Why Is All Covid-19 News Bad News? | Hacker News Reader

Why Is All Covid-19 News Bad News?

nber.org

41 pointsundefined168 comments

Here in Brazil the pandemic is currently in the worst phase it has ever been, with no signs of improving in the near future.

I'm glad that other countries can have good news to share but unfortunately that is certainly not the case here.

Are you saying that just based on PCR testing results, or actual experience in daily life?

You at least get to shop, study, entertain and transport yourself in public without limitations, which is something that most people from elsewhere in the world cannot say?

Would love to hear personal experience of OP but there are horrifying news stories.

Lots of young people and kids getting very sick [1], lack of food [2], running out of oxygen w/ over 4k dying a day (reported who knows the real number..), vaccine they are using only 50% effective [3], asking women to delay getting pregnant [4] and more.

1 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/brazil-alarming-high-num... 2 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-56765150 3 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/4/10/out-of-control-braz... 4 https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/17/americas/brazil-pregnancy-cov...

Personally, it sucks having to navigate treating a serious health condition, scheduling surgery, etc, in the middle of a pandemic. The silver lining is that my close family has the privilege that we can all work from home, so at least we're relatively safe from the COVID itself.

The lack of limitations is part of the problem. We're currently at the highest number of COVID cases and deaths but despite that there is a lot of resistance against the government implementing a lockdown, in large part because the federal government is run by science-hating lunatics.

The most horrifying recent news is that hospitals around the country are running out of sedatives used for COVID intensive care. There have been reports of intubated patients waking up from sedation and having to be tied down to their beds to keep them from ripping out the air tube. It's inhumane.

(Link warning: shocking images) https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/equilibrioesaude/2021/04/nas-u...

But what guarantee is there that lockdown would prevent this?

Peru has had strict lockdowns, but their COVID deaths are about the same as Brazil, when adjusted by population size.

The same in Europe - Sweden actually has fewer deaths than strict lockdown countries.

Wouldn't it be simpler for Brazilian society to just properly fund and manage healthcare (which it sounds like is the primary problem) rather than ceasing most economic, public, and social activity as part of lockdown?

Intensive care units are at over 90% capacity in most of the country, even after taking into account the recent expansions in the number of beds available. Even if we had all the money in the world, there are not enough doctors to take care of the current volume of COVID patients. At this point, secondary measures to reduce the rate of new infections are the only way to try to avoid a total collapse of the healthcare system.

Sweden is also not a good example of against lockdowns. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-prageru-sweden-...

COVID deaths per capita:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...

Brazil has fewer COVID deaths per capita than Czechia, Hungary, Belgium, Slovakia, Slovenia, Italy, UK.

These are all countries that have had strict lockdowns and have modern healthcare systems.

This would suggest that Brazil is doing well and that their current approach is justified.

Brazil is now entering the Winter of the Southern Hemisphere, whilst Europe and North America are entering Summer - which also adds a seasonal element to comparisons.

Aren't ICUs meant to be used to capacity? Why would hospital planners build ICUs that aren't going to be used?

What about looking at general public health improvements, such as improving air quality (by increasing the price of coal and oil products, and encouraging EVs) and reducing obesity (by taxing sugar) - which will have benefits beyond this current epidemic - given that obesity and cardiovascular health are major comorbidity factors for COVID severity.

It's hard to believe that you are arguing in good faith if you're trying to suggest that Brazil is anywhere close to doing well when it comes to COVID.

I don't even know where to start. Even though you're lucky to be able to work from home, it sounds like you're taking on a lot of burden to keep those around you safe.

Rather than compare countries that did horribly or slightly less horribly, I would give several counterpoints from Asian countries that took strict but short measures early on and have now been living free without dying for it. Waste of time in this thread though. I hope you be OK soon.

Peru has lockdown - they were one of the first countries to initiate it, in March 2020.

Brazil does not.

The results in both countries are basically the same, when using COVID deaths per capita as the primary measure.

How can you conclude logically that Brazil's no-lockdown approach is a failure?

Its not realistic to compare to East-Asian countries which are in many cases wealthy islands with strong borders and homogenous populations.

Lockdown interrupts regular medical care and worsens the health of the existing population, from things like decreased activity and poorer diets [2]:

[1]https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-lockdown-may-have-ind... [2]https://time.com/5949263/pandemic-weight-gain/

At this end of this article, there are some detailed reports on the effectiveness of ivermectin in Brazil.

https://covid19criticalcare.com/ivermectin-in-covid-19/epide...

