The front page of The New York Times for May 24, 2020 | Hacker News Reader

The front page of The New York Times for May 24, 2020

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48 pointskaizenb32 comments

Absolutely gutting to see. And this isn't even the full up-to-date list even for one country. Considering how the government is responding to the virus here, I'm a bit worried the UK newspapers will have to do multiple-page spreads soon enough if they want to do the same.

To preempt the cynics, yes, ultimately, this gesture won't change anything. No politician will look at it and say "Wow, we really should change our ways!" and suddenly find the cure. But it's good to see the media stand behind the people and give the time of day to those who are lost forever. It's a hopeful message, if anything.

Everything turned into numbers and data; X cases, X deaths. We all talk about it so easily, check every day the changes but as far as I can see we lost the connection between these numbers and what they really represent. These numbers are human beings, and the slightest changes, one change even matter a lot. This is a good reminder from NYT in my opinion that numbers are us, actual people dying. Not some random computer-generated stuff. But of course you are right, no human life can change the perception of a politician and the games they play.

In 2003 I asked the NYT to list casualties of the Afghan and Iraq invasions on the front page but they told me they were satisfied to bury them in the middle of the newspaper. It was only ever a few names at a time, and Even that not every day.

Eventually they just stopped printing them at all.

I'm not trying to belittle those deaths and they should have put them on the first page, but didn't 5000 Americans die in Iraq? At this rate Coronavirus will kill 100 times that :o

Deaths in a war like Iraq were entirely preventable - no choice to go to war, no US deaths in Iraq.

Pandemics are preventable. Pandemics escalating domestically is preventable.

Indeed, though the newspaper in question was all-in for the Iraq War initially while it has never been cheering on the pandemic.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/may/26/pressandpublis...

> I'm not trying to belittle those deaths and they should have put them on the first page, but didn't 5000 Americans die in Iraq?

Did only americans die in iraq?

> At this rate Coronavirus will kill 100 times that :o

Hundreds of thousands of iraqis died because of the illegal invasion. That's not counting the people who starved or died of disease due to the destabilization of the country due to the invasion.

Also, there is a difference between death by natural causes and murder.

Would NYT dedicate the front page to Iraqis? I doubt it. I'm not American, BTW.

> Would NYT dedicate the front page to Iraqis?

Of course, if it aligned with their political agenda. But the NYT was behind the propaganda to start the illegal iraq war, so I doubt that.

Roughly half a million fatalities in the second Iraq war and about 150K in Afghanistan. (All numbers are of course disputed).

Of those they were about 4.5K and 1.5K US government employees (e.g. soldiers). Those are the only ones the NYT would bother to list, of course, but I had hoped even that meager portion might provoke some attention.

Your position echoes Stalin’s calculus that “quantity has a quality all it’s own. In both cases action (and inaction) by a few caused enormous misery for whole populations, though now the country has used its weapon of ignorance to attack itself.

You mean the USA invasion to ... and the USA war in... I assume. These crimes are crimes initiated and committed by the USA and the UK for which only Iraqis and afghans had to pay the price.

I was hoping that the NYT would be willing to draw attention to even the small cost the US was paying...no luck.

Yes criminal invasions; calling them “wars” makes them sound more morally neutral, at least to the modern ear.

> It was only ever a few names at a time, and Even that not every day.

Because Iraqis and Afghans, notoriously, have no names.

Very much so but I figured that was a position I was definitely not going to make progress on with the NYT via email. I was hoping that Even seeing just the names of Americans might remind people that something horrible was going on “over there far away”.

I edited in “and even that not every day”. I thought if I were less subtle the comment would be downvoted.

Reminder that the US is undercounting, so 100,000 had died a while ago without anyone noticing that milestone:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/04/27/cov...

What really boggles my mind is to consider the next "milestone". The US lost 116,516 in WW1. We're probably less than 2 weeks from reaching that on paper, and probably past that in blood.

