27 ms·

South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

237 points by belltaco 6y ago

djsumdog 6y ago
This feels like it's just to shame everyone based on very few eccentrics. I'm sure most people in SD agree COVID is real, but it's also not a very densely populated state with small cities, and the governors response seems appropriate. It's keep the economy from totally collapsing. I drove to Sioux Falls a few weeks ago, just to be some place normal. It was nice just being able to go into a brew pub or an indoor restaurant, and talk to people. Too bad it was only for a few days.
- zero_deg_kevin 6y ago
  "This feels like it's just to shame everyone based on very few eccentrics." I must have missed that paragraph. Where in the article was that?
- silverpepsi 6y ago
  Are there still people who believe it is just "a few eccentrics"? As someone who has a lot of them in my direct family, extended family, and even Facebook friends, my perception is that partisanship has reached a point where there is literal mass delusion out there far left and far right. And in the case of covid19, it feels like at least 10% don't fully believe in it (the level of doubt varying by individual and situational circumstances, like needing immediate medical assistance vs being in good health).
  - Valgrim 6y ago
    >there is literal mass delusion out there far left and far right. What delusion is the "far left" believing in, in your opinion?
    - soco 6y ago
      People like to look equidistant, so they will blame all extremes the same out of reflex.
    - dx87 6y ago
      That everyone who voted for Trump is a white supremacist. I've seen that attitude quite a bit on this site in the days after the election, and I've seen journalists call minorities white supremacists because they didn't vote for Biden. Some people just refuse to believe that he's anything but a wannabe Hitler, and use that as an excuse to say that they have no reason to try and come together as a country.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - uoaei 6y ago
        Intention matters less than material consequences. Consider the fact that this last year was the worst for hate crimes for at least a decade. If a whole group of people is propping up a leader who literally and almost exclusively enacts white supremacist policies, and uses white supremacist rhetoric/dogwhistles, what else could you call them?
        vokep 6y ago
        >a leader who literally and almost exclusively enacts white supremacist policies, and uses white supremacist rhetoric/dogwhistles This is where the rift is. This is not true. Yes, some could take that sort of interpretation of what he's saying, and that sort of interpretation being taken by lots of white supremacists regardless of intention, does mean something. But it doesn't mean much, at least, I don't see why we'd expect that to be any significant effect. Just to bring an example, at least, ime the most common "but he said.." claim. The "fine people on both sides" quote. Many misunderstand what he was actually saying there and actually what happened - the event started with a wide range of people on the right, a general conservative gathering seeming thing. It was organized by white supremacists, which lots attending did not realize until some time passed and they started getting uncomfortable and leaving, by the time people were chanting slurs and all, it went full on neo-nazi rally. Trump clearly did denounce that, and what happened that night, and was speaking to the normal people who had attended in the beginning and left later.
  - sam0x17 6y ago
    There is no "mass-delusion" on the far left. We are literally at a point where the current daily cases mean that a month from now we will be having around 3-4k deaths per day based on how many people are already infected NOW. That's a 9/11 terrorist attack per day in deaths. Anyone who doesn't acknowledge that is delusional.
    - sam0x17 6y ago
      Don't believe me, do the math yourself. Extrapolating from data on https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality we get: U.S. mortality rate is 2.29%. Average daily cases for the past week have been hovering around 140k (https://covidtracking.com/data/charts/us-daily-positive https://covidtracking.com/data/charts/us-daily-positive). 140,000 * 0.0229 = 3,206 deaths per day. 9/11 was just 2,977 deaths (https://www.google.com/search?q=9%2F11+deaths https://www.google.com/search?q=9%2F11+deaths) So once the cases from the last few days progress further, we will have 3206/2977 = 1.07692307692 9/11s a day in deaths. note: corrected above, should have said 3k not 9-10k. Misremembered my calculations from earlier this week. Analogy still accurate
    - Mindless2112 6y ago
      The delusion of the left is that central planning and control will prevent the spread of the virus. That's not exactly wrong -- it just has to be the level of government control that China has. A lot of Americans, myself included, won't tolerate that. (And for the record, I wear a mask.)
      - sam0x17 6y ago
        It's more of a battle of public opinion -- if people on the right were consistent about mask wearing, and didn't believe that they are immune or the virus is fake or whatever, our ability to contain this would be much greater. Sure, we can't force mask wearing at a federal level, but it sure would help if everyone on Fox and Newsmax were working to encourage the use of masks. That would have more weight than any federal or local mandate unfortunately, so it's unproductive to raise the point you're raising, though I agree. This also comes down to enforcement. Even if a federal mandate were somehow passed, if the people's hearts aren't in it in red areas, cops won't enforce it in those areas and it will be a joke. It really is 100% about public opinion. To your point though, I'm pretty extreme left, and I don't think we are going to have an easy time containing it by any means. It is going to continue to rise months and possibly years into a Biden administration, but I think we'll still have a lot less deaths. No one on the left thinks this is magically going away, even with a vaccine. Distribution and production of a vaccine is incredibly difficult logistically, and these things need to be refrigerated. So at best we're looking at like a year from now we all get a vaccine imo.
- jasonlaramburu 6y ago
  What a bad take. Disregard for covid precautions is the reason we have an outsized outbreak in the US. The outbreak in SD, despite the state’s low population density, will spread to other states.
  - analyte123 6y ago
    The outbreak in the US is not particularly "outsized" compared to other developed countries: https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=usa&areas=fra&areas=esp&areas=gbr&areas=che&areasRegional=usny&areasRegional=usca&areasRegional=usfl&areasRegional=ustx&byDate=0&cumulative=0&logScale=1&perMillion=1&values=deaths https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=usa&areas=fra&are...
    - jasonlaramburu 6y ago
      Look at Australia and New Zealand. Both free and open societies with high per capita GDP. They both have achieved zero community transmission through stringent travel restrictions and a nationwide strategy. It’s disgraceful that we can’t do the same or better in the US.
      - Taniwha 6y ago
        In both NZ and Australia it took real leadership by government, and a population overwhelmingly willing to listen to them and to follow the science. (In Australia's case it has been leadership by state government over the complete opposite by their federal government)
        jasonlaramburu 6y ago
        In the US we have real anti-leadership. Our leaders repeatedly cast doubt on science and common sense in order to reduce their own culpability. They spread the myth that there is ‘nothing we can do’ about COVID until we have a vaccine when other countries have proven this to be false.
    - hawkesnest 6y ago
- pengaru 6y ago
  > I drove to Sioux Falls a few weeks ago, just to be some place normal. It was nice just being able to go into a brew pub or an indoor restaurant, and talk to people. Too bad it was only for a few days. Frivolous travel for the express purpose of not social distancing during the throes of a pandemic... smh, what a prick.
  - jeffbezos982134 6y ago
    I agree with him. I wear a KN-95 mask everywhere I go. I don’t mind it at all. I’d really prefer to live somewhere that lets you go to a bar or eat inside a restaurant. I’d love to go to the barber shop and have my beard shaped up. Maybe I’ll go to Sioux Falls :)
    - uoaei 6y ago
      Coronavirus enters the body through the eyes as well as mouth and nose. If it gets on your hands, you can put it on your face. Only 1000 virons are needed to establish an infection. If you're wearing KN95 mask with a beard on, your mask isn't working properly anyway and you could be unwittingly spreading the virus, further delaying a reopening.
  - oceanplexian 6y ago
    Traveling makes absolutely no difference when both the place you're traveling from and the place you're traveling to have widespread virus transmission.
- pwinnski 6y ago
  A few eccentrics? Like someone who will, say, deliberately drive to an area without adequate legal orders in place in the middle of a sharp uptick in cases during a pandemic, just to "feel normal?"
Diederich 6y ago
https://mackuba.eu/corona/#south_dakota_united_states.daily?trend=7 https://mackuba.eu/corona/#south_dakota_united_states.daily?...
- jeffbee 6y ago
  To set the perspective for those not familiar, the population of the state is close to 900k, roughly the same as the city of San Francisco. The normal pace of all-cause deaths is about 24 per day, so with COVID-19 killing off 15 people per day it is probably the leading cause of death in that state today.
  - Diederich 6y ago
    If I remember correctly, deaths today are linked with the hospitalizations 12 days prior. From what I've seen, South Dakota is nearly out of ICU beds, as are many other states. These Covid19 death rates are going to get really, really bad this time around.
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      Definitely. The die, as they say, is already cast. Remember, too, that the trailing 7-day average of an exponential process is incredibly misleading. If it's 15 deaths per day by that measure, that means it's really 50 today and 100+ soon.
      - Diederich 6y ago
        Yeah, that graph added 7-day averaging because the reporting numbers bounce around on weekend boundaries, which was leading to a lot of confusion. Whether there's 1-day or n-day averaging, exponential growth is the scary beast.
    - jdhn 6y ago
      >From what I've seen, South Dakota is nearly out of ICU beds Do you have a source for this?
sigstoat 6y ago
great, she got her 15 minutes of fame for telling you unsubstantiated rumors. valuable use of time.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  Is her first-hand reporting that patients don't believe in COVID an unsubstantiated rumour?
  - rriepe 6y ago
    It's either unsubstantiated or a HIPAA violation
    - sonotathrowaway 6y ago
      Telling you uncomfortable truths isn’t a hipaa violation, as the law was not written to protect your feelings.
      - ralusek 6y ago
        I mean...many uncomfortable truths ARE HIPAA violations. What makes it NOT a HIPAA violation is that it's just general/anonymized anecdata. I can't go up to someone and be like "Alice Rosenstein has cervical cancer, sorry if that's an uncomfortable truth, but the law wasn't written to protect your feelings." That would, in fact, be a HIPAA violation.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        wesleywt 6y ago
