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Rip Ride Rockit > The American Healthcare System

Jeff said:

To be fair, there was no mention of a number or percentage, and the guy interviewed didn't use the word "clog," but he heard stuff from other people.

A little critical thinking is in order when local TV is reporting something. This is not news.

Critical thinking when referencing local news, talking heads on national news. This isn't the first time I've heard or read about needing to filter out, and clean up information received from news networks. Do you believe that the American public at large is capable of real critical thinking?

How much of the fallout of the current issues in the world (not restricted to covid) can be attributed to governments, to media networks, how much lies solely on the public themselves? I wouldn't say trust is a particularly strong suit in America currently. Trust lies at the root of the vast majority of the reasons for rejection of covid vaccinations, and you might argue that this is just some niche subset of the population living in the woods in a cave next to the bears, but it isn't. This is a sizeable chunk of the population.

Instead of continuing to beat a dead horse, and trying to make that dead horse drink the water, maybe the larger entities and organizations in this country should reassess the root cause of the current situation. More advertisements and more pressures are probably not going to convince the remaining people to get vaccinated.

As a quick sidenote, when reporting on any situation, if the news media was clear and unbiased would that mean that no matter what network I watched it would be the same exact story? Maybe one network might have an extra piece of the story because of a new source, but every network would be carrying the same exact message, if reporting was honest and accurate, correct?

Yes, the majority of Americans are are capable of critical thinking. The assumption that most people are stupid and that everyone is associated with one ideological extreme or another is part of the reason why the COVID crisis has drug on as long as it has.

Agreed, people are capable of critical thinking. That's why I try to refer to a subset of people as willfully ignorant, because I believe that they're making a deliberate choice, in part to avoid feeling uncomfortable about reality. I mean, we watched people cheer on a fascist autocrat, the antithesis of democracy, while waving an American flag. You have to turn off all reasoning to get there. In fact, the same people say out loud that intellectualizing anything makes you some kind of elitist snob, which is also willfully ignorant.

I imagine that there's blame to lay somewhere, but it's also because the world changed. Even I grew up in a time where there were three men on TV every night that you could reasonably trust were honest and true journalists, and local newspapers were well staffed with legions of trained and ethical journalists. Cable "news" first started to erode that and then the Internet completely broke it all.

That said, it also isn't hard to sniff out what's factual and valuable. You can't just throw your hands up and yell "but the media!" The first test is whether or not the news agency has true autonomy to report the facts. Because deregulation lifted ownership limits, many broadcast stations have the same owner, and you've seen the clips of editorials that use the same copy nationally to advance an agenda. That's not independent. But even for huge conglomerates, sometimes the news agencies take actions that prove their autonomy from their parent. Compare the disciplinary firings or demotions from CBS and NBC to the non-action of Fox News, for example.

Print journalism, even online, has the ability to be accountable to the public by opening itself as a public forum. This is one reason I admire the New York Times, because they've printed some bat**** crazy things from politicians, and they've taken heat for it. Their comment engine moderation does not exclude unpopular opinions.

Fundamentally, good journalism is about facts though, and it's not hard to see that without deep analysis. If something is reported, how has it been verified? What backs up the facts? Have the facts been quantified, measured or validated in context? Does the headline support the facts or color their meaning? In the case of government or fiscal power, does it act as a monitor or advocate? You can generally answer all of these questions with anything that you read.

For example, the Vermont article says people are "clogging" ER's with people looking for PCR Covid tests. If that is the fact, the 227 words do not verify it or back it up. There is one expert quoted, and at no time does he quantify the problem, in terms of the number of people seeking the tests or the impact on other patients. All he does is say that it's a distraction, which itself is not news. A second source, without attribution, is said to have heard "similar stories," again, without context or quantifying the problem. Are ER's being "clogged up?" You can't verify that, no. (Also, my ex-wife works in a hospital in that town, coincidentally, and she calls BS on this story.) I would call out the author's experience, only two years, as a problem as well, but you only get better at the job if you have a strong mentoring editor, and clearly she does not.

There was a missed opportunity there. You could have had a story that said, "Hospitals say avoid ER's for non-emergency testing." Then you could have talked to a number of hospitals to get quotes from their administrators who said the same thing. That would actually serve the public and it would be factually accurate.

If you think that NBC report is an example of poor journalism... Imagine the news consumption of a scared asymptomatic person who decided to take a covid test..then clog an emergency room.

Two years of the media's best inviting public health officials on the air, asking leading hypotheticals, then salivating at the potential panic caused...

