Your thoughts regarding the media coverage?
I skim-read multiple news aggregators daily, and for weeks now, every single day, 75% or more of the news is specifically about Covid-19.
By comparison, it is worth reminding younger readers that we didn't even know about the Spanish Flu until ~30 years ago. During WWI, we (humans) suffered the deadliest pandemic of the modern era, and it took 60-70 years before anyone even noticed.
If you didn't grow up before the Spanish Flu became common knowledge, that may be a hard thing to grasp ... but during the late-80s and into the '90s, there was this slow, years-long trickle of news from medical researchers, historians and (FFS) archeologists (?!!?) about how there might actually have been a massive global pandemic during WWI that no one knew about.
Today in Wikipedia, there is just one little tidbit about how various things like (intentional) under-reporting and co-mingling of flu deaths with war casualties, led to it being nicknamed "the forgotten pandemic" ... which doesn't really capture that sense of "Holy Fuck"-ness when you discover that up to 100 million people died of the flu one year, and no one even noticed.
Okay ... at any rate .... you get my point. In 1919, the news intentionally under-reported it worldwide (except in Spain ... hence the name), in part to help prevent panic.
Today, the news media coverage is just incredible. Nothing on Earth happens any more, except Covid-19. A few thousand people die (I'm sorry, but yeah, more people die in car accidents), and the Media loses its mind.
OTOH, honestly, it's mostly been pretty good, accurate, up-to-the-second coverage (as best I can tell), really driving home the message of "we know it sounds lame, but wash your hands, dammit ... a lot", and etc.
So ... thoughts? This constant in-your-face media coverage ... good or bad? How much is media causing the panic vs just reporting on it?
There is not a single true number for the fatality rate because the denominator is tricky. What counts as recovered? If you mean, how many who were hospitalized with pneumonia recovered, then you will get a different answer than in a country where they tested everyone and you count everyone who tested positive.
Recovery rate will also vary with demographics and available medical care. It's not a stable fact about the disease.
Yep, not ideal. I think that's all true, but on the other hand, common understanding is moving pretty rapidly, at least here in California. It's a little late, unfortunately.
They did the same math on the Diamond Princess after the required 17 days passed, and determined the death rate is 0.5%-1% depending on demographics.
The problem with your math is you are looking at known recoveries. There are so many unknown recoveries, because of a lack of testing. If you do the math on South Korea, which has the largest number of tests per capita you will realize the death rate is very similar to what happened on the Diamond Princess.
Another thing to consider is that the 1% mortality rate out of S.Korea seems to be a best case scenario too, as they got things under control very quickly and their healthcare system was not overwhelmed as a result. Italy, on the other hand, got forced into triaging Covid patients and has almost a 10% mortality rate as a result. And where the rest of the world is going to land after this all shakes out is anybody's guess. :(
Source:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
Are you in Afghanistan for deployment?
I mean this very non-agressively: this is simply not true. Other news does get reported, it even gets frontpage. But it doesn't get the prime front page real estate so it jumps out less.
And that's part of the issue we're dealing with: covid19 is on people's mind so subconsciously your eye is going to focus on that bit of the news more than the rest. This seems to be a kind of deeply rooted characteristic for a lot of people, in times of big uncertainty and/or crisis we want relief from the news and also hunger for more at the same time.
The online media, in turn, is dependent on tapping into these subconscious desires for survival. If you want advertisements and pageviews you need to report the news people are looking for, and that means covid19 currently. But this has more or less been a thing since the advent of the 24 hour news cycle, even before the online presence was as large as it is now.
Of course this creates an effect of making the subject feel more urgent and all-encompassing, because otherwise why would it be in the news right? So a feedback loop emerges where people go to the news for information about covid19, get a lot, and then keep coming back in case there's more.
It is a kind of perverse, self-reinforcing system, but it's not even really a deliberate construction or a lack of desire to do better that makes it so. It's kind of just the ways thing are, and if the media doesn't play along it risks getting sidelined and possibly going out of business.
Are you saying I'm biased? the readers notice it more? Or that the media presents it disproportionately, to draw in readers?
Because, for my part, this is not subconscious bias. I am literally counting the articles. Today on my primary news aggregator, the count is 12 out of 64 articles whose titles do not explicitly refer to the coronavirus, covid-19, pandemic, quarantine, etc. So ... 82% == Covid-19, 18% == Everything Else.
