One of my biggest gripes with this whole situation is that I believe that if authorities treated us like adults, the ambiguity (COVID doesn’t exist vs Very Serious People culture war) would be significantly mitigated.
What do I mean? I will use Ontario as a example.
On September 30th they came up with a modelling update.
Skipping to slide 9, I can infer very easily the following:
If we get to 150 COVID-19 patients hospitalized in the ICU, it starts becoming problematic for the health system in the province. If we get to 350, it starts breaking down the health system currently in place.
As of today 77 people in the province are hospitalized in the ICU. I can also see that the number of COVID-19 ICU patients in August were between 11-30, in September from 12-35, and in October from 36-82.
Why is it that I had to do some decent Googling to find this information and come up with this conclusion? Why aren’t government officials and the media telling us this information daily, so we as a population are aware that we are halfway in ICU hospitalizations for this to start becoming a problem, and thus we can personally adjust our behavior accordingly?
Authorities seem to think the masses are stupid, but then fail to do the bare minimum to educate them on the metrics that matter.
The sad thing is people are definitely smart enough to realize that just raw case numbers don’t matter. But then they don’t take the additional, and granted fairly tedious step, of figuring out which numbers do matter(hospitalization rates, positive test rates, death numbers, ICU usage rate in their area).
Or maybe it’s pure red tribe blue tribe on a global scale(or rather with variations in different countries) and I’m being naive and hopeful.
I’ve found this to be much worse than just what you’re claiming. Like how ‘most people claim to be above average’, I’ve noticed a lot of people claiming that most other people are stupid.
That’s a really weird situation – a significant proportion of people think that almost everyone else can’t handle hard truths (about whatever).
Or maybe it’s pure red tribe blue tribe on a global scale …
I think this is true, but in a weird ‘fractal’ number of dimensions beyond the obvious political coalitions. It’s more like many-dimensional culture war than pure { red tribe / blue tribe } conflict, at least based on my own experience and personal observations.
One of my biggest gripes with this whole situation is that I believe that if authorities treated us like adults, the ambiguity (COVID doesn’t exist vs Very Serious People culture war) would be significantly mitigated.
What do I mean? I will use Ontario as a example.
On September 30th they came up with a modelling update.
https://files.ontario.ca/moh-fall-prep-modelling-deck-en-2020-09-30.pdf
Skipping to slide 9, I can infer very easily the following:
If we get to 150 COVID-19 patients hospitalized in the ICU, it starts becoming problematic for the health system in the province. If we get to 350, it starts breaking down the health system currently in place.
OK. Seems simple enough, where are we now?
https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data
As of today 77 people in the province are hospitalized in the ICU. I can also see that the number of COVID-19 ICU patients in August were between 11-30, in September from 12-35, and in October from 36-82.
Why is it that I had to do some decent Googling to find this information and come up with this conclusion? Why aren’t government officials and the media telling us this information daily, so we as a population are aware that we are halfway in ICU hospitalizations for this to start becoming a problem, and thus we can personally adjust our behavior accordingly?
Authorities seem to think the masses are stupid, but then fail to do the bare minimum to educate them on the metrics that matter.
The sad thing is people are definitely smart enough to realize that just raw case numbers don’t matter. But then they don’t take the additional, and granted fairly tedious step, of figuring out which numbers do matter(hospitalization rates, positive test rates, death numbers, ICU usage rate in their area).
Or maybe it’s pure red tribe blue tribe on a global scale(or rather with variations in different countries) and I’m being naive and hopeful.
I’ve found this to be much worse than just what you’re claiming. Like how ‘most people claim to be above average’, I’ve noticed a lot of people claiming that most other people are stupid.
That’s a really weird situation – a significant proportion of people think that almost everyone else can’t handle hard truths (about whatever).
I think this is true, but in a weird ‘fractal’ number of dimensions beyond the obvious political coalitions. It’s more like many-dimensional culture war than pure { red tribe / blue tribe } conflict, at least based on my own experience and personal observations.