I'll never forget how, in July-ish 2020 a (different) NYT reporter publicly admonished me on Twitter for suggesting that it her article was misinforming the public by arguing that COVID reinfections were improbable. I pushed back w/ evidence showing COVID reinfections were already taking place but that the CDC wasn't tracking on the data. She doubled-down. A few months later, I was proven right. She won some kind of journalism prize for her COVID stuff. Anywho, better late than never, NYT
And for the record, there's no real debate among reasonable experts: multiple COVID infections are bad. To the extent that there's *any* reasonable disagreement among experts it's over a very narrow range of extreme badness— from more likely to suffer permanent damage to vital organs (lungs, heart, kidneys, brain) more likely to end up dead. I wouldn't want anyone to get the impression that "you'll be perfectly fine" is part of the debate because it most definitely is not.
The great thing about being the self-appointed "paper of record" is that you get to write your own revisionist history that completely ignores the role your editors and reporters played in minimizing the threat of COVID— time, and time, and time, and time again
@DataDrivenMD The way mass media was so quick to declare reinfection "unlikely"/"rare" just goes to show how they were committed to minimizing/denial from the start & never actually cared about science.
As a layperson, knowing that the "novel coronavirus" was a *coronavirus* & that the common cold was also a coronavirus, it made more sense to assume reinfection was possible until proven otherwise, esp. when people explicitly compared it to cold/flu, which you can obviously get multiple times.
It really solidified that they have a capitalist bias and were more than willing to sacrifice us all for profit.
@Jeramee @ikuo1000 @DataDrivenMD
All we heard was, We have to get the economy back up & running. If the govt had given everyone a UBI & kept us at home, think how many would be alive now.
@Pomegracias @Jeramee @ikuo1000 @DataDrivenMD Which “us” would be kept at home? The vast majority of jobs can’t be done from home, and you or I staying at home depends on a lot of people going out to farm, prepare food, transport stuff, work in factories and power plants, etc. “We all” could never get to stay at home. But we all could have continued to get support (not just UBI) that was cut off when the COVID emergency was declared over.
@MisuseCase @Jeramee @ikuo1000
You’re right. My using the word “all” is a sign of my privilege.
But had I fleshed out my point, I’d’ve said, only the most essential of workers should’ve been needed and they should’ve been compensated generously & their health guarded much more zealously than it was. My point was that, as usual we privileged profits over people.
@Pomegracias @MisuseCase @ikuo1000
I didn't take "all" to mean 100% but as a more colloquial "as many as humanly possible". Most of the folks I talk to are lefty, and we all held that we should do as you said: protect those who must be out and not pretend the market would take care of it. But, to protect the essential workers, the rest of us needed to do our part too, which America stood against for the sake of corporate profits.
@Pomegracias @ikuo1000 @DataDrivenMD
When the Lt Gov of Texas said that we might have to sacrifice grandparents for corporate profits and people didn't demand his expulsion from office, that pretty much showed what a propagandized, brainwashed, and immoral society we've become.
@Jeramee @Pomegracias @ikuo1000 @DataDrivenMD
Lt Gov Patrick and his ilk remind me of hospital managers in the UK who ignored concerns raised by doctors that a neonatal nurse was killing sick babies -- I assume because the managers were afraid it might make their hospital look bad. The nurse finally was charged recently with 6 counts of murder.
@Jeramee @Pomegracias @ikuo1000 @DataDrivenMD
We learned a lot about people's values during the height of the pandemic. We learned that so many people put their convenience above other's lives. We learned who was really flexible, and who was not. We also learned that institutions that folks said would never change could change, and fast!
I learned not to believe people when they said things like UBI will never work, because it did work to make the common people's lives better.