        There is a difference between saying, Mrs. Jones has a bad yeast infection and there are many yeast infections this time of year. The one is giving patient information the other is discussing the disease.
jimkleiber 6y ago
My friend works in the covid ICU here in Michigan and told me yesterday that she's seeing a dramatic increase in patients who are getting angry at her and still believing that covid is not real. When she asks where they may have caught it, they sometimes say at a wedding with 100 people where no one was wearing masks. I can't imagine how emotionally taxing it was to be a healthcare worker attending to people with covid in the beginning, but at least then they received a lot of gratitude from their patients. I cannot fathom how these healthcare workers must feel after 8 months of this and then getting yelled at by patients who don't think this is real. I almost don't even want to imagine how much pain they might be feeling.
- nappy-doo 6y ago
  I work on the mobile contact tracing effort (FAANG), and I am exhausted thinking about it as well, and I don't even risk my life everyday. Part of me wants to say, "fuck these idiots that don't wear masks, just die," but know that they will just get others sick on the way, and use up scarce resources.
  - Diederich 6y ago
    This is a harsh thing to say, but I understand where you're coming from. We....all of us, all human beings...need to be very patient and merciful with each other. My wife and I know good, honest and smart people who are fully convinced that Covid19 isn't that dangerous, that it's a hoax, etc. I'm not saying "smart" lightly. All humans...even the best of us...are at our core deeply irrational most of the time. Different groups of us are irrational about different things. Saying all of this, I do not mean to minimize the focused, concerted actions of a relative few who have taken advantage of not just human weakness but also the new communication technologies available to them. We should reserve our ire for those who pull the strings of manipulation to the detriment of many.
    - dkural 6y ago
      Why do you think they're good and smart, why do they think Covid19 is a hoax? Surely a good person would try to do the safe thing even if they had doubts.
whalesalad 6y ago
My wife and I just moved from Orange County, CA to Detroit, MI this last August. We decided to drive the northern route. Heading through Vegas, Utah, Yellowstone and Montana. Then onward through the plains of North Dakota and Minnesota. Turning north we entered Wisconsin and finally the UP (Upper Peninsula) of Michigan. After a few days exploring we turned south to Detroit. In Vegas the concern for masks started to wane. By Utah, no fucks were given and pretty much not a single fuck was given until we crossed the Mackinac Bridge into the lower peninsula of Michigan. When I say no fucks were given - I mean that pretty much no one around me cared about wearing a mask, social distancing, etc. Hotels would participate out of corporate necessity. We drove hundreds and hundreds of miles sometimes and were the only people in stores with masks on. Sometimes I felt like an outsider alien, being stared at by the people around me. I was surprised yet not surprised at the same time. So the surge and issues the comminuties up there are facing don't surprise me in the least.
- posix_compliant 6y ago
  Weird, I moved from SF to Philadelphia last week and most stores on route 80 required masks.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - andy318 6y ago
    How is the move working out for you, btw?
    - whalesalad 6y ago
      they're posix compliant so I would imagine they can colo anywhere lol
    - jeffbezos982134 6y ago
      I have lived in Philadelphia for almost 8 years now and it’s making less and less sense to live here. City taxes are high, housing prices are steadily increasing, making changes to property is an expensive, bureaucratic nightmare, parking is a nightmare, etc. There aren’t (m)any good places to work that pay well enough to justify the taxes and cost of living. The winter is cold and dreary, the summer is humid. If not for covid it would make a lot more sense to live in Boston or NYC. I’m interested in moving to South Carolina or Florida.
mtgx 6y ago
Propaganda is one hell of a drug.
skyzyx 6y ago
Yes, the pandemic fatigue is real. Yes, it would be wonderful to hang out with my friends in person, or to drive 100 miles crossing the border to go visit my children. But the reason this is lasting so long, and things are shutting back down is because people are ignoring the truth. You can talk about the economy all day long, but the fact of the matter is that if we all would’ve taken this seriously and shut everything down, we would be through the worst of it already. Comparatively, New Zealand and Canada have done a dramatically better job than America. People there appear to be willing to set aside their selfishness in favor of the common good. And the people who don’t believe that it’s real? All I can say is that it’s extremely clear that we are living in a second Cold War. But instead of fighting with nukes, we’re fighting with misinformation, and Russia is winning.
- claudeganon 6y ago
  Americans refusal to embrace reality has little to do with Russia or any other foreign power. Instead, it’s derived from the long standing and pervasive belief in its exceptionalist, irrational ideology. The same belief system that allows one to compartmentalize the experience of a broken, unequal, and vicious society with an unblinking belief in its greatness will produce this and many other dissonances.
  - joshmarlow 6y ago
    It kind of sounds like you're just describing the vulnerability that other state actors can exploit... Which doesn't argue against point in the parent post.
    - claudeganon 6y ago
      Right, but the supposition is that such exploits are the source of mass delusions. There are plenty of people who think COVID is a hoax who didn’t arrive at that kind of thinking because of foreign intelligence operations. It’s regurgitated daily by right wing American politicians and media.
      - 6y ago
remote_phone 6y ago
Basically the US’s complete disregard for public education is now coming to a head. I remember one study that said the US students were one of the lowest in terms of education but the absolute highest in terms of self confidence. We are reaping what we have sowed for decades now. We have such a vast uneducated population that this coronavirus is almost more like a horrifying culling of the uneducated than anything else. The utter confidence in these patients to not believe the doctors is staggering but not surprising. I hate to be so blunt, but 50% of the population has IQ below 100. Nothing to me has demonstrated this more than the reaction to the pandemic. When you are so uneducated that you think a mask won’t help prevent a disease that is spread via respiratory droplets, that is a big problem and unfortunately those people are all sitting ducks. Of course many won’t believe the doctors when they don’t have the capacity to understand even the basic concept? If you were to ask a child what might be a good way to help prevent a disease that originated from their mouth, I’m pretty sure one of their top two answers would be a mask. It’s such a basic concept that a child would have the solution, and you need to do mental gymnastics to convince yourself otherwise.
- padseeker 6y ago
  there are plenty of people with high IQs that are plainly in denial. There is a difference between stupidity and delusion.
- istorical 6y ago
  Can we call it education though or is it an anti-intellectual spirit or a disdain for elitism and the idea of experts? Or perhaps mistrust of authority and experts? It would seem like perhaps an uneducated but highly communal/cooperative/respectful-of-authority society would have better outcomes than one with well educated individuals who have a culture of disregard for institutional science or the idea of technocrats and bureaucrats that might know more than Joe Sixpack. You could argue that education is what creates the values we're hoping for here, but that is kind of what I'm questioning. Perhaps the culture itself is the problem not the test scores.
  - GordonS 6y ago
jdhn 6y ago
I feel like I've seen versions of this story pop up throughout the year, and it seems that others have too [0]. I guess I remain skeptical as to whether this actually happened until more proof can be provided. [0] https://twitter.com/annbauerwriter/status/1328538348173004800 https://twitter.com/annbauerwriter/status/132853834817300480...
- nojito 6y ago
  Really? https://www.mibluesperspectives.com/2020/10/30/teen-diagnosed-with-covid-19-its-not-a-joke-to-us-anymore/ https://www.mibluesperspectives.com/2020/10/30/teen-diagnose... These types of interactions happen all the time. A simple youtube search will get you tons of patient accounts. This was a strategy used by certain hospitals to increase public awareness.
  - jdhn 6y ago
    Nowhere in that article does it say that he went to urgent care insisting that covid isn't real. The link that the OP posted says that dying patients are insisting that covid isn't real. Your own link says that the kid thought that it just hit older adults, not that he thought it was fake or a new world order conspiracy or any garbage like that.
- thsowers 6y ago
  Here is a similar story from a news source: https://www.npr.org/2020/11/12/934266487/icu-nurse-on-dealing-with-latest-coronavirus-outbreak-in-michigan https://www.npr.org/2020/11/12/934266487/icu-nurse-on-dealin...
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  Interesting. I followed the links, and found one that seemed legit: https://twitter.com/TheBlondeRN/status/1328378945172074499 https://twitter.com/TheBlondeRN/status/1328378945172074499
- therealdrag0 6y ago
  Did you see the link to the nurse being interviewed? https://mobile.twitter.com/theblondern/status/1328378945172074499 https://mobile.twitter.com/theblondern/status/13283789451720...
aazaa 6y ago
Politics seems to be a factor here, but I wonder how much of this has to do with popular culture. Over the last 20 years we've been bombarded with metric tons of Apocalypse porn, a lot of it focused on killer viruses. Most of those movies are unrealistic to put it mildly. Zombies. Deserted cities. Rotting corpses on sidewalks. Visible, palpable nauseating death. This pandemic is nothing like those movies. I know of not a single pop culture depiction that looks anything like what we have now, except maybe the movie Contagion. And that's really a stretch. So a lot of people have a problem when they see dire predictions and statistics that bear no relationship to what their own five senses are telling them. There's also the problem of previous pandemics that sounded the alarm, but amounted to little in the US. SARS-CoV-1 and the Swine Flu. All of this leaves the US with a population primed to expect a very unrealistic kind of pandemic, and already skeptical from previous false alarms. Throw in a president who not only sympathizes with the "hoax" perspective, but actively encourages it, and it should maybe not be surprising that we are where we are.
- Forge36 6y ago
