> A story from your barber is not only anecdotal, it is quite possibly based on misunderstanding - especially if the barber is inclined to distrust Government.

> A story from your barber is not only anecdotal, it is quite possibly based on misunderstanding - especially if the barber is inclined to distrust Government. My barber is a young, apolitical Latina. And please explain to me how the family "misunderstood" a death certificate saying she died of COVID, contacted the hospital, the hospital looked into it, and agreed it was an error and fixed it... This is a straightforward chain of events. > To really estimate Covid fatalities it is not enough to count reported Covid deaths, you also need to look at other numbers - specifically "excess mortality": How many people have died in the last 2 years compared to in "normal" years? How do you separate out the vastly increased number of deaths from diseases of despair like addiction? What about people like my mother-in-law, who went into cardiac arrest hours after her second shot due to a rare adverse event? She was in the midst of a fever. (The hospital, understandably overwhelmed by covid cases, inadvertently forgot to report her death to VAERS, despite the team of cardiologists recommending they do so.) Every single hospital in the US has a huge financial incentive to test for covid, which was deliberate to prevent the undercounting you are talking about. It's clear that the incentives are biased towards over counting, with the CDC admitting a few days ago that they are working on getting separate numbers for "hospitalized for covid/hospitalized with covid". > arguing that the "mass media" is deliberately exaggerating the danger is plain disinformation and wishful thinking. Mass media has absolutely obfuscated the stratification of risk by age. This indirectly results in most members of the public dramatically overestimating their personal risk. This is obvious, but also documented quantitatively by Gallup. It's not a small overestimation either, but orders of magnitude. You may be one of these people for all I know. Someone is responsible for the public being grossly misinformed on this topic. I think it's the media combined with CDC, but perhaps you have other ideas. From Gallup: https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimates-covid-hospitalization-risk.aspx https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat... "Previous Gallup research has found that the American public has a poor understanding of the true risks associated with the COVID-19 pandemic and that misperceptions vary by political party. In December 2020, through the Franklin Templeton-Gallup Economics of Recovery Study, we asked 5,000 U.S. adults: "As far as you know, what percentage of people who have been infected by the coronavirus needed to be hospitalized?" Only 18% provided the correct answer, which at that time was between 1% and 5%, and a higher percentage of Republicans (26%) gave the correct response than did Democrats (just 10%). Likewise, experimental research from Gallup and Franklin Templeton found that providing people information about high vaccine efficacy led to greater acceptance of the vaccine."