<i>And so, believing the pandemic to be a hoax, my partner and I hosted family members on Saturday, June 13. On Sunday, June 14, I woke up sick.</i><p>Is this satire? The Biogen outbreak was in late February, the disastrous White House briefing that caused the stock market to lose 30 % of its valuation on March 17. What more confirmation did they need that the plague was on the move?<p><i>A GoFundMe page has been created to help his in-laws pay medical bills resulting from their illness.</i><p>Personal responsibility is for the plebs, we happily fall back on charity when it suits us. And no word in the whole damned article about responsibility for healthcare personnel, just for friends and family.
what can be said to people like the author?<p>"i told you so" is too bitter an admonishment for someone who has shown contrition and suffered greatly for their sizeable sins. "sorry for your loss" is too gentle. "why didn't you listen?" will simply devolve into partisan bickering, and nobody will be convinced.<p>more importantly, what might we say to someone to prevent them from killing other people through their ignorance and intransigence, like the author did? rational discussion of evidence hasn't worked. legal mandates haven't worked. social shaming hasn't worked. mass death hasn't worked.<p>and more importantly still: how can we hope to build or repair a society when people like the author are so keen to drag us down, at least until they fall victim to the very problem we are trying to protect them from?<p>we can't simply let them all get infected if they are nearby -- they'll drag us to hell with them, as they already arguably have. at what point do we refuse to entertain their backwardness? at what point do we withdraw from them or exile them and leave them to their fate?
I'm past the point of caring when pandemic denialists come regret their mistakes, but I am intensely curious about why people come to be a denialist in the first place.<p>People were in denial during the Wuhan lockdown because China so different from West to start with. But once it hit Italy, there was no logical reason to deny the existence of the pandemic. Understanding how so many people came to believe something so obviously wrong could have some major implications.
I think it's both. It was a pandemic for many places, peoples, and nations, but because of rampant media over-hype, speculation, and just plain bad reporting, it gave the impression of being far worse than it might actually have been. There is also the justification that the media's hype made it into more of a "scare-demic" as seems to be the case for the media during election years.<p>2004: Sars
2008: Bird flu
2010: Swine flu
2012: mers
2014: Ebola
2016: Zika
2018: Ebola again
2020: COVID-19<p>Yes, you will find SNOPES[0] and all sorts of sources that will say these existed prior to the elections. My point is: These outbreaks/pandemics/etc. may have never risen to the level of such mass hysteria had it not been for the media's sophistic instigation.[1.]<p>[0.]<a href="https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/coronavirus-meme/" rel="nofollow">https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/coronavirus-meme/</a>