  Contagion feels like a stretch because everyone has PPE. News teams aren't sending camera crews into the overflow hospitals being setup. Hard to show full hospitals ("rooms are full" doesn't look good on TV), nor could TV crews go into Patient rooms and show what it looks like (social media is doing this, but typically for patient's who are surviving as personal accounts).
  - robertoandred 6y ago
    World News Tonight showed a hospital and a patient in his room last night.
- me_me_me 6y ago
  While maybe there is some truth to what you say, it doesn't justifies being an idiot that cant distinguishing reality from tv. Furthermore denying evidence because it doesnt align with how it happens in the movies
- TheGrim-999 6y ago
analyte123 6y ago
Obviously, it isn't right to be rude to nurses but it probably also isn't right to sneer at people on their deathbed who don't want to accept that they're dying or really understand why, and blame them for their disease even though we have no idea how they got it. I think some people dying in hospitals from COVID have a right to be mad at the medical system. Did these patients get any of the 5+ antiviral or immunomodulatory drugs with published successful RCTs? Did they get prophylactic antithrombotics? Did they get good advice on a healthy diet and medical care throughout their life? Probably not, and I don't think a judgmental tone towards them helps anything.
- thsowers 6y ago
  > but wow do we sure know that they're dumb hicks who deserve to die I didn't see that sentiment expressed in the article, or by the majority of comments here.
  - analyte123 6y ago
    I have toned this down, thank you.
- cultus 6y ago
  People in the healthcare system are doing the best they can, putting their lives at risk to help people, with insufficient resources. Every should be very, very angry. It should be directed at politicians and corporations, not middle or working-class individuals trying their best.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- hcknwscommenter 6y ago
  >5+ antiviral or immunomodulatory drugs with published successful RCTs I don't think that number is at all accurate. Dexamethasone is really the only thing that fits your description. People think of remdesivir, but the data on that are still quite ambiguous.
- 6y ago
macspoofing 6y ago
Very sad account and I feel terrible for those people - not only because dying from COVID is a terrible way to go, but also because had they followed proper mitigating strategies, many could have evaded infection. Question that should be raised, but won't, is why so many people choose to not only disbelieve traditional authoritative sources, like public health officials and mainstream news, but worse, think they are actively being lied to. The standard answer is 'fake news' but that's putting cart before the horse. Maybe the distrust comes first, and once those authoritative sources are gone, 'fake news' is what fills the vacuum. Look at it from the perspective of a regular mainstream conservative: Mainstream news during 8 years of the Obama presidency had them do minimal work on holding the administration to account, and then promptly ramp up to 11 against the Trump administration - with much of the coverage being outright lies (like the Steele document, which was actual Russian misinformation paid for by Hillary Campaign, and used as a basis for investigating a presidential campaign, and even purposely misinterpreting statements, like when Trump called cartels 'animals' and news promptly decided that this was a slur against regular Mexican-Americans). None of major news networks had open Trump supporters on staff, and actively shielded Biden and Democrats from any criticism. At the same time, those same outlets were/are pushing social networks to ban conservative outlets and label mainstream conservatives as bigots and attack them when they speak on collage campuses. Similarly, public health and government officials either ignored, or actively encouraged large scale anti-racism protests in the middle of the pandemic, while cracking down on Orthodox Jews who attended synagogue, or accosted people who visited their families for holidays (meanwhile officials like mayors of New York, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, as well as Speaker Pelosi, and Gov. Newson, openly flaunted lockdown rules and refused to even apologize for it when caught ... because rules only apply to the others). But this mistrust will be attributed to conservatives, Russian misinformation and fake news, because that's easy.
- hcknwscommenter 6y ago
  Your view of "mainstream" news does not fit at all with what I have seen.
  - macspoofing 6y ago
    Progressives, specifically progressives focusing on class and economics (as opposed to culture and identity) and conservatives tend to see "mainstream" news the same way: aligned with Democratic establishment, wholly center-left and actively hostile not only to their political goals, but hostile to them personally through actions like pushing social media to ban their speech. Is that not how you see it?
whoomp12342 6y ago
tis but a flesh wound
- BrianOnHN 6y ago
  Lol, perfect! Though, sadly, some people here that are going to see that, combined with seeing "news" in the domain, and will start preaching it as fact to their children: "Dont worry, news says it's just like a flesh wound."
hackeraccount 6y ago
This is all just one step away from those people who post conversations they supposedly had with their 4 year children that mysteriously support all their political prior beliefs. "And then my little Johnny said to me, 'Mommy, wouldn't it be more fair if instead of treating capital gains as normal income we indexed it to inflation?'" "I just don't know Johnny but some people either aren't able or will not just see the world as it is."
- ghthor 6y ago
  Yeah, it'd be dead simple to pull this off with false information.
mike_h 6y ago
Covid is turning out to be a disease of culture. The same virus hit the East and the West. The East got through it, the West is on its knees.
- zero_deg_kevin 6y ago
  I’d call it a disease of experience, first and foremost. The US missed the worst of SARS-Cov1 and MERS, which were catastrophic in some parts of the world. East-Asian Democratic countries had public debates about what are and are not reasonable public health measures. They passed enabling laws, built public health infrastructure, and established cutting edge novel virus surveillance programs. The US did not. We were creating homeland security departments and starting stupid trillion dollar wars.
  - roflulz 6y ago
    How do you explain certain states and cities doing so much better, even within the US? And other western countries, such as NZ, Canada, and Germany really beating the US in every metric possible? Experience is not the key here. Quality of leadership is
    - 9HZZRfNlpR 6y ago
      Is Germany really beating anything now? They sure did before but things have changed over here, the whole Europe is affected though.
  - mike_h 6y ago
    Do you see anything happening in the US public sphere to make you particularly hopeful about how we’ll handle the next one? These people are literally dying on the hill of “covid is a hoax”. Half of the country claims they won’t take a vaccine, and the leadership of half of the country has learned they can gain power by downplaying covid.
    - zero_deg_kevin 6y ago
squarefoot 6y ago
This is what happens when politics becomes religion, then pollutes things where religion should have no place, namely science. I just recovered from Covid, and I can tell you although some symptoms indeed are similar to a normal flu, and although I wasn't heavily hit by the virus, there are others that I never experienced in my life, like squishing a fresh basil leave right under my nose and smell absolutely nothing, or eating potatoes that tasted like cardboard. Only somebody whose critical thinking has been completely annihilated could think there wasn't something serious going on.
- dumbfoundded 6y ago
  This has happened frequently in history. Separation of church and state is a relatively new idea. The fascinating part to me is that this appears to be the first time the religious people are demanding the right to effectively kill themselves as well and not just others. Seems like a self defeating strategy.
vkou 6y ago
Idaho is currently sending it's overflow COVID patients to Washington state. Idaho's state health authorities are blaming it on a mysterious epidemic that is definitely not COVID, and that social distancing, reduced capacity, and mask use is unnecessary. > "Something's making these people sick, and I'm pretty sure that it's not coronavirus, so the question that you should be asking is, 'What's making them sick?'" he told the medical professionals who testified. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-idaho-kootenai-county-drops-covid-mask-mandate-despite-hospital-doctors-warning/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-idaho-kootenai-coun...
usefulcat 6y ago
Covid may not be real, but cognitive dissonance sure is. /s
BrianOnHN 6y ago
Tangent, but, since ~2010, I believed HN was the smartest publicly available forum. It made sense that the users here would go on to be leaders at innovative companies. Something changed around 2016 and has accelerated since 2018. Seeing the "COVID denial" comments in this thread is exactly what I'm talking about. It's just too bad.
- BrianOnHN 6y ago
  Worse, this entire thread has already been flagged into oblivion, like any other thread that HN apparently "can't handle" anymore, Sadly, that will ultimately decrease the amount of smarts working on this critical problem.
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    I'm also shocked at the amount of COVID downplaying, but I guess it's better than the usual "only one right opinion" you see on other controversial topics where the echo chamber is stronger. I guess I'd rather engage and debate a COVID denier than have their posts simply downvoted to -4 and flag-killed.
    - holbrad 6y ago
      I'll bite sure. Covid is not that bad. Statistically unless you are very sick and/or very elderly, you are extremely likely to not die. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73777-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73777-8 Deaths were almost entirely in the 60-80+ years old range. When your that old dying is sad, but inevitable. I'm extremely glad that we don't have an actually dangerous pandemic that effects a wider span of the population.
      - ryandrake 6y ago