Why does the plight of Brazil have to be a magnet for all manner of denialism to show up in the comments? Ivermectin doesn't work, just like Hydroxichloroquine doesn't. Seriously, if these things actually worked wouldn't it be expected that rich countries would purchase the entire supply, as they've been doing with the vaccines? Part of that tragedy we're going through is precisely because our government instead of working to acquire life-saving vaccines, is pushing the lie that there's an "early treatment" for COVID with these medications.

I guess you didn't read the paper I referenced.

CNN Technical director told us as much - Money & power.

https://www.projectveritas.com/news/part-2-cnn-director-char...

Just to be clear .. a technical director has approximately 0 to say about programming decisions. They deal with sound / lighting / computing equipment.

Indeed, but they can definitely provide insight as to what's going on on set.

I wouldn't say zero. He works there, he gets the feel there.

You have to wonder why did he said all of those specific things. Do you think he made them all up on the spot?

Those things he said line up with their programming (the death toll counters, etc.).

CNN's 24/7 death clock seems to have disappeared when Biden was inaugurated. It's almost as if .... :-)

It's wild to me that people think there was some big anti-Trump effort with Covid news -- there were 3,300 people per day dying of the disease in January, now there are 1/4th - 1/5th as many. Maybe, just maybe, that's why the news has changed focus?

There were a lot fewer people per day dying last September than today, but CNN's death clock was 24/7 then.

https://covidtracking.com/data/charts/us-daily-deaths

A bias source with an axe to grind and a history of deceptive editing

That's a straw man argument. I wont necessarily dispute the axe to grind, but can you provide proof when "deceptive editing" occurred?

Currently Project Veritas is in multiple lawsuits disputing that claim.

Most recently, in Project Veritas vs New York Times, the NYT claimed their articles contain journalistic "opinions" without notifying readers. Meaning they made claims they can't back up:

https://assets.ctfassets.net/syq3snmxclc9/maEy58HDFCR7qdtFOb...

I don't think it's fair to dismiss the content of their videos out of hand. While I disagree with the tactics, this is essentially undercover journalism and you can hear longs stretches of the CNN technical director discussing the mood / methods on set.

> but can you provide proof when "deceptive editing" occurred?

The Wikipedia page has plenty of examples and sources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Veritas#Content

I've reviewed this and none of them seem either (a) claim they are deceptive at all or (b) are proven deceptive. You also have to ignore the pending lawsuits (Project Veritas vs NYT) and the fact Project Veritas hasn't been successfully sued for defamation or anything like that.

Wikipedia itself is not a reputable source and frankly the examples don't actually show deception to the audience. I'll repeat what I asked someone else.

> Who edits wikipedia? There's some serious concerns there, by the co-founder of wikipedia. Basically, you can hire firms to edit wikipedia relatively easily and there's some extreme bias on anything even remotely political.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWQaVx5mGco

On the topic of deception...

The main "deception" I see is editing out sections of the video which had no bearing on the story. This is how all news is conducted.

One example labeled as a deception appears to be mentioning the thumbnail of a video:

> He framed the undercover recordings with a preface of him dressed in a "pimp" outfit, which he also wore in TV media interviews. This gave viewers, including the media, the impression that he had dressed that way when speaking to ACORN workers. However, he actually entered the ACORN offices in conservative street clothes (the sleeve of his dress shirt is visible on camera)

Does that change how the ACORN employees reacted? Is it better that they broke the law with him in different clothes (he also went to 6 different locations, dressed differently each time). This has no bearing on the story, because the ACORN employee(s) were still breaking the law - the point. The story was not about how they treated people differently based on attire.

Their wikipedia has a long list of incidents that I won't relist but it's not a straw man to discuss the credibility of a source.

Who edits wikipedia? There's some serious concerns there, by the co-founder of wikipedia. Basically, you can hire firms to edit wikipedia relatively easily and there's some extreme bias on anything even remotely political.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWQaVx5mGco

There are links at the bottom under References if you're interested in learning more about the context. Tim Poole and Project Veritas videos aren't going to convince anyone who doesn't already agree with you.

Project Veritas has a history of being so wildly deceitful[1] that if they said the sky was blue, I'd want to look outside to check myself first before I believed them.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Veritas#Content

Linking to a Wikipedia article doesn't seem like a great way to convey an accusation, especially when you don't want to address the content.

I suppose you don't want to also link to the defamation lawsuit Project Veritas recently won against The New York Times.

Concerning the actual content, I don't see how you can chalk this up to selective editing, the guy goes on for quite a while describing CNN's tactics.

