Maybe doctor's and research scientists should present this as a data point instead of instead of yorkshirecoastradio relaying some facebook posts.

While this narrative may fit what is perceived as a good cause, do we want it at the expense of truth? Do we want every story to first be questioned, "what are they trying to get us to do by telling us this?"

> do we want it at the expense of truth?

I’m confused by that, what do you mean? What here is untrue? What is the “truth” that should be reported here? Someone died of COVID, someone who was young and didn’t have other health factors, which is abnormal compared to what we’ve heard about nearly all other cases of COVID death so far.

Nobody claimed this is somehow a huge number of cases, and I think it’s well understood - and not being challenged here — that old people and sick people have much, much higher risk factors for dying of Coronavirus.

But isn’t it worth knowing that the risk distribution does not start at 70 years old, that it starts at 18 and goes up?

> Someone died of COVID

possibly

> and didn’t have other health factors

an aunt is saying so

> who was young

the only thing that can be regarded as certain

Have you put this level of skepticism on the news reports about old people dying?

Those details will be proven true or untrue by more official sources, and probably today. My point was not that I know they're true, it's that they are facts that can be checked. But I have no specific reason to be more skeptical of this report than of any other COVID deaths I've read about, do you?

Yes. Such reports also deserve to be examined skeptically.

The big problem surfacing at the moment is deaths being reported as 'caused by covid' when they're in reality deaths that were about to happen anyway, and the victim happened to be infected e.g. cancer sufferers who were already in terminal decline.

There's increasing evidence that the excess death rate - deaths that truly wouldn't have happened if not for COVID - might be nearly zero.

> Do we want every story to first be questioned, "what are they trying to get us to do by telling us this?"

This should already be the standard operating procedure.

Anecdotal doesn’t mean a lie. Anecdotal means n=1, or more broadly, trying to extrapolate from a narrow sample to draw a broad conclusion. This meets the exact definition of anecdotal.

You’ve moved the goalposts to say that if it kills even one young person then young people generally are at risk. The claim was never that zero young people have died. Just vanishingly few.

DR. BIRX (March 23, 2020):

"In the mortality data that has been provided to us, there has been no child under 15 that has succumbed to the virus in Europe. There was the one 14-year-old in China. So we still see that there is less severity in children, and so that should be reassuring to the moms and dads out there.

To Generation Z and to my millennial colleagues who have been really at the forefront of many of these responses: Less than 1 percent of all the mortality is less than 50. And so this is, I think, also a very important point.

That doesn’t mean that individuals won’t have severe disease. So still 99 percent of all the mortality coming out of Europe, in general, is over 50, and preexisting conditions. The preexisting condition piece still holds in Italy, with the majority of the mortality having three or more preexisting conditions."

> Anecdotal means n=1

No, that is incorrect. It has nothing to do with the size of the sample.

"Anecdotal evidence is evidence from anecdotes: evidence collected in a casual or informal manner and relying heavily or entirely on personal testimony."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence

"Anecdotal" also means data that is not verifiable. In this case, the data is verifiable even if the news spread via Facebook.

> trying to extrapolate from a narrow sample to draw a broad conclusion. [...] You've moved the goalposts to say that if it kills even one young person then young people are generally at risk.

I did not draw a broad conclusion, I stated clearly in this thread that this is one sample, and old people are at much higher risk. So did the article. You are constructing a straw man argument that doesn't accurately reflect or counter my point of view.

As long as your view is that young people are at vanishingly low risk of dying from this disease, and that individual reports of young people dying are essentially irrelevant and a play on emotions, than I suppose we vehemently agree on the facts.

Whether zero people worldwide under 15 have died or 10 people worldwide under 15 have died doesn’t meaningfully change the obvious conclusion, when the number of cases is several hundred thousand.

It seemed like you were saying that one child dying from COVID was relevant because someone claimed zero children died. Anyone claiming literally zero children have died from COVID are uninformed. The fact remains that children almost universally do not die from COVID.