        Sounds like you're coming at this in good faith so thanks! OK, so your paper only takes about mortality. It's a good point that a low percentage of people die from this. Great news. However there's growing evidence pointing to long-term health problems for survivors. Elevated risk of stroke even among young people, heart damage, and long lasting respiratory problems. Since the disease is new, we don't really know the long lasting effects yet. Maybe they will go away after years, we'll see. My neighbor had it and still struggles to breathe and has that widely-described "mind haze" many months later. Point is you can't just look at death rate. But, for the sake of argument, let's assume you personally are fortunately in the group that won't experience any of these problems. How do you know that everyone you encounter are also in that lucky group? Same for the people they encounter after they encounter you? You don't, and by not following the basic guidance of staying at home and wearing a mask when you have to go out, you're increasing the likelihood that others you meet catch it, and then either die, have long-lasting health problems, or spread it to others. Now, let's talk about 60-80+ year olds. "They're gonna die anyway so..." So, what, exactly? Increase their chances of dying because we don't want to close Starbucks? I don't think I can really even put myself in the shoes of someone making this argument. Almost everyone has someone in their family or acquaintances in this age range. A mother or grandfather. Maybe a teacher. I don't think you're really saying downplay the virus even if it throws these loved ones under the bus. If this was the year 2060 and you were in this age range (I'm assuming), would you still make this argument? One thing we can agree on: We're glad it's not more deadly than it is. If COVID were 10x deadlier, or affected people uniformly across age ranges, or if it were 10x more transmissive, we would have been in a world of shit, because people evidently don't have the character to make small uncomfortable sacrifices for the greater good. Even with a 10x worse COVID, we would have just kept insisting on going shopping and partying and accepting more people dying. Which is appalling, really.
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
I have three small children who have not been sick ONCE since the lockdowns started. They barely have seen another child, let alone played with them in close proximity. Do you think this is good news? No, it actually puts them at much higher risk of childhood leukemia and that scares me much more than them getting covid 19[1]. Articles like this strike me as propaganda. You can believe that covid 19 is real and covid 19 is deadly but still be against lock downs, despite what the propaganda would have you believe. Our actions have consequences. There's no free lunch here. 1. https://www.nhs.uk/news/cancer/child-leukaemia-linked-reduced-exposure-germs/ https://www.nhs.uk/news/cancer/child-leukaemia-linked-reduce...
- Abundnce10 6y ago
  > Articles like this strike me as propaganda. You can believe that covid 19 is real and covid 19 is deadly but still be against lock downs, despite what the propaganda would have you believe. How is this article propaganda? The nurse said, "many of her patients don't believe they are dying of COVID-19". The patients weren't arguing against the lock down, they were arguing that the virus isn't real.
- _Microft 6y ago
  If it helps, this is from the same article (here again: [0]) and sounds like you do not have to worry too much about this. All the best to you and your family! "Can I reduce my child's risk of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia? The evidence isn't well enough established to suggest definitive recommendations that will reduce risk of child leukaemia. [...] Obviously, parents make their decisions about childcare based on a number of factors. They should not worry that they are endangering their child by not sending them to a nursery or day care. And while most childhood infections are benign, some less common ones bring their own set of serious risks. So this review certainly shouldn't be taken as an encouragement to ditch important methods of infection prevention, such as frequent handwashing and making sure your child's vaccinations are up to date." [0] https://www.nhs.uk/news/cancer/child-leukaemia-linked-reduced-exposure-germs/ https://www.nhs.uk/news/cancer/child-leukaemia-linked-reduce...
- ghthor 6y ago
  Yeah this all seems like propaganda
sdfkkikig 6y ago
Article doesn't even give a number. How many is is many? Two patients perhaps? Come on, this is silly, unworthy of HN.
SnowProblem 6y ago
Can someone help me understand something? Back in March, we had ~40k new cases per day, and were seeing ~3k deaths per day. Today, we have ~140k new cases per day, but our deaths seem to be ~1k per day, and haven't risen much with rise in cases since September. What explains this? Were we not testing as much in March, and really our cases were ~200k per day? Or were the populations that got sick in March somehow different than today?
- echelon 6y ago
  Detection and treatment have gotten better. The populations exposed are also shifting. Schools are back, more elderly and at risk are taking proper precautions.
- decebalus1 6y ago
  We don't know for sure. But several hypotheses are being thrown around: - when the virus hit the first time, the age group of those affected was higher, hence the high initial mortality. - hospitals have better protocols now to deal with the disease. They learned a lot over the past months wrt to treatment. For example not putting people on ventilators that fast. - through natural selection, a milder strain has managed to be more contagious but less lethal overall. - some of the mask ordinances were effective in reducing the viral load
  - SnowProblem 6y ago
    Regarding the last point, I'd never thought of a virus like a poison before. Very interesting, thank you. If I get a higher dose of virus does that mean I will be sicker? Yes – work on two other coronaviruses: severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers) has shown this. https://www.sccm.org/getattachment/05471bbb-2f6d-40f4-aa0e-c402c70c69b6/What-is-viral-load-and-why-are-so-many-health-work https://www.sccm.org/getattachment/05471bbb-2f6d-40f4-aa0e-c...
- brilee 6y ago
  A few answers: - the infected population tends to be younger this time around (the nursing homes already got cleaned out). - test availability in March was low, so only the severe cases got tested - better treatment awareness (e.g. proning).
afrojack123 6y ago
The effect is strong as the seasonal flu. She is saying it's not real because we are over reacting.
joshxyz 6y ago
The absurdity of the irrationality at play here is just surprising. It's like the bystander effect, except it's all about being right and also involves risking yours and other people's lives. Unbelievable.
ycombonator 6y ago
Did anyone Fact check this ? Fact checking seems to be all the rage on the left wing rags like Washington Compost & New Slime Times.
cjbenedikt 6y ago
Einsteins quote springs to mind:"Only two things are unlimited - the Universe and human stupidity. I'm not so sure about the first one."
jimkleiber 6y ago
In the US we seem to either focus on the medical crisis or the economic crisis. I wish we would focus on both. How I understand it, how to resolve this would require medical interventions (shutdowns, testing, tracing, therapies, vaccines, etc) and economic interventions (stimulus, deferrals, forgiveness, etc) and yet we seem to mostly be doing the medical ones and getting pushback on it. I could be wrong on this, but I think one of few institutions in this country that can provide economic interventions is the US Congress. They provided one stimulus bill that helped to provide the economic safety net while we worked on the medical safety net. It shocks and angers me that they haven't provided another one. I struggle to see why they don't provide more economic stimulus. HN, can you help me understand why Congress isn't providing more financial help to the country?
- randcraw 6y ago
  More precisely, the majority of the US Senate (republican) opposes another large COVID bill. In contrast, the majority of the US House (democrat) has proposed new bills at between $2-3 trillion. The GOP is currently under control of the current President. Until he leaves, they will not act independently. After January 20 (and after the Georgia Senator runoffs are over), republicans will fear Trump's wrath less. But will that be enough to shift those politicians' sentiment? Only the impact of enough lives lost to COVID in the next two months will tell.
  - jimkleiber 6y ago
    But why does the Republican majority oppose another large COVID bill? I guess I just haven't heard or understand their arguments for why they think giving more economic stimulus would be a bad thing. - Is it a moral one? "Giving money makes people lazy, people should work for their money." - Is it a financial one? "If we give more money, this country will go further into debt." - Loyalty/obedience to Trump? - Something else? I'm just so confused...
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      They say that "it's a bunch of radical left-wing priorities disguised as a pandemic bill". What they mean is that they really don't want to give money to states and local governments, because they believe it will be poorly spent. This is problematic because these governments can't borrow, so will need to cut services in the midst of a pandemic. Additionally, the Republicans are pushing strongly for a liability shield for employers from Covid deaths/cases, which the Democrats don't like. Additionally, a bunch of Republican senators have found debt-reduction Jesus again, in the midst of the pandemic (even the IMF, those bondholder-buring, water-privitising backstards have said that now is not the time to worry about debt).
RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 6y ago
At this point my sentiments can be summed up thusly[0][1]. Although I'm the fortunate few who could work remotely -- and I've been doing so since the beginning of the year -- my job[2] still bounds me to CONUS. I'm beginning to entertain the thought of quitting so I could move to one of the few Asian countries that takes COVID-19 seriously. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXK03FHVsHk&t=26 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXK03FHVsHk&t=26 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW9WGibEF04&t=266 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW9WGibEF04&t=266 [2] My company's COVID-19 response so far is excellent, but it doesn't help when (seemly) no one else gives a crap.
dennisgorelik 6y ago
'Not real' is a strawman fallacy argument. The real argument against wearking masks is that Covid-19 is similar to Influenza: a dangerous desease, but still not dangerous enough to spend too much time on wearing masks/social distancing -- and keep living in fear. The reasoning against wearing masks -- is that wearing masks and social distancing - hurts more than it helps.
Pyramus 6y ago
While politics are being hotly debated I came here to say that I am again and again fascinated by the ability of the human mind to delude itself. You might be quick to argue that these patients aren't smart, and there will likely be a correlation, but being smart does not protect you from delusion. This is evidenced by a number of Nobel prize winners who have gone on to peddle pseudo-science. E.g. Kary Mullins, 1993 Nobel prize in chemistry for the PCR technique, went on to deny the link between HIV and AIDS [1]. This New York Times article has more examples [2]. So there is a non-zero chance that you and I might find ourselves in similar situation of denial, and we shouldn't be too quick to judge. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis#Contrarian_scientific_views_and_HIV/AIDS_denial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis#Contrarian_scienti... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/weekinreview/28johnson.html https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/weekinreview/28johnson.ht...
bangelo 6y ago
Go Darwin, Go
RickJWagner 6y ago
It's a shame that even pandemic diseases have to be politicized.
djsumdog 6y ago
So it turns out this post is likely complete disinformation and made up. This nurse likely hasn't treated very many dying patients. Wired did a followup: https://www.wired.com/story/are-covid-patients-gasping-it-isnt-real-as-they-die/ https://www.wired.com/story/are-covid-patients-gasping-it-is...

