I hope moderators do something about it.
We're just seeing how the sausage is made in a medical crisis. And it is never pretty.
And even if you have that, there's always a risk that someone out there reads the most dangerously stupid comments and interpret them as gospel no matter how downvoted.
I don't know about the USA, but on TV here (Italy), yes they do.
EDIT to avoid sounding too snarky: there are plenty of experts many times on TV, however the public is not aware of the unknowns and the constant challenging of ideas that usually occurs in scientific settings (and so the press).
The result is that there are often contradictory statements which confuse the general population (also the press is not helping at all), which considers "science" as "truth".
For instance it is good that hydrochloroquone is being trialled, I might want it myself, but it is notorious that antiparasite and antibiotic drugs kill viruses in vitro but kill patients if they do anything at all in vivo.
The truth will out but it will take a while.
That's the price we pay for open discourse.
I don't think this is true. It's entirely possible to have open discourse without over-selling one's own loosely-informed speculation.
The problem with censorship is that you often just end up substituting one set of nonsense for another.
That a Darwin award winner and his insane, political activist wife, neither of whom had Covid-19, ingested toxic chemicals (probably after indulging in mind altering chemicals) is not very good evidence that discussion on Hacker News should be curtailed in any way.
I stay away.
Have you heard of the expression "the cure is worse than the disease"? It applies as much to what you and cowpig are proposing as it does to what that man chose to do.
In this case, a Darwin award seems more appropriate to me than blaming anyone for speculating based on low quality data.
I am not a doctor myself, but I am dating one, and helped her prepare for her (likely endless) shift in the COVID-19 unit at the hospital two weekends ago. I was shocked at how much more serious the health effects were than the internet had led me to believe, and I don't use facebook avoid low-quality journalism.
Bias towards either direction is still bias. Educated discussion and critical thought are all we can rely on.
If that leads us to the conclusion (as it has led me) that the severity of this disease has been inflated, I think that's a worthy topic of debate and evaluation. Not a taboo subject to be avoided "because someone somewhere might not take it seriously enough and then do something stupid".
I too have my wife a doctor, and I was shocked how little and behind-the-curve their covid infection information is. Most specialist doctors here treated covid in 'what the heck are people worried about, just another flu, right' fashion till maybe 2 weeks ago. Mind you, we talk about Switzerland here with northern italy 50-100km from here, and experts in their (non-virology) fields like urology surgeon, nephrologist, radiologist, emergency doctor(!) and so on.
For once, thank you internet and (also) HN users!
I consider statements about what "most specialist doctors" were doing, especially without citation, to be a form of the misinformation I'm talking about.
If there were people who didn't take the oncoming pandemic seriously enough, they should probably revisit their priors and processes by which they come to conclusions.
But it doesn't mean we should start posting about it on the internet as justification for speculating on things we don't understand, and simultaneously casting doubt on the expertise or authority of an entire group of professionals.
An update - just learned that 1 year old daughter of our friends, both are doctors, is tested positive, probably from her nursery/child carer. The poor little thing is sick for more than a week. They still think they are OK to continue to work and not being sick since only one of them shows mild symptoms which could be anything. How the fuck is that possible? With doctors? En Suisse?
Some doctors, while experts in their narrow field, are just doing what they are told and don't do much research outside of their field. Please don't tell everybody to just blindly trust appointed experts, that can be a dangerous advice in these times.
I hope HN mantains this profile, and I hope this profile applies to medical science as much as it applies to rocket science. I've learnt a lot about rocket science from discussions here, and I hope to learn a lot about medical science from discussions here. All without any danger of assembling and flying my own rockets, or cooking my own medication. I am very aware that Dunning-Kruger applies to everyone, myself included.
Buyers beware, and if you are not, thank you for your sacrifice.
Of course, we can argue about what constitutes medical advice. I think there needs to be a call to be a call to action (IMO, an implicit call to action would qualify if it's strong enough).
Heart arrest can be also external (deliberate crime or medical error) so is important to discuss and understand any anomaly. Physicians and nurses are about at the end of their forces (and incredibly upset) in many places.
that's why health officials were telling us not to use masks, not just because supply is short and they need them for health workers but probably more so because:
- viral load is important and that's far too complicated for people to understand, just talk about it in binary sick/not sick.
- having better protection incentivizes people taking more risk, better not do that
- people might not comprehend that masks are imperfect and can fail, better just to tell them they don't work.
health is important, and the way you learn about things is by talking about them. treating it like a special scary topic that only experts should be able to talk about not only leads to disinformation, it leads to lack of trust.