2019 Novel Coronavirus Covid-19 Discussion

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Awrrr
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#2870952 18-Feb-2022 15:49

johno1234:

The medical director of the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners, Dr Bryan Betty has called on the Government to stop scaremongering over the Omicron variant of COVID-19.

In a statement Dr Betty said Omicron is mainly cold-like illness and probably less severe than flu.
Dr Betty said, “Omicron is highly infectious, and so a lot of people will come down with it, but the majority of people will have mild symptoms or no symptoms at all, and so it is very different from the Delta situation.”

He raised a very significant concern regarding the overaction to Omicron compromising our health services ability to respond to people suffering from other more serious illness.
"On Monday the Ministry of Health issued a statement advising that of the 20.000 swabs taken in Auckland, about 80 to 90% of those that turned up, didn’t need to. This is symptomatic of our Government creating a high degree of unnecessary anxiety fear.
"The scaremongering and the fear factor is causing a huge amount of resource being unnecessarily being taken up in our health system, and in some circumstances, people are suffering dire consequences due to their inability to access urgent healthcare.
"Not only are people now fearful of domestic travel, going to restaurants and the movies, some of our most vulnerable are fearful of going to their letter box.
"Our Government must come to its senses before it’s too late. Enough is enough."

https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2022/02/latest-on-covid-19-community-outbreak-parliament-protest-friday-february-18.html

I listened to the interview. Dr Betty did not say some of the things you attribute to him. Your post is verging on misinformation.

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alexx

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#2870956 18-Feb-2022 16:01

johno1234:

The medical director of the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners, Dr Bryan Betty has called on the Government to stop scaremongering over the Omicron variant of COVID-19.

In a statement Dr Betty said Omicron is mainly cold-like illness and probably less severe than flu.
Dr Betty said, “Omicron is highly infectious, and so a lot of people will come down with it, but the majority of people will have mild symptoms or no symptoms at all, and so it is very different from the Delta situation."

If Omicron is so mild, who is killing all those people in Countries like Finland (similar size to NZ) or Australia and many other examples?

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ezbee

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#2870960 18-Feb-2022 16:12

I suppose Dr Bryan Betty could volunteer to help his colleagues at Middlemore hospital.
I'm sure they could use the help for next month or two or...
He might see he is 'No longer in Porirua Dr Betty', things are different.

There is plenty of information out of USA etc that omicron is not nice to unvaccinated,
nor with significant co-morbidities and immune-compromised.
Problem is its ability to spread quickly means it gets to these people quickly hitting healthcare system.

Hong Kong which had a good medical system, well you are in a gurney in a tent if lucky or on street outside.

‘Exhausted, stressed out, helpless’: Hong Kong hospitals buckle under Omicron wave
“Now, with a disease that is more transmissible/severe than flu, and requires exposed staff to quarantine, HK’s hospitals are sandcastles in a tsunami,” said Siddharth Sridhar – a microbiologist.
https://hongkongfp.com/2022/02/17/covid-19-exhausted-stressed-out-helpless-hong-kong-hospitals-buckle-under-omicron-wave/

""
People lie in hospital beds with temperatures falling at night-time outside the Caritas Medical Centre in Hong Kong on February 16, 2022, as hospitals become overwhelmed with the city facing its worst Covid-19 coronavirus wave to date. Photo: Peter Parks/AFP.
""

Then delta is not 'completely' wiped out just suppressed to low levels so far here and apparently this was so in Aussie.
A much of this suppression being vaccination, so unvaccinated keep delta more alive than it might perhaps ?

However we are 77% of population at least two doses vaccinated, 40% triple, no 11-5 double vaccinated.

Edit, For Bryan and the Brain error.

Rikkitic

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#2870976 18-Feb-2022 16:37

johno1234:

The medical director of the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners, Dr Bryan Betty has called on the Government to stop scaremongering over the Omicron variant of COVID-19.

The more I look at this, the more it bothers me. This appears to be a deliberate attempt to twist the statements of a credible professional in order to serve a propaganda agenda. Based on what was actually said in the interview, here is a detailed critique:

First, Dr Betty did not reference the government. He was talking about media scaremongering. He may or may not have called on the Government somewhere else, but it was not part of the quoted interview. As it stands, this is misleading and untrue.

In a statement Dr Betty said Omicron is mainly cold-like illness and probably less severe than flu.

Dr Betty said, “Omicron is highly infectious, and so a lot of people will come down with it, but the majority of people will have mild symptoms or no symptoms at all, and so it is very different from the Delta situation.”

He raised a very significant concern regarding the overaction to Omicron compromising our health services ability to respond to people suffering from other more serious illness.

This above is correct.

The remainder is garbled BS. The first part is actually a quote of the interviewer. The rest is fragments taken from the interviewer, Dr Betty, and the poster mixed together to make it look like Dr Betty said something he did not say at all. This is pure propaganda misinformation intended to serve an agenda. It is intentional lying. This post deserves to be deleted.

