Can Shocking Images Persuade Doubters of Covid’s Dangers? | Hacker News Reader

Can Shocking Images Persuade Doubters of Covid’s Dangers?

scientificamerican.com

5 pointsvo2maxer9 comments

From my experience as a 90s kid, I've become pretty inoculated against this sort of propaganda. The DARE program and driver safety courses were two examples. I just sort of filter it out now because it doesn't seem REAL.

The stuff that really gets to me isn't the shocking images, but the stories from people. From the guy that got COVID and blogged about his 2 weeks of suffering to my friend who lost his partner in what seemed like an instant. If you want to get to people, share real, unembellished stories. Don't try to persuade either, just give people real stories.

It makes me sad to say, but I do not believe any evidence will convince unbelievers about the things they are told not to believe.

> about the things they are told not to believe.

I don't believe things because I'm "told" them, I believe them when I'm convinced using evidence and data. The danger presented by Covid to otherwise healthy adults and children under 60 is extremely minimal and there are corresponding tradeoff costs to any decision made. At the moment, it seems more deaths will have been caused by our reaction to Covid (in terms of missed cancer diagnosis, heart problems, surgeries related to the same, tuberculosis, missing vaccinations that didn't happen) than would have been caused by the disease itself. And that's assuming that deaths are the only valid measuring stick, which simply isn't true. What's happened to education of children? Quality of life for people not allowed to see loved ones?

Relating to the article, photos are by their nature anecdotal and will not do anything to sway someone like myself. About as effective as showing me a picture of a car accident and telling me never to get in a car again.

> I'm convinced using evidence and data. The danger presented by Covid to otherwise healthy adults and children under 60 is extremely minimal

ICNARC: (22/01/2021) https://www.icnarc.org/Our-Audit/Audits/Cmp/Reports

Mean age of admission to ICU is 59.8

45% of the people admitted to ICU are under the age of 60.

88% of people admitted to ICU were able to live with no assistance in day to day life before being admitted.

Most people admitted did not have very severe comorbidities (cardio, respiratory, renal, livel, metastatic, haematological malignancy, immunocompromised).

If you're interested in debunking fake info you might be interested in https://www.covidfaq.co/

83.29% of patients who died from COVID-19 had a comorbidity. As a patient’s number of comorbidities increased, so did the odds of dying from COVID-19.

https://www.ajmc.com/view/contributor-links-between-covid-19...

We know that people with learning disability often live in homes that are crowded, staffed by people on low pay without access to sick pay; and that medical care in general is not as good as for people without LD.

In the UK we know that doctors often use DNACPRs for people with LD without asking those people or their families, and they do this more than they do for people without LD, and they often use blanket criteria ("does this person have LD?") to do so (this is against the law in England but we know it happens).

Your link is telling us of a scandal of poor care for people with LD that's killing them many years before they would otherwise die. I don't think it's telling us what you think it is, especially since my post is people being put in ICU, not dying, from covid.

Your beliefs are yours to hold. Go ahead and believe whatever you want to believe. However, you want to claim you are a free thinker and grounded in "evidence and data". Taking that at face value, let's set Covid aside, and imagine we are asked to objectively evaluate the weight of the evidence for and against a finding.

Is it more likely that the vast majority of international experts on a subject agree and are correct about something, or is it more likely that a small minority of stalwarts speak the truth in the face of a well coordinated global conspiracy involving tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of co-conspirators?

If you feel that you should reject the overwhelming evidence in favor of a minority voice that aligns with your world view, then yes, you in fact don't believe what you have been told not to and are not in fact grounded in evidence and data.

As you say, evidence that does not align with your world view is "anecdotal" and to be rejected, sadly, demonstrating my point.

The problem is how to ensure that the same tools can't be used to spread misinformation. Like a photo of a 5 years old girl that lives at 10 miles of a 5G tower and dies of cancer. Or a photo of a 5 years old boy that got all the vaccines and now has autism.

It's easy to get one shocking photo of each of these cases, because girl get cancer in spite they are not nearby 5G towers and boys get autism in spite they are not vaccinated.

The difference is that using statistics you can show that cancer is not more usual in people that live 5G towers and autism is not more usual in people that is vaccinated.

Statistic and serious medical reporting can show the difference of information and misinformation. Shocking photos put them at the same level.

I think what works better are the short 'In Memoriam' portraits of random normal people who fell victim to the virus, where you see pictures of them from their life and sometimes family members talking about them. CNN does this occasionally.

Very powerful, and driving home that this drama can befall anyone.

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