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Comment by andrelayer | Hacker News Reader

I think a lot of people in this discussion are pitting the argument at people prioritizing their individual choices over the collective health of the community. I think that is a very singular framing from one side. A lot of people I know just believe that the virus itself is not as deadly as the reaction warrants. The infectious mortality rate of Covid is at best twice that of the normal flu, which isn't nothing and warrants action but probably not 40M people unemployed and possible national depression. The fact is if your under 30 you have a better chance of being hit by lightning then dying of Covid. It's pretty rational for someone to understand that and make personal choices without feeling like they're causing real danger to the community.

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Best data I've seen is 6x (.63% IFR). And due to lack of existing immunity from the Flu which keeps the flu at less than 10% of the population/yr, we're looking at a dramatic death toll.

That people don't want to believe it, without evidence to the contrary, just makes them solidly into the wishful thinking category - and likely spreaders that will inevitably get someone killed.

Even at 6x, it still very much comes up for debate. Most reasonable people can agree that a .01% IFR is not worth shutting everything down for, and that a 50% IFR is definitely worth shutting everything down for. Where you fall on this spectrum determines whether someone will call you a wishful thinker or not. Everyone believes their own opinion is the best.

>Most reasonable people can agree

Is this just a way of saying that people who don't agree with you aren't reasonable? What do we do with those people's opinions if they are the majority?

No, it is setting a wide range and excluding the extremes -- that is, people who aren't even within spitting distance of a good faith debate. 0.01% IFR would be 1/10th of the seasonal flu. And 50% would be up there with bubonic plague. I feel pretty comfortable with my definition of 'reasonable people.'

so what happens when all the people you think are unreasonable think you're the one being unreasonable? How do you deal with that?

Do you have a link to the data you're looking at?

Where do you stand on the BLM protests/riots? I assume that is haram too?

How do you think we're going to get immunity like we have with the flu, if everyone is hiding in their basement?

You don't need immunity if you exterminate the virus, which some countries have done..

That's ridiculous. Maybe they're "exterminated" it temporarily. There's absolutely no way the entire world will be rid of it if we ever expect to get international travel back.

SARS-CoV-1 was exterminates wasn’t it? You been worried about Ebola or TB recently? We’ve gotten really far with some muscle. But for some reason lots is ppl gave up on Cov19 real fast.

i dont think you know what the word exterminate means.

Smallpox is the only disease in history that has been eradicated

Lol okay I used poetic license. The point is we had international travel and was not under lockdown due to these other diseases because they're under control. Maybe the ship has sailed for C19 but just saying it's possible.

In addition to IFR we should also consider the rate at which a virus spreads. COVID-19 appears to more powerful than regular flu on this front as well.

Not "possible depression". Depression. The economy crashed. It's over. The government's been buying the stock market to prop everything up. All the numbers you see are fabricated. The market never recovered from the initial crash.

Last I checked a 3rd of Americans aren't paying rent now? It's going to explode dude.

AFAIK global capitalism has been in an over production crisis since at least 2008. So it's not a depression due to covid-19, but a worsening of the existing depression due to covid-19.

Still, those on top are still raking in profit - arguably the crisis isn't that we suddenly are running out of energy, food or housing - just that we're distributing it so badly that we've created poor living conditions for a lot of people.

Much of the fall in activity is independent of announced quarantine measures. People simply stopped engaging in commercial activity.

This appears across multiple states in the US and in multiple countries.

Restaurant, cinema, theatre, and travel bookings most especially.

The stock market recovery is not due to the government "buying the stock market" because they never did that.

If you look at winners and losers in the stock market, followed the Q2 earnings season and saw what companies were facing, it seems clear to me that our economy faced a transition rather than a crash. There are huge winners in this market. Home Depot, Target, and other major retailers all announced record breaking income this past quarter. People are still shopping. Tech has lead the charge due to WFH and the shift to online. There are many more factors in this economic shift than could be explained by the Fed's money printing.

