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Comment by e40 | Hacker News Reader

A colleague made the point that we need more pictures of overflowing morgues and ICUs and (like is happening in LA) people waiting in an ambulance for 7-8 hours (and some of those people dying because of it).

Just like the US government banned (discouraged?) pictures of caskets coming back from war.

These images need to be on the news and on news websites 24/7.

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At the beginning of this pandemic, I watched a 2-3 min video of a Turin hospital (back when Italy was the epicenter in the west) of people silently choking to death in their ventilators. It was absolutely fucking eerie and insane and every time I think of doing something risky, I think about the sound in that video.

Unfortunately in this context, it is illegal to film people in a hospital. I think that's a fair rule but I really would like to have a few videos floating around with no voiceover and no commentary just to scare the shit out of people. I think it would work.

If the person gives their consent to be filmed I don't think it's morally wrong. If I ended up in intensive care due to the covid I'd agree to be filmed for prevention

Or you can blur faces etc.

Qualify that the people in those videos, for example Italy, were very very obese.

Obvious panic doesn't help much, but I was sort of advocating a "Do you want to execute grandma?"-style advert for people who think it's a bit of a laugh.

Reminds me of this seatbelt advert (warning: graphic) https://youtu.be/mKHY69AFstE

I saw the same video and it still haunts me.

Yet there are some people who still say that it's no worse than flu, and that it only kills old people.

Those images have been intentionally suppressed in the US.

https://theintercept.com/2020/12/27/covid-photography-hospit...

Thanks, I had forgotten about that.

And I think there's a direct line between this suppression and the behavior of many people.

> I think there's a direct line between this suppression and the behavior of many people

Me, too. And, obviously, so did Severino and his boss.

I agree that this would be effective against most people.

But when this happened in Italy, a large number of the conspiracy crowd just said the photos were faked.

Life was easier when it wasn’t so easy to fake a photo...

When was that, 1880? You can do some pretty funky stuff in the darkroom when you are making your prints.

Modern conspiracy has nothing to do with facts, but entirely to do with the shape, rate and self forming nature of modern human communication networks.

I'll argue, strongly, that right now - everything regarding Social Media misinformation is an epiphenomena of those factors.

To illustrate -

Misinformation based communication travels differently than "Fact" based information https://www.pnas.org/content/113/3/554.full.

People assign truth value based on heuristics, one of which is how many times information is repeated. If you self select a network of people who believe the same things and repeat it, with slight modifications - you can ensure people will believe conspriacies.

With the ability to self select nodes/people who tend to be conspiracy inclined you will easily cross the number of people needed to make an idea seem socially valid.

The pace and size of our information networks naturally supports the evolution of highly viral content - not truthful content.

There is a comment not far away above from HN user who doesn't feel safe on a street without mask with other people closer than 25 feet. Imagine what those TV pictures of yours gonna make with people like that.

"Fear is Safety"

Those images were on the news constantly when New York was having trouble 8 months ago. That doesn't seem to have changed much behavior.

Isn't the images idea similar to what is done with cigarette packs and that certainly doesn't stop the smokers.

There should be more awareness about what is going on in hospitals all year round. Media hype can make everything extreme.

And there are many theories to explain, for example NY morgues may have been overflowing because morgue owners were afraid to accept people who died from Covid.

Is there actual evidence that people died because they couldn't receive care? Even in Italy I have not seen the evidence, just YouTube videos of some alleged doctors making such claims.

Serious question. I would love to see evidence of people dying because they couldn't receive care (in the Western world).

Maybe they died because aliens coincidentally Tele-killed them. Lots of theories!

So you won't accept video evidence given by named doctors at specific hospitals, thus easily checked by the media or anyone who has anything to do with the hospital.

What evidence would you accept?

Named doctors would be a start. Media doing some checking would also be a start. Some person looking like a doctor making claims on YouTube is not sufficient.

None of those reports citing the alleged doctor actually checked with the hospitals.

Maybe that should be the minimum: actually checking the situation, rather than repeating some random claims.

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