That article makes inaccurate statements like, "basically hyped a bunch of data and weren’t transparent about their methods" which is not true. There were 100% transparent about where there information was from and how they were presenting it.
I can vouch for their transparency. The speed with which I was able to see that their statistical methods were totally wrong was almost entirely due to their transparency. The only fact I had to find outside of what they said was the criteria for testing in the county for which they cited statistics, which I found at https://kernpublichealth.com/coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-...
"Testing is NOT indicated for asymptomatic persons."
The doctors' statistics in the quote below don't work because of sampling bias.
“In Kern County, we’ve tested 5,213 people and we have 340 positive COVID cases. Well, that’s 6.5 percent of the population. Which would indicate a widespread viral infection similar to the flu,”
They use the same logic for Kern County, California, and New York. Their logic is, that if you test N people and find M positive cases, that in the population at large you'll have an infection rate of M/N. This would be true if the N tests were performed on random members of the population. But because the tests are only performed when there's reason to suspect infection, M/N is a higher infection rate than in the population at large. Their inflated number for total infected persons makes the death rate appear smaller.
https://www.turnto23.com/news/coronavirus/video-interview-wi...
I suppose that’s the real problem, in so many words...
Because you have a basic understanding of statistics.
> Why can't we watch and make our own judgements?
You can. The video is available in many places.
Sample size doesn't help if the sampling method is biased. Even if tests were available to everyone regardless of symptoms, you would still have a selection bias that would skew the numbers. The only way to accurately estimate overall infection rates in the general population is to test a random sampling.
Then there is the "comparison" of Sweden (no lock down) and Norway/California. They mention the death counts and population of these countries in another attempt to show that the "number of cases is high and the number of deaths is small regardless of lockdown" but completely gloss over the fact that Sweden has more that 5x the covid deaths per capita that Norway and California have.
Regardless of if this video should be censored, these guys are awful scientists.
This is the exact reason why it shouldn't be censored. Because if their science is bad then it needs to be available for people who know better to tear it to shreds.
If you take it down then the story can't be "this is why they're wrong" because what they said isn't available anymore, so a rebuttal isn't believable because you can't tell if it's an accurate representation of the original presentation.
So then the story becomes about censorship and you're making it all too easy for motivated people to spin a conspiracy theory about how these scientists are speaking truth to power and getting oppressed, even if they are in actual fact totally wrong.
This isn't something I have been able to confidently form an opinion on; it's a hard topic. I think we will be strugging with how to balance bias, deliberate misinformation and freedom of speech for a long time.
But I think at the very least, YouTube needed to put up prominent disclaimers and links to limit the harm that this content can cause.
I count several detailed criticisms of it just in this thread. Do none of them have a YouTube account?
Why don't the people proposing to censor it post their own rebuttal?
> I think at the very least, YouTube needed to put up prominent disclaimers and links to limit the harm that this content can cause.
Which is totally different. Leaving the video up while posting a prominent link to a rebuttal isn't censorship, it's more speech.
I did post a rebutal in some of the duplicates I found on YouTube. YouTube comments are not really a great platform for debate and the way their algorithm works tends pull videos like this into an echo chamber that avoids the exact types of critical discussion you are calling for.
So, given the (artificial) choice between leaving the video up as is and taking it down, I suspect that in this particular case, the practically beneficial choice for society (in the short term at least) is to take it down precisely because of how YouTube works as a platform and community.
> Which is totally different. Leaving the video up while posting a prominent link to a rebuttal isn't censorship, it's more speech.
Yes, I am a big fan of free speech. However it has become increasingly clear that simply making speech as free as possible in as many places as possible is not enough (by itself) to solve the problems of misinformation, partisanship and radicalization that we are facing as a society. We can't just dismiss those problems, so as advocates for free speech, we need to find non-censorship ways to help solve those problems.
This seems like a YouTube-specific problem that should have solutions not involving censorship.
I'm not saying that you are misrepresenting or disinforming people. But, how would you know unless someone told you?
https://www.aaem.org/resources/statements/joint-endorsed/phy...
And then, comparing that to the flu and saying this isn't much worse, we're now well into the "this video is a potentially a public health hazard" territory.
No, lockdowns are the public health hazard. The data is quite clear at this point that what's going on here is no worse than the flu. Here's a simple graphic from the UK to make that point clear:
http://inproportion2.talkigy.com/
And if you look at when lockdowns could have possibly started working given incubation and death lags, you'll see that most countries seem to have peaked before the lockdowns could have started working. Implication: they weren't responsible for the peak and decline.
But the more important point is that it's critical such things can be debated. Simply assuming you're right and anyone who disagrees is a "public health hazard" is totalitarianism. You won't have any ability to defend yourself, or even any right to, next time someone erases you because e.g. Trump declared your views to be dangerous.
Also i've said it here before, but young, healthy people who did not had to have invasive respiration (so no ICU) still got out of their sickness with lingering asthma, possibly caused by a pulmonary fibrosis. I found this [0] in English if you don't know what it is. In five to seven years (assuming we find a vaccine for sras-cov2 in two year) we will really start counting our dead, unless we find a non-chirurgical fibrosis cure.
