I stopped trusting any of those rags after the pushed the hysterical “4% kill rate for Covid” fear mongering nonsense well after it was shown to be multiple orders of magnitude less fatal. All forms of critical thinking went out the window thanks to their misinformation.

That's crazy because NYT never reported that. I haven't checked The Atlantic, but I suppose it's much the same story.

NYT reported the WHO's early (and high) estimate of 3.4% CFR (way way below the 4% IFR that you claim) in March 2020 [1] but even in that same article noted that this was probably a high over-estimate.

> Is 3.4 percent a misleading number? We spoke to a number of experts in epidemiology, and they all agreed that 1 percent was probably more realistic (the W.H.O. has also said the number would probably fall)

The real CFR ended up being somewhere between 0.5% and 1%, which is way closer to both the 1% CFR the NYT reported and to the 3.4% CFR the WHO reported than your alleged 4% IFR. Which... again... was never reported by the NYTimes.

Neither the WHO's 3.4% nor NYTimes' 1% estimates are "multiple orders of magnitude" above 0.5% - 1%.

It seems like you lost trust in reputable institutions because you've been lied to incessantly on the Internet about what they said when. It might be worth reconsidering the trust you place in whatever pulled your trust away from these institutions!

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/07/upshot/how-de...

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Just for context of how insanely made-up your 4% figure is, in March 2020 when NYTimes was reporting "probably close to 1% CFR," our testing infrastructure was extremely lacking. It would be reasonable to estimate less than 25% of cases were detected. If so, a 4% IFR would imply a CFR of at least 16%. But yeah, as mentioned, the NYTimes was reporting a CFR of 1%. Which is pretty close to what it ended up being.

Covid kill rate is not a number. It's a function. Inputs include isolation levels, respirator availability, vaccinations, etc.