Media Fear-Mongering With Zero Education Value
For most of the past year I have been hammering on the media for their destructive COVID fear-mongering. By always cherry-picking the most alarmist opinion on every topic, and filling articles with carefully calibrated fear-provoking language, they have made us all dumber.
Let me give you one example. For literally months, day after day, our AZ papers have been screaming that emergency rooms are filling up and telling the public they may soon be lying untreated on some hallway floor or not allowed into a hospital at all. The articles were in my email every morning -- maybe some day I need to piece together a supercut montage of them all but my guess is most of you have experienced something similar.
I know zero about hospital management but even I can look at ICU data and see that the narrative is substantially more complex than what is in the media. Here is the AZ state tracking report on state ICU bed utilization -- dark gray is total and red is COVID-related in some way.
The implication in the media is always that a 80% full ICU plus the equivalent of 30% of the beds with new COVID patients = zero capacity and people dying with no treatment. But that is clearly not what happens. AZ ICU's have run at 80+% capacity utilization since June 1, while COVID bed use in that time has drifted from 10% to 60% but we were never out of capacity.
There is clearly some complex management process the goes on with the management of ICU capacity. In fact, it seems like someone knows what they are doing here. Why don't we ever, ever get to hear that story? I can't think of one hospital administrator I have seen interviewed in our local papers discussing how this management process works. The only people they ever interview seems to be that one nurse with PTSD screaming that her hospital is a dystopian nightmare.
Perhaps this capacity management is being done with little cost, deferring non-urgent cases. Perhaps someone is missing out on care to defer to the COVID folks. Perhaps this is entirely normal in every winter flu season. We don't know because apparently the media has decided it is not interesting, or at least not as interesting as the reactions they get when they have everyone as scared as possible.
