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Comment by hoorayimhelping | Hacker News Reader

You know those signs we memed the hell out of last decade? They're so cliched that they don't mean anything anymore, but think of those.

    Keep calm and carry on

You should relax. We're not the first humans to see some hardship. Everything isn't going to fall apart because the economy has a downturn. Society isn't going to collapse because of this. It didn't happen in the 1600s, nor the 1700s, nor the 1800s, nor the 1900s. It's not going to happen in the 2000s.

Two global wars, the use of nuclear weapons, and a 50 year cold war with the ever present threat of nuclear apocalypse didn't cause society to break down last century, a flu won't cause it to fall apart this century either.

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While all of that is true, it can be very painful for most people. These types of events almost invariably lead to social unrest which compounds the problem. Ambitious and unscrupulous leaders in government and businesses will use this to undermine many of the norms we take for granted.

What is clear is that people are underestimating this crisis, no one wants to think we are in a WWII level moment, and so we don’t activate the appropriate level of response. But it is and will be a world altering period.

Once consistent pattern is that countries seem to feel like you do, it’s just a flu, then doctors see patients gasping for breath and literally drowning as their lungs fill up with fluid, and the true dread sets in. My friend is a doctor in NYC. She said this feels like war, and the nature of death experienced by people is horrific. If people were bleeding from their eyeballs like a movie maybe that would capture people’s attention but on the front lines people are terrified because this is an awful awful way to die.

Hopefully we have the chance to undermine the horrific norm of employer-based private healthcare in the US

I agree with you, but still would like to point out that the same line of argument (we’ve been fine before) would be as valid if society were to actually collapse. No species has ever gone extinct before... until it does!

So you're saying -- if things now return to conditions that were present during "Two global wars, the use of nuclear weapons" of last century... no cause for alarm?

Civilization can withstand alarming situations.

Civilization can; personally... I'm somewhat concerned about my next (and possibly last) 20-30 years.

This isn't a flu. Stop repeating misinformation.

You know what he means, don't be pedantic.

It's not pedantic, a lot of people will die because people were saying, "It's just a flu" and not properly preparing or isolating.

Context and audience matter. If you're getting up in front of a bunch of people and advising them that it's "just like the Flu" you're doing damage.

If you're invoking the flu as a parallel for illustrative purposes with an informed audience then it's pedantic to call it out.

1. HN is not "an informed audience", it's literally the public. And it's common for software developers to mistake themselves for domain experts on any domain but they aren't.

2. It's not an informed audience if misinformation is not challenged, it's a misinformed audience.

3. The flu is a bad parallel. The flu, while annually killing lots of people, does not overwhelm hospitals like a novel virus does. At best it makes people think this is like swine flu, while it has quickly shown to be nothing like swine flu.

Regarding 3, upper estimates for the 2009 swine flu are north of 500k deaths and the 1918 Spanish flu is 50 million.

Flus can be very deadly and the poster obviously did not intend to use the word in a diminutive way. You added that interpretation, knowing it is wrong, and then challenged it.

The whole post was playing down the effects of the current pandemic on society. The whole conclusion was that "a flu won't cause [society to break down]".

So yes, the poster was using flu in a diminutive sense. And yes, flu is deadly and a lot worse than a lot of people (who've probably never had flu) realise. But even given that, even recent novel flu strains haven't stressed and shut down the global economy like this pandemic has.

To be accurate, the government(s) have shut down the economy.

We had several options for how to respond to this, and chose the most invasive, drastic and potentially economically catastrophic one.

To respond to "Clayton" in this thread, we did not have much of an option for reacting to the virus once it got to our land. Legally, the federal government cannot shut down the country and order lockdowns, only cities and states can do that. We could have taken the need for testing and equipment preparation more seriously, but we didn't.

In the absence of data around who is sick, who is not, and who is immune, there is no way to slow the spread of the virus during an outbreak except to keep everyone away from everyone else.

>The whole conclusion was that "a flu won't cause [society to break down]"

This does not minimize the harm a flu can do, it puts it in perspective. Nuclear bombs going off over LA, London, New York, and Beijing probably would not cause society to break down. That does not mean that does not mean that it wouldn't be terrible, deadly, and disruptive.

When planning for how to prepare and deal with this pandemic, people should not be preparing for some Mad-Max scenario where an assault rifle is their most valuable possession.

While the death toll remains smaller, at this point the global consequences of this pandemic are worse than LA, London, New York and Beijing getting glassed (assuming this hypothetical scenario was some kind of a terror attack, and not the first strike in WWIII).

This is juxtaposition, a form of literary style. He is sarcastically downplaying the _flu_ in comparison to the world wars because the _flu_ is already significantly lesser than the holocaust or an atomic bomb landing in Japan.

except the Spanish Flu killed more than World War 1 and 2 combined (est. 50 million dead from Spanish Flu)...

World War II alone killed 70MM - 85MM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

Also, 50MM for the Spanish flu is the top end of reasonable estimates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Around_the_globe

you're right. Thanks for the correction.

> Keep calm and carry on

You know that that meme originated from a campaign designed by the British government for motivation in the face of mass bombing anticipated in England before the onset of WWII right? I think saying that "this won't be any worse than being bombed by nazis" is not a particularly motivated slogan.

> a flu won't cause it to fall apart this century either.

If you think this is just a freak thing that is happening, som e flu what will pass, then you don't understand what is happening. What we're seeing is the way this pandemic is exposing vulnerabilities in our global capitalist system.

And finally, plenty of societies of collapse in those time periods. Of course humans and societies continue to exist, but there are more an enough examples of societies that have ceases to exist and the transition is a painful process.

It's actually way more ironic than that. It's traced back to the public stance of the British government during the spanish flu pandemic in WW1, where they decided that keeping the economy going was more important than trying to slow the spread of the flu.

"According to Dr Honigsbaum, the “carry on” advice may well have been responsible for thousands of the 250,000 Britons who ultimately died in the Spanish flu pandemic."

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/health-fitness/body/coronavirus-...

The irony is almost palpable! Thank you for sharing this.

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