237 points by belltaco 6y ago

This feels like it's just to shame everyone based on very few eccentrics. I'm sure most people in SD agree COVID is real, but it's also not a very densely populated state with small cities, and the governors response seems appropriate. It's keep the economy from totally collapsing. I drove to Sioux Falls a few weeks ago, just to be some place normal. It was nice just being able to go into a brew pub or an indoor restaurant, and talk to people. Too bad it was only for a few days.

zero_deg_kevin 6y ago
"This feels like it's just to shame everyone based on very few eccentrics." I must have missed that paragraph. Where in the article was that?
silverpepsi 6y ago
Are there still people who believe it is just "a few eccentrics"? As someone who has a lot of them in my direct family, extended family, and even Facebook friends, my perception is that partisanship has reached a point where there is literal mass delusion out there far left and far right. And in the case of covid19, it feels like at least 10% don't fully believe in it (the level of doubt varying by individual and situational circumstances, like needing immediate medical assistance vs being in good health).
- Valgrim 6y ago
  >there is literal mass delusion out there far left and far right. What delusion is the "far left" believing in, in your opinion?
  - soco 6y ago
    People like to look equidistant, so they will blame all extremes the same out of reflex.
  - dx87 6y ago
    That everyone who voted for Trump is a white supremacist. I've seen that attitude quite a bit on this site in the days after the election, and I've seen journalists call minorities white supremacists because they didn't vote for Biden. Some people just refuse to believe that he's anything but a wannabe Hitler, and use that as an excuse to say that they have no reason to try and come together as a country.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - uoaei 6y ago
      Intention matters less than material consequences. Consider the fact that this last year was the worst for hate crimes for at least a decade. If a whole group of people is propping up a leader who literally and almost exclusively enacts white supremacist policies, and uses white supremacist rhetoric/dogwhistles, what else could you call them?
      - vokep 6y ago
        >a leader who literally and almost exclusively enacts white supremacist policies, and uses white supremacist rhetoric/dogwhistles This is where the rift is. This is not true. Yes, some could take that sort of interpretation of what he's saying, and that sort of interpretation being taken by lots of white supremacists regardless of intention, does mean something. But it doesn't mean much, at least, I don't see why we'd expect that to be any significant effect. Just to bring an example, at least, ime the most common "but he said.." claim. The "fine people on both sides" quote. Many misunderstand what he was actually saying there and actually what happened - the event started with a wide range of people on the right, a general conservative gathering seeming thing. It was organized by white supremacists, which lots attending did not realize until some time passed and they started getting uncomfortable and leaving, by the time people were chanting slurs and all, it went full on neo-nazi rally. Trump clearly did denounce that, and what happened that night, and was speaking to the normal people who had attended in the beginning and left later.
- sam0x17 6y ago
  There is no "mass-delusion" on the far left. We are literally at a point where the current daily cases mean that a month from now we will be having around 3-4k deaths per day based on how many people are already infected NOW. That's a 9/11 terrorist attack per day in deaths. Anyone who doesn't acknowledge that is delusional.
  - sam0x17 6y ago
    Don't believe me, do the math yourself. Extrapolating from data on https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality we get: U.S. mortality rate is 2.29%. Average daily cases for the past week have been hovering around 140k (https://covidtracking.com/data/charts/us-daily-positive https://covidtracking.com/data/charts/us-daily-positive). 140,000 * 0.0229 = 3,206 deaths per day. 9/11 was just 2,977 deaths (https://www.google.com/search?q=9%2F11+deaths https://www.google.com/search?q=9%2F11+deaths) So once the cases from the last few days progress further, we will have 3206/2977 = 1.07692307692 9/11s a day in deaths. note: corrected above, should have said 3k not 9-10k. Misremembered my calculations from earlier this week. Analogy still accurate
  - Mindless2112 6y ago
    The delusion of the left is that central planning and control will prevent the spread of the virus. That's not exactly wrong -- it just has to be the level of government control that China has. A lot of Americans, myself included, won't tolerate that. (And for the record, I wear a mask.)
    - sam0x17 6y ago
      It's more of a battle of public opinion -- if people on the right were consistent about mask wearing, and didn't believe that they are immune or the virus is fake or whatever, our ability to contain this would be much greater. Sure, we can't force mask wearing at a federal level, but it sure would help if everyone on Fox and Newsmax were working to encourage the use of masks. That would have more weight than any federal or local mandate unfortunately, so it's unproductive to raise the point you're raising, though I agree. This also comes down to enforcement. Even if a federal mandate were somehow passed, if the people's hearts aren't in it in red areas, cops won't enforce it in those areas and it will be a joke. It really is 100% about public opinion. To your point though, I'm pretty extreme left, and I don't think we are going to have an easy time containing it by any means. It is going to continue to rise months and possibly years into a Biden administration, but I think we'll still have a lot less deaths. No one on the left thinks this is magically going away, even with a vaccine. Distribution and production of a vaccine is incredibly difficult logistically, and these things need to be refrigerated. So at best we're looking at like a year from now we all get a vaccine imo.
jasonlaramburu 6y ago
What a bad take. Disregard for covid precautions is the reason we have an outsized outbreak in the US. The outbreak in SD, despite the state’s low population density, will spread to other states.
- analyte123 6y ago
  The outbreak in the US is not particularly "outsized" compared to other developed countries: https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=usa&areas=fra&areas=esp&areas=gbr&areas=che&areasRegional=usny&areasRegional=usca&areasRegional=usfl&areasRegional=ustx&byDate=0&cumulative=0&logScale=1&perMillion=1&values=deaths https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=usa&areas=fra&are...
  - jasonlaramburu 6y ago
    Look at Australia and New Zealand. Both free and open societies with high per capita GDP. They both have achieved zero community transmission through stringent travel restrictions and a nationwide strategy. It’s disgraceful that we can’t do the same or better in the US.
    - Taniwha 6y ago
      In both NZ and Australia it took real leadership by government, and a population overwhelmingly willing to listen to them and to follow the science. (In Australia's case it has been leadership by state government over the complete opposite by their federal government)
      - jasonlaramburu 6y ago
        In the US we have real anti-leadership. Our leaders repeatedly cast doubt on science and common sense in order to reduce their own culpability. They spread the myth that there is ‘nothing we can do’ about COVID until we have a vaccine when other countries have proven this to be false.
  - hawkesnest 6y ago
pengaru 6y ago
> I drove to Sioux Falls a few weeks ago, just to be some place normal. It was nice just being able to go into a brew pub or an indoor restaurant, and talk to people. Too bad it was only for a few days. Frivolous travel for the express purpose of not social distancing during the throes of a pandemic... smh, what a prick.
- jeffbezos982134 6y ago
  I agree with him. I wear a KN-95 mask everywhere I go. I don’t mind it at all. I’d really prefer to live somewhere that lets you go to a bar or eat inside a restaurant. I’d love to go to the barber shop and have my beard shaped up. Maybe I’ll go to Sioux Falls :)
  - uoaei 6y ago
    Coronavirus enters the body through the eyes as well as mouth and nose. If it gets on your hands, you can put it on your face. Only 1000 virons are needed to establish an infection. If you're wearing KN95 mask with a beard on, your mask isn't working properly anyway and you could be unwittingly spreading the virus, further delaying a reopening.
- oceanplexian 6y ago
  Traveling makes absolutely no difference when both the place you're traveling from and the place you're traveling to have widespread virus transmission.
pwinnski 6y ago
A few eccentrics? Like someone who will, say, deliberately drive to an area without adequate legal orders in place in the middle of a sharp uptick in cases during a pandemic, just to "feel normal?"

Diederich 6y ago

https://mackuba.eu/corona/#south_dakota_united_states.daily?trend=7 https://mackuba.eu/corona/#south_dakota_united_states.daily?...

jeffbee 6y ago
To set the perspective for those not familiar, the population of the state is close to 900k, roughly the same as the city of San Francisco. The normal pace of all-cause deaths is about 24 per day, so with COVID-19 killing off 15 people per day it is probably the leading cause of death in that state today.
- Diederich 6y ago
  If I remember correctly, deaths today are linked with the hospitalizations 12 days prior. From what I've seen, South Dakota is nearly out of ICU beds, as are many other states. These Covid19 death rates are going to get really, really bad this time around.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    Definitely. The die, as they say, is already cast. Remember, too, that the trailing 7-day average of an exponential process is incredibly misleading. If it's 15 deaths per day by that measure, that means it's really 50 today and 100+ soon.
    - Diederich 6y ago
      Yeah, that graph added 7-day averaging because the reporting numbers bounce around on weekend boundaries, which was leading to a lot of confusion. Whether there's 1-day or n-day averaging, exponential growth is the scary beast.
  - jdhn 6y ago
    >From what I've seen, South Dakota is nearly out of ICU beds Do you have a source for this?

sigstoat 6y ago

great, she got her 15 minutes of fame for telling you unsubstantiated rumors. valuable use of time.

