unethical and immoral? If the only way you can get people to comply with your draconian interventions is lying to society about the risks of covid… well that is pretty fucked up.

Worse, by the way, is peoples risk assessment for covid is so completely wrong it makes debating public policy impossible. If the average adult thinks they have a 10% of dying if they got covid, of course they will want to mask little kids at school, of course they’ll cheer vaccine passports, of course they’ll rat each other out for sitting on a park bench. If they knew kids were at almost zero risk of covid, and their age bracket had minimal risks, would they have agreed to any of that?

[0] a fascinating data set: https://covid19pulse.usc.edu/

[baumy]

I remember when I first saw that USC dataset, it was mind blowing. Any public health official worth their salt should be absolutely horror struck that the public's perception of the risk profile of a disease is off by multiple orders of magnitude. Their entire job is to accurately inform the public about public health risks, and that dataset is proof that they've failed more spectacularly than I would have thought possible. They should be working around the clock to try to amend their failure, and earn back the trust they've thrown away.

Strangely, despite all the pearl clutching about "misinformation", this data-backed and quantifiable instance of covid misinformation never gets brought up. As a result, I now consider government / public health institution claims to be politically calculated fearmongering or propaganda until proven otherwise, and likely not worth my time to pay attention to. I'll update my opinion about them if their stance toward "correcting misinformation" starts to include misinformation like the above as well.

I'm not holding my breath.

[pasabagi]

Mmmm - I thought the problem was that the risk profile is it's not linear? So like, if enough people have it, they swamp emergency rooms, and suddenly, a lot more people are dying than would be dying at a lower incidence rate. So from a public health perspective, you're not really looking at 'how likely is this to kill people' but rather, 'how likely is this to crash an already fragile medical system' and thereby cause a lot of people to die.

I think the point about COVID is that if everybody just ignored it, this is absolutely what would happen, and case fatality rates could get pretty high.

[spookthesunset]

You expressed my exact thoughts better than I ever could hope to. Thanks!