I don't see how that relates at all. The parent is talking about how we perceive information and especially information that comes from authoritative sources.

That doctor had first-hand experience of what was happening and the authorities getting in his way when he tried to get the word out. He was never in a position where he had to decide between going with the consensus or follow a fringe theory, but rather whether to follow the obviously incorrect official version instead of what he could see with his own two eyes.

Have you ever heard The expression "the exception that proves the rule"? Do you understand the meaning of the expression? It means that the rule is so good that exceptions to it are so rare that they seem significant. The prototypical examples are plane crashes.

What do you think the chances are that I haven't heard about that? What do you think makes this an exception?

There is a lot of politics happening around this theme. Can you trust the numbers put out by the authorities? Yes, within a margin of error due to unreported cases.

The article is not at all in the fearmongering category. It appears to me quite level headed and simply acknowledges that we are past the point of containment, something that seems born out by the facts.

To continue to deny that there is a pandemic will do a lot more harm than to accept that as a fact and act accordingly.

>What do you think makes this an exception?

Do you realize it's completely irrational to debate unknown unknowns? Any certainty comes from bias. So you think the doctor is the tip of the iceberg but you absolutely can't know how big the iceberg is. I think the doctor isn't and honestly I can't know that either. What I do have going for me is the biased perspective that on balance the world is being run adequately and if all of these subversive things were true that couldn't be the case. But I readily admit that that's circular and to the extent that it's not it's completely apriori.

My point is, in case that isn't clear: the people on the front lines of this outbreak are telling a different story than the one that you seem to favor and that up to some point (right up until it became untenable) was still held by the Chinese authorities. So I'm a little skeptical about numbers and stories coming in from Chinese official channels taking them as a baseline with the mental note that things might be much worse.

The data points that we have from outside of China: Iran, the cruise ships, South Korea and several other regions where the virus has established a relatively strong foothold should give anybody pause at this point, any comparisons with the flu are pointless and noise.

Whether or not we are calling a pandemic is semantics, in all but name it is here today.

The doctor was the tip of the iceberg, he is no longer. But there are other people in charge of the messaging for other countries and it seems as though the dreaded pandemic word is now also used by the CDC and similar organizations, internally and with qualifiers ('preparing for a pandemic') it is more a matter of time when they will feel comfortable in using it publicly.

My two cents in this great discussion. The climate change emergency and the biodiversity collapse with no corrective measure taken whilee the stakes are so high for our survival seem to be proof that the world is NOT run adequately.