StavrosK 6y ago
Is her first-hand reporting that patients don't believe in COVID an unsubstantiated rumour?
- rriepe 6y ago
  It's either unsubstantiated or a HIPAA violation
  - sonotathrowaway 6y ago
    Telling you uncomfortable truths isn’t a hipaa violation, as the law was not written to protect your feelings.
    - ralusek 6y ago
      I mean...many uncomfortable truths ARE HIPAA violations. What makes it NOT a HIPAA violation is that it's just general/anonymized anecdata. I can't go up to someone and be like "Alice Rosenstein has cervical cancer, sorry if that's an uncomfortable truth, but the law wasn't written to protect your feelings." That would, in fact, be a HIPAA violation.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - wesleywt 6y ago
        There is a difference between saying, Mrs. Jones has a bad yeast infection and there are many yeast infections this time of year. The one is giving patient information the other is discussing the disease.

jimkleiber 6y ago

My friend works in the covid ICU here in Michigan and told me yesterday that she's seeing a dramatic increase in patients who are getting angry at her and still believing that covid is not real. When she asks where they may have caught it, they sometimes say at a wedding with 100 people where no one was wearing masks. I can't imagine how emotionally taxing it was to be a healthcare worker attending to people with covid in the beginning, but at least then they received a lot of gratitude from their patients. I cannot fathom how these healthcare workers must feel after 8 months of this and then getting yelled at by patients who don't think this is real. I almost don't even want to imagine how much pain they might be feeling.

nappy-doo 6y ago
I work on the mobile contact tracing effort (FAANG), and I am exhausted thinking about it as well, and I don't even risk my life everyday. Part of me wants to say, "fuck these idiots that don't wear masks, just die," but know that they will just get others sick on the way, and use up scarce resources.
- Diederich 6y ago
  This is a harsh thing to say, but I understand where you're coming from. We....all of us, all human beings...need to be very patient and merciful with each other. My wife and I know good, honest and smart people who are fully convinced that Covid19 isn't that dangerous, that it's a hoax, etc. I'm not saying "smart" lightly. All humans...even the best of us...are at our core deeply irrational most of the time. Different groups of us are irrational about different things. Saying all of this, I do not mean to minimize the focused, concerted actions of a relative few who have taken advantage of not just human weakness but also the new communication technologies available to them. We should reserve our ire for those who pull the strings of manipulation to the detriment of many.
  - dkural 6y ago
    Why do you think they're good and smart, why do they think Covid19 is a hoax? Surely a good person would try to do the safe thing even if they had doubts.

whalesalad 6y ago

My wife and I just moved from Orange County, CA to Detroit, MI this last August. We decided to drive the northern route. Heading through Vegas, Utah, Yellowstone and Montana. Then onward through the plains of North Dakota and Minnesota. Turning north we entered Wisconsin and finally the UP (Upper Peninsula) of Michigan. After a few days exploring we turned south to Detroit. In Vegas the concern for masks started to wane. By Utah, no fucks were given and pretty much not a single fuck was given until we crossed the Mackinac Bridge into the lower peninsula of Michigan. When I say no fucks were given - I mean that pretty much no one around me cared about wearing a mask, social distancing, etc. Hotels would participate out of corporate necessity. We drove hundreds and hundreds of miles sometimes and were the only people in stores with masks on. Sometimes I felt like an outsider alien, being stared at by the people around me. I was surprised yet not surprised at the same time. So the surge and issues the comminuties up there are facing don't surprise me in the least.

posix_compliant 6y ago
Weird, I moved from SF to Philadelphia last week and most stores on route 80 required masks.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- andy318 6y ago
  How is the move working out for you, btw?
  - whalesalad 6y ago
    they're posix compliant so I would imagine they can colo anywhere lol
  - jeffbezos982134 6y ago
    I have lived in Philadelphia for almost 8 years now and it’s making less and less sense to live here. City taxes are high, housing prices are steadily increasing, making changes to property is an expensive, bureaucratic nightmare, parking is a nightmare, etc. There aren’t (m)any good places to work that pay well enough to justify the taxes and cost of living. The winter is cold and dreary, the summer is humid. If not for covid it would make a lot more sense to live in Boston or NYC. I’m interested in moving to South Carolina or Florida.

mtgx 6y ago

Propaganda is one hell of a drug.

skyzyx 6y ago

Yes, the pandemic fatigue is real. Yes, it would be wonderful to hang out with my friends in person, or to drive 100 miles crossing the border to go visit my children. But the reason this is lasting so long, and things are shutting back down is because people are ignoring the truth. You can talk about the economy all day long, but the fact of the matter is that if we all would’ve taken this seriously and shut everything down, we would be through the worst of it already. Comparatively, New Zealand and Canada have done a dramatically better job than America. People there appear to be willing to set aside their selfishness in favor of the common good. And the people who don’t believe that it’s real? All I can say is that it’s extremely clear that we are living in a second Cold War. But instead of fighting with nukes, we’re fighting with misinformation, and Russia is winning.

claudeganon 6y ago
Americans refusal to embrace reality has little to do with Russia or any other foreign power. Instead, it’s derived from the long standing and pervasive belief in its exceptionalist, irrational ideology. The same belief system that allows one to compartmentalize the experience of a broken, unequal, and vicious society with an unblinking belief in its greatness will produce this and many other dissonances.
- joshmarlow 6y ago
  It kind of sounds like you're just describing the vulnerability that other state actors can exploit... Which doesn't argue against point in the parent post.
  - claudeganon 6y ago
    Right, but the supposition is that such exploits are the source of mass delusions. There are plenty of people who think COVID is a hoax who didn’t arrive at that kind of thinking because of foreign intelligence operations. It’s regurgitated daily by right wing American politicians and media.
    - 6y ago

remote_phone 6y ago

Basically the US’s complete disregard for public education is now coming to a head. I remember one study that said the US students were one of the lowest in terms of education but the absolute highest in terms of self confidence. We are reaping what we have sowed for decades now. We have such a vast uneducated population that this coronavirus is almost more like a horrifying culling of the uneducated than anything else. The utter confidence in these patients to not believe the doctors is staggering but not surprising. I hate to be so blunt, but 50% of the population has IQ below 100. Nothing to me has demonstrated this more than the reaction to the pandemic. When you are so uneducated that you think a mask won’t help prevent a disease that is spread via respiratory droplets, that is a big problem and unfortunately those people are all sitting ducks. Of course many won’t believe the doctors when they don’t have the capacity to understand even the basic concept? If you were to ask a child what might be a good way to help prevent a disease that originated from their mouth, I’m pretty sure one of their top two answers would be a mask. It’s such a basic concept that a child would have the solution, and you need to do mental gymnastics to convince yourself otherwise.

padseeker 6y ago
there are plenty of people with high IQs that are plainly in denial. There is a difference between stupidity and delusion.
istorical 6y ago
Can we call it education though or is it an anti-intellectual spirit or a disdain for elitism and the idea of experts? Or perhaps mistrust of authority and experts? It would seem like perhaps an uneducated but highly communal/cooperative/respectful-of-authority society would have better outcomes than one with well educated individuals who have a culture of disregard for institutional science or the idea of technocrats and bureaucrats that might know more than Joe Sixpack. You could argue that education is what creates the values we're hoping for here, but that is kind of what I'm questioning. Perhaps the culture itself is the problem not the test scores.
- GordonS 6y ago

jdhn 6y ago

I feel like I've seen versions of this story pop up throughout the year, and it seems that others have too [0]. I guess I remain skeptical as to whether this actually happened until more proof can be provided. [0] https://twitter.com/annbauerwriter/status/1328538348173004800 https://twitter.com/annbauerwriter/status/132853834817300480...

nojito 6y ago
Really? https://www.mibluesperspectives.com/2020/10/30/teen-diagnosed-with-covid-19-its-not-a-joke-to-us-anymore/ https://www.mibluesperspectives.com/2020/10/30/teen-diagnose... These types of interactions happen all the time. A simple youtube search will get you tons of patient accounts. This was a strategy used by certain hospitals to increase public awareness.
- jdhn 6y ago
  Nowhere in that article does it say that he went to urgent care insisting that covid isn't real. The link that the OP posted says that dying patients are insisting that covid isn't real. Your own link says that the kid thought that it just hit older adults, not that he thought it was fake or a new world order conspiracy or any garbage like that.
thsowers 6y ago
Here is a similar story from a news source: https://www.npr.org/2020/11/12/934266487/icu-nurse-on-dealing-with-latest-coronavirus-outbreak-in-michigan https://www.npr.org/2020/11/12/934266487/icu-nurse-on-dealin...
disgruntledphd2 6y ago
Interesting. I followed the links, and found one that seemed legit: https://twitter.com/TheBlondeRN/status/1328378945172074499 https://twitter.com/TheBlondeRN/status/1328378945172074499
therealdrag0 6y ago
Did you see the link to the nurse being interviewed? https://mobile.twitter.com/theblondern/status/1328378945172074499 https://mobile.twitter.com/theblondern/status/13283789451720...

aazaa 6y ago

Politics seems to be a factor here, but I wonder how much of this has to do with popular culture. Over the last 20 years we've been bombarded with metric tons of Apocalypse porn, a lot of it focused on killer viruses. Most of those movies are unrealistic to put it mildly. Zombies. Deserted cities. Rotting corpses on sidewalks. Visible, palpable nauseating death. This pandemic is nothing like those movies. I know of not a single pop culture depiction that looks anything like what we have now, except maybe the movie Contagion. And that's really a stretch. So a lot of people have a problem when they see dire predictions and statistics that bear no relationship to what their own five senses are telling them. There's also the problem of previous pandemics that sounded the alarm, but amounted to little in the US. SARS-CoV-1 and the Swine Flu. All of this leaves the US with a population primed to expect a very unrealistic kind of pandemic, and already skeptical from previous false alarms. Throw in a president who not only sympathizes with the "hoax" perspective, but actively encourages it, and it should maybe not be surprising that we are where we are.

