I happen to think a lot of the pandemic denial and downplaying had to do with the media's refusal (for valid privacy reasons) to show what was actually going on in ICUs everywhere. The lack of graphic coverage kept the pandemic's worst effects out of sight, out of mind for a lot of people, allowing them to focus on and rage against the less important side-issues like how awful masks are and how upset it made them to not be able to drink at bars for a while. Just like honest, graphic war reporting helped to end Vietnam, honest, graphic COVID reporting could have helped shock people into doing their part to end the pandemic.
I agree with this. Unfortunately, I got covid right out of the gate and should have been in the hospital.
Then I lost some people, one of whom was worth a lot, and despite that still spent 40 some days on a ventilator, basically in hell, only to die pretty terribly.
While all this was going on, I am surrounded by people who think it is all fake, nobody is dying, etc...
I would tell about what I saw, felt and they would just ignore me, or ask me why more of that is not on the TV.
Thanks for sharing. I’m glad you recovered and very sorry about the others. My own family happened to escape it but my wife lost several loved ones.
> While all this was going on, I am surrounded by people who think it is all fake, nobody is dying, etc...
The saddest, craziest stories are the ones who, while the tubes were going in, used their last voluntary breaths to cry “How is this happening? The virus is a hoax!” We need to have a serious reckoning with mental health in this country.
No doubt! I know one of those, and they made it through.
It is rough. I can see them question just about everything and feeling a little lonely, due to their peer group not identifying very well with their struggle.
Yeah, I had a couple loooooong nights deep breathing, eye on an oximeter. Was early enough to feel a lot of angst about going to the hospital! We were not good at treatment yet, people go in, die alone...
Woke me right the fuck up.
Not to say I was anti, but I had not really internalized what was happening. Was not as careful as I could have been. Definitely did not have all the info I could have had.
Those are the worst. They have a mild case and there basically is no convincing them otherwise, unless someone close to them has a different experience.
>unless someone close to them has a different experience.
my partner could not give two trucks that i was sick. through the sleepless gasping nights where i was wondering if it was time to go to the hospital, my partner blamed it on anxiety. when i couldn't feel my feet, my partner thought it was due to me not eating (because food tasted like paper). this all culminated with my partner calling me lazy for sleeping all day. it really woke me up to their attitude and has reshaped the trajectory of our relationship. as of now it's pretty much just a show so our kids don't end up too messed up
Speaking as someone who’s parents when waited to get divorced until I went to college, I think I would have been less messed up if they’d been honest and mature enough to get divorced when they’d wanted to.
Speaking as someone in that same boat, I appreciate my parents kept a semblance of a family for my entire childhood. Hearing my friends who did not have that makes me understand that even my childhood with all of the fighting and arguing was better than that of my peers who did not have a good relationship with one or both of their parents
Could you please explain how you got this number? If I look at the statistics for the most countries in Europe I'll see a ratio of around 2/100 between detected cases and deaths (Germany, Belgium). That would mean that we would have around 5x more cases than we detect ,if we see "mild" as doesn't die. If you define "mild" as "not in hospital" this number would be even higher (meaning in some case that more than 100% of the population of a country would have had covid). So please explain your numbers and reasoning.
Looking at your previous comments, it seems you like to throw out this stat and other... less than factual statements, then never back up your comments or engage in the conversation. You are trolling or misguided.
You are conflating outcomes with cases in progress.
To understand severity, work with outcomes and that is dead people divided by recovered people.
Infected people will eventually arrive at their outcome, but until they have actually ran their infection course, adding them into the risk assessment artificially marginalizes risk.
Early on, before we understood treatment, the outcome numbers, chance of someone dying was quite high, 7 percent or so depending.
It is currently a little over 1 percent and will likely improve as the science does, and our ability to treat cases is managed better. And that assumes we can get people vaccinated in high enough numbers to manage mutation rates.
So far, vaccinated people do not die. Vast improvement over the 1'ish percentage currently in play for unvaccinated people.
Without that, we run the very real risk of a mutation sending us back to the beginning.
I have had this exact conversation with people who died thinking their low risk assessment, dividing dead people by infected people, made sense.
It does not, and it does not because outcomes are being mixed in with cases in progress. It is like combining the wrong units and wondering why nature does not match the math.
I’m just a tad more jaded and think had the reality been shown more, it would just have been spun by media to fit a desired narrative (i.e. what you’re seeing is normal, you’re just see it for the first time, and you should ask why you’re being made to see this now) or worse it would be called fake news/actors (e.g. students who survived school shootings being called actors, or entire school shootings being called fake).
