The pandemic was just a ‘scamdemic’ – until truth hit home hard | Hacker News Reader

The pandemic was just a ‘scamdemic’ – until truth hit home hard

dallasvoice.com

And so, believing the pandemic to be a hoax, my partner and I hosted family members on Saturday, June 13. On Sunday, June 14, I woke up sick.

Is this satire? The Biogen outbreak was in late February, the disastrous White House briefing that caused the stock market to lose 30 % of its valuation on March 17. What more confirmation did they need that the plague was on the move?

A GoFundMe page has been created to help his in-laws pay medical bills resulting from their illness.

Personal responsibility is for the plebs, we happily fall back on charity when it suits us. And no word in the whole damned article about responsibility for healthcare personnel, just for friends and family.

I thought COVID-19 had a weeks-long incubation period before the appearance of symptoms?

Even now we don't really know with certainty. It's certainly longer than one day. But as far as that quote: I take it to mean "We were contagious and hosted family, oops" and not "We caught it from them".

Last I read, the median incubation periods is estimated to be some 5 days.

Here's the paper I remember looking at: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-0504

Up to 14 days incubation, but if I recall correctly the average is five days.

Generally around five days, but yeah, they probably didn't get it at that family party. They may well have given it to their family members, of course (you're infectious before symptoms show).

I had nearly the same reaction to the GoFundMe page, one that I'm sure this person has uttered in his lifetime repeatedly: "maybe they should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps". If that makes me a terrible person, then so be it.

what can be said to people like the author?

"i told you so" is too bitter an admonishment for someone who has shown contrition and suffered greatly for their sizeable sins. "sorry for your loss" is too gentle. "why didn't you listen?" will simply devolve into partisan bickering, and nobody will be convinced.

more importantly, what might we say to someone to prevent them from killing other people through their ignorance and intransigence, like the author did? rational discussion of evidence hasn't worked. legal mandates haven't worked. social shaming hasn't worked. mass death hasn't worked.

and more importantly still: how can we hope to build or repair a society when people like the author are so keen to drag us down, at least until they fall victim to the very problem we are trying to protect them from?

we can't simply let them all get infected if they are nearby -- they'll drag us to hell with them, as they already arguably have. at what point do we refuse to entertain their backwardness? at what point do we withdraw from them or exile them and leave them to their fate?

“Go and sin no more” is the traditional dismissal, but it’s too often interpreted poorly.

I am not interested in punishment or wailing and gnashing of teeth, or public wearing of hair shirts or sackcloth and ashes. I want to see positive, healing, restorative acts. We’ll call that a good penance.

I'm not interested in Truth and Reconciliation committees when this is all over (not before mid-2021), the question is what can be done to improve public health now when you have people like the overpoliticized idiots in Jefferson, GA: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/27/us/covid-georgia-schools-...

At Dartmouth they got to deal with coronavirus early on, someone who felt they didn't have to quarantine brought it from the Biogen outbreak. They have experience and the Dean of Students stated that Dartmouth is going to come down savagely on frat parties, the punishment being expulsion.

Expulsion from society sounds about right.

problem is, expulsion from society sure sounds like “make a natural reservoir” to me...

You raise some very good points.

I don't think there's really anything that can be said at this point. It was an entirely preventable tragedy and the author (and his family) will have to live with the consequences for the rest of their lives.

It's incredibly sad, but I really can't empathise with the mentality the author describes that lead up to blindly following Trump, rejecting "mainstream media" and all scientific evidence in favour of a dumb conspiracy theory.

I really don't get it.

Back in the day we'd exile them to new frontiers. But now we don't have any frontiers left (and space will not be a frontier for a very very long time).

We do, but it's a less geographical method called "cancelling"

I don't think "sorry for your loss" is too gentle. Frankly I think it's perfect. They've learned their lesson the hardest way possible, and their loss is no less real than someone who took it seriously the whole time.

