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Comment by JacksonGariety | Hacker News Reader

No matter how seriously you value your life, no matter how seriously you take the quarantine, you simply cannot overlook the fact that all of this looks exactly like every other recent TV sensation: it comes out of nowhere; the media capitalizes on it; and now we're slowly getting bored, waiting for something substantial to happen in our lives.

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I’m not sure I would call 65,000+ dead from coronavirus “waiting for something to happen”.

To be fair that's just over US the flu death rate last year, and outside of our most dense city everything has been rather manageable. It's gonna have to bump up another exponent to hit Spanish Flu levels, and even that didn't really affect the US very adversely if the Roaring 20s are anything to go by

Comparing COVID-19 deaths to flu deaths is like comparing apples to oranges. The former are actual numbers; the latter are inflated statistical estimates. See: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing-...

The problem is even if that doubles in 2018 flu had like 90k. Lets say by November it doesn't reach 90k how angry would people be. All the business owners and workers that were laid off.

If you deploy a contingency plan you can't then later say "see it wasn't so bad" using the measured numbers. You have to use a model of what it would have been without the containment measures.

Based on the fact states/countries have used different levels of contingency and some states have similar sizes its easy enough to use states as A/B tests and figure out the p-value.

But Idk if it needs to be that complicated. People are simple. If texas which just opened kills fewer people total and fewer people per million than NYC. Theres no way people in texas don't look at this as a success.

Irrational actions based on an apples-oranges comparison fallacy by ignorant, impulsive people who lack delayed gratification is why advisory and legal mandates are necessary. Loosening up the lockdowns without evidence (good testing) and a vaccine or infected carriers reduced to zero just restarts the pandemic curve all over again and the pain becomes all for nothing. Easily-distracted, angsty, confused, selfish, short-term-focused, un-empathetic people who lack critical thinking skills and proper perspective can't anticipate the consequences of their actions or self-reflect. If some people are going to be dangerous assholes or clueless liabilities to others, the government has to step-in and prevent undue permanent harm. Otherwise, there will be another 100k deaths. If officials in all states acted with complete negligence and denial, they would've lost their next elections and there would've been somewhere between 500k-1m additional deaths. These are deaths can still happen since few % of the overall population is immune, and there's a possibility of importing a deadlier Italian strain to supplant the weaker West Coast US strain.

Almost 40.000 die in traffic accidents year after year in the USA and there’s barely a peep about that. Everything about life requires risk.

I would just like to point out that there are factions around here who will let you know about all the ways car companies lobbied to make the US dependent on driving long distances and driving frequently to the point of social ruin.

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