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Comment by leashless | Hacker News Reader

Seems less bad to me than the year or so that followed 9/11. Bad and bad enough though.

I lived in lower Manhattan on Sept 11. The following months were full of anxiety as no one knew if there would be more attacks (hijackings, bombings, perhaps a chemical attack on the subway like what had happened in Tokyo some years earlier). The city was full of missing person posters, who you knew were people who would never be seen again.

After 9/11, a lot of people avoided the subways or going to terrorist targets like Times Square, but life outside of the immediate area around the WTC continued, and even the World Series was played in the Bronx shortly after. 9/11 had a terrible impact, but things returned to almost normal much more quickly than they have with covid-19.

Its interesting to me that you bring up 9/11 since that was my first thought as well. I remember that time as a surreal haze of watching the news with a near constant "is this real and happening?" thoughts running through my head. I recall the feeling of waking up and how things felt normal again until the realization of the current state of the world washed over me. It took a long time until things felt "normal" again which is crazy considering the wars that were happening and the waste of life that the events led to.

I haven't really had that experience until the last few months. Its just as surreal now as it was then.

9/11 was definitely more localized to New York and maybe America. But the pandemic has been the first major crisis at a global scale for this generation.

This pandemic is probably the worst human catastrophe since ww2.

What? Less than half a million deaths so far. Pretty serious, but definitely not the worst human catastrophe since WW2.

There are a few dozen wars, civil wars, and genocides over the last 70 years that resulted in more than half a million deaths. Plus of course much non-death related suffering. Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran-Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Congo.

Plus some real stand-outs, like the Korean War (2M - 3M?), the Vietnam War (1M - 4M?), the Khmer Rouge mass killings (1.5M - 2.5M?), Nigerian Civil War (1M - 3M?), the Bangladesh genocide of '71 (500k - 3M?),

In the natural world, cyclone Bhola (and subsequent flooding) is blamed for over half a million deaths.

As it stands, COVID-19 isn't even in the top 20 yet (er, bottom 20?), though unfortunately it is on track to perhaps hit top-10.

For reference, WW2 is still two orders of magnitude worse than any of the above. Yikes.

There's also something that seems mentally different about a pandemic rather than a war. Diseases are horrific and it's one of the great tragedies that we weren't able to contain this one. But something about deaths from a natural cause like a virus just feels different from a death caused by the human hatred or greed of a war.

It's not even the worst pandemic since WW2. The 1968 flu killed between 1 and 4 million people.

AIDS has killed 32 million people. It killed 1 million people in 2016 alone.

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