Hacker News Reader

Comment by NikolaeVarius | Hacker News Reader

Its pretty crazy. Report about a bunch of people denying COVID exists with their last COVID induced dying breaths.

www.cnn.com/videos/us/2020/11/16/south-dakota-nurse-intv-newday-vpx.cnn

Note that the "last dying words" claim has been disputed due to there being just 11 deaths where that nurse worked: https://twitter.com/Zigmanfreud/status/1328401634360131585

It is not unusual for deaths to take weeks to be reported.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/report001.pdf

(See, in particular, figure #2 on page #2.)

Yup. Remind me in a month. :)

Yeah, disputed by a hard-right anti-mask COVID truther. I dunno about the story in question, but at this point, these people can't be considered neutral referees. They exist to shitpost and drive wedges between people.

He provided an authoritative source - official death stats - and a rational explanation as to why that source suggests the nurses claim may be a lie. As others in this thread pointed out, the attention of getting on to CNN is unfortunately enough to encourage people to lie.

You don't need to trust him personally.

> You don't need to trust him personally.

You do, though. You need to trust that he's not omitting critical information, either via ignorance or deliberate malice.

Information like this:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/tech_notes.htm

> It is important to note that it can take several weeks for death records to be submitted to National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), processed, coded, and tabulated. Therefore, the data shown on this page may be incomplete, and will likely not include all deaths that occurred during a given time period, especially for the more recent time periods.

So the website the tweet used as it's source aggregates info directly from the relevant state governments, speeding up reporting compared to going through NCHS. How much, I'm not sure.

This is the website they cite as their source for South Dakota: https://doh.sd.gov/news/Coronavirus.aspx I don't seem to be able to access it - not sure if that's geoblocking (I'm in Canada) or it's down at the moment.

That page indicates a lag in their data is similarly possible:

> Deaths: SD-DOH does not report deaths until a certified death record has been filed with COVID-19 as a cause or contributing factor. By law, a death record must be filed within 5 days of the date of death.

(I don't know how long it takes between filing and processing after that point, but it's clear that there's potential time between death and showing up in the count.)

Oh, so it is in fact just geoblocked? That's annoying. It's still down for me (and my EU VPN).

Does the site list deaths by date of report, or date of death? Hopefully the later, so we can just check back in a few weeks.

Anyway, in general this "dying breath" stuff doesn't really tell anyone anything useful. For starters, how much faith do you really want to put in what people say when they're so sick they're about to die? Hypoxia significantly affects mental capacities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUfF2MTnqAw

For all you know, these people don't actually realize that they're sick at all.

Harsh words like this hammer the wedges, too. Let’s accept everyone (irrespective of them being right or wrong) and coexist in peace.

If you simply accept those who hammer wedges, they can be more successful at it. It's called the Paradox of Tolerance:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

It's far from clear how to unravel the paradox, but it's certainly not as simple as "let's just all coexist in peace". It's asymmetric: it only takes one person to break the peace.

It takes people to prioritize truth, due dilligence, trust and maturity, not the extremely judgemental attitudes against anything not toing the partyline. The leader is simply the figurehead of the dysfunction, ie. the dysfunction itself meeting with the people face to face!

Who doesn't allow two thoughts at the same time. Isn't that violation against free speech? Do opposite of that.

Good to know. I somehow doubt there would be any valid reason for her to lie, but oh well.

Being interviewed on CNN is considered pretty amazing for most people. If you have to make something up that fits the overall narrative and is unlikely to be fact checked by "legitimate" news sources, few obvious/immediate downsides.

Of course, if her employer comes out and says "her statement doesn't match reality" and decides she can't be trusted and gets fired, that changes things. Some will see it as "justified" because she made it up while others will see it as a "coverup to hide the facts!" and again, few obvious/immediate downsides.

sigh

I'll state that my wife -an ICU nurse- has stated the same thing. A man dying from COVID19 claiming its a fake virus as he was being sedated to have a tube shoved down his throat passed away days later still believing it was fake. He was one of the first deaths in our region. She broke down hard that night, things are just ramping up here.

Frankly given what we now know about overuse of ventilators, that the man was still speaking at that point is concerning.

https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2020/04/24/ventilato...

Without reading through the article and its sources, are we surprised that patients who were experiencing severe enough symptoms to warrant a ventilator were also teetering on the brink of death?

What I'm surprised at is they are still healthy enough to be talking, yet fit the criteria for ventilation, given what we now know. I'm no doctor. But everything I read in mainstream sources indicates it's well accepted that ventilators were overused earlier in the pandemic.

God it’s amazing how they all said it to the one nurse.

How is this related to the article, or even the title? Except for "covid" ?

Bizarrely enough I found a tweet by a rabid right winger and covid denier that linked this BMJ article as proof that covid was a left wing plandemic conspiracy.....

The twit obviously didn't read more than the headline.

Probably hadn't read more than the headline of anything actually.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com