This Business Insider article seems really pointless and vapid to me. Their criticism of reddit is they don't link to official CDC or WHO pages at the top of their search results? You might as well level the same accusation at Hacker News or any other internet forum. And the fact that Facebook and Twitter has those links does nothing to stop them from being full of misinformation themselves.

I looked through /r/covid19/ and it mostly seems to be an aggregator of research papers. Don't really see much tinfoily or panicky stuff there.

I also have no idea why posting this chart would be considered "making bold and fearmongering claims": https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/euokq5/oc_...

Besides, I'm not sure why Business Insider thinks linking to the CDC is some sort of be all end all solution to providing coronavirus information. They've actually been incredibly slow to provide up to date information (not to mention testing).

This article comes across as Business Insider taking a petty swipe at reddit to generate clicks and trying to stir up drama where none exists.

Such demands infuriate me to no end. BI's prescription seems more mild than others, but a good example of where they can go awry is YouTube. Youtube used to be a great tool for finding primary sources and citizen livestreams during ongoing events.

The coup in Venezuela, the Yellow Vest protests, and even Charlottesville all had individuals, both partisans and observers contributing to a body of information that allowed interested people to develop a more holistic awareness of the ground-level context as it unfolded in real-time.

Seemingly there are a number of medical professionals providing coolheaded analysis of the COVID outbreak, but if I were to search it up, I would be subject to a tsunami of vapid, hyperbolic observations and speculations breathlessly belted out by talking heads whose two great skills are reading a teleprompter, and running their mouths between segments.

Every time something of cultural interest or controversy occurs, self-interested media outlets run hitpiece after hitpiece against whichever platform hasn't bent the knee to their industry in the recent past, all under the auspices of the public good, and ensuring only the highest quality information is available.

Which, of course, only inflames the skepticism and paranoia of those convinced that the media is plotting to control them, even as they deny knowledge to those capable of keeping themselves informed and acting through their own sources.

Traditional media is being outcompeted as a primary source for both critical audiences that want to stay informed, as well as for credulous audiences who want to be entertained, and hear what they already agree with.

This isn't to denigrate the great work being done around the globe by investigative journalists. News reporting is a thankless, and unprofitable venture. It's unfortunate that their great work is so often buried beneath a sea of punditry with little more insight than a reddit thread.

HN has been a great source for information on COVID 19, and I get links to primary articles that I wouldn't know to find, and which most publications only reference in passing. It helps me stay informed. If I was just passively reading/watching the news, I shudder to imagine what I'd think.

It is, and pulling out the marathon bombing case just shows it's a hit piece.

Social media in general, and Reddit in particular, are commoditizing news publications, and displacing them as trusted sources of information. That's IMO why there have been so many such articles coming out regularly in the past few years.

You don't find it terrifying that anonymous unaccountable randos are displacing the mainstream media?

Mainstream media is almost as anonymous and just as unaccountable as Internet "randos". The latter at least link to their sources sometimes.

Edit: here’s a Lancet Editorial “COVID-19: too little, too late?” https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

* * *

Seattle is about 2 weeks behind Lombardy. The Bay Area maybe 3 weeks behind. Everywhere in the US is going to be in that situation in 2 months at most, unless something very dramatic changes ASAP.

The kinds of measures being taken in the US are grossly inadequate for this challenge: leaders and some media outlets continue to downplay risks, residents continue to blithely go about their everyday lives, large gatherings like church meetings and sporting events continue as usual, the CDC/FDA is still blocking sufficient testing around the country, hospitals and medical workers are not being sufficiently trained and prepared, and the supply of personal protective gear and ICU beds is not going to suffice.

We have squandered 4–6 weeks of preparation for this crisis, and hundreds of thousands of people in the US may die as a result, with others experiencing permanent lung damage.

China has shown that this virus can be managed if the number of patients stays low enough that infections are discovered early and patients are treated aggressively with antivirals, supplemental oxygen as soon as blood oxygen starts to drop, mechanical ventilators for severe cases, etc. People’s immune systems generally do fight this virus off if we can keep them breathing for long enough. But that depends on having enough hospital capacity.

If everyone stays complacent and continues to mingle until there are hundreds of local deaths in each area it’s going to be a disaster.

Edit 2: To everyone here: If you have what seems like a minor cold, even if you are a young adult, please stay away from people and don’t spread it. What is 2 weeks of minor cough and sore throat for you might become severe pneumonia requiring hospitalization for your parent or neighbor or coworker. If anyone in the family gets a minor cold, please keep your kids out of school. Etc.

