Expressing skepticism would be fine. Where I take issue is when somebody rants on about how “this is all fake because...” and then proceeds to say a bunch of nonsense that contradicts observable reality.
The evidence we have available is that COVID-19 has an infection fatality rate of 0.65%. That doesn’t sound like a lot until you do the math on hundreds of millions of people getting infected. Then it’s a lot. You get a lot of people saying “lol who cares about a disease that’s 99.35% survivable?” Then you do some simple math to say that 0.65% of 270 million is 1.75 million deaths and those same people start screaming “THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE YOU MUST BE MAKING THIS ALL UP YOU SHILL COMMUNIST SPY”. They were perfectly ready to accept 0.65% fatality, but then completely unwilling to accept the other side of the mathematical equation based on that number.
As if basic mathematics is somehow at fault here or a sign of somebody engaged in some grand conspiracy. No, it’s just math. And the Earth is not flat; it’s an oblate spheroid. No amount of yelling, screaming, and name-calling changes that simple observable fact. But there’s always somebody ready to chime in with “If the Earth is round, why aren’t the roads round around the edges? CHECKMATE ROUNDISTS!”
Mortality rates are BS. Hospitals are paid a ransom for reporting “death by Covid.”
The 0.65% includes both the inflated numbers through deliberate conflation of "death FROM" and "death WITH";
And the inflated numbers caused by forcefully putting patients on ventilators in the early days';
And the inflated numbers caused by Dem governors turning down the dedicated military hospital ships to put the infected patients in close quarters with the most vulnerable, in nursing homes;
and the inflated numbers by refusing to consider other treatments which various doctors had good real-world clinical results with (HCQ / Zinc, Ivermectin)
Not to mention, you know, the 0.65% is mostly due to those over 70 with co-existing or pre-existing morbidities.
I've never heard anyone in earnest saying the world is flat.
Your use of absurd strawmen is proof of your desperation and bad faith.