[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!