It was always a loss-making enterprise, even with centralized distribution.
24 hour news cycles and internet competition isn't a good recipe for in-depth, long-pursuit journalism.
conveniently leaving out that those doing the funding aren't the viewers but advertisers (for most media companies).
If the funding came from viewers - who pay for quality, informative and unbiased journalism, there would be more of it. But people don't want to pay.
I feel like this was never a majority of the viewer or readership.
Instead, in an era of scarcity, BDFLs were able to choose this for them.
They were overloaded in Wuhan, Milan, Madrid and Brussels, and came within a hair of capacity in Paris and New York. What "false sense" are you talking about, exactly? There was real risk. Are you saying that the media reported overloads that didn't exist?
Your argument seems a bit vague to me. You could just as easily argue, with perfectly symmetric evidence, that it's good that "the media" "gave a false sense" of hospital capacity, because it prevented an actual overload of the system. Why is your version better, except that in yours you get to have a more personally pleasing enemy?
Pretty much all criticism of "the media" is like this.
Um... Cuomo said he needed 40k new ventilators to make sure hospitals had all they needed after he instituted a shelter in place order. He needed nowhere near that amount. That is hysteria. I don't understand why this is controversial.
The fact that we were being told to expect Italy/New York levels of hospital overruns ALL OVER the country (hint: field hospitals that hardly got used weren't just deployed in NYC)? And that we're still being told that hospitals ALL OVER the country are in danger of being brought to their knees by re-opening state economies right now? Meanwhile, the nurses that aren't furloughed are making nightly dance videos during their shifts.
Can you cite the specific coverage you're thinking of?
Basically: this seems like a bit much to me. The media warned us of something. We listened. The warning worked. And now you want to attack "the media" because the thing they warned us might happen didn't... because they warned us.
If you have pre-existing conditions, catching COVID is a lot more dangerous than if you don't.
Who typically goes to the hospital for medical treatment?
People with pre-existing conditions.
"I don't want to go to the ER, because I might catch COVID from another patient, or doctor" is a very justifiable fear.
This is just the consequence of the virus spreading to the community - not the consequence of mitigating the spread of the virus through the community.
The mortality risk of undetected/unaddressed heart problems, etc, far supercedes the risk from COVID-19. You could find some limited examples where that's not true but it is overwhelmingly the case.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the level of panic associated with COVID-19 is absolutely divorced from the ground truths.
But it doesn't just affect non-COVID-19 mortality. It may be that our response is even making COVID-19 mortality worse in some cases:
From https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2009787?query=rec...):
"Social distancing, isolation, and reluctance to present to the hospital may contribute to poor outcomes. Two patients in our series delayed calling an ambulance because they were concerned about going to a hospital during the pandemic." (My note: So the irony here is incredible, these weren't just non-COVID-19 patients afraid to come in but _people who actually had life-threatening COVID-19_.)
And from https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...:
"Third, the COVID-19 epidemic has caused a parallel epidemic of fear, anxiety, and depression. People with mental health conditions could be more substantially influenced by the emotional responses brought on by the COVID-19 epidemic, resulting in relapses or worsening of an already existing mental health condition because of high susceptibility to stress compared with the general population."
and
"Finally, many people with mental health disorders attend regular outpatient visits for evaluations and prescriptions. However, nationwide regulations on travel and quarantine have resulted in these regular visits becoming more difficult and impractical to attend."
No, it's becoming increasingly clear that people are incapable of telling the difference between their personal health[1], and the health of society as a whole.
The risk of COVID to me is low. The risk to society of me going about my daily business as if nothing has happened is high. There are social adjustments that do little to reduce my risk, but decrease overall risk, and unsurprisingly, people who don't understand, or don't care about the difference between the two, push back on them.
And now we get to look forward to a torrent of people who will be complaining that the horse didn't bolt because we closed the barndoor.
[1] You are pointing out a few anecdotes of people not going to the ER when they should. I don't deny that a few people are making that mistake. But if we're going by anecdotes, I can point out a million and one anecdotes of people not taking basic health precautions - that I don't even need to go to a newspaper for - since I can see them out of my window.
This is not a fair characterization. Rather, it could be said that the externalities of suspension of elective surgeries, widespread business closures, widespread social isolation and unprecedented fear (which is certainly disproportionate to the risk, _even in those with comorbidities_), are all factors that those who are parroting the "Stay home!" party line are neglecting.
