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Comment by hsnewman | Hacker News Reader

This implies that our government is managing the propaganda around Covid-19 by simply not testing suspected cases. Is this true?

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I’d at least entertain the possibility that this means the CDC has a limited number of test kits right now and can’t yet afford to give one to every single person who has a cough. It would be a bummer for some serious cases who wouldn’t get tested, if they had to test everyone who asked as long as they had kits available.

They were pretty clear yesterday that they’re ramping up test kit production and test sites as fast as possible. They didn’t answer a direction question about how many sites there were yesterday, implying to me that the number is pretty low.

https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/t0228-COVID-19-updat...

Pretty much. The CDC tried to finally roll out a test to New York City that local labs could use to carry out broader surveillance testing, after some early problems, but the local labs don't trust it and won't use it: https://www.propublica.org/article/cdc-coronavirus-covid-19-...

No, it does not imply that. The facts are that the CDC followed their protocol and so the person was not tested. It could imply the protocols are too stringent, or that they are successful because the user might not have the coronavirus.

Its unclear to me where 'managing the propaganda' came out in relation to the reddit post.

To a substantial extent, yes.

UC Davis Medical Center statement on refusal of CDC to grant permissions to test suspected patient:

https://health.ucdavis.edu/health-news/contenthub/novel-coro...

"UC Davis Health does not control the testing process."

Florida refusal to release testing data:

https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2020/02/27/flo...

Note that Spring Break in the US, in which about 10 million college students consume substances, exhibit poor judgement, congregate in large numbers, swap bodily fluids, and return to some 3,000+ institutions of higher education, begins today. With Florida and cruise ships as prime destinations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_outbreak_on_c...

I just posted my own update on COVID-19 yesterday (after watching events overtake me for 4 days -- I'd started after listening to the US CDC press conference on Feb 25):

https://joindiaspora.com/posts/bc04cb503c840138f4b8002590d8e...

On the Media's episode this week focuses strongly on COVID-19 and if anything is rather more alarmed and alarming than my own take (I very conciously strove for verified data and sober takes):

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-med...

Audio: https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/otm/...

Features Laurie Garrett, excellent content. Focuses to a large extent on both government mishandling and information suppression -- in the US having no information to report rather than China's suppressing avaiable information) -- as well as other forms of mis- and dis-information.

> consume substances

I find this kind of euphemism use really weird. "Substances"? Water is a "substance". A carpet is too. Why not just say what one is actually referring to?

Beer, wine, rum and maybe some herbal drugs.

I believe this usage is in reference to “controlled substances”, a legal term.

You might care to insert "mind altering" before the phrase.

But as used, relatively common in standard English.

yes and extend that to many governments.

It appears to be pretty much all western governments. at least 3 countries in the middle east appear to be pretty transparent, including surprisingly, Iran

The level of censorship around unquestionably authentic videos coming out of China has left me in a deep state of shock

You must be joking about Iran, based on pure math, it’s clear they are lying about the number.

Or, more likely: they don't actually know the real numbers. So you can treat what you do get from them as lower bounds, that's the bits they are sure about so they report them but events have possibly overtaken the authorities there to the point that their reporting is completely botched.

There's some evidence that the Iranian government knows the number of coronavirus deaths there is much higher than they're admitting to: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-51673053 Of course, even just the official number of deaths implies that coronavirus is a lot more widespread there than their numbers say.

It's pretty easy actually: they report about 600 cases and 50 deaths, That means they are an outlier in the number of deaths or that their stats are seriously compromised. I would give them some leeway about that being malice though, I suspect they are simply totally overwhelmed by this.

Maybe they're incompetent.

What videos are you referring to?

There is, unfortunately, no such thing as an unquestionably authentic video in the modern era. It’s not reasonable to assume that everything you see in a video on Twitter is true.

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