Whatever helps you sleep at night. Just don't be surprised when you wake up tomorrow and can't afford to buy a loaf of bread with your american monopoly money.

Dude (or dudess or whatever), Fed literally has positions in all sorts of stocks, including bankrupt HTZ.

How is that not "buying the stock market"?

How much actual buying and selling have they done? How does that compare to a year ago? How does that compare to the market as a whole? Those are actually relevant, while the government just having some stock is not, so those are what we should be looking at.

Wrong.

Fed did not purchase a single share of HTZ.

They hold two ETFs that include Hertz corporate bonds. Not stocks. Bonds. And not new issues.

Yeah GP has the facts wrong.

There has actually been interesting speculation that the Fed will eventually buy stocks similar to the Bank of Japan over the past few decades [1] but the Fed hasn’t done it yet.

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevincoldiron/2020/07/18/the-fe...

(Edit: Maybe GP was thinking that bankruptcy could lead to debt converting into equity? But even then the Fed’s holding would be indirect and the bond ETF probably wouldn’t hold onto the equity.)

Nah, All these financiers are just getting caught up in semantics trying to ignore the reality of the situation. No the fed doesn't "own" anything, because they haven't "bought" anything.

The fact remains that they've spent over a trillion dollars on junk bonds and they are almost singlehandedly financing the entire economy right now.

>The stock market recovery is not due to the government "buying the stock market" because they never did that

Whether they directly bought stocks is irrelevant because money's fungible. They injected trillions of dollars into the economy[1]. If that drove institutional investors to stocks from treasuries/bonds (in search of higher returns), the effect is identical to them buying stocks directly.

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...

The Fed are buying corporate ETF bonds, not stocks.

Do you have evidence that the government has been buying the stock market to prop everything up? I haven't heard that before.

To amplify this, while I appreciate the passion some people have for community health, there has been a pattern of bald-faced lying that is unsustainable and potentially counterproductive. I can see somebody going to the gym and not feeling bad about it for that reason alone.

As most authoritarian-collectivist movements go, the "Stay the fuck home" crowd took no time at all in destroying all goodwill towards their worldview.

Had its tone been more educational and pleading instead of arrogant, shaming and outright threatening they could have avoided polarizing the conversation and creating a contrarian counter-movement that resists even sensible compromise.

Lives are at stake here, so the "Stay the fuck home" crowd, as you put it, has a right to express feelings that may be stronger than "educational and pleading."

I guess the over 1000 health professionals who said BLM protests are OK but everyone else "stay the fuck home" did not help make the case.

But that's precisely the problem. While you may think this way, someone else may not. So when you try to convince that person from an assumption that they agree with you on the importance of the premise, you fall flat.

People aren’t staying home, so it seems like that didn’t work.

You might feel the stakes are higher than other people, just like there are people who probably elevate issues like, say, gun control to a similar level of urgency. That's the whole basis for discourse in a society.

If it was truly that urgent I would hope the "stay home" crowd could act pragmatically by taking a more receptive tone. That's belied by a truly frightening undertone of violence that I see simmering underneath the messaging, e.g. "Can't we just throw all the anti-maskers in prison?"

People have a right to shout, but their interests would be better served if they didn't.

Lives are at stake for every single large scale event or decision. McDonalds changing the price of their fries, in either direction, has lives at stake.

If you can't calmly and dispassionately discuss "lives at stake" situations you have no business in any conversation of importance.

Interestingly. Many have been clamly and dispassionately discussing a "lives at stake" situation called Climate Change and there hasn't been much meaningful action.

Also, i find this rebuttal interesting. Why do humans have to be dispassionate? We are humans. Getting rid of the passion really seems dehumanising.

I'm tired of hearing about "the new normal". This is NOT normal, and the weak attempts to make it normal is just disgusting. Like you said, this isn't as deadly as people first thought it was, but it seems that those in charge don't want to admit that they're wrong, and as a result everybody is suffering from this even if they really wouldn't suffer from COVID.

