Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths • Hacker News Board

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#651

Post by clairity » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 5:53 AM UTC

jimkleiber wrote: post #633

clairity wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "...I could easily kill grandma..." see, there's the hyperbole that makes you lose credibility. ~95% of those 65 and older in the US are vaccinated. visiting with grandma (or any family, for that matter) is an instance where wearing a mask (and certainly a number of other potential mitigations) could make a difference, so use your brain to make that assessment, not some brainless heuristic infringed upon you by an…

I lived with my parents for all of last year and my mom was going thru chemo, so at the time, the threat to her life from covid was very present in my mind. That has gone away since she got vaccinated and I'm grateful. At the same time, my best friend's parents are not vaccinated and I worry that they will get very sick and/or die. My great uncle died from covid. I agree that maybe the phrase "easily kill grandma" wa…

perhaps i misheard it, but i literally heard the 95% for over-65s figure this morning on the radio, which seemed to be quoting the cdc (but again, it didn't have my full and undivided attention). the difference could also be first dose vs. 'fully vaccinated'.

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#652

Post by etchalon » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 5:53 AM UTC

While I appreciate the articles thrust, I think any article which compares any other country to America fails to recognize that a weirdly high percentage of Americans seem to have a distinct distrust in government.

It was exaggerated in this pandemic because the person whom that group has come to place a lot of trust in (Trump) was telling them that they shouldn't listen to anyone but him, and that everything was fine.

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#653

Post by iammisc » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 5:54 AM UTC

hackingforfun wrote: post #434

iammisc wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anecdotally, the liberals I know seem much more open to the science behind the COVID vaccine and I don't know any of them who didn't get the shot. Anecdotally, most people only know others who view things very closely to themselves.

That is why I used the word anecdotally. I was responding to a sentence that was also anecdotal.

I was mainly referring to this:

> Anecdotally, the liberals I know seem much more open to the science behind the COVID vaccine and I don't know any of them who didn't get the shot.

IME, this is because liberals are highly fractured based on race and class. The democratic party is composed of several groups that rarely intermix and often have competing interests. For example, large numbers of white liberals have few black liberal friends. This is not a value judgement, it's a description of how the world is.]

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#654

Post by kcplate » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 5:57 AM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #617

kcplate wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Closing borders is racist. Two weeks to flatten the curve. Don’t mask. Mask. Stay Inside. Trump didn’t close the borders fast enough! Double mask. Protest crowds are not superspreaders. Trump Rallies are superspreaders. School is dangerous, distance learning is good. Go outside, inside is bad. Dems-don’t trust Trump Vaccines. Biden/Pelosi - we can’t mandate vaccination. Dems-you must trust our vaccines, they are effe…

Ya, people who have problems with dynamic situations (e.g. best practices continually changing via new information coming in) have had real problems with this pandemic. They wanted a static stable unchanging story from the onset, and were very disappointed and anxious when they didn't get that. But everything you’ve written above is simply condemning authorities because they didn’t have the best solution from the ons…

This wasn’t an evolutionary change of best practices. This was waffling from one extreme to another, then back again. When you do that, people will lose confidence in leadership.

Everything I wrote above condemns authorities not because they didn’t have the best solution from the start, but by all appearances never had a solution at all. Additionally, one party by my observation spent more time trying to exploit the pandemic for political power gains rather than treating it as a problem to solve.

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#655

Post by ameminator » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 6:00 AM UTC

nuerow wrote: post #646

throw_nbvc1234 wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/

If anything, the Herman Cain Award is a place to vent frustration about the wave of reckless and irresponsible behavior perpetrated by a largely uninformed/disinformed segment of the population which happens to also be highly vocal and even militant regarding their personal ill-informed beliefs. The Herman Cain Award focuses mainly on reporting cases of individuals who are eggregiously contrarian and even hostile in…

I don't see the Herman Cain Award subreddit as a "place to vent frustration". I see it as an orgy of shadenfreud and a place to mock the dead, no matter how people try to spin it.

