1328, I can see how you'd think that "accepting all data at face value" can be a sign of gullibility. But I wish more people could recognize that "extreme skepticism" and the "tendency to dismiss all data no matter what" can be a sign of gullibility, too.
My skepticism toward Covid numbers is not anything of the sort of reflexive, Pavlovian skepticism of which you speak or imply. It's very well justified. Look at what we've seen, and much of what we've discussed in this very thread:
- We've seen deaths attributed to Covid for people that had car and motorcycle accidents
- We've seen deaths attributed to Covid for people in hospice with terminal illnesses who only had days to live
- We've seen deaths attributed to Covid for people that never tested positive, but had a symptom or symptoms which could have just as easily been attributed to a common cold
- We've seen deaths attributed to Covid for things such as heart attacks and other medical events that occur irrespective of pandemics
- We've seen huge downward deviations in deaths from other causes, far from their historical norms, during this pandemic
- We've seen models predict 2 million deaths in the U.S. when we are barely scratching 10% of that now even with our fudged numbers
- And speaking of those death numbers, because of the other things mentioned beforehand, they are so tainted as to be nearly worthless in giving us any kind of an accurate picture of the true deadliness of this disease
- We've seen tests that cannot be reliably reproduced, as in the Musk tweet a few pages back (and which is not the only instance of something like that occurring)
- We've seen tests be marked as positive for picking up traces of the dead virus in people that linger in someones bodies for months after they've had it
- We've seen PCR test for which the sensitivity can be adjusted with large effects on whether a diagnoses is positive or negative
- We're in month 8 of "fifteen days to flatten the curve"
- We've seen people flip-flop on masks, and after flopping to the pro-mask position, completely ignore their own recommendations and do so in very public ways
- We've seen people flatly deny certain drugs work to treat the disease despite hundreds of doctors treating thousands of patients with the same drug that allegedly doesn't work
- We've seen so-called experts say certain protests of one political bent do nothing to spread the virus but turn around and say other protests of the opposite political bent are super-spreader events
- And a host of other things. In summary, we've seen experts and authorities either lie, mislead, or just talk out there ass, we've seen numbers fudged to a point that they are virtually useless as data for drawing any conclusions about Covid, and we've seen incompetence and fuck-uppery from virtually every institution that told us they had the answers on how to handle this.
You wonder why I'm skeptical of those hospitalization numbers? In light of the above, why are you NOT skeptical of those numbers? Why would you take anything your are told about Covid at face value at this point?
At this point, there is nothing reflexive or Pavlovian when it comes to skepticism about Covid numbers and Covid data. When the people putting for that "data" have been shown to be wrong time after time, a heavy level of skepticism is just common sense.
Just to prove my point, let me briefly describe a debate I had with a flat-earth believer.
Why the hell would you even waste your time on that?