When the virus hit China, it had around a 4% death rate. Now, in the US, we have 5.6M confirmed cases, and 175k deaths. That is 3% death rate. (although, deaths lag behind diagnosis) You're right, its less than they first feared, but not much. And still 30 times the death rate of the flu. There have been some groups that keep looking at the number of deaths, and compare it to the population as a whole, to make the numbers look much smaller. But those are purposefully deceptive.

and how many unconfirmed cases? I personally know 10 people who have had symptoms that are likely covid, but not serious enough to go get tested. The fact that the least symptomatic patients are also least likely to get tested means that the calculation you presented gives us, at best, an upper bound. A better way to get the true measure would be based on population-based antibody testing.

More info available at the WHO website: https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/estimating...

The actual best estimate of death rate in the US is 0.65%, not 3%.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

Sadly 3% is the right number to use for that comparison between observed fatality in the US and earlier estimates https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

The estimated IFR is quite different and can’t be just swapped.

You're comparing one meaningless number to another meaningless number. What's the point?

CFR isn't a meaningless number and the estimated IFR is useful for making predictions.

In what sense is CFR meaningful? What can you do with that number? There is little consistency between countries in testing rates or the criteria of what counts as a "case".

Assuming that the probability of being hit by lightning is higher than the probability of dying from COVID under 30, it does not follow that one should take the similar levels of precaution for both. Lightning does not present systemic risk. Me getting struck by lightning doesn't change your odds of being struck.

A relevant factor for countries that have largely controlled covid, or back in March when it was uncertain what direction which countries were going in. For ones that have just let it rip though, the people who were going to get it from you are just going to get it from someone else if you isolate.

If I as an Australian have covid and go to a gym and infect a bunch of people, I've given covid to people who otherwise wouldn't have caught it. If an American does the same, they've given covid to people who would have just caught it next week or next month. They've also given it to less people because a lot more people in that gym have already had it than in my Australian one.

But you know that you can be a carrier and infect less healthy people right?

Asymptomatic transmission, while possible, is rare.

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-2671

If it was, we wouldn't be in this situation

(and the article doesn't say anything about asymptomatic transmission, only that 8% of secondary infected people were asymptomatic)

"Of these 127 [COVID-19 cases], 8 (6.3% [CI, 2.1% to 10.5%]) were asymptomatic. Of the 119 symptomatic cases, 20 (16.8%) were defined as mild, 87 (73.1%) as moderate, and 12 (10.1%) as severe or critical."

6.3% of transmissions being asymptomatic doesn't sound rare to me.

Also, the 89.9% of people with mild or moderate cases may still not realize they have covid, and spread it.

It's also worth noting that there is confusion between "asymptomatic" and "pre-symptomatic". In the health industry apparently "asymptomatic" means you never present symptoms, however you can be "pre-symptomatic"(meaning you will present symptoms) and spread the disease as well. The media had been using "asymptomatic" to mean both, but then a study came out saying it was rare and blah blah blah.

Should I be surprised how many people on HN have resorted to conspiracy theories, accusations of malice, and discreditation over changing and mixed information? We live in a world of changing requirements but somehow changing recommendations based on new and changing information is all the evidence we need to indulge ourselves in confirmation bias?

Then lets lockdown and force people who are less healthy to take all the steps to protect themselves, and leave alone the healty ones ?

Vulnerable people have needs that are supplied by the broader community (food, medicines, medical care, etc) so it's impossible to fully isolate vulnerable populations.

let's do like, china and directly deliver food to them. Every citizen of the us has been sent a 1200 check, US is able to fund a service like that also

$1200 check sent out like 4 months ago. That money is long gone.

So... segregation?

Something tells me that won't really fly

Having or being vulnerable to a virus isn't a protected class.

People with disabilities are in a protected class. Being immunocompromised qualifies as a disability.

Here's a brief definition, from a government site about equal employment:

https://www.eeoc.gov/disability-discrimination#definition

It doesn't seem like immunocompromise generally constitutes a disability by that definition, without satisfying some other criteria. But I'm not a lawyer, so what do I know.