We could have had an educated populace without unjust "apathy AND panic" had they focused on the individual risk profiles. It isn't impossible to see a world where measured and moderate respect for Covid "could have been."

Instead, some media outlets today will report "1500 dead today" without explaining the breakdown of who that is... And the next news consumer is warming up her car to go to the emergency room.

I agree we have a journalism problem in this country. However, I'm not at all convinced that this Vermont article is a decent example to encompass the real problem.

On a positive note, people are tuning out anyhow...

Various metrics illustrate the dwindling popularity of news content.
Cable news networks were the main form of evening entertainment for millions of Americans last year. In 2021, weekday prime-time viewership dropped 38% at CNN, 34% at Fox News Channel and 25% at MSNBC, according to the Nielsen company.

The decline was less steep but still significant at broadcast television evening newscasts: 12% at ABC’s “World News Tonight” and the “CBS Evening News;” 14% at NBC’s “Nightly News,” Nielsen said.

To be fair, majority last year were sitting at home and just waiting for the latest news update, this year many of them have adopted the whatever attitudes that some of us here had last year. Pandemic isn’t new and exciting anymore, so those numbers would have dropped.

must be a tough existence if tv news is your nightly entertainment form, but there lies the problem, news is not supposed to be entertainment.

I agree that the media is either overly dramatic (CNN/MSNBC) or downplaying (FOX) this to score ratings points. But, let's not forget that the number of unvaccinated people, largely causing the problems in the hospitals, can directly be tied back to Trump's strategy on this from the beginning. He molded the "anti" sentiment that is, to this day, still killing people.

Yes, he is now speaking (almost apologetically) for vaccines, but the damage has been done.

Do I think Trump taking a "pro" position from the beginning would have caused EVERYONE to go out and get vaccinated? Of course not. But, there is no question about his influence and I think it would have moved the needle considerably.

Check this out if you're into data porn:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/28/us/covid-deaths.html...u8M0dUOEM6

The tldr is that younger white people are seeing the biggest rise in Covid death among all causes, in part because they seem to have the largest contingency of skeptics.

Just a quick peak at Ohio tells the tale of two states. The red peaks show increases in death rates since the vax became available. NE Ohio (including CLE) has faired well, while Southern Ohio has created its own mountain range of death, joining WV (yikes) and Eastern KY.

I remember stopping at a Bob Evans on the Ohio/West Virginia Border and walking in with my in-laws...all of us in masks. We were the only people in the place with masks. We could not have received dirtier looks if we had walked in with shirts that said, "Trump is the Devil".

Jeff said:

The tldr is that younger white people are seeing the biggest rise in Covid death among all causes, in part because they seem to have the largest contingency of skeptics.

But among young people, white people still have the lowest percentage of COVID related deaths as a share of all deaths when compared to hispanics, blacks and asians (as the data does).

So I guess it's mostly in how you choose to present/interpret the data. I feel like your TLDR is different than mine would have been.

The red/green mountain peak date rate after vax availability maps don't look anything like I'd have drawn them if I was asked to do it based on the general narrative. That's a surprise.

The vax/death chart is pretty revealing too. The difference between somewhere like Maine with a >75% vax rate and Louisiana with a 50% rate is ~5 deaths per month per 100,000 people. Which surprised me, again based on general narrative.

There's enough moving parts that anything beyond "more caution tends to save more lives" feels like...I dunno, grey area or something.

I thought the virus was racially biased toward killing black people? But now it’s going after young white people?

Nevermind, Gonch beat me to it.

I'm not choosing an interpretation... the cohort with the largest delta before and after universal vaccine availability is younger white people. Let's not be ridiculous about who the virus is "choosing," you know that's not what's going on. The article calls it out in plain terms: people of color had less access early on, but now death rates are driven more by choices.

I wonder what the motivation might be to suddenly discuss the "Change in RATES" of increased Covid deaths? It doesn't seem like a particularly pertinent question in need of answering. It certainly doesn't seem practical and helpful. And most of all it is confusing and downright conflating…

How about they (New York Times) give us the "risk" of dying for Covid? Does it get any more simple and helpful than this? How about they break it down by age?

For example, what is the statistical chance a 19-year-old healthy woman dies from Covid? What if she is vaccinated? How does this change her risk profile?

How does the risk of dying from Covid compare to other typical activities/realities for a 19-year-old woman? For example, compare Covid death risk to driving a car, suicide, heart disease, cancer, riding a rollercoaster, scuba diving, rock climbing, etc.

