My favorite media quote nowadays is "Les variants, on le sait, attaquent les jeunes" (Variants affect young people). This is just flat out bad information and completely wrong.
No earlier than last week Legault came up and said we had twice the amount of young adults being hospitalized than at the latest peak, which is simply untrue. There are actually less admissions per day in hospitals and ICUs for the 30-59 y/o group. The variant has been scientifically proven to be more contagious, but there are a lot of conflicting messages as to whether it's actually more lethal or not. And if it is, it's certainly not any worse for a specific age group than for the others.
Variants don't affect a specific demography. Same when they say "The variants make the virus that much more dangerous outside." You'd believe, listening to them, that the virus is going to jump on you like a spider if you ride a bike too close to someone who's infected.
Believe me, I'm taking this pandemic pretty seriously and I'm still very careful. Hell. Both of my parents have been vaccinated for a month with Pfizer now and I'm still careful around them and only see them to go on a walk.
That being said, I can't help but think a lot of the media is actually trying to scare people rather than properly informing them.
I'd be ready to wager the next "media scare" is reporting a couple of breakthrough infections here and there, without mentionning the outcome of the infection, neither the circumstances. Then, once again, it's going to be doomsday for all of the overly anxious people.
The worst thing in all of this is that people just swallow it all up without double checking the facts. I had a FaceTime with my parents this weekend, and my mother straight up wouldn't believe me when I told here the media was wrong and that Legault was wrong when they said we have "tons of young people in ICUs and in the hospitals". It's flat out misinformation. And the data is available to all on the INSPQ website. I sent her the link and the screenshots on Messenger, she looked at it, and was still skeptical as to whether the raw data or Legault was right. I couldn't believe it.
I don't want to sound like a denier or a conspirationnist, but they're right on one thing; A lot of people have lost the ability to even try to judge if something makes sense or not in this pandemic. It's scary. I mean. I personally know a lot of people who were ready to wear a mask alone on a 23x11 meters tennis court because the government told them to.