I don't think it's fair to say that those who argue against the path we've taken are doing so because of their purely personal risk factors. When highly interconnected systems - like the global supply chain - unravel, it's very hard to predict the full ramifications there. It might be good to start with the impact of these lockdowns on the global food supply and the estimates of 100+ million extra cases of starvation. (I generally try to focus on other factors because quite frankly, to flip your rhetorical technique around, I think that many in favor of these lockdowns don't really care too much about how lockdowns impact conditions in third-world countries and thus I largely try to talk about the direct first-world impact).
I don't think those in favor of lockdown are trying to do harm, their intentions are good. But the poor understanding of key concepts such as _what an economy actually is_ is leading to a number of irrational statements being made: for example, the argument that re-opening business is "trading human lives for money". The actual reality is much more nuanced.
While on the contrary, perhaps it's just been in my online interactions, but arguing against lockdown/indefinite containment is consistently characterized as either motivated by self-interest or due to the perceived personal risk being low. In essence, the "you clearly don't care about old peoples' lives" argument.
--
I've been doing a pseudo-experiment where I've been asking acquaintances of mine what they think the overall infection fatality rate of COVID-19 is, and also what they think their personal risk is. Everyone I've talked to has overestimated the mortality risk both to others and to themselves by an order of magnitude. For example, many have told me that they think the infection fatality rate is 2.2% overall, or 4-5%, etc.
In one case a largely healthy young 20-something estimated their personal risk of death at 2%. That's multiple orders of magnitude off.
This pseudo-experiment of mine proves nothing, but it's an interesting insight into what people think. (Many of my social groups are very transparently "liberal"-leaning and disproportionate panic in the US is split on party lines so that's not very surprising).
Pundits advocating for reopening are deliberately conflating those things, as if the ROI on having a movie theater, or a hairdresser open is the same as allowing a tumor removal brain surgery to proceed.
It's not. Nobody's advocating that everything should be closed forever, but there's an enormous space between "Let's figure out how to get people the medical care they need, because elective medical procedures cannot be postponed forever", and "Everything's fine, everyone go back to work".
The fact that you're bringing up the global food supply is testament to this. Most of the food supply disruptions were caused by direct impact of the virus, with food workers getting sick - not overly aggressive closures. Food is an essential service, no government on the planet told food producers, or food logistics workers to stay home. [1] Yet, the re-open folks are pushing hard on the fiction that we're all going to starve to death, because clothing retailers aren't operating. Meanwhile, the reason you can't get ground meat is because 80% of the people working at the local meatpacking plant are sick, because the plant manager refuses to provide PPE, sanitary working conditions, or even to send sick employees home.
[1] There were temporary border closures for migrant agricultural workers in the US, but they were very quickly lifted, once the government realized that Americans don't pick strawberries. Canada never closed itself to TFWs, neither did most of Europe.
How does brain surgery get paid for? Let’s even assume a single payer system for a minute. Where do the tax revenues come from?
Instead, people had to make do with partial information and many people -- believing incorrectly that their local hospitals were overwhelmed and needed them to stay home -- chose to do so.
And have you ever watched local television news? Millions of Americans do every night. It's the worst of the worst, and their over-the-top tactics are a well worn joke. "Is your refrigerator going to kill you and your children? Tune in at eleven to find out, only on FUTV News".
As a scientist I say sometimes that one of the unnoticed victims of SARS-CoV-2 is media reporting. Some newspapers here (Italy) really love gruesome details, to be honest, but they conveniently forget talking about the frequency of said details.
I mean, if you have a respiratory disease that can blow your head off (this is just an absurd example), you prepare differently depending if it happens in 50% of the cases or in 0.5%. This is completely lost in news reporting.
In addition, the news (but sadly, some experts too!) treat SARS-CoV-2 as a magic virus that does everything different from any other known biological entity. While I was initially surprised to hear those cases of meningitis, I then found in the literature that other coronaviruses can infect the central nervous system (e.g. [1]).
It doesn't mean this complication less severe, when it occurs. But it's not a feature of this virus alone.
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncel.2018.0038...
Care to share a link or two? I’m skeptical that any respected news outlets reported that we can’t become immune.
Agreed on local TV news though; it’s a cesspool.
I mean, I don't respect CNN, but I'm sure some people do.
"WHO says no evidence shows that having coronavirus prevents a second infection"
The second paragraph of the article literally quotes a published brief from WHO:
"There is no evidence yet that people who have had Covid-19 will not get a second infection," WHO said in a scientific brief published Friday.
The headline is literally taken from the WHO's actual words. There's a case to be made that these sort of articles need to be more deeply contextualized with respect to how science works and what the implications of findings are (and what they aren't), but that gets into deeper questions about scientific literacy -- not just for journalists, but for their audience -- but it's hard to point at this and say that this reporting is making it look like the WHO was saying something that they weren't.
