Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

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Hmm, this is bad. A ton of people from NYC / Brooklyn also commute back to the east end of Long Island for weekends so this has a potential to spread pretty quickly.

I don't keep up with the news at all but recently I started reading some articles from major news outlets just for more info about this virus. It's mind boggling at how different each channel's reporting is (I'm in the US).

I was at the store this morning and they had a TV playing. One channel down played it like it's nothing and it's even "technically" less potent than the regular flu because they compared yearly flu deaths to covid-19's deaths and played it off like "we're no where near the number of deaths that the flu has killed this year!" and then all of the surrounding anchors all agreed with the spokesperson they had on, etc.

Others make it out to be 1 notch away from an apocalyptic event.

So I guess this is really what "fake news" is? I don't get it. You can get a life time of prison for ordering someone to kill someone else but somehow it's ok to potentially gamble with the entire human population by not giving accurate information about a virus that's killing people.

I just saw a virologist give out the flu argument in addition to presenting the naive mortality rate and making an intentional arithmetic mistake (100-3.5=97, perhaps 96.5 does not feel such a big number anymore).

I would recommend to study this site https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ if you want to be more informed.

Rounding up .5 is considered proper form.

I agree. If you only have two significant digits to work with, pretending to have more precision is a different kind of dishonesty.

100 - (3.5 +/- epsilon) is 96.5 +/- epsilon.

You seem to have made up your mind about which news channel was correctly reporting. Why do you think your opinion and that of many others conflicts with the WHO and CDC?

To me it feels like the experts (WHO/CDC) are 'downplaying' while nonexperts (internet commenters who read a few articles) are doing the opposite.

I haven't made up my mind because most media outlets have conflicting information. That was why I posted the comment.

I mean, it doesn't help when you hear stories like the one posted on Reddit too. Of course it makes you think things like "why wouldn't they test him? Is it because they want to keep the registered cases down or is it because there's not enough tests to go around or maybe it's because the tests aren't accurate?".

These are questions I have as someone who isn't working at the CDC and I'm sure other regular citizens are thinking the same. I thought the media's responsibility was to take information from experts and present that information without bias to people who are not experts in the matter.

>I thought the media's responsibility was to take information from experts and present that information without bias to people who are not experts in the matter.

The media's job is to take attention from people who are not experts in the matter and present it to advertisers.

Media which doesn’t have advertisers to care about, what’s their job?

If not advertisers, there's someone else giving them money. Everyone's job, media or not, is to appease the person who can decide they receive more or no more money.

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