"On Monday the Ministry of Health issued a statement advising that of the 20.000 swabs taken in Auckland, about 80 to 90% of those that turned up, didn’t need to. This is symptomatic of our Government creating a high degree of unnecessary anxiety fear.
"The scaremongering and the fear factor is causing a huge amount of resource being unnecessarily being taken up in our health system, and in some circumstances, people are suffering dire consequences due to their inability to access urgent healthcare.
"Not only are people now fearful of domestic travel, going to restaurants and the movies, some of our most vulnerable are fearful of going to their letter box.
"Our Government must come to its senses before it’s too late. Enough is enough."

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johno1234

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#2870985 18-Feb-2022 17:02

Hey Rikkitic, you appear to have alleged twice that I have twisted his words. I have done no such thing. Please take another look: I have quoted directly from the cited newspaper article, nothing added or twisted.

Betty's comments are reasonable. Michael Baker has asserted that the true number of cases could be 10 times the number reported. https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2022/02/covid-19-professor-michael-baker-warns-daily-case-numbers-not-showing-extent-of-omicron-spread-actual-figure-could-be-10-times-higher.html

If true, we would be close to 20,000 actual cases a day yet only one person in ICU and about 80 people in hospital *with* COVID. With, not by. A week ago 10% of turn-ups at Middlemore hospital tested positive. There's a huge number of cases but not a corresponding number of seriously ill people.

It seems a arguable that Omicron is mostly in the cold to flu level. This may be largely because of vaccination but there's still some a lot of unvaccinated out there.

Similar comments to Betty's came out of South Africa early in the Omicron emergence and similar comments from Denmark and other countries.

So we have just had somewhere between 2000 and 20,000 cases a day yet a very small number of people seriously ill with Omicron. However, the hospitals and labs are struggling they are being accessed by a large number of people who are not seriously ill. That is Betty's consequential point from Omicron's mildness. Our hospital system is not under pressure from Omicron itself. It is under pressure from people who are afraid.

Let's not attack messengers and have a calm discussion instead.

johno1234

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#2870988 18-Feb-2022 17:05

"I suppose Dr Brain Betty could volunteer to help his colleagues at Middlemore hospital."

His name is Bryan,

There are 59 people with COVID in all 4 Auckland hospitals. That in itself is no problem at all. The bigger problem is people turning up that don't need to turn up. Hence Betty's comment that the government needs to stop needlessly scaring people.

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johno1234

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#2870989 18-Feb-2022 17:09

freitasm:
Oblivian: You would think someone in that line of work might actually consider that you cant at face value tell what variant you have and are passing on. It may not always be the one you think is better.

Exaclty what I was thinking.

I'm thinking that as Medical Director of The Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners, Dr Betty would know better than any person commenting or thinking here.

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#2870993 18-Feb-2022 17:19

alexx:
If Omicron is so mild, who is killing all those people in Countries like Finland (similar size to NZ)

Finland is the home of Nokia, one of the major 5G deployers. Need I say more?

Rikkitic

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#2871004 18-Feb-2022 17:31

johno1234:

Hey Rikkitic, you appear to have alleged twice that I have twisted his words. I have done no such thing. Please take another look: I have quoted directly from the cited newspaper article, nothing added or twisted.

You quoted as your source the Newshub link. I traced it back to a radio interview with Betty conducted by Chris Lynch (which Newshub gives as their source). I listened carefully to the interview and the quotes attributed to Betty were incorrect. At least one of these seems to be due to sloppy reporting by the Newshub monkey, who clearly misunderstood the interview. The other things I don't know where you got them. If you actually based your post on a different source, as you imply, than quite possibly it was garbled by the 'journalist' who wrote the article. Regrettably, this happens a lot here and I can see where a sloppy repeater might have jumbled stuff together. But my posts still stand. What you wrote (or copied and pasted) is not what Dr Betty Said. If you listen to the interview, you can hear this for yourself. It is a good illustration of the journalistic principle of never relying on a single source.

[Layout mistake edited.]

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johno1234

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#2871030 18-Feb-2022 19:46

Rikkitic:

johno1234:

Hey Rikkitic, you appear to have alleged twice that I have twisted his words. I have done no such thing. Please take another look: I have quoted directly from the cited newspaper article, nothing added or twisted.

You quoted as your source the Newshub link. I traced it back to a radio interview with Betty conducted by Chris Lynch (which Newshub gives as their source). I listened carefully to the interview and the quotes attributed to Betty were incorrect. At least one of these seems to be due to sloppy reporting by the Newshub monkey, who clearly misunderstood the interview. The other things I don't know where you got them. If you actually based your post on a different source, as you imply, than quite possibly it was garbled by the 'journalist' who wrote the article. Regrettably, this happens a lot here and I can see where a sloppy repeater might have jumbled stuff together. But my posts still stand. What you wrote (or copied and pasted) is not what Dr Betty Said. If you listen to the interview, you can hear this for yourself. It is a good illustration of the journalistic principle of never relying on a single source.

