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gRegor Morrill

My name is gRegor Morrill, a.k.a. gRegorLove. I live in San Diego, enjoy tinkering on the web, and try to make people laugh. Yes, “Gregor is a weird name,” and I know gRegor is a weird capitalization. More about me

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A Rookie Mistake

The other day I watched a moving video of a woman recounting some verbal harassment and stalking she recently experienced in a store from another customer, simply because she was wearing a mask. She was understandably emotional about it because she masks to protect a family member who has cancer. Thankfully it ended well enough; the store took it seriously and removed the harasser.

I went into the comments to leave a supportive comment and thankfully saw many others doing the same. I kept going though, and saw some pretty disheartening ones. One person said they would never actually say something to a masked person, but they would feel sad that they are so “brainwashed.” It was a pretty tactless comment which a few others tried to engage them on, but they doubled down in subsequent comments, referring to COVID in part as “an illness that isn’t deadly - never was.”

I made a rookie mistake of deciding to reply to that.

I mean, what a callous and ignorant thing to say. Over 1.2 million have died from this in the US. Over 7 million have died worldwide. I also pointed out that death is not the only bad outcome from this virus. So many people are experiencing long-term illness or disability after an infection. This is all happening with the backdrop of a crumbling healthcare system in the US.

We went back and forth with a few comments. They claimed that COVID hadn’t killed more people than the flu and that the death counts were exaggerated. They brought up the “died from” vs “died with” talking point and claimed that “they” had changed how deaths were counted, so broadly that it included people who died in car crashes.

These aren’t new talking points, of course. They go all the way back to 2020 and I’ve heard them before. I don’t know why I continued at this point. In retrospect, I probably should have dropped it there. Still, I decided to ask if they had a source to cite for their claim. I was pleasantly surprised when they responded with one, the 2022 CSTE Revised COVID-19-associated Death Classification Guidance for Public Health Surveillance Programs.

The document itself mentions that it is not guidance on how the cause of death is assigned on death certificates:

“This revised guidance is intended for STLTs preparing reports for situational awareness and public health response. It is not intended for use by physicians or other healthcare providers assigning causes of death on death certificates. Standard guidance on how to report COVID-19 on death certificates has been made available throughout the pandemic and is available at the CDC NCHS Reporting and Coding Deaths Due to COVID-19.”

It also links to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) for that cause of death guidance. That’s the same part of the CDC which reports the COVID mortality data and their Provisional COVID-19 Mortality Surveillance currently shows ~1.23 million deaths where:

“COVID-19 was listed as an underlying cause of death for 87% of these deaths. For the remaining deaths, COVID-19 was listed as a contributing cause of death.”

This all seemed to be backing up my point so far. Yes, interim guidance changed as the pandemic progressed, but was there evidence that NCHS numbers we have now were exaggerated? I wasn’t seeing it based on this one source they provided, so I asked them.

That’s when I got the response I should have anticipated (and should have made me bail on this effort sooner):

“I suggest you use ChatGPT to find the answers to your questions. It will help you explore the data and ask clarifying questions and support with source data. Basically every country falsified their death toll...”

So the answer was “No,” they didn’t have evidence the numbers were exaggerated. I told them I’ll stick to the evidence, not asking spicy-autocorrect for answers when it’s been trained on all sorts of texts, including misinformation.

On the contrary, research has shown these numbers are likely undercounts, not overcounts:

I guess I don’t entirely regret posting those comments. Hopefully if there are other people reading it who think “it’s not that big a deal,” they might reconsider. It soured my mood the rest of the day, though.

Obligatory xkcd: #386 Duty Calls.

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gRegor Morrill

Other Recent Articles

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Photos

Screenshot of album covers that all have a purple-ish, goth aesthetic

I appreciate The Birthday Massacre’s consistency in their album covers. #purple

Click through for larger photos

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Notes

animated image of construction person shovelling dirt into their own face This section is under construction

Please help support legal costs for an asylum seeker in our Southern California community. They were kidnapped by ICE at their court hearing: https://gofund.me/24440eda

Any amount helps and boosting appreciated. 💛

#MutualAid #AbolishICE

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gRegor Morrill

A handy note for future-me or any other WordPress plugin developers:

If you need a plugin admin link that performs a download (e.g. a CSV file), you will need to use a hook that is called earlier in the process, before WP sends HTTP headers/content to the browser.

With a typical plugin admin page that displays content, I would use:

add_action( 'admin_menu', 'foo_add_menu' );

Then in function foo_add_menu(), I would use add_menu_page like:

// my example is OO, so $this points to the object and calls the index() method
add_menu_page(
    'Plugin Page Title', 
    'Plugin Menu Title', 
    'edit_posts', 
    $this->plugin_name . '_index', 
    [$this, 'index'], 
    ''
);

If you try to do this with a method that starts a download, you will get errors like “Cannot modify header information.” This StackOverflow answer pointed me in the direction of the load-page hook to solve that.

That documentation is a bit slim, but what I figured out was add_menu_page() returns a hook name. You can take that hook name, prefix “load-”, and use the resulting string as the hook name in an add_action().

In my example above, let’s say the plugin name is “foo_plugin” and replace “index” with “download”. The resulting hook name would be:

load-admin_page_foo_plugin_download

Then I can use:

add_action( 'load-admin_page_foo_plugin_download', 'download' );

(Be careful with the hyphen vs underscores in that)

Finally, within the download() class method, I can safely modify HTTP headers to start a download:

header('Content-type: text/csv; charset=utf8');
// other headers and content...

#WordPress #dev

gRegor Morrill

Scheduled to get my pacemaker generator replaced soon. Here’s hoping the new one looks like Stark’s arc reactor.

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gRegor Morrill

Great snipe by Rebecca Watson in this video:

“Musk is so terrible at programming that he couldn't even get Grok to say that white genocide is a real thing. Musk has had more success reprogramming his other chatbot, President of the United States Donald Trump...”

youtu.be/bNla2Jl1DZk

Also on: bsky.app

gRegor Morrill

An FDA committee is meeting and considering removing some COVID vaccine recommendations for certain groups. Public comment is open until May 23, 2025 11:59PM Eastern.

#COVID #ActionItem

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gRegor Morrill

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