Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has reached a level that threatens the health of the whole world. This study aimed to prevent misinformation on this subject by examining the death-related dimension of COVID-19 disease. In the study, the internet archive of three newspapers (Sabah, Hürriyet, and Sözcü) with the highest circulation as of October 2020 was searched with the keywords “corona death” and “COVID-19 death.” A total of 120 contents in three newspapers (40 items from each newspaper) were selected by a simple random sampling technique and all of them were subjected to content analysis. As a result, the COVID-19 disease was handled in a panic-inducing manner. This situation reflected the images. The deaths will increase even more in the winter months of 2020. Although there are initiatives regarding vaccination, not all people can benefit equally in the short term. Measures are often emphasized, especially by the Minister of Health. While COVID-19 deaths are increasing all over the world, how are they so low in China? This is a question in the contents.
Top2. Covid-19 Deaths And Risk Factors
Different themes are touched upon in the literature regarding Covid-19. However, the common point of the studies is that they focus on risk factors in deaths. In addition to studies that monitor the conditions of Covid-19 patients and report this, there are also studies focusing on the conditions of people at risk.
Different People Groups Have Different Risks
Emphasizing that death poses different risks in different people, Alipour (2020) reported that people were divided into groups such as A, B, C, D, E, F and that the most deaths were in groups D, E, and F and that they encountered those with liver problems in the first deaths they analyzed. They also found that overweight people had a higher risk of death than those who were underweight. They revealed that those with heart problems are also at risk.
The Materialistic Character of Links About Death Statistics
On the other hand, Dağ (2020) follows the course of illness and death through networks such as https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html, with a spirit of the secular and materialistic character of humanity that reduces death to statistics. According to Dağ, Joshua Sperber thinks that people, who were previously trapped in virtuality and digitalism, about tracking death through their mobile phones, experienced a disconnection from both themselves and their social environment and experienced virtual communication exponentially due to the isolation they experienced due to the coronavirus.
Older People Are at Risk
Arumugam et al. (2020), in their study on the risk of death of Covid 19 in India, it has been revealed that children of all ages are susceptible to COVID-19 and that there is no significant gender discrimination in this regard. He found that Maharashtra, Kerala, and Delhi are the regions where Corona is most common, and most of the cases have happened in Maharashtra. They reported that older people are more likely to be infected and can cause serious and even fatal respiratory illnesses such as acute respiratory infections.
With a similar emphasis on the elderly, Nischal et al. (2020) also revealed that people aged 65 and over are at a higher risk of death from COVID-19 than young people. There are differences in mortality rates among the elderly in various geographical regions of the world. European countries and Canada have two to three times higher mortality than the average global elderly mortality rate from COVID-19; Africa and some Southeast Asian countries have two to three times lower mortality rates among the elderly population. The higher elderly mortality rate in European and American countries is due to the higher number of older people living in these countries.
Older people add that men, those with hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and chronic lung disease are at risk. At the same time, obesity and smoking are increasingly risky situations. While the average case fatality rate for adults under 60 is less than 0.2%, it is 9.3% for those over 80.4 years old (Jordan, 2020). Besides Turk (2020) emphasized in his study that the elderly live with the fear of death.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Risky People: People at risk of death.
Panic Health News: The news about COVID-19 deaths.
Mortality Rate: The rate of people who died because of COVID-19.
Worlddometer: The site that reports the corona case numbers and mortality rates.
Older People: Persons over 65.
Risky Groups in COVID-19: Groups of risk of deaths, old people, men, pregnant women.
Increasing Deaths: The number of deaths is increasing day by day due to COVID-19.
Reuters: It is a foreign news agency referenced by Turkish online newspapers.