Where did you see media hysteria? Somehow that didn't enter my bubble.
And have you ever watched local television news? Millions of Americans do every night. It's the worst of the worst, and their over-the-top tactics are a well worn joke. "Is your refrigerator going to kill you and your children? Tune in at eleven to find out, only on FUTV News".
As a scientist I say sometimes that one of the unnoticed victims of SARS-CoV-2 is media reporting. Some newspapers here (Italy) really love gruesome details, to be honest, but they conveniently forget talking about the frequency of said details.
I mean, if you have a respiratory disease that can blow your head off (this is just an absurd example), you prepare differently depending if it happens in 50% of the cases or in 0.5%. This is completely lost in news reporting.
In addition, the news (but sadly, some experts too!) treat SARS-CoV-2 as a magic virus that does everything different from any other known biological entity. While I was initially surprised to hear those cases of meningitis, I then found in the literature that other coronaviruses can infect the central nervous system (e.g. [1]).
It doesn't mean this complication less severe, when it occurs. But it's not a feature of this virus alone.
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncel.2018.0038...
Care to share a link or two? I’m skeptical that any respected news outlets reported that we can’t become immune.
Agreed on local TV news though; it’s a cesspool.
I mean, I don't respect CNN, but I'm sure some people do.
"WHO says no evidence shows that having coronavirus prevents a second infection"
The second paragraph of the article literally quotes a published brief from WHO:
"There is no evidence yet that people who have had Covid-19 will not get a second infection," WHO said in a scientific brief published Friday.
The headline is literally taken from the WHO's actual words. There's a case to be made that these sort of articles need to be more deeply contextualized with respect to how science works and what the implications of findings are (and what they aren't), but that gets into deeper questions about scientific literacy -- not just for journalists, but for their audience -- but it's hard to point at this and say that this reporting is making it look like the WHO was saying something that they weren't.
I would put more blame on the WHO for this than CNN in any case. It’s fair to say the way the WHO reported this was misunderstood, but the WHO themselves tweeted the same type of wording out directly on Twitter.
The mean age of death from c19 is 80, and even in this group they die at a rate of 1%/wk anyway, for which c19 is about as deadly.
This isnt WWII
The background rate of death in this "sickest and weakest" group is already high. C19 is no higher.
Please do some research, there's an article on the BBC with a graph demonstrating this point.
When we talk about flu stats: most people have some immunity to the flu thanks to flu shots (even if they haven't gotten one for this past year) and general herd immunity, which we DO NOT HAVE for this virus, and won't gain without either a vaccine or a few million dead from this thing running rampant.
The stats you're quoting are WITH the level of serious intervention we've had so far, which is why as certain states are reopening, we're starting to see the numbers ticking back up again and looking just as bad if not worse.
I think an uncomfortable stat this coming year will be just how few people will have been reported to died in 2020 of regular flu. It's not saying Covid19 isn't bad in any way to realize that number, will be almost nothing, and that will be suspicious to people going forward for NextTime.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-didnt-wait-fo...
Stop assuming things.
It's hard to make inferences about the world without assumptions.
Compare that to the Coronavirus deaths. The numbers are really close.
Italy isn’t particularly an outlier in terms of Coronavirus severity when you look at their historical flu numbers compared to the rest of Europe. Their Coronavirus deaths follow the same trend as with their flu fatalities. Really nothing surprising in Italy, but the media lost their minds over it.
https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(19)30328-5/ful...
You're presenting what happened in Lombardy as some sort of mass hysteria. Was the healthcare system overwhelmed, or was that a mass hallucination?
There have been 30,000 confirmed CoVID-19 deaths in Italy, which is about double a normal flu season. What do you think that number would have been without any social distancing measures? As I see it, the numbers are not that difficult to estimate. About 70% of people would need to catch CoVID-19 before herd immunity brought R below 1. With an IFR of 0.5%, and a population of 60 million people, that would mean about 200,000 deaths. Is that enough to "lose one's mind over"?
> When has the flu done that?
The flu overwhelms hospitals quite often. For example, the 2017-2018 flu season saw many hospitals around the world setting up tent wards: https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...
* Not enough doctors, nurses, beds and medical supplies to treat all (or even most of) the patients.
* Extremely stark triage decisions. Deciding not to treat patients who would normally be treatable, instead leaving them to die.
* Doctors and nurses working to the limit of exhaustion.
* Normal care essentially stopping. All medical resources being focused on one disease.
* Morgues unable to handle the number of dead.
Finally, double the regular number of flu deaths occurred in just a few weeks, and that was with extreme social distancing measures. Without those measures, the death toll would have been far higher.
You're describing this as some sort of mass hallucination. I don't see how that's a defensible position.
If there was any doubt that you're being disingenuous and purposely deceitful, the fact that you've decided to resort to petty arguments on semantics to desperately avoid facing the facts is enough to clear up that doubt.
Do you think that information is relevant to a comparison?
By mid-February the media as a whole was already raising alarm bells, and the stock market began crashing on February 24 as a result of media coverage of the virus.
To jog our memory, we could look at what people were saying in contemporary February articles... https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/28/trump-chief-of-staff-mulvane...
> “The press was covering their hoax of the day because they thought it would bring down the president,” Mulvaney concluded. “The reason you’re seeing so much attention to [the coronavirus] today is that they think this is going to be what brings down the president. That’s what this is all about.”
In my eyes that define is hysteria.