The latter two, it's a combination of both.
I don't know which news aggregator you use, but usually aggregators will push the stories that get the most views, so they're less of an adequate representation of what news gets reported and more of what news gets promoted and what gets read. A more qualitative study would be to take the titles from news feeds of various news sources and count the mentions in there, possibly even to use a more sophisticated text parsing system to see which articles are about the virus itself and which simply mention it.
Is the coverage not more about the people who will soon die, who just haven't done so yet? We can see the trends, and know that at our current best guess, ~1% of the people who get it will die, and that will happen in ~17 days from infection. More people will die if the healthcare system is overwhelmed. If you look at the curves, that quickly leads to a very large number. It makes complete sense to me that this would dominate the news.
[I made a tool over the weekend to try and put relative geographies into perspective, in case you are interested.]
Super cool tool! Very fun to compare with, it seems the exponential rise is inevitable, but the plateau is less clear.
I am curious why Japan hasn't seem to grow exponentially nearly at all.
One of the problems with using this data is that you have no control over e.g. testing rates. Clearly, at the very least, you can only increase by as many tests are are performed. I'm going to expand it later today to look also at deaths / recovered / current cases, and fix a few bugs. If you had any things you'd be interested in looking at, feel free to let me know!
If you switch to log view, Japan does appear to be roughly exponential. It just has a much lower growth factor than... basically every other country I can think of. Even South Korea has that same high growth rate until it plateaus.
Edit: Our World In Data has a (very) similar visualisation here.
Absolutely. And as I said, by and large, the reporting I've seen has been very good. Media is certainly handling it better than certain Federal Govts who shall remain nameless.
I think this is really bold (and incorrect) claim.
By any historical accounts I found, there was tons of media coverage at the time the flu happened about the flu; there were media outlets giving advice to stay home (social distancing), the economy had issues, statisticians adjusted the life expectancy (in some cases by as much as 12 years, like the US), entire health-related companies made millions of dollars, such as Vick's, whose yearly intake more than tripled the first year of the flu. People knew about the flu as it happened. What makes you think that people didn't know the flu was a thing?
I may be exaggerating (a bit).
I'm not saying no one knew there was a flu ... I'm saying no one knew that it was a devastating global pandemic. To the vast majority of people, it was just another flu.
It's anecdotal, but for the first 20-25 years of my life, I swear, No One had ever heard of the Spanish Flu.
They literally named it the Spanish Flu because Spain was the only country that didn't repress news about it, and so everyone thought there was an especially bad flu that only hit Spain.
My instinct is to be mad at "the media" but FFS, it's doing fine? It reports on the reasonable measures to be taken, which match what experts seem to say, it tells people to take measures but not to panic. Even twitter is mostly fine. A lot of good info on twitter. I'm not saying there aren't some crazy conspiracy sites out there posting insanely stupid shit, but overall... it's fine.
Relevant article on Columbia Journalism Review today: The everything story
It can be pretty hit or miss, honestly, and I have an example. I was trying to find some data on the claim that patients will have diminshed lung function after recovering from the disease. Here's an example. Follow this link, and click through to this link. The trail went cold, until I got lucky with the search terms and found an observational study just trying to find some sort of common symptoms to use for diagnosis in the absence of viral testing. I've seen people claiming this issue as well, and it's a known effect of pneumonia, so it's not impossible, just, as far as we know, rare for viral respiratory infections.
I went down this rabbit hole after somebody seemed panicked in my university's subreddit, and I became determined to understand where a rumor that "some patients will suffer diminished lung function" as a result of this virus came from. With "some" seeming to sound like a significant amount, and the poster in question mentioning it would be 17% of ICU patients, which is still a very small amount.
The main thing I'll say is the truth is out there, but more, now than ever, you have to pay close attention and see where the news media is oversimplifying or sensationalizing this situation. I don't know what the news really looks like (I don't follow any specific publications), but these are the issues for the corona-related articles I've read. The media coverage of this is about as bad as any science journalism, to be completely honest. The best site I've seen so far that is not a medical publication is stat, as even their publishing of opinion is really informative. It's not too hard to arm yourself with information, provided you have the time (school and work closed, and I'm being fully paid for work, I have time in spades), especially considering places like PubMed are publishing all sars-cov-2 publications for free in the public interest.