Ask HN: Are you skeptical about the official corona narrative?

This is not true. Or, more accurately, it is not more true about COVID-19 than other diseases. If someone tests positive for COVID-19 and then has a car accident, the cause of death does not add to the COVID-19 death count. As was the case before COVID-19, the physician fills out the death certificate with the immediate cause of death and the circumstances leading up to that immediate cause. There are some cases where the cause of death is not entirely clear, but this was the case long before COVID-19. Examples would include George Floyd, who had a knee pressed on his neck, exacerbated by heart disease and diabetes. The official cause of death was "cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression" despite the fact that he tested positive for coronavirus.

My wife is an ICU nurse. Her hospital on a regular day last year had 19 ICU beds, with half of them occupied at any given time. These are beds for patients who require level 2 or 3 support...basically constant monitoring by a nurse with specialized training, and support for respiratory or 2 or more failing organ systems. Not all nurses are certified for this level of care (CCRN certification), and there is a limit to the amount of equipment needed for a bed on this floor (you've heard of ventilator shortages).

Fast forward to today. Her hospital expanded from 19 beds that used to be 50% utilized to 38 beds that are 95% utilized. That leaves only 2 open beds in the ICU. So if 10 people get hospitalized for COVID-19, and 3 of them have to go to the ICU, 1 will have to be transferred to another hospital. The rest of the hospital is pretty empty. The elective surgery clinic, allergy clinic, hearing clinic, orthopedic clinic...these are all closed. The emergency department is also open. So a hospital that normally has a few hundred beds seems empty, but the ICU that normally has 10 patients has more than triple that. It is a contradiction that the hospital is both empty and over capacity at the same time.

We’re more than triple the number of deaths from Covid, and we just don’t know who’s gotten it and who hasn’t yet.

It has a wide range of effects, most seem to not know it happened, a few are killed quickly, and in between a bunch are debilitated for a couple of weeks. I haven’t noticed having it, I know people who have. Extended family has died from it.

The transmissibility and the wide range of responses confounds everyone who can only handle simple rules about what to think and do.

I agree that many of the published stats are not that useful, and the sledgehammer shutdowns needed to be careful fine-grained tracking and harm control. None of the points above relate to the narrative, though, but rather to bits and pieces of stuff. We, supposedly the richest nation on earth, cannot get our act together to test effectively or treat effectively. Lockdown damage, ineffective travel bans at the beginning (ban travel, but with tons of sentimental exceptions? No ban at all, really) is self-inflicted harm.