Johanna Faust, a mixed race Jew, prefers to publish pseudonymously. She is committed: first, to preventing war, ecological disaster, and nuclear apocalypse; last to not only fighting for personal privacy & the freedom of information, but, by representing herself as a soldier in that fight, to exhorting others to do the same. She is a poet, always. All these efforts find representation here: "ah, Mephistophelis" is so named after the last line of Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, whose heretical success flouted the censor for a time. 













































































































































          

        

          

        










An Example Of Misinformation On Social Media Willfully Downplaying Coronavirus Danger















Now
 I think not preventing even one preventable death is a grievous 
mistake, & doing so on purpose, knowing the consequences, is a 
crime. 

        


        But
 let’s leave that aside for the moment, and look at this conversation I 
had recently on Twitter. It was in response to a reply to the the above tweet:
 


  
    

      
        



        
I knew his numbers looked wrong, so I originally responded by working out what he was actually saying. (For the purposes of argument.)  
 
 
 
I left it there, being tired, and went to bed.

        

When I looked at it again I knew the stats had serious issues. Here are the COVID-19 numbers for today, August 27, 2020.
 
Blurred but otherwise unredacted screenshot here.
 


        
        
 The
 stats in above Twitter conversation claimed less than 10% of people show 
symptoms, & only .002% of the people that show symptoms need 
hospitalization.

        


        
So that’s only .002% of 10%, which is the same as 0.0002 per 100 people, which is the same as 2 people in 1,000,000.

        


        
These stats claim that only 2 people per million positive coronavirus cases are bad enough to require hospitalization.

        


        
If
 everyone in the US tested positive, that would mean only 656 people 
hospitalized (and by implication, a smaller amount dying).

        


        
THE US HAS HAD ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY THREE THOUSAND (183,000) DEATHS TO DATE FROM COVID-19.

        


        
Errors
 such as this in statistics appear to me to indicate a willful attempt 
to misinform that in this context I consider criminal.
 

      

    
  




To be fair to the intelligence of Twitter, there were other objections mounted while I was composing:
 

 
Thanks to every one of them.  I wish I knew what goes through a person's mind to willfully misinform.  Actually, maybe I don't want to know.

I do know that that last paragraph I wrote reminds me of so many phrases demonizing people (liberals, SJWs, protesters, antifa, etc.) that I find on far-right platforms.  Usually after coming to conclusions based on erroneous assumptions and faulty logic.  Neither of which are I think at play here, but if they are, please tell me, either in the comments or on Twitter.

Thank you.




Be seeing you.










put here for your consideration by



on this









































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