Two things.
Mar. 23rd, 2020 05:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bladesparkOne:
A Prediction About Covid-19, Why I'm Scared And Why You Should Be Too is indeed frightening, (and a little bit clickbaity in the title) but it's also grounded in solid realism and good explanations of actual math and statistics, and I wish to GOD that more people could see it, but it's a My Little Pony Fanfiction blog, so hardly anybody will.
Two: The fact that this and a series of articles by a doctor/BDSM educator collaboration on Fetlife are the two best "explain this to the layman" articles I've read about Corona so far tells me that journalism right now suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks.
I've tried some more mainstream stuff, but I'll be honest. The lack of facts, of numbers, and of real explanations drives me batty. You get either short info pieces with very little info in them, or long, "A woman walks down the street, mask on her face, her expression filled with nervous fear..." stuff that seems to be attempting to write a novel. Or fishing for a Pulitzer. Or I don't know what.
I do not need 4k words if your 5k word article to be "humanizing" the people involved. Most people are not psychopaths, we understand that doctors are human beings. Report. Facts. Explain. Things. Take what the experts you interview know, put that into terms people understand. Leave the fucking flowery language for your retrospective novella after we've lived through it.
Ugh.
Anyway! I loathe modern reporting! It feels like it's either padded out fluff, or wild fearmongering, or total failure to convey useful information. Blurgh.
P.S. Third best explanatory "article" prize goes to the Kurzgesagt video on the topic, which is more focused on what covid-19 is and how it functions, and less about what it's going to do going forward, but does still emphasize the most useful things, i.e. stay home, wash your hands, and gives good info about why those work, the flatten the curve thing, and other useful items. And it's pretty damn good given they usually take months and months to make a video and rushed this one out in a matter of weeks.
A Prediction About Covid-19, Why I'm Scared And Why You Should Be Too is indeed frightening, (and a little bit clickbaity in the title) but it's also grounded in solid realism and good explanations of actual math and statistics, and I wish to GOD that more people could see it, but it's a My Little Pony Fanfiction blog, so hardly anybody will.
Two: The fact that this and a series of articles by a doctor/BDSM educator collaboration on Fetlife are the two best "explain this to the layman" articles I've read about Corona so far tells me that journalism right now suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks.
I've tried some more mainstream stuff, but I'll be honest. The lack of facts, of numbers, and of real explanations drives me batty. You get either short info pieces with very little info in them, or long, "A woman walks down the street, mask on her face, her expression filled with nervous fear..." stuff that seems to be attempting to write a novel. Or fishing for a Pulitzer. Or I don't know what.
I do not need 4k words if your 5k word article to be "humanizing" the people involved. Most people are not psychopaths, we understand that doctors are human beings. Report. Facts. Explain. Things. Take what the experts you interview know, put that into terms people understand. Leave the fucking flowery language for your retrospective novella after we've lived through it.
Ugh.
Anyway! I loathe modern reporting! It feels like it's either padded out fluff, or wild fearmongering, or total failure to convey useful information. Blurgh.
P.S. Third best explanatory "article" prize goes to the Kurzgesagt video on the topic, which is more focused on what covid-19 is and how it functions, and less about what it's going to do going forward, but does still emphasize the most useful things, i.e. stay home, wash your hands, and gives good info about why those work, the flatten the curve thing, and other useful items. And it's pretty damn good given they usually take months and months to make a video and rushed this one out in a matter of weeks.
no subject
Date: 2020-03-24 01:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-24 01:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-24 01:22 am (UTC)I'm sure that news outlets are soft-pedaling the facts and predictions so as to avoid fueling hysteria.
It also annoys me that every single news story starts with some anecdotal blurb about some 'Joe Blow' doing something in some way connected to the story. Just give me the data already.
no subject
Date: 2020-03-24 12:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-24 06:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-25 03:43 am (UTC)https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1239975682643357696.html
A summary of this: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf
1-4 million deaths in the US alone. Those are the figures which scared the US government (and also the UK government, because their figures were nasty too) into changing their government policies overnight. It's no coincidence that the leaders of the US and UK both announced drastic changes to national policy on the same day. Their advisers had told both of them about this study.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/a-chilling-scientific-paper-helped-upend-us-and-uk-coronavirus-strategies/2020/03/17/aaa84116-6851-11ea-b199-3a9799c54512_story.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/us/coronavirus-fatality-rate-white-house.html
no subject
Date: 2020-03-25 04:11 pm (UTC)I would like more of the math-and-directives kinds of pieces, but if they want a chance of making it all stick in people's minds, they have to "humanize" the story to that people will see their neighbor or their relative instead of one of Stalin's "statistics."