Item — HN Reader

> Well imagine all of your news sources downplay covid and even when you get it yourself it's not as bad as the hysteria led you to believe - just some mild flulike symptoms and loss of smell and taste. You start to mistrust all of the zealots...

If you'd rather believe Fox News than scientists who are telling you this is much worse than the flu, then while you might not be a bad person, you've earned my mistrust.

You can drop your mask if you want, but you can't really blame the OP for not trusting you.

1 comments

> If you'd rather believe Fox News than scientists who are telling you this is much worse than the flu...

Scientists say it is much worse than the flu. For the vast majority who actually experience the disease, it is not much worse than the flu. Thus, people start to mistrust the science because there's a disparity between the statistics on paper and what people actually experience in reality. I think most people understand now that covid is basically like the flu 99% of the time, and much worse than the flu for a tiny subset (and for the most part, the tiny subset can self-identify).

> Scientists say it is much worse than the flu. For the vast majority who actually experience the disease, it is not much worse than the flu. Thus, people start to mistrust the science ...

You're probably right: it's hard to understand the difference between statistical evidence and anecdotes. On the other hand, a lot of other people who don't experience COVID still seem to be able to separate their own lack of statistical knowledge from the ability to trust scientists. I think these mask deniers are mistrusting scientists for some other reason.

I dunno. It's worse than flu for more than 1%, about 1% die from it. A much larger proportion need to be hospitalized than from flu in a normal flu season.

Yes, you are right, it would have to be higher than 1%, but I think it would still be a minority. I searched around a bit, but it was super hard to find hard numbers. The closest I found was this[0] which seems to suggest that hospitalization rate of covid positive whites (including asians) is around 1%, but closer to 3-4% for other groups like blacks and latinos. I could be reading the charts wrong though.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidvi...