> so basically like the last 15 months

Yup. It started with conflating CFR and IFR (picking CFR of course because it is the bigger number). Comparing raw numbers between two regions that report their data completely different, etc.

Worse is when you show public data and get called "dangerous" because it doesn't fit the narrative that this all is the worst thing ever.

> picking CFR of course because it is the bigger number

And it changed over time. You remember hearing news media 3% at the beginning of the pandemic?

When did you hear them update it to <1%? Nope by that point they had moved to raw case counts, which by then then the higher statistic.

Selective reporting all day long.

Plenty of people (like my folks) still think that covid has a 4% “kill rate”.

“Well that is what the experts say” is what their source is.

It’s disgusting how this whole thing is nothing but raw appeals to authority the entire way down. Thinking for yourself, expressing doubt or skepticism or having hope and optimism gets met with scorn, shame and ridicule.

Well, there has been a lot of 'skepticism' that amounts to cherry picking whatever facts allow people to believe what they please. I think the fact remains that COVID was and is extraordinarily dangerous, and that's evidenced by the enormous casualty figures, even in countries that were supposed to be well prepared.

I think there's a simple difference in scale between this other events, that makes it hard to assimilate - COVID was, statistically, the most deadly single natural disaster to happen to my country (the UK) in a century. That's hard to relate to, hard to make policy about, hard to put in perspective. Bear in mind the last pandemic (Spanish Flu) was before antibiotics, before oxygen, before all of the techniques that made COVID something you can treat to some degree of success in a hospital.

> COVID was, statistically, the most deadly single natural disaster to happen to my country (the UK) in a century

Technically true because of the "natural disaster" qualifier, but the world wars killed 890k and 450k Brits.

And smoking killed 750k in the last decade. And now that's been overtaken by obesity.

COVID won't even come close to touching that.

Manmade disasters have fearful consequences too. Perhaps that makes it easier to "relate to."

I guess for me it seems different to normal public health stuff because of the speed - but perhaps your second world war figure is exactly what I am getting at. COVID is on the same scale as the UK's losses in the second world war - it's worse than the blitz, for example, but less deadly than the entire british involvement. The second world war caused seismic political and cultural changes in the UK. It's probably the most significant moment in the UK's history since the napoleonic wars.

Now, I don't think casualty figures alone provoke the kind of reassessment and realignment that made WW2 such a watershed, but honestly, I think they probably should.

Now the question is how do we correct for this? How do we get the critical thinkers in the headlines and fear merchants on the sidelines?

Why would you? If you're a critical thinker who can exploit a knowledge advantage over the world, your life will get better faster than the life of non-critical thinkers, and they, in turn, will have their lives improve faster than that of a critical thinker fighting against the weight of non-critical-thinkers.

The optimal strategy for all people unable to determine if they're critical thinkers is to either go with the weight of opinion or to attempt to exploit their edge. The middle where you try to convince people is just free labour.