6 ms·

The CDC has failed: Ex-health officials urge states to abandon agency

52 points by pabo 6y ago

sixpercent2020 6y ago
Is it time to invoke section 230 on HN? Liberal News? Covid News? Since when has this actually been Hacker News?!
sixpercent2020 6y ago
Good! How about we go arrest Fauci now?
mensetmanusman 6y ago
Which statistics plot are they interested in? https://www.statista.com/statistics/1076314/covid-19-case-fatality-rates-select-countries-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1076314/covid-19-case-fa...
makomk 6y ago
Oh no, not this again. There's been a long-running propaganda campaign to convince Americans that the CDC and their government has failed them because they can't achieve a supposedly easy level of Covid-19 testing which is in reality an order of magnitude beyond what any other major country has managed, and that that this is a uniquely American failure. The NYT opinion piece this is based on looks like it's in part a continuation of that. It's gone hand in hand with a narrative that the US is behind the rest of the world in its level of Covid-19 testing, when in fact it's ahead of almost everyone else. (Last I looked, this trick was being pulled off by comparing based on the number of tests per positive, even though this is really a measure of outbreak size rather than testing levels if you're trying to test everyone with symptoms - unless the outbreak has hit catestropic levels, the number of tests required to do that is basically independent of the number of cases. Clearly it has absolutely nothing to do with how close a country is to being able to test a particular proportion of the population on a regular basis regardless of symptoms.)
- nickthemagicman 6y ago
  Why is there such a force of propoganda surrounding Corona trying to make everyone feel like things are worse than they are? I've noticed it too.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    Because there's an election in just over two months. And if the US blew handling Covid, that reflects badly on the president. So you have insane levels of propaganda (from both sides, plus foreign meddling), trying to influence how you see Trump's performance as a leader.
    - najarvg 6y ago
      Or it could be because US has 4% of the world population but 25% of the coronavirus cases? With supposedly the best brain trust and the biggest economy of the world, we were maybe expected to do better but landed up performing worse than other developed nations that have at least used this time to establish the infrastructure to conduct limited local openings or closings as needed? Maybe we really blew handling covid because of excessive political interference and amplification of fringe conspiracy theories?
      - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
        That could be true. But it doesn't answer why there is such a force of propaganda surrounding Covid. If what you said is true, it should be plainly reported and clearly understood (fringe conspiracy theories aside). Instead, we've got this blizzard of people trying to make it very hard to see anything objectively. Why? (Which, restated, is nickthemagicman's question.)
      - makomk 6y ago
        Yeah, that's one of the other standard lines being pushed by the press to convince everyone that the US is uniquely failing. It's a very effective talking point. The trouble is, it makes no sense to compare those two numbers because most of the world's population is in places that don't have widespread access to medical care or coronavirus testing, and we know that there have been major outbreaks in pretty much all of those areas. (For instance, antibody testing on a sample of residents suggests about half the population of Mumbai's main slums had caught Covid-19 as of a couple of months or so ago. That's quite a lot of people which really weren't captured by the official case count - and there have also been outbreaks throughout India, including more recently in rural areas, in Africa, South America, Mexico...) The other problem is that even within Europe, the really major outbreaks happened in countries which also didn't have widespread coronavirus testing at the time. For the most part they were usually only testing people who ended up being hospitalized. So the total death counts are probably reasonably accurate, but case counts are basically meaningless even for those outbreaks. (Which causes some problems when comparing the current, somewhat alarming case counts in many European countries with the initial wave.)
Proven 6y ago
Makes sense. CDC is corrupt and useless.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

52 points by pabo 6y ago

sixpercent2020 6y ago

Is it time to invoke section 230 on HN? Liberal News? Covid News? Since when has this actually been Hacker News?!

sixpercent2020 6y ago

Good! How about we go arrest Fauci now?

mensetmanusman 6y ago

Which statistics plot are they interested in? https://www.statista.com/statistics/1076314/covid-19-case-fatality-rates-select-countries-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1076314/covid-19-case-fa...

makomk 6y ago

Oh no, not this again. There's been a long-running propaganda campaign to convince Americans that the CDC and their government has failed them because they can't achieve a supposedly easy level of Covid-19 testing which is in reality an order of magnitude beyond what any other major country has managed, and that that this is a uniquely American failure. The NYT opinion piece this is based on looks like it's in part a continuation of that. It's gone hand in hand with a narrative that the US is behind the rest of the world in its level of Covid-19 testing, when in fact it's ahead of almost everyone else. (Last I looked, this trick was being pulled off by comparing based on the number of tests per positive, even though this is really a measure of outbreak size rather than testing levels if you're trying to test everyone with symptoms - unless the outbreak has hit catestropic levels, the number of tests required to do that is basically independent of the number of cases. Clearly it has absolutely nothing to do with how close a country is to being able to test a particular proportion of the population on a regular basis regardless of symptoms.)

nickthemagicman 6y ago
Why is there such a force of propoganda surrounding Corona trying to make everyone feel like things are worse than they are? I've noticed it too.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  Because there's an election in just over two months. And if the US blew handling Covid, that reflects badly on the president. So you have insane levels of propaganda (from both sides, plus foreign meddling), trying to influence how you see Trump's performance as a leader.
  - najarvg 6y ago
    Or it could be because US has 4% of the world population but 25% of the coronavirus cases? With supposedly the best brain trust and the biggest economy of the world, we were maybe expected to do better but landed up performing worse than other developed nations that have at least used this time to establish the infrastructure to conduct limited local openings or closings as needed? Maybe we really blew handling covid because of excessive political interference and amplification of fringe conspiracy theories?
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      That could be true. But it doesn't answer why there is such a force of propaganda surrounding Covid. If what you said is true, it should be plainly reported and clearly understood (fringe conspiracy theories aside). Instead, we've got this blizzard of people trying to make it very hard to see anything objectively. Why? (Which, restated, is nickthemagicman's question.)
    - makomk 6y ago
      Yeah, that's one of the other standard lines being pushed by the press to convince everyone that the US is uniquely failing. It's a very effective talking point. The trouble is, it makes no sense to compare those two numbers because most of the world's population is in places that don't have widespread access to medical care or coronavirus testing, and we know that there have been major outbreaks in pretty much all of those areas. (For instance, antibody testing on a sample of residents suggests about half the population of Mumbai's main slums had caught Covid-19 as of a couple of months or so ago. That's quite a lot of people which really weren't captured by the official case count - and there have also been outbreaks throughout India, including more recently in rural areas, in Africa, South America, Mexico...) The other problem is that even within Europe, the really major outbreaks happened in countries which also didn't have widespread coronavirus testing at the time. For the most part they were usually only testing people who ended up being hospitalized. So the total death counts are probably reasonably accurate, but case counts are basically meaningless even for those outbreaks. (Which causes some problems when comparing the current, somewhat alarming case counts in many European countries with the initial wave.)

Proven 6y ago

Makes sense. CDC is corrupt and useless.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]