In the last few days Ontario has found 2 cases of Covid-19 in people who recently travelled to the US:

https://news.ontario.ca/mohltc/en/2020/03/ontario-confirms-n... https://news.ontario.ca/mohltc/en/2020/03/ontario-confirms-n...

All the other cases we've seen were related to travel to Iran, Italy, Egypt, & China IIRC.

EDIT: one was a woman who returned from Colorado on Mar 2, the other a man who returned from Las Vegas on Feb 28.

In Argentina a new case just confirmed some hours ago is from a young man coming back from a conference in Boston, MA.

I had an interesting experience - my local hospital (which is actually a very good medical hospital). Has already called in every at risk (which I am) person and had them do a check up (and in my case an x-ray).

They also have already stock piled masks and additional resources. The medical staff in the area are similarly mentally preparing, schools are prepping for the shutdown (at home school).

I wouldn’t say the US is doing nothing, this is rural Illinois. There just isn’t much to do here until it’s a problem. But as soon as we get a few test positives schools are planning shutdown (I’m assuming gyms will be used for patients as necessary).

> If anyone in the family gets a minor cold, please keep your kids out of school. Etc.

Unfortunately this is effectively "let them eat cake" for many people.

Keeping kids out of school means not going to work. Not going to work means not having money to pay the bills, and very possibly losing your job.

In China, where the state has basically total control, things like this can be done. In the US, it's going to be a tough sell for an awful lot of people.

I would feel a lot more comfortable if the USA had a testing setup like South Korea (where they have performed something like 500 times as many tests per capita as the USA, and then done aggressive isolation and contact tracing for positive cases).

If it were up to me the federal government and state and local governments would be closing schools, closing nursing homes to visitors, canceling church services and sporting events, figuring out how to make transportation less risky, closing restaurants and bars to customers and drafting those workers to make deliverable prepared meals instead, recruiting childless people aged 15–40 into temporary (paid) public service jobs, doing everything possible to guarantee sufficient supply of protective equipment, taking every roadblock out from researching antiviral drugs for treating positive cases, etc.

Governments should be figuring out how to guarantee anyone with untested minor colds to stay home from work without losing pay until they can be tested; figuring out how to temporarily relieve rent, loan payments, and taxes for people quarantined or with jobs in temporarily affected industries; preparing to distribute food, medicine, and other items to patients in quarantine or isolated at home, and so on.

With a robust public response it should be possible to dramatically slow this virus without completely collapsing the economy. The fallout (not just illness/death but also economic impact) from all the cases hitting at once within a few weeks is going to be much more worse.

I’m not sure exactly what the best responses would be, I’m just spitballing here. But it seems to me we should have been thinking and talking about possible extreme measures for the past 6 weeks instead of collectively twiddling our thumbs and going on with our ordinary lives.

Ask any taxpayer and they will tell you that the US also has total control. I get your point about not having the right to force people to do things (ie people ignoring mandatory hurricane evacuation orders) but they do have the power to make it such that the people who do want to stay home but can’t due to financial reasons can. If there were the will for it.

Everybody who works any public-facing job will go to work with a “cold”, I guarantee it. I did. The alternative is losing said job. Welcome to America.

Your take on things is interesting as one instance of 3blue1brown's point in the video: if everyone is worrying, you don't have anything to worry about. But if no one is worried, you should be worried.

You seem to be taking a position of "Everyone else is worried. I assert that my non-worry will be proven to be the correct position." Yet, your prediction that the redditors are excessively worried ("panicky") will only be borne out if those who worry are sufficient in number and intensity to keep downward pressure on the exponential multiplier.

There's a worry vector field around the Earth here, I can feel it. I wonder what you get with the line integral?

I worry but I don't accept reddit's panicky "70% will be infected + 4% death rate = 150 million deaths"

I even think the 500k death in the US is too much

https://www.businessinsider.com/presentation-us-hospitals-pr...

>Lawler's estimates include:

>4.8 million hospitalizations associated with the novel coronavirus

>96 million cases overall in the US

>480,000 deaths

Once again I'm not downplaying it but I think we will be closer to the 1957-59 asian flu which had 70k deaths in the US and 2 million global BUT maybe that's even too much https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H2N2

Except downplaying it is exactly what you are doing, based solely on a personal opinion which you do not back up in any way.

