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Comment by dustinmoris | Hacker News Reader

> “ According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), air pollution kills an estimated seven million people worldwide every year and nine out of 10 people breathe air with high levels of pollutants.”

This is approximately half the deaths we would expect worldwide if no country was to do anything and we’d let COVID-19 rage through our societies.

Why is our response to air pollution so drastically different then? We don’t even implement a single day lockdown to reduce pollution for a single day. I’m sure air pollution also disproportionately affects young children and damages their lungs as opposed to Coronavirus.

This world is so weird.

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It gets better. The WHO puts ischaemic heart disease as claiming about 9 million lives a year world wide. Most of which is caused from unhealthy diet, not exercising and smoking. Summing up to piss poor life choices. Yet theres a movement that a doctor telling someone obese to eat right and start walking everyday so they can later jog is fat shaming.

Hypothetically speaking if we were visited by aliens... yea, I dont blame them for not making contact.

What? Since when do doctors not tell people to lose weight?

No, docs tell people to lose weight, but theres a movement where that's considered fat shaming and "wrong". You being epically confused is natural. I was too when I stumbled across an article about this, then found that theres more with a full fledge movement as devoted as flat earthers. I hate this planet.

The simple answer is that Covid-19 is equally threatening to rich and poor anywhere in the world, while death from pollution is a highly localized problem, both in terms of geography and socio-economic position. This obviously doesn't take into account the danger of climate change or other dangers caused by the same pollution that we simply overlook.

You can't really prevent pollution deaths easily. You'd need to retrofit thousands of factories, construction sites, billions of cars, etc.

The solutions for Covid are quite simple in principle but our lack of discipline in minor things is killing us.

We've had the better part of a hundred years to fix this if we wanted to. The main reason nobody's doing anything about pollution deaths is that it mainly affects poor people. It also mainly affects people in poorer "non-western" countries, with the Western Pacific and the South-East Asia regions dwarfing all other regions. (2012) [1]

[1]: https://www.who.int/airpollution/data/AAP_BoD_results_March2...

According to figure 2, European regions are in 2nd and 4th places with most deaths per capita, with the value in high-income European countries almost as high as in South-East Asia.

GP's point is fair though. Many developed economies are spending literally hundreds of billions of dollars tackling COVID. Have we done proper cost/benefit analyses to verify whether that money could save or improve more lives in other areas?

Have you heard of the Ford Pinto?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto

I think a famous newspaper article at the time said something like: "Ford decided your life was worth $500". And it was after a cost benefit analysis.

Covid has a fatality rate of, at best, 0.3%. At worst, higher than 3%.

Nobody sane is going to sit still and let, say, 1% out of 8 billion people (80 million people!) die.

We can work on other issues in parallel, but prioritizing emergencies.

> “ Covid has a fatality rate of, at best, 0.3%. At worst, higher than 3%.”

The current fatality rate is 1% despite it is only measured by testing the most severe cases which end up in hospital. How did you come up with 3%?

> “ Nobody sane is going to sit still and let, say, 1% out of 8 billion people (80 million people!) die.”

Latest science claims that we need 42% of a population to be infected to create herd immunity. Only this week we learned that slums in India (e.g in Mumbai) have reached herd immunity and are now the least affected in India where the rest of the country is struggling. 0.5-1% of 42% of 8 billion people (the expected number of deaths) is only twice as much as the yearly deaths from pollution.

Additionally pollution kills 7 million every year. A novel virus is novel only once, so after 2-3 years COVID cannot even reach the deaths caused by pollution even if we tried hard.

So overall it’s completely illogical why we respond to coronavirus with such draconian measures and at the same time are so blasé about pollution which is evidently more damaging overall.

I can't imagine the pollution death numbers to be directly/trivially correlated to pollution: pollution in a single place varies, victims move between places and pollution kills slowly, so it's not psychologically considered an urgency. Covid19 kills quickly, so it is trivial to establish correlation and causation: I would say that the world's response to Covid was driven by the narrative on social media.

If you are asking why humans as a species are not smarter than they are to see through short/long term effects, well, beats me :) But I still don't want my close ones to contract coronavirus, so I am still largely social-distancing. But I only hope to get an electric car in a couple of years.

We aren't blasé about pollution... But to actually get rid of it as drastically as you seem to suggest would shrink our economies by 30% permanently, not for 6 months. Or at least until the alternative techs take over, which could be after decades.

Coal plants? Gone today. Electricity production reduced by 30-50% in most countries.

No ICE vehicles? I don't even know how many there are, but I'd imagine we're talking about 1 billion or more. Now that you're at it, goodbye trucking, taxis, 80% of public transportation, food delivery, ambulances, fire trucks, ...

No planes or helicopters? Goodbye emergency search and rescue, weather services, crop spraying, etc.

You haven't thought this through with your comparison ;-)

Look at the response to things such as mass shootings which, statistically, represent a small fraction of the total murders committed. Terrorist attacks (in the west) receive a disproportionate amount of attention compared to other problems as well.

Perhaps it's because these things can disrupt anyone's daily life seemingly at random. Pollution on the other hand is just part of our daily lives. There are other things which fall into that category as well such as smoking, fast food, alcohol, etc.

Perhaps we as a species, rightly or wrongly, fear the unexpected more than we fear the status quo, even if the latter is more harmful than the former. So we allocate resources to fix the former but not the latter.

I mean, there's good reason for this. Air pollution is manageable because it's known, the market and people can take it into account and try and make informed decisions. Terrorists attacks do not have this property and the variance of the people they kill is quite high. This makes it hard to ignore.

So what? If there is a total lockdown for covid, then there should be a total ban on cars, except for travels that are vital to the economy. The air in cities was perfect during the most strict lockdown phase.

Cars have benefits, your comparison makes no sense to me.

Covid is purely negative.

The answer is money.

Preventing pollution is expensive, and upsets the status quo. And many companies stand to lose their entire livelihood if it were to succeed.

A day of lockdown would probably not have a measurable impact. The first result I got on scholar for atmospheric pollutant half-life claims 83.5 days:

[1]: https://hysz.nju.edu.cn/_upload/article/files/79/b2/159a6762...

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