Forge36 6y ago
Contagion feels like a stretch because everyone has PPE. News teams aren't sending camera crews into the overflow hospitals being setup. Hard to show full hospitals ("rooms are full" doesn't look good on TV), nor could TV crews go into Patient rooms and show what it looks like (social media is doing this, but typically for patient's who are surviving as personal accounts).
- robertoandred 6y ago
  World News Tonight showed a hospital and a patient in his room last night.
me_me_me 6y ago
While maybe there is some truth to what you say, it doesn't justifies being an idiot that cant distinguishing reality from tv. Furthermore denying evidence because it doesnt align with how it happens in the movies
TheGrim-999 6y ago

analyte123 6y ago

Obviously, it isn't right to be rude to nurses but it probably also isn't right to sneer at people on their deathbed who don't want to accept that they're dying or really understand why, and blame them for their disease even though we have no idea how they got it. I think some people dying in hospitals from COVID have a right to be mad at the medical system. Did these patients get any of the 5+ antiviral or immunomodulatory drugs with published successful RCTs? Did they get prophylactic antithrombotics? Did they get good advice on a healthy diet and medical care throughout their life? Probably not, and I don't think a judgmental tone towards them helps anything.

thsowers 6y ago
> but wow do we sure know that they're dumb hicks who deserve to die I didn't see that sentiment expressed in the article, or by the majority of comments here.
- analyte123 6y ago
  I have toned this down, thank you.
cultus 6y ago
People in the healthcare system are doing the best they can, putting their lives at risk to help people, with insufficient resources. Every should be very, very angry. It should be directed at politicians and corporations, not middle or working-class individuals trying their best.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
hcknwscommenter 6y ago
>5+ antiviral or immunomodulatory drugs with published successful RCTs I don't think that number is at all accurate. Dexamethasone is really the only thing that fits your description. People think of remdesivir, but the data on that are still quite ambiguous.
6y ago

macspoofing 6y ago

Very sad account and I feel terrible for those people - not only because dying from COVID is a terrible way to go, but also because had they followed proper mitigating strategies, many could have evaded infection. Question that should be raised, but won't, is why so many people choose to not only disbelieve traditional authoritative sources, like public health officials and mainstream news, but worse, think they are actively being lied to. The standard answer is 'fake news' but that's putting cart before the horse. Maybe the distrust comes first, and once those authoritative sources are gone, 'fake news' is what fills the vacuum. Look at it from the perspective of a regular mainstream conservative: Mainstream news during 8 years of the Obama presidency had them do minimal work on holding the administration to account, and then promptly ramp up to 11 against the Trump administration - with much of the coverage being outright lies (like the Steele document, which was actual Russian misinformation paid for by Hillary Campaign, and used as a basis for investigating a presidential campaign, and even purposely misinterpreting statements, like when Trump called cartels 'animals' and news promptly decided that this was a slur against regular Mexican-Americans). None of major news networks had open Trump supporters on staff, and actively shielded Biden and Democrats from any criticism. At the same time, those same outlets were/are pushing social networks to ban conservative outlets and label mainstream conservatives as bigots and attack them when they speak on collage campuses. Similarly, public health and government officials either ignored, or actively encouraged large scale anti-racism protests in the middle of the pandemic, while cracking down on Orthodox Jews who attended synagogue, or accosted people who visited their families for holidays (meanwhile officials like mayors of New York, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, as well as Speaker Pelosi, and Gov. Newson, openly flaunted lockdown rules and refused to even apologize for it when caught ... because rules only apply to the others). But this mistrust will be attributed to conservatives, Russian misinformation and fake news, because that's easy.

hcknwscommenter 6y ago
Your view of "mainstream" news does not fit at all with what I have seen.
- macspoofing 6y ago
  Progressives, specifically progressives focusing on class and economics (as opposed to culture and identity) and conservatives tend to see "mainstream" news the same way: aligned with Democratic establishment, wholly center-left and actively hostile not only to their political goals, but hostile to them personally through actions like pushing social media to ban their speech. Is that not how you see it?

whoomp12342 6y ago

tis but a flesh wound

BrianOnHN 6y ago
Lol, perfect! Though, sadly, some people here that are going to see that, combined with seeing "news" in the domain, and will start preaching it as fact to their children: "Dont worry, news says it's just like a flesh wound."

hackeraccount 6y ago

This is all just one step away from those people who post conversations they supposedly had with their 4 year children that mysteriously support all their political prior beliefs. "And then my little Johnny said to me, 'Mommy, wouldn't it be more fair if instead of treating capital gains as normal income we indexed it to inflation?'" "I just don't know Johnny but some people either aren't able or will not just see the world as it is."

ghthor 6y ago
Yeah, it'd be dead simple to pull this off with false information.

mike_h 6y ago

Covid is turning out to be a disease of culture. The same virus hit the East and the West. The East got through it, the West is on its knees.

zero_deg_kevin 6y ago
I’d call it a disease of experience, first and foremost. The US missed the worst of SARS-Cov1 and MERS, which were catastrophic in some parts of the world. East-Asian Democratic countries had public debates about what are and are not reasonable public health measures. They passed enabling laws, built public health infrastructure, and established cutting edge novel virus surveillance programs. The US did not. We were creating homeland security departments and starting stupid trillion dollar wars.
- roflulz 6y ago
  How do you explain certain states and cities doing so much better, even within the US? And other western countries, such as NZ, Canada, and Germany really beating the US in every metric possible? Experience is not the key here. Quality of leadership is
  - 9HZZRfNlpR 6y ago
    Is Germany really beating anything now? They sure did before but things have changed over here, the whole Europe is affected though.
- mike_h 6y ago
  Do you see anything happening in the US public sphere to make you particularly hopeful about how we’ll handle the next one? These people are literally dying on the hill of “covid is a hoax”. Half of the country claims they won’t take a vaccine, and the leadership of half of the country has learned they can gain power by downplaying covid.
  - zero_deg_kevin 6y ago

squarefoot 6y ago

This is what happens when politics becomes religion, then pollutes things where religion should have no place, namely science. I just recovered from Covid, and I can tell you although some symptoms indeed are similar to a normal flu, and although I wasn't heavily hit by the virus, there are others that I never experienced in my life, like squishing a fresh basil leave right under my nose and smell absolutely nothing, or eating potatoes that tasted like cardboard. Only somebody whose critical thinking has been completely annihilated could think there wasn't something serious going on.

dumbfoundded 6y ago
This has happened frequently in history. Separation of church and state is a relatively new idea. The fascinating part to me is that this appears to be the first time the religious people are demanding the right to effectively kill themselves as well and not just others. Seems like a self defeating strategy.

vkou 6y ago

Idaho is currently sending it's overflow COVID patients to Washington state. Idaho's state health authorities are blaming it on a mysterious epidemic that is definitely not COVID, and that social distancing, reduced capacity, and mask use is unnecessary. > "Something's making these people sick, and I'm pretty sure that it's not coronavirus, so the question that you should be asking is, 'What's making them sick?'" he told the medical professionals who testified. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-idaho-kootenai-county-drops-covid-mask-mandate-despite-hospital-doctors-warning/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-idaho-kootenai-coun...

usefulcat 6y ago

Covid may not be real, but cognitive dissonance sure is. /s

BrianOnHN 6y ago

Tangent, but, since ~2010, I believed HN was the smartest publicly available forum. It made sense that the users here would go on to be leaders at innovative companies. Something changed around 2016 and has accelerated since 2018. Seeing the "COVID denial" comments in this thread is exactly what I'm talking about. It's just too bad.

BrianOnHN 6y ago
Worse, this entire thread has already been flagged into oblivion, like any other thread that HN apparently "can't handle" anymore, Sadly, that will ultimately decrease the amount of smarts working on this critical problem.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  I'm also shocked at the amount of COVID downplaying, but I guess it's better than the usual "only one right opinion" you see on other controversial topics where the echo chamber is stronger. I guess I'd rather engage and debate a COVID denier than have their posts simply downvoted to -4 and flag-killed.
  - holbrad 6y ago
    I'll bite sure. Covid is not that bad. Statistically unless you are very sick and/or very elderly, you are extremely likely to not die. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73777-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73777-8 Deaths were almost entirely in the 60-80+ years old range. When your that old dying is sad, but inevitable. I'm extremely glad that we don't have an actually dangerous pandemic that effects a wider span of the population.
    - ryandrake 6y ago
      Sounds like you're coming at this in good faith so thanks! OK, so your paper only takes about mortality. It's a good point that a low percentage of people die from this. Great news. However there's growing evidence pointing to long-term health problems for survivors. Elevated risk of stroke even among young people, heart damage, and long lasting respiratory problems. Since the disease is new, we don't really know the long lasting effects yet. Maybe they will go away after years, we'll see. My neighbor had it and still struggles to breathe and has that widely-described "mind haze" many months later. Point is you can't just look at death rate. But, for the sake of argument, let's assume you personally are fortunately in the group that won't experience any of these problems. How do you know that everyone you encounter are also in that lucky group? Same for the people they encounter after they encounter you? You don't, and by not following the basic guidance of staying at home and wearing a mask when you have to go out, you're increasing the likelihood that others you meet catch it, and then either die, have long-lasting health problems, or spread it to others. Now, let's talk about 60-80+ year olds. "They're gonna die anyway so..." So, what, exactly? Increase their chances of dying because we don't want to close Starbucks? I don't think I can really even put myself in the shoes of someone making this argument. Almost everyone has someone in their family or acquaintances in this age range. A mother or grandfather. Maybe a teacher. I don't think you're really saying downplay the virus even if it throws these loved ones under the bus. If this was the year 2060 and you were in this age range (I'm assuming), would you still make this argument? One thing we can agree on: We're glad it's not more deadly than it is. If COVID were 10x deadlier, or affected people uniformly across age ranges, or if it were 10x more transmissive, we would have been in a world of shit, because people evidently don't have the character to make small uncomfortable sacrifices for the greater good. Even with a 10x worse COVID, we would have just kept insisting on going shopping and partying and accepting more people dying. Which is appalling, really.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