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#656

Post by nuerow » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 6:02 AM UTC

stickfigure wrote: post #649

nuerow wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> see, there's the hyperbole that makes you lose credibility. It is not a hyperbole, and it saddens me to hear this level of ignorance in this forum. The COVID-19 mortality rate for the age >65 is over 20%. That's over 1 death per 5 infections. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics_of_the_COVID-19_pan... > ~95% of those 65 and older in the US are vaccinated. No, not quite. It is estimated that 95% of the total US…

The CDC says that the covid IFR for the 65+ cohort is 9%, not 20%. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena... > it saddens me to hear this level of ignorance in this forum Ahem.

> The CDC says that the covid IFR for the 65+ cohort is 9%, not 20%.

It seems you did not noticed that the data I presented was provided by the CDC.

https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Sex...

Your misconception is that you've tried to compare apples to oranges, as you tried to compare IFR estimates with death/infection ratio, which aren't the same thing at all.

Nevertheless, I'm sure no one would make the mistake of interpreting a 10% IFR as being negligible, thus even with that contrarian nitpicking the point still stands.

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#657

Post by forgotmyoldname » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 6:10 AM UTC

rc2634 wrote: post #502

spookthesunset wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that to this day people still trot out “4% kill rate” and make their kids wear a mask for a disease a kid isn’t even remotely at risk for… my trust in public health is below zero. Not once have these people done anything to calm people or tell them good news. Not a single time. It is disgusting how horribly these public health “experts” treat us.

They keep yelling “follow the science” while completely ignoring or ridiculing science that goes against their pro-mask, pro-lockdown, pro-vaccination narrative.

There's science proving that covering your mouth to prevent spread of germs and getting vaccinated doesn't work?

That's a bold claim. I'd like to see your science.

Signed, person living in a country with almost no ongoing infections and with a high vaccination and mask-wearing rate.

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#658

Post by InvaderFizz » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 6:11 AM UTC

gremIin wrote: post #601

djrogers wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's an issue of seeing illness as a personal failing - that's just dismissive and an unhelpful characterization. People I know that choose to not get vaccinated yet are largely resistant to the 'do it for others' push because we've been told that the vaccine is so effective that the 'others' should be safe anyway, unless they've chosen not to get the vaccine too. That leaves these people with a risk as…

What government group said that the non-vaccinated were safe anyway? Do you have a single source?

I suggest you reread the parent post. I think you have inverted the message.

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#659

Post by ameminator » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 6:14 AM UTC

autoexec wrote: post #592

Natsu wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The success cases I've seen were people talking to their family members, which is a reasonable approach. The subreddit itself with some of the hateful "these people deserve to die" kind of comments is actively harmful.

Plenty changed their mind due to seeing the subreddit. You can find a bunch by searching it for "IPA" and the twitter account https://twitter.com/YassIPAqueen shares a bunch as well. I don't think the hateful comments are the reason people are changing their minds though. I think it's just seeing example after example of people who think like they do facing the consequences of their actions which really drives home t…

I think a lot more people would be convinced by images of these ICUs and seeing the impact of not being vaccinated as well. However, let's not pretend that the whole point of that subreddit is to "encourage people to get vaccinated". It's to feel good about people (who disagree with you) dying. Maybe if we remembered that some of these unfortunates had more to their lives than being anti-vax, we could be a bit more compassionate and more of them would be convinced in participating in measures against the coronavirus.

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#660

Post by skocznymroczny » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 6:24 AM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #82

colordrops wrote: post #10

The article is discussing the media and government being intentionally vague or even misinformative because they don't trust the public, but it backfires and causes more distrust. The flip side that wasn't discussed is the belittling and censoring of voices that were skeptical of the narratives, which engendered even more distrust. Their strategy of information control backfired, and they doubled down. Now we've got…

In my opinion the biggest example of this was the poor mask guidance early on in the pandemic that was subsequently reversed. Zeynep Tufekci had a very good piece in the NYT on this: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-... The real fear was that there would be a run on masks by the public, making them unavailable for hospital use. Also, at the time, there wasn't clear evidence of the effective…

I'm not convinced by that narrative. I think there is still limited proof that masks make any noticeable difference. But the public demanded mask mandates (unlike things like vaccines this is very noticeable so for many people it gives them a peace of mind that something is being done), so the officials delivered. But to save face, they invented a story how they always knew masks work great, but didn't want people to do a run on masks.