Media bias in the age of Covid

Media bias has always been a problem, but I find it particularly brazen with regard to Covid. They do this partly for sensationalism, partly to responsibly promote behaviors they believe are beneficial, and occasionally out of partisanship. Here are a few examples.

Flattening the curve

Remember "flattening the curve"? The idea was to suppress the spread of the virus so that the health care system is not overwhelmed by simultaneous patients. Ideally you engineer social restrictions so that ICU beds are near but below 100% capacity until herd immunity takes over. The media loved this because it promoted correct behavior. But we don't hear this much anymore. That's because most locales are now at the far end of that curve, and the media does not want people to ease up on social distancing.

Log log plots

For a while, the media switched to log-log curves. They are really the same data, but they exaggerate the plunge when the curve starts downwards. This made the US look really bad compared to some other countries, encouraging social distancing. But when countries such as Australia started a second wave of infections, it ruined the effect.

Cases vs deaths

Here are graphs from google of cases over time and deaths over time. Notice cases are way up and deaths are way down. That's because there are 90 times as many tests available. Cases are a meaningless statistic. But they continue to be reported as a "resurgence".

Case fatality ratios

Early on the media would report dramatic "case fatality ratios". You can read them off of the google graphs above. They started around 10% and are now closer to 2%. Because it uses case numbers, it's another meaningless statistic. The interesting part is, the media doesn't report this statistic anymore. I wonder why.

The fate of New Zealand

New Zealand's response to Covid has been widely praised in the media. They controlled the outbreak with early aggressive quarantines, testing, contact tracing, and physical distancing. Borders were closed and returning New Zealanders were required to undergo managed isolation.

The policies were entirely effective. By early August, New Zealand went over 100 days with no community spread. The country went to it's lowest alert level (contact tracing and border restrictions only) in early June. Everyday life was nearly normal, but the country was living in a bubble.

The long stretch without community transmission was broken on August 11, when 4 new cases arose. The country has returned to higher alert levels.

In seemingly unrelated news, there's a good chance the pandemic of 1890, which killed over a million people, was not influenza as has long been assumed, but rather a novel coronavirus called hCoV-OC43, which jumped from cows to humans. What makes this especially interesting is that OC43 is very common today, and is one of several virus species that cause the common cold. The implication is that we have developed a sort of "herd immunity" to the more severe effects of OC43. Those whose immune systems were vulnerable died off, and new generations are immunized naturally at a young age when there is little risk.

This presents an interesting conundrum to New Zealand and other countries with similar harsh approaches to Covid. If Covid-19 develops the same way OC43 supposedly did, then those countries will never develop herd immunity, and they will need to continue living in a bubble for at least 130 years.

An open letter to Mark Zuckerberg

Mr. Zuckerberg,

You have said that "Facebook shouldn't be the arbiter of truth". I wholeheartedly agree. But after considerable pressure from advertisers, Facebook has finally capitulated and blocked one of Trump's posts about Covid. The post contained a video which included Trump saying that children are "almost immune from this disease."

Facebook justified the removal, saying "this video includes false claims that a group of people is immune from COVID-19 which is a violation of our policies around harmful COVID misinformation"

Of course "immune" and "almost immune" are not the same. In the absence of an obvious definition of "almost immune", let's just examine if the President's statement is reasonable from a common sense perspective.

As of July 11 in the US, 20 kids aged 5-14 and 6838 people aged 45-54 have died of Covid. The populations of these groups are about the same. This means school age kids have a 99.7% lower mortality from Covid than the older group. Or we can turn it around and say the older group's mortality from Covid is 34,090% higher. It may be hard to say if Trump's imprecise statement is false, but it is certainly not misleading.

The President does not seem fazed by his posts being censored. It just gains him more free exposure. I worry more about others such as myself, who attempt to expose ways in which our conventional wisdom has lost its way. We are dependent on social media companies, which operate as monopolies. Corporate censorship of alternative views is as clear a threat to our civil liberties as a state controlled media.

One way or another, this will not end well.