Coronavirus and Credibility

But at the time, especially given China's clampdown on information outflow, it didn't appear to be significantly different from SARS, which didn't effect the West much, or MERS, which had almost no impact outside of the Middle East.

But as another commenter noted, the timing matters a lot.

Everyone except Fox News thought back in January that COVID19 was going to be big, but based on prior coronaviruses not something that would significantly impact the West. They've all done 180s and are pulling out the stops to fix their earlier error.

Fox News is still saying that today (i.e., April 6). One of their talking heads just said that COVID19 is overblown just a few minutes ago.

People don't have the time to deeply engage in subjects themselves to understand what is true. So we take a shortcut of uncritically adopting ideas from elsewhere. I see this usually play out as the most repeated ideas coming from any direction are the ones taken as correct. There is some amount of ranking of sources: the New York Times or in some cases a professional network is given a higher ranking. But normally none of the sources are experts.

The video linked in that article is a tour-de-force of out of context snippets. Anyone could splice together a video just like that one with material from any TV news network or politician, from the tip of South America to the extremes of Siberia and everything in between.

In many ways, and sadly, PG reveals (perhaps proudly) his own bias on this front. This is very much a hit job on Fox News and the right. One can't claim intellectual superiority and do this at the same time. Sorry.

This isn't to say that Fox News isn't without fault. They are. Everyone is. NOBODY understood this well enough to say anything intelligent about it. NOBODY, from politicians to doctors and, yes, newscasters and celebrities.

What we can say is that nearly everything that was said or predicted during the early phases of this thing by almost everyone has now been proven wrong by this cruel virus and its behavior. That isn't an indication of nefarious intent. Ignorance? Yes. Malicious intent? I doubt it. Political battle? Yes, likely, sadly...because nobody really understood this thing was going to get ugly.

Faulting anyone, from Trump to local officials is, from my perspective, intellectually dishonest and counterproductive. This is where I have a problem with the media. I am sure the founders did not pen the first amendment with the intent of providing protection for extreme political alignment in the media. We have, somehow, allowed this to happen, and, what is worse, we have not come up with a way to curtail it.

Watching US coverage and press conferences is a display of just how politically aligned the media has become. Their focus is, 24/7, to attack the political party they are not aligned with. In order to accomplish this they are more than willing to take things out of context, distort reality, fabricate narratives and disseminate lies. As someone who works hard to remain as neutral as possible, a registered independent who has equal disdain for both major parties, this is truly revolting to watch. Sometimes I feel like a visitor from another planet watching from an orbiting spacecraft while the people below play stupid games to destroy each other rather than unite for the benefit of all. Unbelievable.

While I agree with most of the observations in this article I wish PG had taken the time to find real examples of ignorance without resorting to a left-wing hit piece on the right wing by using an array of out of context pieces cut together.

While I can't be on a spacecraft orbiting above the US, I can take a look at what our approach to COVID-19 looked from other parts of the world. For example, SkyNews Australia:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdKLx5MhTpk

Dr. Oxiris Barbot, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health herself, was, for some incomprehensible reason, telling New Yorkers to just go out, gather, use subways and change nothing other than wash their hands and stay home if they were sick:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2DetEolgOg

And, before someone says "you took that out of context" (I did not edit the video so...), here's a full press briefing where she goes into clear detail about "no need to do any special anything...":

https://youtu.be/NEhLOp7UGNM?t=1659

I mean, this is the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health!!!!

I cued-up the video to her statement so you can see and hear it from the horses mouth and confirm what I present above. If interested, I urge you to rewind to the start and watch the entire press briefing. If you do, you'll hear a bunch of good things and a bunch of incomprehensibly bad things, among which are:

    - Just like the normal flu
    - We should relax
    - We don't think it's going to be as bad as it is in other places
    - We have been ahead of this from day one
    - Go about your lives
    - Go about your business
    - There has to be prolonged exposure
    - Just wash your hands
    - There is no need to do anything special anything in the community,
      we want New Yorkers to go about their daily lives, ride the subway,
      ride the bus, go see your neighbors
    - We have the equipment
    - It's not like we are dealing with something we haven't dealt with before
    - We have the ability to address this
    - We have the capacity to keep this contained
    - Like the normal flu

This is the real reason for which places like New York and Louisiana are in such trouble. Their leadership failed the people. They failed miserably. They were ignorant, political and just plain wrong. And they got everyone infected. It's one thing to start with a handful of cases. It's quite another to tell people to pile into subways, festivals, restaurants and other high-traffic public environments and effectively help the virus replicate. You then start your odyssey with thousands of cases, not a handful, which can't end well.

Either we dismiss this as collective ignorance and excuse it as such, or we don't. Yet, other states took it very seriously. People took it seriously. The trigger for most was when Trump shut down travel from China. That was on January 31st. Love him or hate him, an neutral observer would instantly understand this was a seriously out of band move and one that could not have been taken lightly or unilaterally. That was a very strong signal that something was seriously wrong.

For me, that event, added to the R0 data that was coming in, told me this was serious and it high likelihood of going way beyond China. During the first week of February I bought three months of supplies for our family. Various states around the nation started to take measures as well. Places like NY and Louisiana, instead, decided closing the doors to China was racist and, as if the virus cared about political defiance, actually promoted mass gatherings and helped the virus spread and infect large numbers of people.

Yes, I agree with the general message issued by PG. However, I strongly suggest the article needs to be edited in order to remove the intellectually dishonest and politically one-sided focus. It simply isn't true and it is wrong. There's a very direct and well documented link in the video and Twitter record of who in the US is directly responsible for hundreds of thousands of people getting infected and likely tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people dying.

This isn't a joke. People are losing partners, mothers, fathers, siblings, sons and daughters. Let's not lie or distort the truth due to political alignment and effectively join the very group we are accusing of being dishonest.

"The answer, I realized, is that they didn't think they could get caught. They didn't realize there was any danger in making false predictions. These people constantly make false predictions, and get away with it, because the things they make predictions about either have mushy enough outcomes that they can bluster their way out of trouble, or happen so far in the future that few remember what they said.

An epidemic is different. It falsifies your predictions rapidly and unequivocally."

Paul believes that this is all about the quality of the predictions, and about the perps getting caught. That's nonsense. Nobody, and I really mean that, nobody has been held accountable for the longest time about the quality of their predictions. Or even the quality of their work. Mushy, exact or otherwise. These people have absolutely nothing to fear from the quality of their work product, and their hand in that, being held accountable. It just won't happen.

We have 100's of miles of video tape by now documenting falsehoods spoken by officials. The consequences: nil. Nothing. Zip, Nada, etc.

And as long as that is the case, as long as there are no consequences this shit will continue.

Have you stopped saying that, or are you still saying it for some reason?

>It made me realize how getting vaccinated for the flu as soon as you reach 50 may actually be a pretty good idea..

Do you realize, you can, and probably should, get vaccinated for the flu each year? And that these vaccines are only a 'best guess' for that particular year, so you should get on each year?

>It actually made me realize how the whole world has been completely desensitized to catastrophic predictions.

I suppose the alternative is to not warn people about pandemics and just let them all run wild? I'm sorry if people choose to get "desensitized", but these organizations are not interested in the politics of whether or not the general public will be able to appropriately digest their messages, and hence don't ration warnings based on how much we can "handle".