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Comment by forgot_my_pwd | Hacker News Reader

Many studies across the world are showing infection rates for Covid-19 are far higher than official numbers indicate. These studies appear to support the spirit of their statements.

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AFAIK, there is not a single study that "[shows] infection rates for Covid-19 are far higher than official numbers indicate". There is no place in the world (again, afaik) that is attempting to report the number of infected people, all the "official numbers" are roughly either "confirmed infected" or clinically-confirmed infected. All health experts (as far back as early january when we just had numbers from Wuhan) were saying that the actual number of infected will be much higher than those confirmed infected. There are a lot of studies that indicate that those experts are correct (and I am, maybe unfairly, assuming that those are the studies that you are misrepresenting).

Confirmed infected is being used for the mortality rate. Confirmed infected is not being updated to take advantage of serological data which shows percentage prevalence tens of times higher than the official confirmed count.

If we were talking an order of double, I think people would be a bit less ruffled. We're not though. We're talking 50-85 times in places like Santa Clara.

Same with the death rate. Covid is most always a co-factor in the death along with other reasons. Like a smoker with emphysema who was dying anyway and the virus is the trigger. They really died from smoking their whole life. Another virus or bacteria could've killed them.

It doesn't matter. Why is YouTube policing speech? If anything, this will give "incorrect ideas" more attention than letting them be heard.

That does not logically follow if the general public does not have the expertise to evaluate public health policy discussions and decisions.

> if the general public does not have the expertise to evaluate public health policy discussions and decisions

But you're now asking people to trust experts, which in 2020 is apparently crazy-talk

It doesn’t help that the experts started 2020 by downplaying the threat and telling people not to wear masks.

"Experts" in 2020 are merely washed up mathematicians and Ethiopian politicians who have no incentive to be correct, only to speak, and who have spent a lot of time publicly arguing with each other and producing completely contradictory advice and predictions. Of those predictions they all had severe and deep flaws, like the Imperial paper that assumed hospital capacity was entirely static and couldn't increase at all. That's an assumption any working nurse could have corrected immediately but the team responsible didn't bother asking them.

There are no experts in this disease, only people trying to control other people through false proclamations of authority.

The problem is that the people who made this video are by definition experts. Experts are often wrong and disagree, so if the public listens to the wrong experts and silence the right experts we have a problem. Therefore it is better to not try to decide which experts are right or wrong so we can silence them, since chances are that the people doing the evaluation are the ones in the wrong.

> The problem is that the people who made this video are by definition experts.

They are experts in an entirely different field.

You don't need any training in statistics, epidemiology, public health, etc. to be an urgent care doc. They're experts in diagnosing and fixing ailments (at an individual level) that don't require a full-blown ER visit or hospitalization.

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