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South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

thehill.com

271–280 of 521 posts

Re: South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

#271
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think they're good and smart, why do they think Covid19 is a hoax? Surely a good person would try to do the safe thing even if they had doubts.

Not the original poster, but I would imagine it echos what I have seen (and believe myself) in that it’s not a hoax as is normally defined, but a mass hysteria fueled by a media that needs clicks to survive. The risks are real for certain demographics, we need to take precautions to help vulnerable people, etc. however the unintended consequences of drastic policies are economic hardship, creating a new generation of…

I strongly disagree. “Some misguided old people in the Midwest” are not like heroin addicts quietly overdosing and dying out of sight, they are drunk drivers careening down the highway in a twenty ton truck.

Re: South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

#272

Can someone help me understand something? Back in March, we had ~40k new cases per day, and were seeing ~3k deaths per day. Today, we have ~140k new cases per day, but our deaths seem to be ~1k per day, and haven't risen much with rise in cases since September. What explains this? Were we not testing as much in March, and really our cases were ~200k per day? Or were the populations that got sick in March somehow diff…

Detection and treatment have gotten better.

The populations exposed are also shifting. Schools are back, more elderly and at risk are taking proper precautions.

Re: South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

#273
post #250
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oregon’s cases are skyrocketing: https://covid-19.direct/state/OR Much of this is in Portland: https://covid-19.direct/county/OR/Multnomah

Much of it is due to private gatherings without masks, gyms, and maybe bars and restaurants. From what I can tell (I'm just staying home), people maybe did backyard gatherings when it was nice enough out, but moved indoors and that's gotten a lot of people sick.

> Much of it is due to private gatherings without masks, gyms, and maybe bars and restaurants.

Prove it.

When cases go down, it’s because of masks. When they go up in the same place, it’s because people suddenly stopped wearing them, but no proof is provided for either assertion.

Re: South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

#274

Can someone help me understand something? Back in March, we had ~40k new cases per day, and were seeing ~3k deaths per day. Today, we have ~140k new cases per day, but our deaths seem to be ~1k per day, and haven't risen much with rise in cases since September. What explains this? Were we not testing as much in March, and really our cases were ~200k per day? Or were the populations that got sick in March somehow diff…

We don't know for sure. But several hypotheses are being thrown around:

- when the virus hit the first time, the age group of those affected was higher, hence the high initial mortality.

- hospitals have better protocols now to deal with the disease. They learned a lot over the past months wrt to treatment. For example not putting people on ventilators that fast.

- through natural selection, a milder strain has managed to be more contagious but less lethal overall.

- some of the mask ordinances were effective in reducing the viral load

Re: South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we call it education though or is it an anti-intellectual spirit or a disdain for elitism and the idea of experts? Or perhaps mistrust of authority and experts? It would seem like perhaps an uneducated but highly communal/cooperative/respectful-of-authority society would have better outcomes than one with well educated individuals who have a culture of disregard for institutional science or the idea of technocrat…

> Can we call it education though or is it an anti-intellectual spirit or a disdain for elitism and the idea of experts? Or perhaps mistrust of authority and experts? I'm sure poor education accounts for a lot of it, but it can't be the only factor - even here on HN (where I'd assume most posters are well educated) there are people claiming COVID is a non issue and/or claiming masks are dangerous. Another example are…

>I might suppose that a lot of people in the US are batshit-insane, but there has to be a reason for all that lunacy.

Peter Medawar addressed this[0] quite some time ago:

"The USA is so enormous, and so numerous are its schools, colleges and religious seminaries, many devoted to special religious beliefs ranging from the unorthodox to the dotty, that we can hardly wonder at its yielding a more bounteous harvest of gobbledygook than the rest of the world put together."

That sort of stuff just breeds magical thinking, conspiracy theories and all manner of other sorts of malarkey, hogwash, balderdash and hooey.

[0] https://www.quotetab.com/quote/by-peter-medawar/the-usa-is-s...

Re: South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if 10 years from now we discover that wearing a mask was a completely pointless endeavor .... the cost of wearing a mask is SO LOW that it is worth doing it. But it is scientifically proven to limit the rate of the spread, which is the least I can do to protect myself and those around me. I don't care if I get covid ... I don't think it will kill me based on my vitals. However, we don't fully understand the long…

What I don't get, is even for the people saying that the symptoms are like the flu. Clearly they don't remember having the flu, because if I can wear a mask to avoid any fever, that is a reasonable cost to me.

Yeah, last time I had the flu it sucked. And I'm relatively young.

Re: South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

#277
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a harsh thing to say, but I understand where you're coming from. We....all of us, all human beings...need to be very patient and merciful with each other. My wife and I know good, honest and smart people who are fully convinced that Covid19 isn't that dangerous, that it's a hoax, etc. I'm not saying "smart" lightly. All humans...even the best of us...are at our core deeply irrational most of the time. Differe…

Why do you think they're good and smart, why do they think Covid19 is a hoax? Surely a good person would try to do the safe thing even if they had doubts.

Beliefs don't exist in a vacuum - hoax memes spread much like COVID itself. Media literacy is scarily low among most people, even those who are brilliant in other ways. Metaphorically we are failing to vaccinate against misinformation in primary education, leaving tech giants the impossible task of policing misinformation on their platforms designed to maximize engagement for profitability. 'The Social Dilemma' documentary (Netflix) dips into this if you haven't seen it.

Re: South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indiana has had a mask mandate since May. Our compliance has been great >95%, yet our cases are skyrocketing.

Ouch: https://mackuba.eu/corona/#indiana_united_states.daily?trend... I appreciate the contrary feedback. Do you have a link to the high mask compliance in Indiana handy? I've honestly looked for this kind of data and haven't been able to find it, and so assumed fairly poor (US-wide at least) mask wear based on anecdotes.

I've posted this elsewhere, but mask compliance in the United States is ~80%. This is of course subject to error, but both where I live and in my travels, most everyone wears a mask. This includes urban and rural areas, some with mandates some without.

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/10/06/pandemic...

Re: South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

#279
post #157

Covid is turning out to be a disease of culture. The same virus hit the East and the West. The East got through it, the West is on its knees.

I’d call it a disease of experience, first and foremost. The US missed the worst of SARS-Cov1 and MERS, which were catastrophic in some parts of the world. East-Asian Democratic countries had public debates about what are and are not reasonable public health measures. They passed enabling laws, built public health infrastructure, and established cutting edge novel virus surveillance programs. The US did not. We were…

How do you explain certain states and cities doing so much better, even within the US? And other western countries, such as NZ, Canada, and Germany really beating the US in every metric possible? Experience is not the key here. Quality of leadership is

Re: South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

#280
post #249
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oregon’s cases are skyrocketing: https://covid-19.direct/state/OR Much of this is in Portland: https://covid-19.direct/county/OR/Multnomah

I think we can pretty safely conclude that any data saying blue cities have it worse than bumfuck nowhere towns must be misleading or manipulated. It just doesn't line up with what we know about education levels and compliance levels.

The graphs I linked use the Covid Tracking Project API. The data is not manipulated in any way.
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