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Originally Posted by Chris
I agree we should do all of the above but I did definitely sniff an agenda in that Grauniad report. For my taste they were not nearly curious enough about the reasons behind policy decisions and far to willing to assume they’re comparing like-with-like. The BBC ran a very similar piece a couple of days ago, but the main difference was they were willing to examine the fact that European nations, ever since the beginning of the pandemic, have not gone through their waves at the same time, and are not doing so now.
An uncritical snapshot of comparative levels of infection and death between European countries doesn’t really tell us very much about our pandemic response. It probably tells us more about the Grauniad’s editorial agenda.
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Indeed, to be honest it's probably worth fact checking most claims from the media at the moment or at least thinking about what they're actually saying.
A lot of it seems to be out to scare people especially around various supply issues right now. Pictures of empty shelves which could just as much be a missed delivery or some muppets panic buying toilet roll again all of a sudden becomes a dossier on a major supply crisis. Yet I was in Morrisons on Saturday night and the shelves were far from empty in most cases. How much can you trust them to be objective?
As for covid it's clear that our figures are because it's ripping through school kids at the moment, and whilst some kids can get ill from it, most will recover after a few days like a cold or similar, and as we have no mitigations in place such as wearing face nappies or year group bubbles and only positive tests need to stay off (by which point you'd argue the class is going to all get it anyway) it's no surprise it's happening especially as they have only recently made the vaccine available to 12+ which doesn't even cover most year 7s and primary age kids at all, and most 12-16 probably haven't had the vaccine yet or had it long enough to be effective. Even if they had, it's not as if the vaccine is mainly designed to stop people getting mildly ill. But seeing figures without context, which is what happens if you want to make a point, ignores the actual issue. Which is hospital admissions and deaths, which whilst they're not minimal, are low enough not to be too concerning, and it's not as if we've monitored a lot of viruses like this before.