Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

wicked · Mar 23, 2021

The Big Ragu said: ↑

I think Trump even having been president was indicative of the same stupidity that had people behaving in ways that has made (and continues to make) the pandemic much worse than it needed to be. In all ways. More people sick, more dead and making it economically worse than it needed to be.
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I agree. We apparently are not creatures of reason. The folks who thought “how bad could it be?” when they pulled that lever in 2016 are often very self-centered — to some degree we all should be — without much regard for the following results.

Neutral Corner · Mar 23, 2021

What blows my mind is that the same Magats who were all about reaching Herd immunity by letting seventy percent of the population catch Covid now refuse to reach it by means of a vaccine.

Regan MacNeil · Mar 23, 2021

It’s been 28 hours and the only symptom is the sore arm.

Jerry-atric · Mar 23, 2021

Regan MacNeil said: ↑

It’s been 28 hours and the only symptom is the sore arm.
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And that is likely from “burping the worm,” my friend!

I jest!

Gutter · Mar 23, 2021

Neutral Corner said: ↑

What blows my mind is that the same Magats who were all about reaching Herd immunity by letting seventy percent of the population catch Covid now refuse to reach it by means of a vaccine.
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The same ones who said, "I'm not gonna live mah life in fear," are the ones who are fearful about not knowing what's in the vaccine ... all while they down another case of Busch Latte and deep-fried onion rings.

SFIND · Mar 23, 2021

You’re Not Fully Vaccinated the Day of Your Last Dose

Jerry-atric · Mar 23, 2021

SFIND said: ↑

You’re Not Fully Vaccinated the Day of Your Last Dose
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People should continue to “shelter in place.”

Deskgrunt50 · Mar 23, 2021

SFIND said: ↑

You’re Not Fully Vaccinated the Day of Your Last Dose
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That seems like a lot of writing for “it takes two weeks after your second dose.”

Twirling Time · Mar 23, 2021

Deskgrunt50 said: ↑

That seems like a lot of writing for “it takes two weeks after your second dose.”
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More like "An editor assigned me a story and I have to feed the monster."

tapintoamerica · Mar 23, 2021

Deskgrunt50 said: ↑

That seems like a lot of writing for “it takes two weeks after your second dose.”
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It is very long, but it's worth a read because it does a good job of explaining how immunity works.
I thought the same thing about length -- get to the point, dammit -- and it should have been edited considerably so that more readers can actually find themselves getting to the good stuff.

TrooperBari · Mar 23, 2021

Dammit. I'm supposed to get my first BioNTech shot in four hours, and now this. The representative on the vaccine hotline says don't even show up. The people who are convinced the local government is pushing Sinovac out of political considerations (a.k.a. fear for their phoney-baloney jobs) will have a field day with this.
Hong Kong suspends Covid-19 vaccinations for single batch of BioNTech shots over defective packaging

Cosmo · Mar 24, 2021

From this morning's New York Times newsletter, re: COVID bad news bias:

Good morning. The U.S. media is offering a different picture of Covid-19 from science journals or the international media, a study finds.

News updates scrolling on the front of ABC studios in Times Square.John Lamparski/Getty Images
Is bad news the only kind?
Bruce Sacerdote, an economics professor at Dartmouth College, noticed something last year about the Covid-19 television coverage that he was watching on CNN and PBS. It almost always seemed negative, regardless of what was he seeing in the data or hearing from scientists he knew.

When Covid cases were rising in the U.S., the news coverage emphasized the increase. When cases were falling, the coverage instead focused on those places where cases were rising. And when vaccine research began showing positive results, the coverage downplayed it, as far as Sacerdote could tell.

But he was not sure whether his perception was correct. To check, he began working with two other researchers, building a database of Covid coverage from every major network, CNN, Fox News, Politico, The New York Times and hundreds of other sources, in the U.S. and overseas. The researchers then analyzed it with a social-science technique that classifies language as positive, neutral or negative.

The results showed that Sacerdote’s instinct had been right — and not just because the pandemic has been mostly a grim story.

The U.S. media is an outlier
The coverage by U.S. publications with a national audience has been much more negative than coverage by any other source that the researchers analyzed, including scientific journals, major international publications and regional U.S. media. “The most well-read U.S. media are outliers in terms of their negativity,” Molly Cook, a co-author of the study, told me.

About 87 percent of Covid coverage in national U.S. media last year was negative. The share was 51 percent in international media, 53 percent in U.S. regional media and 64 percent in scientific journals.

Notably, the coverage was negative in both U.S. media outlets with liberal audiences (like MSNBC) and those with conservative audiences (like Fox News).

By The New York Times | Sources: Bruce Sacerdote, Ranjan Sehgal and Molly Cook
Sacerdote is careful to emphasize that he does not think journalists usually report falsehoods. The issue is which facts they emphasize. Still, the new study — which the National Bureau of Economic Research has published as a working paper, titled, “Why is all Covid-19 news bad news?” — calls for some self-reflection from those of us in the media.

If we’re constantly telling a negative story, we are not giving our audience the most accurate portrait of reality. We are shading it. We are doing a good job telling you why Covid cases are rising in some places and how the vaccines are imperfect — but not such a good job explaining why cases are falling elsewhere or how the vaccines save lives. Perhaps most important, we are not being clear about which Covid developments are truly alarming.

As Ranjan Sehgal, another co-author, told me, “The media is painting a picture that is a little bit different from what the scientists are saying.”

Why the bad-news bias?
The researchers say they are not sure what explains their findings, but they do have a leading contender: The U.S. media is giving the audience what it wants.

When the researchers examined which stories were the most read or the most shared on Facebook, they tended to be the most negative stories. To put it another way, the stories that people choose to read skew even more negative than the stories that media organizations choose to publish. “Human beings, particularly consumers of major media, like negativity in their stories,” Sacerdote said. “We think the major media are responding to consumer demand.”

That idea is consistent with the patterns in the data, Sacerdote added: It makes sense that national publications have better instincts about reaching a large audience than, say, science journals. And overseas, some of the most influential English-language media organizations — like the BBC — have long received government funding, potentially making them less focused on consumer demand.

All of that sounds plausible to me, but I don’t think it is the full explanation. I have worked in media for nearly three decades, and I think you might be surprised by how little time journalists spend talking about audience size. We care about it, obviously, but most journalists I know care much more about other factors, like doing work that has an impact.

In the modern era of journalism — dating roughly to the Vietnam War and Watergate — we tend to equate impact with asking tough questions and exposing problems. There are some good reasons for that. We are inundated by politicians, business executives, movie stars and others trying to portray themselves in the best light. Our job is to cut through the self-promotion and find the truth. If we don’t tell you the bad news, you may never hear it.

Sometimes, though, our healthy skepticism can turn into reflexive cynicism, and we end up telling something less than the complete story. I am grateful to Sacerdote, Cook and Sehgal for doing to us journalists what we normally do to others — holding up a mirror to our work and giving us a chance to do better.
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Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

wicked Well-Known Member

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wicked Well-Known Member

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