I think that's a bit of an overreaction. The way I read that comment was very similar to your response to it: it's hard to get hard data in the middle of a crisis. The difference is that the commenter was also expressing the very natural, human response of frustration at this fact. A lot of people are feeling that way.

The serious problem with the comment is that it's saying these reports are annoying, however it is not the job of the providers of these reports to provide hard statistics, it's not as if any of them have the option to do that themselves instead. So it's basically just saying, shut up. I don't want to hear your annoying report of actual effects on human beings.

A more charitable reading of the comment would be an annoyance of anecdotes without underlying prevalence data to contextualize the info.

It would be all too easy for the media to pick a healthy senior with a mild case and tout “it sucks but it’s not so bad” or find cases of healthy 18yo dying in horrific conditions to fit their overall narrative.

Data by itself doesn't cut it. That nurse in London didn't commit suicide because of data. She did is because she couldn't face the reality of treating so many patients dying in agony.

I’m not arguing for just data, I’m arguing for both. I would be equally “annoyed” if it were just data.

Just data wouldn’t give me sympathy/empathy and not being a medical professional I’m not familiar with diagnostic or clinical language. Data won’t properly convey the suffering unless you’ve seen it.

I’m weary of just anecdotes because it is impossible for me to be able to allocate my limit resources efficiently. I’m not saying this isn’t important or can only be validated when enough people are devastated.

Thanks, that was well put.

There's no reason that state health departments shouldn't be reporting hospitalization to the best of their ability. Hospitals already send information to them on a daily basis.

I'm sure we all recognize the tragedy. That deserves to stand in a paragraph alone; it's tragic and my heart goes out to the medical professionals and patients who have to deal with it.

But it's not an isolated tragedy like a school shooting. If the proposed response to school shootings were indefinite social isolation, I would definitely want to know the percentage of kids that got shot and I would be intensely suspicious of a narrative that it's rude or dangerous to ask the question.

This.