On big subs, like worldnews.
Like, a lot of people quoting one CDC report on IFR that presented COVID as less dangerous, without actually knowing the difference between CFR and IFR. Despite the fact that the numbers (in the report) are still very fucking high.
I hear more and more people saying that countries overreport deaths, based on some anecdotal evidence (one time a bike crash was reported as a COVID death), which is complete bullshit, of course, easily checked by looking at excess deaths.
Absolutely braindead comparisons to seasonal flu, as if seasonal flu isn't
- less dangerous
- a huge fucking problem and a cause of millions of deaths
Chapos, COVID is the most deadly airborne virus pandemic since spanish flu, and the most deadly virus since HIV/AIDS.
Oh yeah, I say "since HIV/AIDS", but HIV/AIDS pandemic is still happening. Literally millions of people die. We haven't cured it. Who said that we'll cure this one?
Also, you cant really compare coronavirus to HIV, but if we look at annual deaths, then HIV was at its peak at ~1.9 million deaths (in 2005, I think). Compare that to COVID. This is just the first 7-8 months of the pandemic and we already have more than a million deaths! That is, despite the fact that:
- Deaths are seriously underreported (I'm talking 30-50% just in the US. Imagine fucking Brasil. Russia? In Russia its way worse).
- Coronoviruses are seasonal and they peak at winter
- The whole world went into lockdown for months.
Holy shit, I fucking can't.
I've noticed that trend starting on /r/COVID19, actually, right down to the bike crashes deaths reported as covid 19. Now it's gone, so I figure it comes in waves. And it's not just reddit bots or whatever, tenured professors like John Ioannidis have been pushing hard the idea that lockdowns were an unnecessary and even harmful precaution. There were a bunch of preprints that calculated the real R0 to something insane like 30 so the real IFR was 0.01% that were doing the rounds and getting massive upvotes. I imagine all that stuff eventually circled back to the CDC itself and now /r/coronavirus is peddling old misinfo. What follows I guess is T-cell immunity being much more prevalent that anyone imagined, which is probably true enough but not as prevalent as some people will claim it is.
I don't even think it's that hard to end up believing that kind of stuff though. Like I had to fight against it myself, there's real comfort imagining that this stuff is way overblown.