We passed 9/11 (on paper) on Mar 28. We passed Vietnam (on paper) on April 20. We're now passing WW1. This is the true scale that's completely evading our imaginations.

Following World War I the Spanish (lol) Flu killed almost 700,000 in the US.

It’s somewhere around 400k for ww2. I’m really hoping these numbers don’t become relevant. I was simply trying to make unimaginable numbers, imaginable.

I don't know that they're unimaginable. Right now the death count is about 1.25 times the death count for the 2017-2018 flu season. At any rate it fits within a context of many other illnesses and pandemics, and it makes much more sense to compare this virus to those rather than deaths from war (though there are discussions you could have about the direct relationship between the two in specific cases).

I'm not saying that you're doing so here, but evoking the language of war is a common rhetorical tactic. When you compare the deaths from this disease to wartime casualties it causes people to analyze them in similar ways, when the two have mostly non-overlapping causes, remedies, and knock-on effects. I actually believe that's what the New York Times is attempting to do with today's front page, and I think it's something to be avoided.

Edit: disregard if this turns out to be a bioweapon

It makes me wonder. What if the U.S government had information about a terror attack that will happen in few months and thousands coud die from it, how will they act?

Probably in a lot more serious way than how they act towards this virus.

The world will become a safer place if we spend more on science and less on buying weapons

They'd empower the TSA to do more security theater. Much easier to pass, and gets a lot more visibility than science funding.

They’ve actually done this, adding taking travelers’ temperature to the theatrics!

I don't want to minimise the pandemic- I don't think there is any other way to manage it than the one every sensible government is taking. But- a but was coming- the count of the deaths is a really rough way to estimate its damage. A better one would be the total number of years of life expectancy lost. This epidemic is very dangerous for everyone but it's mostly killing people who were towards the end of their life. It is still tragic but it's different from deaths of random people in every age bracket.

I'm not sure we can actually calculate that - especially given the permanent damage left to lungs, heart and kidneys - we don't actually know how many years this is going to take off survivors.

If you survive covid at 20 and die at 50 of complications, do we count this as -30 years life expectancy, or disregard it from your numbers completely?

Deaths is a very rough metric, and we're struggling to get even that right. I've no problems coming up with any other metric you prefer, as long as we can make it more accurate, not less.

> especially given the permanent damage left to lungs, heart and kidneys - we don't actually know how many years this is going to take off survivors

I don't think this is fearmongering per se, but I'm a bit fed up with this line of thinking.

We're playing with fire by surmising there's hidden harms (who's quantifying? is there even evidence this is happening to many survivors? I don't care if there's evidence it's happened to one person, we need demonstrable proof of very widespread damage, but I just don't see that being passed around as a possibility) and outright ruining people's livelihoods.

We're not surmising, we know some people have had kidney damage or lung damage.

I agree that we need to balance that against the risk of continued severe lockdown, but it's not easy.

I honestly don’t think we know yet. I think most resources are being pumped into things that are actionable.

I’m not trying to fear-monger. But if people want to come up with “alternative” statistics, I think they need to be justifiable. There’s been a lot of debate around cases vs deaths, and our margin of error on each.

IMHO unless they can make “potential years lost” at least as accurate as any of our working figures, all they’re presenting is “it doesn’t matter, they’re just old people” masquerading as intelligence.

That we can’t properly quantify this is precisely my problem.

(To be clear, I don’t think any of these metrics should be linked to lockdown. Personally, my entirely uneducated, armchair opinion is that the primary metric for this should be the percentage capacity of medical facilities. All I ask is that we figure out how best to make solid numbers actionable, rather than how to reinvent the numbers to suit our cause.)

Good one that the NYT also pushed the don't wear mask propaganda back in january/february. But hey people forget quickly

Also the NYT: The Imperial College study forecast up to 2.2 million US deaths. (But that seems pretty unlikely at this point.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/world/europe/coronavirus-...

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