The media suffers from serious cognitive bias. That’s no secret. But the past year of COVID coverage has really put it in the spotlight.
Back in March last year, as the novel coronavirus was ravaging Wuhan, the virus was wrongly dismissed as little more than another seasonal flu. It’s an understandable reaction. The last global pandemic of a similar scale was in 1968. Other threats like SARS and Ebola didn’t end up hugely impacting the West. We all assumed COVID would amount to little because, well, that’s what happened before.
In time, the threat of the virus became clear and it took over the global media narrative. COVID is clearly far more contagious and more lethal than influenza which kills around 400,000 people each year. However, in pandemic terms, COVID remains a minnow compared to the Spanish flu. That virus infected a third of the world’s population and killed more than 50 million people — many of them young.
By April, when the genuine impact and lethality of COVID was realised after New York and northern Italy, the media narrative had flipped completely. It tended to overstate, rather than understate, COVID’s impact and risk. And, even now, the media tends to focus on the negative impacts and gloomy forecasts.
In early 2020, the media thought nothing could ever go wrong. Now, the media dutifully reports that COVID will never end.
A brighter outlook
Remember when experts said the development of a COVID-19 vaccine would take years?
Back in April, Australia’s most decorated immunologist Professor Ian Frazer (who led the development of the life-saving HPV vaccine) warned of the difficulties. In September, Frazer said that if the vaccine were 30% effective he would be happy.
Others like Jane “children overboard” Halton — the lifelong bureaucrat who somehow became a vaccine expert (she heads up Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) — warned that a large number of vaccine doses wouldn’t be widely available until 2021 with mortality not reduced until late 2021 or 2022.
However, data out of Israel (and slowly the UK) indicates that virtually no one is getting seriously ill after receiving the full two-dose vaccine. Out of 715,425 people studied, 317 (or 0.04%) became infected and just 16 were admitted to hospital.
Looking to the future
Some experts suggest the world won’t return to normal until 2024. It’s an idea that’s usually predicated on herd immunity.
As Lancet editor-in-chief Richard Horton recently noted, “to reach herd immunity, about two-thirds of the world population — 4 billion to 5 billion people — need to be vaccinated. Each person has to have two doses — that is 10 billion doses of the vaccine”.
But that shouldn’t be our only metric for success. Especially as it fails to take into account the very targeted lethality of COVID.
Unlike the Spanish flu, which killed young and old alike, COVID hones in on the elderly and already sick. If you’re an overweight, 83-year-old diabetic, your chances of dying if you contract COVID are terrifyingly high. If you’re a super-fit 25 year old, they’re infinitesimally low.
So we don’t need to immunise 6 billion people to prevent virtually all COVID deaths. We need to vaccinate the billion or so people above 65 and the other people at risk. Things can theoretically go back to some sort of normal when people don’t die from COVID, not when people stop catching COVID. Right?
But, aside from all that, something strange is happening. For the first time since the pandemic started, the number of people being infected with COVID is dropping. And it’s dropping fast. (Bear in mind: vaccinations have not had time to impact global numbers yet.)
There could be several reasons for the drop off. It could be that winter is coming to an end in the northern hemisphere (respiratory illnesses are historically far worse during winter). Or it could be that the virus is slowly dying off before the vaccines have a material impact.
Regardless of the cause, the data appears far more positive than the media would care to report.
Adam wrote: Things can theoretically go back to some sort of normal when people don’t die from COVID, not when people stop catching COVID. Right?
No, Adam, wrong. The virus mutates, and some mutations can be more dangerous than others.
The rate of mutation links to the rate of transmission. Because SARS-CoV-2 is relatively new to humans we’re not yet sure the kinds of mutations it’s likely to pick up, or how they’ll affect us, but for now, suppressing transmission also slows the mutation rate which gives us more time to react and respond.
As a f’rinstance, if we had somehow been able to roll out vaccines in July last year, we might have delayed the current South African lineage for longer, which is now looking resistant to some vaccines and thus threatens to mess with herd immunity. This would have given us more time to produce a vaccine against it.
While it’s true that we can’t ignore ways of making infections less lethal, doing that alone with this virus is neither wise nor likely to be effective.
But you’d have discovered this if you’d interviewed even one expert to check your ignorant conjectures.
You need to do check in with experts on your ideas, Adam. The articles you’re producing on Covid represent dangerous blogging in the ignorant style of Craig Kelly, not science journalism.
“The virus mutates, and some mutations can be more dangerous than others.”
Rub, you are at it again. Stop cut n pasting the your expert MSM purple circle paid media shills and study the data from independent bonafide epidemiologists and immunologists.
If we could shut the MSM down for just 7 days covid would go away.
Maybe Schwab could have checked with that renowned epidemiologist Dr Craig Kelly.
From the grasp of fact demonstrated, I assumed that he was co-author.
Or at least on retainer.
I’d have just stuck to criticising it for being a statement of the bleeding obvious. Something which has nevertheless escaped Adam.
Craig wrote: study the data from independent bonafide epidemiologists and immunologists.