What context do you think was left out?

> recently won

No, that's ongoing. All they've "won" was that a judge denied a motion to dismiss the suit.

> What context do you think was left out?

I'm not going to waste time looking at the video in the first place, so don't bother asking.

Maybe, but ignore Vertias involvement and just concentrate on the raw footage they captured. You can't just fake a conversation like that without fearsome technology or maybe bribery.

> ignore Vertias involvement

Sorry, no. They've tainted the well too much to do that.

I’m guessing you’re probably infinitely less critical of the standard ‘respected’ mainstream media.

‘Project Veritas Bad’ is a becoming an increasingly myopic heuristic. Probably something better would be to think that PV is complicated, and institutions have the potential to be seriously predatory and anti-social in the broadest sense.

So you'll blindly reject data based on ideological disagreement with the person filming? Sounds like Veritas isn't the biased one here.

translation: I don't like what Project Veritas presents, so it must be wildly deceitful, and I need not consider the issue any further.

Honestly this reminds me a lot of some numbers Pew tracks. They look at crime and perception of crime. For quite some time crime rates have been falling dramatically but perception of crime has increased.[0] There's even a pretty strong political correlation[1]. But that should be no surprise for anyone that watches Fox and CNN. Though one thing I saw at the beginning of the pandemic is that CNN really went all-in in adopting Fox's strategy: fear. I'm a bit worried when the major news sources are selling fear over reality (tricky subject). It also has a big effect on how other countries perceive us and what it is like living in the US. We see so many from Europe, China, India, and elsewhere think America is a lawless land with death around every corner, and I don't blame them if that's what we're pushing with our news. If we consider cultural warfare, I'd say it looks like we are trying to purposefully lose on that front.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/20/facts-about...

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/16/voters-perc...

Highly recommend the "Coronavirus Good News" twitter account

https://twitter.com/Coronavirusgoo1?s=09

It's uk based but a lot of the info it retweets is globally applicable

To be fair, most "news" of any sort on any topic is bad news.

We generally measure the success of news by user engagement, and bad news is often more emotional and engaging.

Perhaps a better metric would be the information content, but that's difficult to measure and most people probably don't care.

> Perhaps a better metric would be the information content,

Celebrity gossip tabloids!

If it bleeds it leads.

And if you find yourself depressed and all that, stop reading "the news."

There actually is good news in the world, but it is seldom found in "the news."

See also Don Henley's Dirty Laundry.

Kick 'em when they're up. Kick 'em when they're down.

Man falls downstairs and breaks his leg.

Pessimist: bad things always happen to me, my leg broke, I'm so unlucky.

Optimist: I'm so lucky I just broke my leg. I could have broken my neck!

There is a steady stream of anti-vaccine fake news - all designed to look plausible. People with an education in biotech detacts this, the common person weighs it as a bit of valid news = seeds of doubt are sown. check microbe.tv for the real goods.

I have to say, I think that vaccine advocates are making a tactical mistake by characterising those who do not like or do not want the vaccine (and say so) as "fake news", "designed to look plausible", and so on. They have a different view to you and people can have differing views without either of them having hidden agendas, being evil etc.

Before you ask, I'm keen on vaccines (and have had AZ), but I'm an old git, it makes sense for me. Younger people could make a valid different choice, and others would be wise to respect that choice.

That is the tyranny of the uninformed manifesting. In technicall matters the vote of uninformed people lacks validity to change affairs. The human immune system(s) - yes, we have a number of them. The innate system which evolution has fine tuned to protect us, and the adaptive (learns to defeat a pathogen). These are not voted on by an animal's free will. They are entirely automatic, as animals and man in the past had zero comprehension of what occurs behind the scenes. People have the unwise right to refuse vaccination - perhaps to their detriment or death. (try to keep living after you get bitten by an infectious rabid animal and see what happens). This brings to center stage the true merits of the anti-vaxxers. Get enough doubters and many controlled viruses will lose their 'herd immunity' at which point we well get sweeping waves of infection of many of these 'defeated' viruses. This is OK, of you feel mankind has overpopulated the earth - the added deaths will reduce the degree of overpopulation. I for one want measles to be eliminated and stay dead. Many orthdox Jewish communities seem to want measles to be an ongoing scourge of man. What about smallpox = 35% death rate. The plague - about the same. Polio? I am old enough to recall the huge rooms full of people doomed to live the rest of their lives encased in an artificial lung. So, no, I will not respect that choice = no respect at all - they can do it if they like, but if they choose to let their kids get those illnesses deliberately, then they need to be forced to buy disease specific health insurance, and remove that burden from my health care pool.

