opinion
There are plenty of great things about technology, and there are plenty of drawbacks as well.
It’s good to see on a small scale how quickly information can get around because of social media in 2020.
For instance and without getting too serious, I can post on my neighborhood’s social media pages that my dogs have gotten out of the fence, and I can get notifications of when people who know my dogs have seen them and where, helping me find them quicker.
But then the downside is how quickly inaccurate information – alternative facts, if you will – get spread because either A) it’s a glorified piece of gossip that sounds great and needs repeating or B) it falls in line with a narrative that the spreader agrees with or prefers or hopes is true.
In 2020, B is the more likely scenario.
Jackson-Madison County Regional Health Department Director Kim Tedford had to address such a situation on social media during the Monday COVID-19 briefing with local leaders.
After many posts and sharings of information saying the CDC had drastically revised the COVID death totals, many people ran with it not realizing these revisions are a weekly thing.
The CDC was retracting nothing. It was more like clarifying.
The information that the sharers were spreading was that only 6 percent of those who’d been identified as COVID-19 casualties actually died of COVID-19 when the other 94 percent died of something else.
The inference was then made that COVID-19 should be blamed for the deaths of the 6 percent (about 9,600 deaths) and not the 94 – which would become an even more miniscule figure once it’s figured into the entirety of the United States’ population of more than 330 million people.
But COVID-19 isn’t the first sickness this kind of reporting has been done with.
My grandmother had cancer and died in 1998. What actually killed her was pneumonia, which was caused by chemo that was caused by cancer. She still died from cancer even though the cancer wasn’t what directly caused her death at the time she passed away.
If we were to take her situation and place her 22 years into the future and give her COVID-19 instead of cancer, then she’d still be listed as a casualty of COVID-19 but not a part of the 6 percent getting shared about now.
What is alarming is the 6 percent this thing has killed who were otherwise healthy. They had no underlying conditions causing COVID-19 to be worse.
If you don’t think that’s a large enough number to worry, I get that. A total of 9,000 deaths among 330 million people equals .000273 percent of the population.
But if driving down a certain stretch of road anywhere in this country got 9,000 people killed in a six-month period, local authorities would probably shut that road down or state or federal authorities would step in and take care of the problem.
Unfortunately, killing a previously unknown virus and slowing its spread is a little more complicated than putting up a “road closed” sign.
We’ve got to do everything for the long haul that we were technically supposed to be doing for flu season every year leading up to this but weren’t because we weren’t worried about flu.
Washing hands, staying away from people, staying home more than usual and wearing masks is something we were to be doing already when flu outbreaks were happening in recent years, but because there’s already a vaccine, no one from the CDC was doing more than a suggestion.
But it’s the situation we’re in now.
And hopefully, flu season – which has been difficult for some areas in recent years as evidenced by school closings in various districts through the region – won’t be as big of a hit on school attendance as it has been.
But with this pandemic – and really anything in life but especially anything that gets political in the next couple months – if you want to disagree and have a dissenting opinion, that’s great and very American of you.
But be responsible and use actual information and not what you hope is true please.
Brandon Shields is the editor of The Jackson Sun. Reach him at bjshields@jacksonsun.com or at 731-425-9751. Follow him on Twitter @JSEditorBrandon or on Instagram at editorbrandon.
"Opinion" - Google News
September 01, 2020 at 04:38AM
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Facts should be foundation of opinions | Opinion - The Jackson Sun
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