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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'

• 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.)
      • JoshuaDavid 6y ago
        I'm not going to defend US policy in terms of COVID handling, but comparing positive test numbers in the US to positive test numbers in the rest of the world mostly tells you about testing rates. The US has 22% of the total (verified) global COVID-19 deaths. Most deaths occur in those aged 65 or above. 9% of the global population (702M people) is over 65. 17% of the US population (56M people) is over 65. So the US has 8% of the population over 65 but 22% of the COVID deaths - it's still almost a factor of 3, so definitely not just reporting artifacts, but it's not a factor of 6+ either in terms of how the US is doing vs how you would expect.
  • natrik 6y ago
    I've noticed it especially on small Reddit communities for cities where constant narrative shifting has occurred: from flattening the curve and potential high death rates to we don't know the side effects of the virus and potential future complications.
    • gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
      > we don't know the side effects of the virus and potential future complications It’s fun to see the rhetorical positions nowadays: pick an argument that doesn’t require evidence and can’t be disproved. You’re always right! It’s also a wet dream for people with anxiety and hypochondria - say the side effects are a complete wildcard and people assume the worst case scenario.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • tynpeddler 6y ago
    We shut down the entire world and it killed over 100,000 in the US alone in 3 months. There's no suspicious conspiracy surrounding Covid19, it really is a very infectious and capable of killing a lot more than it already has.
    • nickthemagicman 6y ago
      It's the third leading cause of death behind heart disease and cancer. And no one has ever shut down a fast food restaurant to prevent the propagation of heart disease. It's bad but it's being severely over exaggerated.
      • ende 6y ago
        Are you really this stupid?
      • ChrisGranger 6y ago
        Call me when cheeseburgers become contagious.
      • andrei_says_ 6y ago
        Nice job repeating snappy talking points but this comparison is malicious, unfounded and indicates a bad faith argument.
        • nickthemagicman 6y ago
          Just doesn't make sense to me that we dont ban cigarettes, we don't ban fast food restaurants... Yet we shut down the entire economy and all of human life as we know it for something with less of the death rate than both of those illnesses. And there's mountains of scientific evidence supporting those directly lead to their respective ailments.
          • drwiggly 6y ago
            How many of those factors spread on accident vs personal choice? ~300,000,00 in the US ~2% death rate .. 6,000,000? Is that enough bodies?
• joshuamorton 6y ago
  Yes, the US government has failed. > 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. Yes, the US is ahead of many nations in raw testing numbers, and in terms of tests per capita (although some do beast us in terms of per capita testing). > Last I looked, this trick was being pulled off by comparing based on the number of tests per positive Indeed, I mentioned this the last time you posted a similar statement. Here's the graph of test positivity rate for a number of nations: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-19-daily-tests-vs-daily-new-confirmed-cases-per-million?country=USA~BRA~CHL~IND~IDN~GBR~KOR~SWE~DEU~ITA~RUS~TWN~PHL~NZL~CHE https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-19-daily-tests-vs-d... So why is test positivity rate important? Because test positivity measures how well you're controlling the outbreak. New Zealand doesn't need to test the entire nation regardless of symptoms. The fewer infected people there are in the population, the less value you get from testing random asymptomatic people. But, if all your tests are positive, it means that you aren't using any on asymptomatic people. You need to test asymptomatic people to prevent asymptomatic/community spread and as part of contact tracing. If you can't do those things, you'll end up with unquarantined infected people spreading the virus. So as test positivity goes down, even as testing rate goes down, you can know that you have a smaller number of cases overall. (and that your reinfection rate is <1). > 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. So while you're correct here, this isn't actually the goal if you can trace reasonably. Which, like, the US can't because too many people are infected. So insofar as controlling things are, the US's case numbers are, to use your words, "catastrophic", while many other nations' are not.
• jmull 6y ago
  The goal isn’t to arguably not be failing worse than some other countries are failing. The NYT piece isn’t about comparing the US to other countries anyway—that’s your narrative, in this context. The question is whether is makes sense right now in the US to curtail testing of asymptomatic people who have had a high-risk exposure event, as the CDC is recommending now. That’s hard to understand from a health policy perspective. Meanwhile the ultimate boss of the CDC has explicitly stated he’d like to see less testing so we’d have fewer cases, so it’s not that wild a conspiracy theory to wonder if this isn’t a partisan political recommendation not a scientific one.
  • makomk 6y ago
    The article uses the testing of asymptomatic people who've potentially been exposed as a jumping-off point to push the authors' proposal for testing asymptomatic people regardless of known exposure. These are of course completely unrelated in terms of actual benefits, practicality, etc but it treats one as though it were an extension of the other. It can even make sense to test selected high-risk or high-danger people without known exposure whilst not testing people known to be exposed in general; I know the UK is doing this to a certain extent for example. As for testing of potentially exposed people without symptoms, it has its issues as the CDC pointed out. The test just can't reliably detect people who're infected but still in the incubation period of the disease, so testing them will tell a bunch of them that they're negative and some of them will think they're in the clear and go about their normal business. I think New Zealand had a incident recently where a health worker in a city they were hoping to stop the disease spreading to tested negative, went back to work, and then tested positive again later after developing symptoms and working for a while whilst infectious, though that one was probably hard to avoid. It's also not terribly commonplace, especially as a companion to mass testing everyone with symptoms rather than an alternative - I know the UK in particular, which is the other country with a big mass testing program and probably the only one with relatively working contact tracing too, doesn't do this as a matter of policy. It also consumes a bunch of tests that would be more usefully used dealing with the test backlog - finding potentially exposed people should work a lot better if you find out they're potentially exposed sooner, and the main tactic is getting them to self isolate.
• thu2111 6y ago
  You aren't wrong. This article describes another trick: https://www.conservativereview.com/news/horowitz-mass-testing-results-endless-panic-false-positives/ https://www.conservativereview.com/news/horowitz-mass-testin... The Harvard Global Health Institute was claiming the USA needed to do 500k tests per day to succeed at fighting COVID. The moment this was achieved they suddenly changed their recommendation to 1.6 million tests per day. Just weeks later they were recommending 3.5 to 5 million per day. CNN interviewed an administration official who stated that the numbers keep changing, and the presenter actually 'corrected' the guy by claiming Harvard's recommendations had been the same for months. Their reasoning is the more cases there are, the more tests need to be done. With any non-zero FP rate increasing the number of tests increases the number of cases, so this is purely circular and yields a no-win situation in which no matter how much testing the USA does it can never be sufficient. You do have to wonder if setting up a no-win situation for the USG is intentional, especially as their recommendations appear to be arbitrary.