Comment by 2008guy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 2008guy | Hacker News Reader

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Actually the “flu bro” crowd has some really good points. For me, it’s impossible to ignore the inconsistency. Imagine tens of thousands of people standing before you before they perish gruesomely. These people who died of preventable things other than covid 19, are ignored by society — nobody cares. You aren’t considered a murderer for going to work with the flu (but you technically are) and you aren’t considered irresponsible for taking your kids on unnecessary car rides. When you look at the amount of death caused by unremarkable things and the amount of death caused by covid 19, they are the same. Compared to 7 billion, they are basically the same in that they are a drop in the bucket. After covid 19, will we care about all the people dying from other preventable things? No. Because this is hysteria. It’s not logic.

I think hospitals should maintain enough capacity to handle influx. I think that people should wear masks and wash their hands. But none of that changes what I wrote above. And it doesn’t change the fact that many, many people have a fetish for doom. It’s the same with global warming or the second coming of Christ — a kernel of truth or good intention becomes a mass fetish for doom and no reasonable discourse can survive.

All the other, regular preventable things don’t grow exponentially and as rapid as COVID-19 does.

I’m talking about the death toll at the end of the day, not the current death toll. I’m talking about the likely maximum number to ever be infected (roughly herd immunity number) multiplied by the percentage of people that the virus kills. I understand exponential growth. People who have their own opinions are not necessarily suffering from a lack of math knowledge.

And if we follow your premise that this is hysteria and we go back to work how many absolute numbers of people will die vs other causes of preventable death?

Herd immunity would still mean millions of dead people you'd have to step over.

The countries that thought they could go this route did a hard reverse once reality hit them.

That final tally of bodies is a drop in the bucket of 7 billion, as I have already pointed out.

You're comparing millions of death in the US to the world population. It would be more fair to either use the expected number of deaths worldwide if we just continued our business, or compare it to the total population of the US.

My friend, take the number of people who end up dying after herd immunity and compare it to the population that it infected. If it’s more than a drop in the proverbial bucket, then please excuse me.

I see there's no use in arguing, as the same pointless statement gets parroted back each time.

This disease is now the #1 cause of death in America. Nothing like a trifling total; nothing like a drop; nothing like an ignorable fraction. Very, very significant.

Unless and until 2008guy offers up his extended network of friends and family to be consumed by the disease, I think it's safe to assume moral reasoning isn't his/her forte.

Big numerator / bigger denominator doesn't make the numerator go away.

Are you going to atoms in the universe next?

So following this logic lets shut down all hospitals and stop treating all illnesses?

This appeared to cross some threshold where it really scared people. Personally, the flu scared me. Motor vehicle deaths and hospital acquired infections also terrified me. Those were already above my personal threshold where I thought the risk was pretty bad. I would already maintain a wide berth around anyone coughing or visibly sick.

There's also some paranoia because this is new, and because of the fear of asymptomatic carriers. That makes people think they're helpless and have no way of protecting themselves. A loss of control is an important factor in creating terror.

That being said, this virus does truly appear worse. Wherever that fear threshold is for people, this virus has crossed it.

It is worse for sure. I was stuck in a hotel for the past two months so all I did was watch cnn. It was amazing to see the sentiment of the language on cnn actually become politically neutral as the disease spread in the US. That was when i really knew that this is something big. Anderson cooper actually defended Donald trump in a minor but explicit way at one point and I thought I was dreaming. The people at cnn were definitely scared for a little while there.

Hysteria?

What negates this thinking is hard mathematics ie that all the other things don't kill at a _geometric_ rate. If left unchecked millions of people will die in a short amount of time.

Yes flu also progress similarly but we have vaccines for the flu and we manage it seasonally. Even considering the CFR for covid-19 will drop substantially it is still killing by OOM more people across all age brackets without co-morbidities (not to mention medics) which the flu doesn't do.

> When you look at the amount of death caused by unremarkable things and the amount of death caused by covid 19, they are the same. Compared to 7 billion, they are basically the same in that they are a drop in the bucket. After covid 19, will we care about all the people dying from other preventable things? No. Because this is hysteria. It’s not logic.

Should we be lucky enough for Covid-19 to have the same disease burden as the worst flu season as of late, and not the disease burden it's actually projected to have, several orders of magnitude more people will die than they would from the flu. So no, compared to 7 billion, they are not basically the same.

Your "really good points" hinge on a shaky understanding of statistics at best, or just outright ignoring the available data at worst.

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