[Layout mistake edited.]

Could you post the URL of the full interview please? And could you please identify which quotes were incorrect? If Newshub put something in quote marks, attributed to Dr Betty, I expect he'll want to know about this.

Nice of you to withdraw your allegation that *I* twisted Betty's words.

I think.

freitasm

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#2871031 18-Feb-2022 19:47

I don't think it was ever attributed to you but the source.

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johno1234

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#2871036 18-Feb-2022 20:04

Here's the original interview, verbatim:

https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/checkpoint/audio/2018831132/dr-bryan-betty-suggests-change-of-mindset-with-omicron

Rikkitic

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#2871049 18-Feb-2022 20:41

johno1234:

Could you post the URL of the full interview please? And could you please identify which quotes were incorrect? If Newshub put something in quote marks, attributed to Dr Betty, I expect he'll want to know about this.

Nice of you to withdraw your allegation that *I* twisted Betty's words.

I think.

Here is the actual interview. I think it was posted by the interviewer to his Twitter account.

Your post begins with this statement: "The medical director of the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners, Dr Bryan Betty has called on the Government to stop scaremongering over the Omicron variant of COVID-19."

This is incorrect. At no point in the interview does Dr Betty say this. He does say that there is scaremongering, and he implies that it is coming from the media. He does not 'call on the government to stop scaremongering', which makes this assertion wrong and defamatory.

These are the next lines in your post and they are correct: "In a statement Dr Betty said Omicron is mainly cold-like illness and probably less severe than flu.
Dr Betty said, “Omicron is highly infectious, and so a lot of people will come down with it, but the majority of people will have mild symptoms or no symptoms at all, and so it is very different from the Delta situation.”

He raised a very significant concern regarding the overaction to Omicron compromising our health services ability to respond to people suffering from other more serious illness."

From this point everything is wrong. It appears to be a jumbled mix of fragments from Dr Betty and the interviewer, as well as some added titbits from the presumed compiler of the piece. It starts thus:

"On Monday the Ministry of Health issued a statement advising that of the 20.000 swabs taken in Auckland, about 80 to 90% of those that turned up, didn’t need to." The way your post (and presumably the article you took it from) is constructed, this sentence appears to be a continuation of the previous quote from Dr Betty. In fact, it is spoken by the interviewer. This is easy to discern by listening to the interview. The sentence then continues: "This is symptomatic of our Government creating a high degree of unnecessary anxiety fear." This is pure editorialising invention by whoever wrote the piece and it is very dishonest because this is a clear if clumsy attempt to put words that were never spoken into Dr Betty's mouth. Never in the entire interview does he say or suggest anything approaching this.

"The scaremongering and the fear factor is causing a huge amount of resource being unnecessarily being taken up in our health system, and in some circumstances, people are suffering dire consequences due to their inability to access urgent healthcare." Dr Betty said bits of this statement in different places, but he did not say this statement and the way it is assembled puts words in his mouth. He should sue.

"Not only are people now fearful of domestic travel, going to restaurants and the movies, some of our most vulnerable are fearful of going to their letter box.
"Our Government must come to its senses before it’s too late. Enough is enough." He did not say this at all. Nothing even close. The writer of this got carried away grinding his axe.

It is always possible that Dr Betty did say all these things in other places, but he did not say them in the interview cited and there is no suggestion anywhere that these statements were drawn from other sources. At the very least, this is incredibly poor journalistic practice. I am more inclined to think it is intentional deception by someone with an agenda who thought they could get away with stealing some credibility by hitching a ride on a reputable professional and hoping he wouldn't notice.

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Rikkitic

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#2871057 18-Feb-2022 21:06

johno1234:

Here's the original interview, verbatim:

https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/checkpoint/audio/2018831132/dr-bryan-betty-suggests-change-of-mindset-with-omicron

First, this is not the 'original interview'. The one you cited is from Newshub. This one is from RNZ. The interviewer in the Newshub piece was Chris Lynch. The RNZ interviewer was Lisa Owen.

Not that it makes any difference. Nothing Dr Betty says in the RNZ interview contradicts anything I have asserted. None of it is materially different from what he said to Chris Lynch. In spite of Lisa Owens' attempts to get him to blame the government for panicking people, he doesn't go there. He also doesn't say any of the outrageous things that were in the text you posted. Whether you made these things up or gullibley took them at face value from another source, they are propaganda designed to sway emotion, instead of objective fact designed to inform. You posted garbage.

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debo

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#2871068 18-Feb-2022 21:36

I think the leason to be learned from the previous posts is to take MSM articles with a pinch of salt.

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