Well, humans are more likely to be interested in bad news. As a survival strategy, that happens to be a good place to direct ones attention. Unfortunately for The News, our attention and so their source of income is getting harder and harder to come by. Given all that, and coupled with how entirely central and all-consuming Covid-19 has become as a topic the past year-and-a-half, these results shouldn't be all that shocking. I wonder how it might compare to any of the upcoming catastrophic or disruptive phenomenons of the 2020s.

This paper is dated November 2020, but I don't think anything has changed. In the past 48 hours, the local paper ran a story about everybody needing a third booster shot, a story about all the things it's still not safe to do if you're fully vaccinated, and finally a story that the city was immediately moving to full general eligibility because vaccine providers couldn't fill appointments. Nowhere did they provide links to any of the providers with open slots. You had to work that out for yourself.

Why is a third booster shot bad news? That seems like neutral news and possibly even good news since it means we have a solution to the problem.

Edit: if you’re going to downvote this comment that’s fine but could you do me the courtesy of explaining why? I don’t understand what the flaw is in my reasoning and I am curious to understand it.

"Why should I get this shot instead of waiting for the one that works?"

Do I really need to clarify that I am not the one asking this question?

Many reasons. To minimize the chances our health care system is overrun and new mutations don’t emerge it’s beneficial to maximize public immunity to as many variants as we can as early as possible. Additionally the booster shot may come in the form of a third dose anyway, so there may be no personal benefit to waiting either.

Why should I study now instead of revising before the exam?

The booster isn't because the first shot isn't working now. It will be required because your body will eventually forget how to fight COVID (you'll need three shots no matter when you start) or because new variants will pop up. Either way, your choice is "get the shots now and be safe for the intervening year, or get the two shots a year of non-protection later". The cost of getting another shot every year is nothing. I'd much rather get a shot every year than go a year without being protected.

But being infected by the virus (esp in moderate infections) causes the same antigen response as the vaccine. Is this saying that the antibodies to sars-cov-2 wane after a year? If so, it seems this virus is well on its way to endemic status

I've heard numbers thrown around for anywhere between 6 and 18 months for common antibody lifetime. Obviously, these are guesses based on similar viruses and have evolved over the past year. It's probably going to be endemic, although it's possible that with sufficient vaccine production we can knock it out of humanity. The problem is it seems to survive so well in animal hosts.

Reinfections right now are rare enough that we don't know much, but there have been second cases that seem more severe than the first. This is likely because of lung damage from the first case. But faded immunity from the vaccine won't have the same lung damage. So the faded immunity should be sufficient to eliminate the worst outcomes most times.

So the question of when we start boosters depends on how bad the condition will have to be that we are inoculating against.

Ironically, maybe confirming that people are interesting in those articles, I was curious what you can not do if fully vaccinated. There are two things you can not do according to the CDC:

- Visit indoors, without a mask, with people at increased risk for severe illness from COVID-19

- Attend medium or large gatherings

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/fully-vac...

It's not? Vaccine roll out seems to be going well and cases are down in California and there have been articles about this, they just aren't very interesting...

Why stop at COVID? If you watch the news you probably think that America is either becoming a communist country or about to be overrun by fascists.

Most of news related to COVID is bad news. You don't get to 500k deaths in the US (3 million globally) as the result of an equal amount of good things (i.e vaccines) vs bad things (repeatedly overwhelmed ERs) happening.

The media has the effect of amplifying the bad news, and some of it is very appropriate when it emphasizes the bad behavior of those in positions of extreme power like the president, but the nature of a pandemic is to be inherently far more bad than good, and most of the good (vaccines, economic relief packages for the working class) are only relative to how bad the fundamental situation is.

The US media saw Covid as a club to use against Trump.

How does that explain the same negative bias after Biden took power? And why exclude Fox News and talk radio which are very popular and have been calling it only a flu?

The old news catechism applies:

Bad news is good news.

Good news in no news.

No news is bad news.

TL;DR - because that's what they think we want to hear.

They do a little bit of comparison to past news, but it would be interesting to see a comparison to post-9/11 coverage of terrorism in particular, since 9/11 was the most recent event with emotional impact on the same level.

When you open up vaccination to less vulnerable groups long before those who most need the vaccination have gotten it, then you end up with a lot more dead people than necessary.

That policy makes it look superficially like fast progress is happening but in the end extra dead people makes sad news.

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