ThirdOfFive |
06-30-2022 09:25 AM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by MartinSE
(Post 2111586)
6 million dead, nothing to worry about at all... the misinformation here is stunning.
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Misinformation? Or personal experience and observation followed by a theory?
As Mark Twain so astutely observed, there are three kinds of untruths: "Lies, dammned lies and statistics". There is no point in unearthing all those horses beaten to death months and months ago: dying OF COVID vs. dying WITH COVID, methods of data collection that were questionable, efficacy of masks, etc. etc. But human nature is--well--human nature. We will believe the numbers that most closely jive with how WE perceive something, all too often neglecting accuracy of numbers in favor of personal validation. Some take the high estimates as gospel. Others, not so much.
The problem (and Twain's observation) comes into play when this-or-that agency has a vested interest in the believability, or not, of the numbers in question. Elected officials and experts are no more or less human than the rest of us, and there were a lot of butts on the line as this whole COVID thing played out. If you have the power to do so, the natural thing is to try to protect your own butt, and the more powerful you are, the bigger the butt you might decide to protect.
For my part, my antenna goes up whenever a situation devolves into "don't believe what you see, believe what we tell you". People tend to gravitate toward like-minded people. In the time since the pandemic first hit, my wife and I have known many people with COVID; every family member except one, many friends and acquaintances, and of course each other. There's no way of knowing the exact number but I'd say in the neighborhood of 75 to 100, if not more. Out of that number we've known precisely ONE person who has died from it (morbidly obese, hospitalized with a positive COVID diagnosis who died in hospital from a heart attack) and ONE other hospitalization (a woman in her 60s who was hospitalized at the time she caught it because of an infection in a replaced knee joint) and who recovered from both. For the most part, the people we know and associate with have life styles similar to ours, and almost to a person, COVID was merely an inconvenience, not a perceived death sentence.
Live right. Think positive. Don't give in to fear.
You'll be fine.
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