/r/coronavirus can definitely be bad on your mental health, but /r/covid19 is pretty level headed. Like ya, there are some scared people on it, but it's not very conspiracy-y.

One thing I don't understand is why we shouldn't all have a healthy dose of anxiety about the outbreak. Most of the stuff in life people go around worrying about is meaningless -- what will people think of me? What happens if I lose my job?

But if anxiety leads more people to self-quarantine and wash their hands over and over again, it will save lives. Potentially a lot of them.

Anxiety doesn't normally have a place in society because it's so overwhelmingly safe most of the time, but we're facing a legitimate threat that people can do something about.

Obviously, there's no place for panic and stockpiling, but most of the people I see don't seem too worried -- they don't seem worried enough. People should be more cautious.

I've yet to see any opinion pieces from Business Insider that weren't shallow hit pieces. It's not a place for intelligent people to get information. Or, really, anyone.

BI posts a hitpiece on their competitor and that's the message you took. Social media and YouTube at least provide a way to find and post first hand information that is needed when traditional news sources have their own agendas that don't always align with the truth.

The thing about reddit is it can be very useful if you know when to take it seriously and know when they're being over the top. All the subs are subject to hivemind, so you have to correct for that.

/r/Coronavirus used to have some info on it. But yeah, for the past week+ (since Reddit began linking it on the front page, maybe?) every other article has been "the US isn't testing enough", and the comments of every article have degenerated into "Trump is literally evil, this is all being done for the benefit of corporations, he just wants to protect the stock market" which is really not helpful.

It might (or might not) be accurate, but that's kinda irrelevant.

Agreed, Reddit is cancer. Reactionary hive mind internet at its worst.

One of the biggest problems with Reddit is that Americans go on boards like /r/politics or in this case /r/Coronavirus, see extreme hostility towards America and Trump and assume that this hostility is all coming from Americans themselves, when really a substantial number of Reddit users (and users elsewhere on the Internet) are not American.

Not being Americans, their hostility comes more from predisposed bias against Trump and America than a careful analysis of what's best for America.

I’m not a fan of the man, but frankly, so many on the other side make him look like a saint that I struggle to understand the outpouring of hate against him. And it’s true Fox is just an extension of the Republican Party, but so likewise are CNN, MSNBC and (basically every other major news site) extensions of the Democratic Party. In fact I think that’s why Fox News was created, to have at least one outlet of propaganda for the Republicans given everything else was propaganda for the Democrats. The big take away from that though is that all major media is just official propaganda for a political party.

What kills me though is the “if you disagree with me politically you’re obviously just a racist/homophobe/etc. That social justice agenda has to stop. And reddit is prime real estate for where they congregate. I watched a mass reddit mob harass anyone who claimed an accusation from a woman shouldn’t be automatically taken as fact, and that women NEVER lie and you are guilty the moment you are accused, and you’re a “horrible human being” if you even dare to think a single woman could EVER possibly lie when accusing someone.

The internet has done a lot of good, but it’s become Ground Zero for extremist ideology like that to run rampant.

The thing is Trump isn't even particularly relevant to the vast majority of the stories, even when it's the federal govt screwing up. But reddit posters are constantly making it about him. The moderators do try to prevent the worst of political posting to their credit.

What's so ironic about foxnews viewers being victims? They aren't panicking appropriately enough or something? I just glanced at their website and it didn't seem particularly slanted on the topic. Looks like they have multiple coronavirus stories coming out every hour. One can easily freak out if so inclined.

I told you dude, sea lions...

Reddit is clearly just self-hating Americans, mostly kids. I guess you assume no American would spend so much time writing anti-Trump comments on r/politics?

I think the real issue is that you go to a place like r/politics or r/vancouver or r/bitcoin and think it's some canonical forum with some semblance of fairness but it's really just someone's little world with its own rules and agenda.

But you can't simply start your own subreddit because you're now r/vancouver2, r/TrueVancouver, or whatever and it can never get the same traction just because it's not the official-looking r/vancouver anymore.

Yup. You can't think of Reddit as a single forum. A subreddit is a community. By size, shape and behavior, Reddit itself is a privately owned Web inside the public Web, with its own, centrally controlled DNS.

I think there are a lot of Americans writing anti-Trump comments on Reddit, but I think the numbers are boosted by non Americans doing the same thing. It artificially inflates the number of anti Trump posters.