The most dangerous thing about coronavirus is the hysteria | Hacker News Reader

The most dangerous thing about coronavirus is the hysteria

spectator.co.uk

26 pointslcaff19 comments

This article makes me angry because it doesn't consider the effects of Cov2 going pandemic. It could become another seasonal flu and kill people like the current flu kills people. It would add to the deaths.

Having just suffered through a flu infection, I absolutely don't want another strain in the wild.

Granted, that is assuming that Cov2 proves as resilient as Influenza. Maybe it will just flounder coming summer and be extinct by next winter. But it's not something we want to find out the hard way. We fight it now and if it turns out weaker than expected that's good!

>This article makes me angry because it doesn't consider the effects of Cov2 going pandemic.

Your anger is justified, but perhaps you are not it's intended audience. The Spectator is prone to virtue signalling and is a sister publication to The Telegraph (aka The Torygraph).

The excerpt below has been used so many times, that it is practically a trope, and easily identifiable. The premise being, telling it's intended audience: you are rich and priveleged, this matter is trivial and does not concern you, continue as usual and pick up a few bargains whilst there is still blood on the streets, screw the poor.

We are living in the healthiest, most peaceful time in history, yet we cannot seem to accept it.

> "We are living in the healthiest, most peaceful time in history, yet we cannot seem to accept it."

This is true. Seen from a historical context, we're living in a utopia, yet we seem very unhappy about it.

You seem to have missed the point entirely or not familiar with this group of publications. This hook is used to entice it's target pearl clutching readership, in order to maintain it's flailing subscriber base ─ even giving it away for free with a bottle of water! I am enclosing yet another facetious quote from the article, of which there are many, and have no relevance or bearing to the grave matter at hand.

At the end of January, Brexit had just been completed without incident.

Here is another dated example of a running theme, amongst many recent ones. I will let you look for them at your leisure. If you agree with it, good luck, you are a Tory.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/10412499/The-w...

> It could become another seasonal flu and kill people like the current flu kills people. It would add to the deaths.

This is bad, but 'another seasonal flu' is not dominating the news day and night. Governments aren't preventing people from doing business with, and traveling to countries due to the seasonal flu. Seasonal flu isn't giving closet racists license to come out of the closet. Maybe you're lucky and have missed all the "they deserve it" comments, but the truth is if this originated in any other country this wouldn't be getting the coverage it's been getting.

I simply don't believe that closet racists are coming out of the closet. It seems to me that open racists are just saying "haha coronavirus" instead of whatever they were saying before.

Governments don't block travel due to the seasonal flu only because they know the seasonal flu is unstoppable. If the seasonal flu could be kept out of your country by closing borders for a month or two, I think a lot of governments would do it.

I think so too. If we had any hope of eradicating just one influenza strain we would discuss even a month of worldwide travel bans to get that.

I debated bursting your bubble on this, because I would like to get back into the bubble - but in case others find this and aren't aware: https://twitter.com/hashtag/JeNeSuisPasUnVirus

I don't really know how to interpret this. The first example I saw in English (I had to skip past some because I can't read French) was some guy beating up an Asian woman. I find it pretty implausible that guy's racism was closeted beforehand.

Where I live, the death rate of Influenza is a recurring topic every season. After that it's not interesting because we know the disease very well. For all we know, it cannot be stopped by measures less bad than the flu itself. Thus eradication has not been attempted and is not even being discussed because there are easier targets.

On the other hand, we know very little about Cov2. Its spread and its projected death rate are interesting to me and many other people. We're also currently trying to contain Cov2 by drastic actions. That too generates a lot of headlines. It seems we're failing because heavier measures are unacceptable. Cue more headlines. It may just become another flu strain we'll understand well and discuss shortly every year when it comes around again.

No, its probably the 14% death rate among the elderly and lung-compromised.

If the virus was so benign then why the Chinese authorities put half the country in quarantine ?

There are about 80k confirmed cases around the world, but since this thing can be asymptomatic for weeks and hospitals don't have the resources to test everybody there are probably many many more unknown cases.

And let's not speak about the trustworthiness of Chinese gov stats.

I can’t defend the article. But it seems hard to maintain a perspective where we distrust China’s case statistics but trust that they reacted correctly and proportionately to the real scenario.

How so? "Watch what they do; not what they say." If your boss says the project is on track but refuses to let anyone take a sick day, you would think there's more to the story too.

From what I understand the virus is particularly dangerous to elderly people or people with compromised immunity in general;

I mean, from the matter of internal security... Its pretty obvious this is putting a big load on their health care systems. Quarantine is a measure to attempt to stop/forestall unrest

look dude i just wanna work from home, traffic in the bay area sucks, if i have to pretend I'm scared of some Wuhan Coronavirus ill do it.

What hysteria is that exactly? Arent easy to implement countermeasures such as avoiding crowds if you can and coughing in your arm and washing your hands more regularly good things without any downsides?

Calling everyone thinking of how to keep virus-free hysteric is hysteric.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com