A HUGE amount of the population in my quickly-regressing country don't believe that COVID was the killer that it in fact was. Most people don't talk about it because as with everything (NFL halftime shows, restaurant logos, etc) in my quickly-regressing country, COVID is a topic that inflames passions.
> A HUGE amount of the population in my quickly-regressing country don't believe that COVID was the killer that it in fact was.
I don't know what country you're referring to, but there's ample data that it's highly partisan in the USA, and you, too, might be misinformed. In particular, the political left wildly overestimates the lethality of Covid (both historically and in the present). See, for example [1]. Other sources [2,3] reporting on the same data also validate the overall partisanship, but unfortunately don't show the correct answer in a way that makes it easy to see the pattern.
To the extent that you asserted anything specific at all, it was that "a HUGE amount of the population" in your country don't believe that the virus was "the killer it in fact was".
I just showed you that a) there's a large misconception about the lethality of the virus, and b) people on the left side of the US political spectrum tend to systematically exaggerate the threat. In particular "the killer it in fact was" is often not a factual statement, but a partisan exaggeration of reality.
There are studies that show the the "far right" (since you insist on interpreting this in a partisan lens) have a much higher death rate, after the introduction of covid-19 vaccination rates. IU'm going to make a wild assumption here: the far left and the far right want to avoid death at roughly equal rates. I interpret the finding above as a partisan underestimation of the lethality of covid.
80% of republicans believed (according to Gallup) that COVID death rates were falsely inflated. Only 47% of Republicans believe that COVID is more deadly than seasonal influenza, whereas 87% of democrats did.
> You've shown that there's a large misconception about the hospitalization rates of the virus, not its lethality.
Hospitalization is upstream of death. You don't just get the virus and fall over dead. More to the point, to the extent that one group incorrectly believes that risk of hospitalization is higher than it is, it reflects their overall incorrect belief that the mortality of the virus is higher than it is.
> There are studies that show the the "far right" (since you insist on interpreting this in a partisan lens) have a much higher death rate, after the introduction of covid-19 vaccination rates.
No, there aren't. You're referring to this study [1], which was conducted in two states (Ohio and Florida), and was overgeneralized on NPR, MSNBC and other left-wing media outlets.
The study ran only until December 2021, and found an overall excess death rate of 2.8% for republican voters, which was 15% higher than the excess death rate for democratic voters, according to their model (in other words, democratic voters had an excess death rate of ~2.4% during the same period). The claim you're making extends only from the May-December period of 2021, where they found a roughly 8% difference in excess death rates between parties, on a baseline of approximately 25%.
In other words: both parties saw excess death rates of approximately 25%, and the "republican" part of the set was 8% higher [2]. But when you look at the data by state [3], there's hardly any difference for Florida, so this study is really describing a difference only in a subset of Ohio voters.
Again, you've probably been misinformed about what you think you know. When you actually look at the data, the results are far less dramatic than reported in the media.
