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S.Peelman on 31 March 2020
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RolStoppable said:
S.Peelman said:

I'm with you on that part.

That's actually quite annoying and is unnecessary fear-mongering. Here in the Netherlands there was this one guy, 39 or something, who was all over the news because he was on a ventilator while "he had always been so healthy". Meanwhile those 99.99% of the other people of his age that get off with just a mild cough are nowhere to be seen. The point is there's always outliers, the guy just had bad luck (or has an health issue he doesn't know about).

I've only been aware of that young German who returned home from his ski vacation in Austria and was put on a ventilator. Then they mentioned his age (55) and I facepalmed.

The news reporting really sucks. Almost always it's about total number of infections, increase to the day before, then number of deaths and increase to the day before. Given how many people are sitting at home these days, a ton of them is going to watch news on TV daily. When you get bombarded with that stuff all the time while important numbers keep getting omitted, then it's no surprise that more and more people are getting paranoid and buying up toilet paper, flour and whatever else seems necessary for survival.

Important numbers are how many of the infected have only mild or moderate symptoms and don't need to be hospitalized. If people got told every day that more than 90% of the infected are getting away easily, then more people would keep a cool head. But I guess it's easier to make people stay inside when you warp reality and instill a little fear.

Exactly, and the actual information is, here at least, readily available. The government publishes a document each day with updated numbers on infected, hospitalized, ICU needs and death each day, even broken down by gender, age, prior sickness, area of residence and whatever. Everything except ‘cured’ people, they don’t track that. Looking through this document really puts things into perspective, to not take the daily numbers from the media at face value. Then you’ll also see that those deaths that were reported this morning didn’t all happen yesterday but are rather more spread out over a number of past days.

Our media seems to have gotten a bit of mild critique about that a few days ago though, it seems they are wording things more carefully now.