Since March last year I’ve been regularly studying data published in Lancet and in preprint,Craig. Please cite some you think the mainstream media has overlooked.
Ruv, Craig was taking the micky (and not from you).
Should be enough links here to keep you happy 🙂
Swiss Policy Research – Geopolitics and Media (swprs.org)
Is there some conjecture about the fact that a virus can mutate, and that some mutations can be more dangerous than others?
How did you learn to type?
Probably at lot of dried TippEx on the screen.
Sorry -you shouldn’t comment if you just parrot MSM. Get back to me with a reply IF you have an Open Mind & read the following – – It’s well researched .
Swiss Policy Research – Geopolitics and Media (swprs.org)
Hi James, thank you for this link. You asked about open minds, but I’d suggest that the question isn’t whether a mind is open or closed, but what is the minimum reasonable evidence needed to change it.
Because a novel virus pandemic is full of conjecture, minds should expect to change and I can list a dozen times where I have changed a view on Covid-19 last year alone because of reliable information that has emerged.
My interests are such that I tend to read the scientific papers and academic debates more than the mainstream journalism that sometimes reports them, so your comments about ‘mainstream media’ are purely conjectural, and in my case, false.
I am very happy to have views changed by thorough, competently-researched, evidence-based analysis and am frequently so frustrated by science and health reporting that I seek better information from primary sources. But what baffles me is why, when there is so much excellent analysis with referenced data available, you think this site has provided that.
In the page I sampled I noticed a number of facts that I I already agreed with, but these were removed from their epidemiological context and used to mislead. I also found some claims that were outright misrepresentations, alongside zero accountability for authorship and competence in analysis.
So what interests me now is the minimum reasonable evidence that would persuade you that this is a shonk site produced by people who fit evidence to support political argument, rather than competently exploring a situation with evidence using the best scientific methods available.
Please get back to me if you can list the minimum evidence that would persuade you to abandon confidence in the worth of this site.
“So we don’t need to immunise 6 billion people to prevent virtually all COVID deaths.”
Stick to tourism, Adam, and leave epidemiology to the experts. Comments like this risk putting you in Kelly territory.
The virus needs to be brought as close as possible to elimination. If there’s a large amount of virus circulating in the communities owing to inadequate lockdowns, spatial distancing, masking, hand hygiene, etc then there’s more opportunity for mutated strains to arise, which may have a competitive advantage over other strains in being more infectious or resistant to the vaccines being used. Or even more lethal.
The appropriate comparison to the Spanish Influenza was that there was a not-so lethal first wave, which then mutated to the very lethal second wave.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus is not be taken with Schwab indifference. There are already vaccine resistant strains.
Agree with most of what you say, but greater lethality is not a ‘competitive advantage’ to a virus because once you’re dead it usually becomes more difficult to pass the virus on to others.
The second wave of Spanish flu was certainly more deadly, and if we’re stupid enough, that could be the case with COVID-19.
But I take issue with the claim that the Spanish flu killed old and young alike. Every piece I’ve read about the Spanish flu suggests that it was the strong and most fit who were most likely to die, given that death was a result of their immune systems responding. Those with weaker immune systems, the very young and older people, were comparatively spared.
Try not to confuse initiatives directed to suppression with instances of infection Wayne. The virus will not be eliminated based on the evidence over millennia. It is debatable that smallpox has been eliminated (if so : it is a special case with given characteristics).
Lastly, infections (given the high rate of recovery) is not a particularly useful metric. In any event the virus could, in principle, lay dormant for decades – only to reappear without warning in a mutated form.
“COVID hones in on the elderly”. No, it doesn’t. It HOMES in on the elderly. Writer needs to hone his skills.
I thought he did alright for a travel agent.
“Alright”. I like what you did there.
This one’s unusually silly, even for Adam.
Now, the media dutifully reports that COVID will never end.
I haven’t seen any of those ‘dutiful reports’, except those based on the increasing number of epidemiologists who now expect the virus to become endemic, which I suppose means it ‘will never end’.
Adam mentions only one possible explanation for the present decline – which isn’t occurring in every country, by the way – and that’s the approaching end of northern hemisphere winter. I don’t count his speculation that it’s simply ‘dying off’ of its own accord, especially as it’s clear now that unpleasant mutations are forming quite rapidly and seriously challenging the efficacy of the vaccines, especially the AZ. But I imagine Adam doesn’t think that should be reported in the media.
The enforcement of lockdowns – which Adam opposes – and mask wearing (notably in India) in numerous countries is likely to be having some effect, too, but Adam’s never been one to admit that they work, preferring the circular argument that ‘the virus wasn’t that bad after all’ once a lockdown has had its effect.
Adam’s prognostications have invariably been wrong, as he jumped to premature conclusions, relied on dodgy sources and ignored lags in new cases and deaths. With any luck, there will be a sustained decline, but there’s no reason why another ‘wave’ won’t follow as the virus continues to mutate. The best friend of the corona virus is human complacency and wishful thinking.