ChatGPT as a potential source of COVID misinformation

Last update: Friday 12/30/22 

This note appeals for help from readers of this blog who have expertise related to infectious diseases. The  blog's editor is a data analyst with multiple certifications in data science, but has no bioscience degrees. 

Like most of the million initial users of ChatGPT, the editor asked ChatGPT a few exploratory questions and was impressed by its responses, startled by its limitations, and gratified by its candid admission that it does not understand what it's talking about.

COVID misinformation in mainstream media's predictions that China's pivot from Zero COVID will fail ... #4

Last update: Saturday 12/17/22 

This note invokes one of this blog's recurring themes ==> COVID misinformation in mainstream media. Conservative media, e.g., Tucker Carlson's Fox News broadcasts, misinform the public by propounding blatant lies; whereas mainstream liberal/progressive media present the facts, but frame the facts in unfounded assertions that appear to be plausible extensions of the facts, but fail to pass muster under close examination. Our current example is the hypocritical "sympathy" that too many mainstream pundits and their go-to bioscience experts have recently expressed in their smug predictions that China's abrupt pivot from Zero COVID will fail, as in, will involve an unacceptable loss of life. 

The era of the "COVID-19 Pandemic" is over

Last update: Wednesday 12/7/22 

Note: The quotation in the image is from Authur Miller, American playwright

The point of this note is that pandemics, as defined by epidemiologists, virologists, and other bio-experts, exist within cultural contexts. So the pandemic in the Chinese autocracy has been a strikingly different event from the pandemic in the American democracy. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that the virus only killed 30,000 people in China out of a population of about 1.4 billion.  The CDC estimates that over one million Americans have been killed by the virus out of a population of about 330 million, which is about one fourth of the population in China. Based on the American experience, one might have expected China to have lost 4 million people to the virus by now.