I have three small children who have not been sick ONCE since the lockdowns started. They barely have seen another child, let alone played with them in close proximity. Do you think this is good news? No, it actually puts them at much higher risk of childhood leukemia and that scares me much more than them getting covid 19[1]. Articles like this strike me as propaganda. You can believe that covid 19 is real and covid 19 is deadly but still be against lock downs, despite what the propaganda would have you believe. Our actions have consequences. There's no free lunch here. 1. https://www.nhs.uk/news/cancer/child-leukaemia-linked-reduced-exposure-germs/ https://www.nhs.uk/news/cancer/child-leukaemia-linked-reduce...

Abundnce10 6y ago
> Articles like this strike me as propaganda. You can believe that covid 19 is real and covid 19 is deadly but still be against lock downs, despite what the propaganda would have you believe. How is this article propaganda? The nurse said, "many of her patients don't believe they are dying of COVID-19". The patients weren't arguing against the lock down, they were arguing that the virus isn't real.
_Microft 6y ago
If it helps, this is from the same article (here again: [0]) and sounds like you do not have to worry too much about this. All the best to you and your family! "Can I reduce my child's risk of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia? The evidence isn't well enough established to suggest definitive recommendations that will reduce risk of child leukaemia. [...] Obviously, parents make their decisions about childcare based on a number of factors. They should not worry that they are endangering their child by not sending them to a nursery or day care. And while most childhood infections are benign, some less common ones bring their own set of serious risks. So this review certainly shouldn't be taken as an encouragement to ditch important methods of infection prevention, such as frequent handwashing and making sure your child's vaccinations are up to date." [0] https://www.nhs.uk/news/cancer/child-leukaemia-linked-reduced-exposure-germs/ https://www.nhs.uk/news/cancer/child-leukaemia-linked-reduce...
ghthor 6y ago
Yeah this all seems like propaganda

sdfkkikig 6y ago

Article doesn't even give a number. How many is is many? Two patients perhaps? Come on, this is silly, unworthy of HN.

SnowProblem 6y ago

Can someone help me understand something? Back in March, we had ~40k new cases per day, and were seeing ~3k deaths per day. Today, we have ~140k new cases per day, but our deaths seem to be ~1k per day, and haven't risen much with rise in cases since September. What explains this? Were we not testing as much in March, and really our cases were ~200k per day? Or were the populations that got sick in March somehow different than today?

echelon 6y ago
Detection and treatment have gotten better. The populations exposed are also shifting. Schools are back, more elderly and at risk are taking proper precautions.
decebalus1 6y ago
We don't know for sure. But several hypotheses are being thrown around: - when the virus hit the first time, the age group of those affected was higher, hence the high initial mortality. - hospitals have better protocols now to deal with the disease. They learned a lot over the past months wrt to treatment. For example not putting people on ventilators that fast. - through natural selection, a milder strain has managed to be more contagious but less lethal overall. - some of the mask ordinances were effective in reducing the viral load
- SnowProblem 6y ago
  Regarding the last point, I'd never thought of a virus like a poison before. Very interesting, thank you. If I get a higher dose of virus does that mean I will be sicker? Yes – work on two other coronaviruses: severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers) has shown this. https://www.sccm.org/getattachment/05471bbb-2f6d-40f4-aa0e-c402c70c69b6/What-is-viral-load-and-why-are-so-many-health-work https://www.sccm.org/getattachment/05471bbb-2f6d-40f4-aa0e-c...
brilee 6y ago
A few answers: - the infected population tends to be younger this time around (the nursing homes already got cleaned out). - test availability in March was low, so only the severe cases got tested - better treatment awareness (e.g. proning).

afrojack123 6y ago

The effect is strong as the seasonal flu. She is saying it's not real because we are over reacting.

joshxyz 6y ago

The absurdity of the irrationality at play here is just surprising. It's like the bystander effect, except it's all about being right and also involves risking yours and other people's lives. Unbelievable.

ycombonator 6y ago

Did anyone Fact check this ? Fact checking seems to be all the rage on the left wing rags like Washington Compost & New Slime Times.

cjbenedikt 6y ago

Einsteins quote springs to mind:"Only two things are unlimited - the Universe and human stupidity. I'm not so sure about the first one."

jimkleiber 6y ago

In the US we seem to either focus on the medical crisis or the economic crisis. I wish we would focus on both. How I understand it, how to resolve this would require medical interventions (shutdowns, testing, tracing, therapies, vaccines, etc) and economic interventions (stimulus, deferrals, forgiveness, etc) and yet we seem to mostly be doing the medical ones and getting pushback on it. I could be wrong on this, but I think one of few institutions in this country that can provide economic interventions is the US Congress. They provided one stimulus bill that helped to provide the economic safety net while we worked on the medical safety net. It shocks and angers me that they haven't provided another one. I struggle to see why they don't provide more economic stimulus. HN, can you help me understand why Congress isn't providing more financial help to the country?

randcraw 6y ago
More precisely, the majority of the US Senate (republican) opposes another large COVID bill. In contrast, the majority of the US House (democrat) has proposed new bills at between $2-3 trillion. The GOP is currently under control of the current President. Until he leaves, they will not act independently. After January 20 (and after the Georgia Senator runoffs are over), republicans will fear Trump's wrath less. But will that be enough to shift those politicians' sentiment? Only the impact of enough lives lost to COVID in the next two months will tell.
- jimkleiber 6y ago
  But why does the Republican majority oppose another large COVID bill? I guess I just haven't heard or understand their arguments for why they think giving more economic stimulus would be a bad thing. - Is it a moral one? "Giving money makes people lazy, people should work for their money." - Is it a financial one? "If we give more money, this country will go further into debt." - Loyalty/obedience to Trump? - Something else? I'm just so confused...
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    They say that "it's a bunch of radical left-wing priorities disguised as a pandemic bill". What they mean is that they really don't want to give money to states and local governments, because they believe it will be poorly spent. This is problematic because these governments can't borrow, so will need to cut services in the midst of a pandemic. Additionally, the Republicans are pushing strongly for a liability shield for employers from Covid deaths/cases, which the Democrats don't like. Additionally, a bunch of Republican senators have found debt-reduction Jesus again, in the midst of the pandemic (even the IMF, those bondholder-buring, water-privitising backstards have said that now is not the time to worry about debt).

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 6y ago

At this point my sentiments can be summed up thusly[0][1]. Although I'm the fortunate few who could work remotely -- and I've been doing so since the beginning of the year -- my job[2] still bounds me to CONUS. I'm beginning to entertain the thought of quitting so I could move to one of the few Asian countries that takes COVID-19 seriously. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXK03FHVsHk&t=26 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXK03FHVsHk&t=26 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW9WGibEF04&t=266 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW9WGibEF04&t=266 [2] My company's COVID-19 response so far is excellent, but it doesn't help when (seemly) no one else gives a crap.

dennisgorelik 6y ago

'Not real' is a strawman fallacy argument. The real argument against wearking masks is that Covid-19 is similar to Influenza: a dangerous desease, but still not dangerous enough to spend too much time on wearing masks/social distancing -- and keep living in fear. The reasoning against wearing masks -- is that wearing masks and social distancing - hurts more than it helps.

Pyramus 6y ago

While politics are being hotly debated I came here to say that I am again and again fascinated by the ability of the human mind to delude itself. You might be quick to argue that these patients aren't smart, and there will likely be a correlation, but being smart does not protect you from delusion. This is evidenced by a number of Nobel prize winners who have gone on to peddle pseudo-science. E.g. Kary Mullins, 1993 Nobel prize in chemistry for the PCR technique, went on to deny the link between HIV and AIDS [1]. This New York Times article has more examples [2]. So there is a non-zero chance that you and I might find ourselves in similar situation of denial, and we shouldn't be too quick to judge. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis#Contrarian_scientific_views_and_HIV/AIDS_denial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis#Contrarian_scienti... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/weekinreview/28johnson.html https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/weekinreview/28johnson.ht...

bangelo 6y ago

Go Darwin, Go

RickJWagner 6y ago

It's a shame that even pandemic diseases have to be politicized.

djsumdog 6y ago

So it turns out this post is likely complete disinformation and made up. This nurse likely hasn't treated very many dying patients. Wired did a followup: https://www.wired.com/story/are-covid-patients-gasping-it-isnt-real-as-they-die/ https://www.wired.com/story/are-covid-patients-gasping-it-is...