Comment by zacharytelschow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zacharytelschow | Hacker News Reader

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zacharytelschow

> 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.

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