I took it really seriously when I saw videos of hospitals in NYC stacking bodies in a freezer truck because there were just too many. They should have shown that more. I usually assume anchors and reporters exaggerate for ratings today, so they've lost a lot of credibility. When I see a video, I get an unfiltered view of what's going on.
As a side note, I implore people to watch police interaction videos and how often they are captured on video casually violating civil rights as standard operating procedure. YouTube has endless content of this. It will make you think twice about the reality of world you live in. If it bothers you, call your mayor or city government.
Video tends to be more truthful, but news outlets who lie to you, will also only show video that supports their point.
Video helps drive a point home emotionally, but it is not at all a source of less biased reporting. Driving a point home emotionally is important, and the point 'covid bad' seems like it needs to be driven home more. But don't believe news just cause it shows videos.
>but news outlets who lie to you, will also only show video that supports their point.
Oh absolutely. I was thinking more of citizen journalist videos which are typically uncut. One example I know of is when the news video has a hard cut, they're trying to manipulate it. This is pretty common, and they use it often when showing videos of people speaking.
In terms of a "graphic exposé on the reality of COVID" - if you haven't seen "76 Days" yet, I would strongly recommend it. It is a wincingly direct and raw documentary - no editorializing or narrative overlay, just real, high resolution footage of a city of millions of people fending off a deadly virus, shot in close quarters with the physicians attending to those dying and their families.
The US media also just likes to try to protect the emotions of the consumer. Some of the articles I've read of scuba diving accidents in the Mexican press are very NSFW by contrast and they'll just show you a dead guy in a wetsuit. In fact a lot of lifeleak content comes from new stories in other countries. Most Americans don't want to think about death and their own mortality or anyone else's mortality and want NSFW warnings splashed over anything remotely unsettling.
I am European, and I recall seeing Italian nurses warning the rest of Europe to take this seriously. They were saying this because they were running out of ventilators and their morgues were overflowing.
That's when I started taking it seriously, 1 week later my country hit lockdown. This was somewhere in March.
I have comment threads in my country's subreddit from that week, where someone wrote that their partner was returning from a business trip to Italy. Someone wrote, "consider quarantining for a couple of weeks just in case".
The replies in that thread were along the lines of "Pffff...If everyone did that the Earth would stand still, idiot!"
That sort of coverage doesn't sway people who have decided already not to subscribe to facts, domain experts, or reality. Conservatives would be shown videos of known popular conservatives online storming the capitol, and in all serious start claiming that these people were actually secretly Democrats or something there to make conservatives look bad. Some would call these would be videos of ICUs fake, just like some people think the moon landing is fake.
"The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." - Orwell.
It can sway people if the truth gets out before the falsehoods take root. I saw the videos from China in early January of people falling over in the streets and emergency rooms. I showed that stuff to my conservative news watching family members before the news here was covering the virus. I believe that saved the ones who would have otherwise believed what conservative media was saying early -- they knew it was real and potentially deadly before anyone could tell them otherwise. They told their friends and showed them the videos from China. The truth can make a difference if it arrives first.
The problem is the conspiracy machine often works faster than the truth. You got there early, many others with the wool over there eyes aren't so lucky, especially when for many their only worldview comes from people with their same biases.
This is probably a "my part of the Titanic is rising!" kind of problem. Doctors have and need some time off as well and doing a dance is good for moral and teamwork. Plus, in some regions, the pandemic is pretty well under control.
This doesn't change the fact that they're currently burning corpses on the streets in India. A bullet missing you by 10cm or 10m does not feel much different; Liveleak showed you the effects of the bullet that did not miss.
Pandemics are non-linear. Pandemic response and fear emptied hospitals almost immediately and reduced normal cases (as well as people delaying treatment in too many cases).
People don't understand exponential phenomenon: a half-full hospital when there's a spreading contagion (with a replication factor ~2) is actually already over capacity. At 33%, with a replication factor of 2, the next influx of patients overwhelms you.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function" - Dr Albert Bartlett, part of his talk "Exponential Growth Arithmetic, population and energy" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZA9Hnp3aV4
The common cold does not overwhelm intensive care unit capacity.
The common cold does not require some people to go on ventilators to survive.
This virus is worse than the common cold, by a lot. If treatment is available, it is not incredibly lethal. But treatment resources are finite, and the spread of the virus has been hard to stop.
Spread too much, resources run out and corona lethality spikes. Way before that, resources get diverted from other places, cancer treatments get delayed, nurse vacations get canceled (leading to burn out and hence less capacity in the long run).
Attitudes like this probably contribute a lot to corona spread being hard to reduce. People just ignore measures because "it's not that bad". Sure, your chances of dying if you ignore rules is probably low. But the larger consequences go beyond you.