Maybe tell us all the top causes for the deaths of 19-year-old women and SHOW us where Covid ranks on that list.

How does a typical 19-year-old asymptomatic woman know whether to panic and clog a hospital emergency room…or just stay home… if she doesn't know her relative risk factor of dying from Covid once she tests positive?

Why are the answers to these questions almost impossible to find 2 years into the pandemic?

These types of questions are much more practical from a traditional journalistic viewpoint. Yet when I try to Google "risks of a 19-year-old woman dying from Covid,"...all I get are pages of articles dedicated to fearmongering...with nary a hint of the practical relative "risks" Covid presents for a healthy 19-year-old woman.

If the journalists were actually trying to hide this type of data…they couldn’t do much better job of it…

We're two years in, and we STILL have to extrapolate our own data from various sources and run our own mathematical calculations to determine the actual risk for ourselves and our families...precisely because journalists like those at the New York Times won't provide concise and straightforward data to show the relative risk of Covid versus other routine activities of daily living.

Earlier I said...

I agree we have a journalism problem in this country. However, I'm not at all convinced that this Vermont article is a decent example to encompass the real problem.

I believe this article from the New York Times is a much better example of the "problem." Journalists are always trying to phrase Covid data in the most politically divisive means possible...all the while hiding, or simply failing to report on helpful information needed to quickly and easily access personal risk...

Why are the answers to these questions almost impossible to find 2 years into the pandemic?

I would guess there are far too many unknowns as it evolves, does anyone here have those answers?

Also, stop using google, too many ad driven and paid results. Remove google from your life as much as possible ;)

Aamilj said:

I believe this article from the New York Times is a much better example of the "problem." Journalists are always trying to phrase Covid data in the most politically divisive means possible...all the while hiding, or simply failing to report on helpful information needed to quickly and easily access personal risk...

Wrong. This piece isn't editorializing anything. There isn't an agenda. You need to warm up to the fact that inequality in healthcare access isn't political, it's a problem. That people make vaccination political is news, because it's contributing to the duration of the pandemic.

Personal risk is still not well understood with omicron, and that's exactly how it's being reported. You've been harping on this nonsense for two years that if something isn't known, or new information changes the guidance, that the experts are useless or there's some agenda.

Are you kidding? The entire conclusion of that piece is editorialized narrative. Their own charts show that even AFTER vaccination from middle aged to the young…the chance (for deaths) in blacks is actually worse than in whites.

I wonder why they decided to use “rate of change” in deaths rather than the more precise “rate of death.” The fact black people are at a greater risk of dying from this virus from middle age on down might be a helpful stat. New York Times buried that helpfulness to inform us that white people’s “rate of change” has a steeper curve.

The average reader wouldn’t know that without interpreting the charts themselves though.

But as stated earlier…the real editorial decision is made on what to cover and what to ignore.

Two years in and a 19-year-old woman can’t discern her relative chance of dying from Covid…but she can go to the New York Times and read a synopses about the “rate of change” broken down by race.

does anyone here have those answers?

No one has these answers precisely because the media has failed us miserably for two years. And as this New York Times piece shows…they aren’t interested in getting us “helpful” information any time soon.

I wonder how Omicron has decreased my relative chances of dying from Covid versus the prior variants?

Too bad I’ll NEVER know unless I piece my own data sets together and do the math myself. The New York Times is too busy turning a virus into identity politics…

So what you're really complaining about is newsworthiness, and because you don't agree, it's wrong. ✅

Yes… As you did for the Vermont article. The article whose premise was to warn the asymptomatic public to quit clogging emergency rooms.

By all means we can all individually choose which news sources to trust, etc. If the New York Times is your “go-to”…have at it.

My purpose in participating in this line of discussion is to demonstrate that no one can even find the relative risk of death for this virus…two years in…from ANY source…I can find.

Indeed, in my opinion, “relative risk of dying” is the most important FACT to know in a viral pandemic. Or should I say the most “newsworthy” fact.

Oh…and it isn’t “wrong” for the New York Times to write an article on the “rate of change”… It is worthless in my opinion…but not “wrong.”

What was “wrong” was when you said…

This piece isn't editorializing anything.

You need to go to school.

Relative risk of death isn't something that can be easily calculated because there are too many risk factors. There is no "fact" there to report. The New York Times doesn't know your risk profile, so you'll have to live with getting vaccinated, wearing a mask and appropriate social distance.