Comment by baq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by baq | Hacker News Reader

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contrary to what thatcher says, there is such a thing as a society. if you catch the disease, you risk not only your death or permanent disability, but also that of your family and neighbors, and in case of asymptomatic transmission, you have no idea you are a risk.

roads are a bad analogy because you don't spread crashes if you crash yourself or get crashed into. car crashes do not follow an exponential curve and aren't contagious. you always know you've been in a crash (except if you die). somebody's always at fault if there's a crash. pretty much none of these are true in case of a plague. we close roads and quarantine people because diseases are contagious and kill people or leave them disabled more or less randomly.

You are giving an argument as to why coronavirus is more threatening to society at large than crashes. That is not relevant to the discussion at hand, which is about whether or not allowing road travel means being complicit in deaths.

Your argument is that, yes, road travel means we choose more deaths (thus implicitly validating the argument you're trying to critique), but that because the deaths don't spread exponentially, this is okay. That is a fine viewpoint, but it relies on the premise you're trying to disprove (that we are in fact okay choosing more death in order to facilitate unnecessary human interaction).

And frankly, Thatcher has nothing to do with this, so you should probably stop bringing her up.

I would understand if you were trying to do a cost benefit analysis between saving lives versus saving the economy but it sounds like you're trying to frame this to focus on semantic differences between closing roads vs closing the economy temporarily. Baq's point is that mortality rates from the covid 19 grow at exponential rate compared to car fatalities which are flat YOY. If you let covid 19 continue to spread, about everyone will be infected, of which 1% will die - young and old - because we will have overwhelmed our healthcare system. This is why the road analogy is flawed.

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