[0] https://lungdiseasenews.com/2017/06/16/12-facts-pulmonary-fi...
They took stats from a massively self-selecting population - people seeking out COVID-19 testing at their facilities - and extrapolated to the general public.
That's inexcusably dumb.
As the bit I quoted states, that's like "estimating the average height of Americans from the players on an NBA court".
I don’t understand why YouTube couldn’t leave the video up, and put some kind of warning or interstitial advising of problems with the content. I would have problems with that approach too, but certainly less so than I do with the wholesale deletion of the video.
Anyway, you can find it hosted here: https://www.turnto23.com/news/coronavirus/video-interview-wi...
They then use this to massively misrepresent the lethality of Covid 19.
There are a few population studies for very specific areas, but no widespread statewide sampling anywhere.
PS: The US has ~50,000 Coronavirus deaths. Assuming a very optimistic mortality rate of 0.5% suggests at most 10 million infections out of 330 million people or 3.3%. A higher mortality rate of say 5% would mean total infections are possibility as low as 0.3% of the US population.
So, no I don’t see how it’s misinformation.
This could mean that substantially more Americans have it. (Though on current projections, less than a factor of 2.)
The biggest question IMO is how much we are undercounting fatalities. NYC lists Confirmed deaths at 11,820 plus Probable deaths at 5,395. They also add: Due to delays in reporting, recent data are incomplete. https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page
Making any assumptions about the mortality rate with the abysmal state of testing in the US and around the world is guesswork.
Making assumptions based on the horrific codebase that's spawned our most cited models should also give anyone in software at least a twinge of anxiety.
The US has an older and sicker population than SK, and in NYC an overworked healthcare system. So, a 1% US mortality rate discounted to 0.5% due to recent infections not having time to die is extremely optimistic. It would also mean testing was only discovering 10% of cases.
PS: Many more people are exposed without having sufficient infections to trigger long term immunity. But, it’s herd immunity or deaths/long term issues we care about making such cases irrelevant as their still at risk.
Even if that’s true, what does it have to do with banning the video and preventing the public from making their own decision?
Right this moment I can go on youtube and look up a million rap videos that talk about guns, violence, murder, and more. I can look at videos that would lead me to harm myself in all sorts of ways if I didn’t have a brain. By picking and choosing like they’re doing, it leads one to distrust the company which will ultimately hurt them.
This video was more like yelling fire in a theater. I’m willing believe the doctors were sincere, but they were gravely wrong, and their misinformation was endangering the public.
YouTube was correct to turn off the alarm they erroneously turned on.
Granted, YouTube’s method of throwing up a standard “violation of community guidelines” message is crude, and leads to suspicion. Then again, so was ABC’s editorial judgment. It’s a hard problem.
The point is that even if they’re wrong, youtube and others are playing a dangerous Orwellian game and it’s going to harm their reputability in the end.
Research done on fake news illustrates why ordinary consumers of news cannot be trusted to make informed judgements.
"Right this moment I can go on youtube and look up a million rap videos that talk about guns, violence, murder, and more. I can look at videos that would lead me to harm myself in all sorts of ways if I didn’t have a brain."
Exactly this. This is why it is irresponsible for a global platform to promote this tripe.
By pulling videos, YouTube/Google is saying they don't trust people to be able to discern anything or do research among several dissenting opinions. And yes, it's their platform and yada yada .. they still allow a lot of content to be uploaded and they have become the most typical/standard centralized source of videos.
I will admit, they might be right to not trust people ... at which point why do we even care about humanity anymore? Are those with more power and influence always going to think the rest of the world are sheep who can't think for themselves and need to be led around?
This time sets all kinds of dangerous prescients. I wish Orwell was still alive.
Most people are not qualified to "examine the evidence" and make public health policy decisions. This is why we rely upon the experts. Otherwise you have measles outbreaks in Beverly Hills.
Perfect example, no expert said there was no human to human nor is there any chance of it. The only language close to that was "there isn't any proof of it now" which might have been informed by CCP misinformation.
Even though they were misinformed, any true expert should have known not to make any definitive statement either way. If you have such a quote, it was not made by an expert.
Do you think epidemiologists are? The people who have apparently never predicted a disease outbreak successfully, ever? Why are they experts but not these doctors?
And what makes YouTube employees believe they're qualified to decide who's right? They're experts in HTML5 video serving, not health.
Even doctors generally recognize that public health (of which epidemiology is only a part) is a separate domain of expertise. There are doctors who specialize in infectious disease who need some public-health training, but there's no reason to expect that e.g. a oncologist or trauma surgeon would know more than the average scientifically-literate person about a different profession.
> 33,865 COVID cases out of a total of 280,900 total tested--that's 12% of Californians were positive for COVID.
This would only be true if those tested were randomly selected. Even in the most optimistic Santa Clara County study prevalence was estimated at under 5%. 1
1. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v...