I would put more blame on the WHO for this than CNN in any case. It’s fair to say the way the WHO reported this was misunderstood, but the WHO themselves tweeted the same type of wording out directly on Twitter.
The mean age of death from c19 is 80, and even in this group they die at a rate of 1%/wk anyway, for which c19 is about as deadly.
This isnt WWII
The background rate of death in this "sickest and weakest" group is already high. C19 is no higher.
Please do some research, there's an article on the BBC with a graph demonstrating this point.
When we talk about flu stats: most people have some immunity to the flu thanks to flu shots (even if they haven't gotten one for this past year) and general herd immunity, which we DO NOT HAVE for this virus, and won't gain without either a vaccine or a few million dead from this thing running rampant.
The stats you're quoting are WITH the level of serious intervention we've had so far, which is why as certain states are reopening, we're starting to see the numbers ticking back up again and looking just as bad if not worse.
I think an uncomfortable stat this coming year will be just how few people will have been reported to died in 2020 of regular flu. It's not saying Covid19 isn't bad in any way to realize that number, will be almost nothing, and that will be suspicious to people going forward for NextTime.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-didnt-wait-fo...
Stop assuming things.
It's hard to make inferences about the world without assumptions.
Compare that to the Coronavirus deaths. The numbers are really close.
Italy isn’t particularly an outlier in terms of Coronavirus severity when you look at their historical flu numbers compared to the rest of Europe. Their Coronavirus deaths follow the same trend as with their flu fatalities. Really nothing surprising in Italy, but the media lost their minds over it.
https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(19)30328-5/ful...
You're presenting what happened in Lombardy as some sort of mass hysteria. Was the healthcare system overwhelmed, or was that a mass hallucination?
There have been 30,000 confirmed CoVID-19 deaths in Italy, which is about double a normal flu season. What do you think that number would have been without any social distancing measures? As I see it, the numbers are not that difficult to estimate. About 70% of people would need to catch CoVID-19 before herd immunity brought R below 1. With an IFR of 0.5%, and a population of 60 million people, that would mean about 200,000 deaths. Is that enough to "lose one's mind over"?
> When has the flu done that?
The flu overwhelms hospitals quite often. For example, the 2017-2018 flu season saw many hospitals around the world setting up tent wards: https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...
* Not enough doctors, nurses, beds and medical supplies to treat all (or even most of) the patients.
* Extremely stark triage decisions. Deciding not to treat patients who would normally be treatable, instead leaving them to die.
* Doctors and nurses working to the limit of exhaustion.
* Normal care essentially stopping. All medical resources being focused on one disease.
* Morgues unable to handle the number of dead.
Finally, double the regular number of flu deaths occurred in just a few weeks, and that was with extreme social distancing measures. Without those measures, the death toll would have been far higher.
You're describing this as some sort of mass hallucination. I don't see how that's a defensible position.
If there was any doubt that you're being disingenuous and purposely deceitful, the fact that you've decided to resort to petty arguments on semantics to desperately avoid facing the facts is enough to clear up that doubt.
Do you think that information is relevant to a comparison?
By mid-February the media as a whole was already raising alarm bells, and the stock market began crashing on February 24 as a result of media coverage of the virus.
To jog our memory, we could look at what people were saying in contemporary February articles... https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/28/trump-chief-of-staff-mulvane...
> “The press was covering their hoax of the day because they thought it would bring down the president,” Mulvaney concluded. “The reason you’re seeing so much attention to [the coronavirus] today is that they think this is going to be what brings down the president. That’s what this is all about.”
In my eyes that define is hysteria.
I've had massive downvotes for saying exactly what you suggested.
My favorite reply comment was, "He was joking." No, actually I wasn't.
But I expected that in advance.
I also remember the take downs of the various antibody studies all pointing to infection being much more widespread than originally thought. As if it was bad news the IFR was going down.
I lack the intelligence to connect the dots but I sincerely feel there's a large bias, if not outright agenda, here to advise prolonging and deepening the economic destruction.
It's at this point that the news media needs to look inwards and wonder if they made such a big hysteria over covid that they failed to point out that people should still go to the ER. I bet many of those who died at home had symptoms of heart attacks/strokes, etc, but didn't want to go out of a mistaken sense of magnanimity (I don't want to take the bed of a COVID patient) as well as a false sense that the hospitals were in any danger of being overloaded (they were not, given the steps we took).