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Comment by pikma | Hacker News Reader

Seeing the replies, it seems that most people agree that it is worth it.

But in the last few weeks I keep wondering if our reaction to covid-19 is consistent with our reactions to other causes of mortality. For example:

- 1.25 million people die in road crashes every year, yet we have collectively decided that abandoning cars is too large a sacrifice to make.

- global warming has the potential to cause huge devastations and millions of death, yet we fail to make the adequate sacrifices to limit our emissions.

So, is there something different about covid-19 that warrants these differences? Is the fatality rate higher, for example?

Or could it be a difference of game theory? For example for global warming, everybody has to participate in order to see gains.

Or maybe humans have a natural fear of germs and react stronger to contagious diseases than to other risks? I remember reading that argument in Factfulness.

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Global warming is too abstract, hard to reason by some due to the distance of cause and effect.

Car driving fatality is fairly bounded. 124 ppm/year in USA.

Coronavirus 19 has the possibility to mutate and keep waving over the world, killing an unbounded number of people, which is downright terrifying. The best-case estimate of fatality is 5000 ppm and >50% of Americans getting it, that's 20x more deadly than cars.

That's substantially less deadly than cars. 20 years of car crashes are equivalent to this virus, and we've had and will continue to have a lot more than 20 years worth of car crashes. 5000ppm by your estimate die once, and then the virus probably stops being a problem.

We can have some faith that this virus is a one time event because

- A vaccine will probably be invented before long.

- Effective treatment will probably be discovered.

- If there is no vaccine and no treatment for some reason. You probably can't catch it twice, maybe everyone gets it once, but after that only kids get it, and kids don't die from it anyways.

to prevent the 1.25 million auto deaths, we have to stop (or drastically curtail) driving forever, or until we invent reliable autonomous driving systems (quite a long time from now). the drastic measures to slow the outbreak of are only expected to be in effect for a couple months or a year at most.

people are willing to take drastic measures over a short period of time to prevent a large number of deaths. this doesn't imply they are or should be willing to take the same drastic measures indefinitely.

Agreed that COVID-19 is a serious threat worth countering.

Our under-reaction to other serious threats is probably both psychological and evolutionary. Psychologically, COVID-19 is salient because it’s a novel threat and our brain is hardwired to notice and react to changes. Evolutionarily, humans have encountered and survived infectious disease, but car crashes and global warming are historically new.

You got your numbers wrong.

In 2016 in the US 37k people died in car crashes.

At 2% fatality rate and 70% infection rate the virus will kill 4.6M Americans.

That's over a 100x difference.

The 1.25 million is worldwide.

7.7 billion people * 0.7 * 0.02 = 108 million people

Now show me a cause of death that involves 108 million people that's not taken seriously.

Also, in a matter of short period ~4 months.

This is a serious pandemic.

If COVID continues to kill people at the same rate in Italy as it does today, it will kill about ~150k people.

Applied to the whole world, the risk is killing easily 10x as much as cars.

If cars suddenly became 10x more dangerous, I'm sure it'd cause mass panic. Especially if cars became 20 to 30x more dangerous specifically to our parents or grandparents.

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