The point of pushing the precautions so hard is to spare people the that pain, to spare THEM that pain. What's the point of withholding sympathy now?

Maybe because their choices and actions didn’t just harm them, but others they came into contact with. When a person puts others lives and health at risk because they are an idiot then they don’t deserve sympathy. They got what they deserved.

What do we say? "Do better next time."

The real question is how do repair communication in our society. The author thought it was a hoax because they didn't trust anyone saying it was real.

Part of this is lack of exposure to other cultures, to people who travel. But a gigantic part is that the people we once turned to for learning what was going on in the world, sold their trust for political advantage. Now we have a collection of echo-chambers, each one every bit as partisan as the other, making each one useless for the social grounding function they used to serve.

So we tell the author, "Do better." But blaming someone who's been misled because "the other side" is usually untrustworthy (from their perspective) doesn't solve the larger societal problem. People like the author aren't "keen to drag us down". They're doing it because the source of information they had was poisoned.

I was able to get a crystal clear picture of what was going on and how we needed respond to it because I have family in China. Worse, I had people in my household visiting China when the lock-downs began. They spent the entire trip scared and apartment-bound. When they came home in early Feb. we all self-quarantined, thinking maybe it wouldn't come here if they could just shut the flights down.

But that is because we got the knowledge directly. News media was completely unreliable.

I'm past the point of caring when pandemic denialists come regret their mistakes, but I am intensely curious about why people come to be a denialist in the first place.

People were in denial during the Wuhan lockdown because China so different from West to start with. But once it hit Italy, there was no logical reason to deny the existence of the pandemic. Understanding how so many people came to believe something so obviously wrong could have some major implications.

And note that the author was denying it in _June_. Like, after New York. June! I mean, there's no helping some people, really. The media has a lot of responsibility here; they were far too passive about pointing out that people were lying about this.

I don't even get why people were denying it during Wuhan lockdown.

Did the fact that they're building not one, but two field hospitals with gear within weeks not give them some clue that shit actually hit the fan, and the only good news is there isn't a lot of direct flights from Wuhan to North America?

I was hearing a mix of higher population density, worse hygiene, expectations of containment, different culture/government, skepticism of Chinese media honesty, and (perhaps most importantly) downplaying by WHO and other experts.

Italy was the nail in the coffin for those... optimistic expectations. Except among the lunatic fringe.

The Reality Market always clears. If people don't mark their beliefs to the Reality Market on a timely basis, it clears with blood and fire.

I think it's both. It was a pandemic for many places, peoples, and nations, but because of rampant media over-hype, speculation, and just plain bad reporting, it gave the impression of being far worse than it might actually have been. There is also the justification that the media's hype made it into more of a "scare-demic" as seems to be the case for the media during election years.

2004: Sars 2008: Bird flu 2010: Swine flu 2012: mers 2014: Ebola 2016: Zika 2018: Ebola again 2020: COVID-19

Yes, you will find SNOPES[0] and all sorts of sources that will say these existed prior to the elections. My point is: These outbreaks/pandemics/etc. may have never risen to the level of such mass hysteria had it not been for the media's sophistic instigation.[1.]

[0.]https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/coronavirus-meme/

More than 650,000 people have died so far around the world, more than 150,000 people have died in the United States. This is despite a massive economy-rocking effort to "flatten the curve" and an unprecedented-in-100-years effort to mask up and isolate and avoid interacting with other people.

Blaming "media" for any part of this, or for exaggerating its horrors, seems so wrong-headed it's unclear where to begin.

You tout a conspiracy theory even while linking to Snopes demonstrating that said theory is nonsense.

I hope that neither you nor anyone you love ends up fighting for their life again COVID-19. Wear a mask, and stay home.

> This is despite a massive economy-rocking effort to "flatten the curve"

In the US, that was largely a complete failure because everywhere started reopening because New York’s case numbers were going down while the rest of the country was going up, and everyone declared “mission accomplished”.

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