The text of the law makes it more explicit: "[...] a major life activity also includes the operation of a major bodily function, including but not limited to, functions of the immune system [...]"

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/12102

How do you define 'less healthy' though?

In the UK the warning was BMI of over 35 needs to be careful, >40 needs to isolate. That would be a hell of a lot of americans. Plus the diabetics, heart issues, elderly etc.

Not as many as all of them, though.

I don't know what the ripple effect is. Might be very close (after all, less than half the americans do work).

And you don't need that many people to isolate for the house of cards to crumble. Plenty shops need to close because 30% fewer customers isn't enough to sustain them

It's ignorant to simply look at the mortality rate of the disease. You have to also consider how transmissible the disease is. If you infected the entire US population with the flu over the course of a few months it would be complete devastation even though it's just "the normal flu" in terms of how an individual's immune system deals with it.

By this logic COVID19 is nothing compared to SARS or EBOLA because those have higher mortality rates, but obviously COVID spreads much faster and farther so it has had a huge international impact.

Focusing on the death rate as a singular statistic is highly flawed. It’s akin to not taking into account health externalities when discussing the coast of energy sources.

COVID-19 has pretty severe morbidity that make it absolutely nothing like the flu. Some afflicted with severe cases will require months of rehabilitation (never mind working as usual) and probably suffer lifelong complications.

Moreover, it’s the hubris and ignorance of people like the speakeasy gym goers that will prolong the pandemic and arguably case more economic harm than any original lockdowns.

In regards to how dangerous it is, there are two other important factors - the number of people that don't get terribly ill, but suffer long term effects - and the fact that if any local/regional health system is overwhelmed - all those survivors who needed intubation would have been casualties. I'm not sure how that would affect the effective mortality rate.

> I think a lot of people in this discussion are pitting the argument at people prioritizing their individual choices over the collective health of the community. I think that is a very singular framing from one side

> The fact is if your under 30 you have a better chance of being hit by lightning then dying of Covid

Yes, but what about the other members of the community who aren't below 30 who you might infect? Thinking "I'm under 30, so I'll be fine" and not worrying about the fact that you could still spread the disease to others is pretty much a textbook example of "prioritizing individual choices over the collective health of the community".

> It's pretty rational for someone to understand that and make personal choices without feeling like they're causing real danger to the community.

Discounting externalized costs to zero is rational, true; that's the source of the tragedy of commons (in the economics/game theory sense, not necessarily the somewhat disputed original example for which the effect is named.)

But that's a manner in which individual rationality is insufficient to address issues whose effects aren't limited to the individuals engaging in transactions.

While you raise a good point, I question the wisdom of relying solely on hastily devised rules and accompanying sloganeering to solve such issues.

I understand the pandemic is an emergency, but it was predictable. If we got caught with our pants down, we got caught with our pants down. Personally I think it’s time to put the hysteria aside and start discussing the longer-term view.

> It's pretty rational for someone to understand that and make personal choices...

No, it's not; it's arrogant.

All of the epidemiologists and experts seem to think otherwise. What do you know that they don't?

So far 172,000 people have died in the US due to Coronavirus, directly[1]. The actual number of people who have died, if you factor in the effect of the virus on infrastructure and missed diagnoses is about double that[2].

We're approaching the total death toll of World War II[3].

Your claim that it's comparable to lightning, which kills about 50 people per year in the USA, is completely inaccurate and displays a grandiose arrogance. An arrogance that, nationwide, has resulted in a staggering number of tragedies this year.

[1] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#Total_...

>> We're approaching the total death toll of World War II[3].

assuming you mean the US death toll also bear in mind the median age of WW II casualties was something like 26; while the median age for covid victims is 75+. Not to diminish the latter but they are very different.

> while the median age for covid victims is 75+.

You mean 48.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/pdfs/mm6924e2-H.pdf

No, that's the median cases age.

I think the link you cited states that 48 is the median age of infections, whereas the person you're replying to is talking about deaths. I don't have national data, but in my state (Indiana) 51.4% of deaths are 80+ years old according to coronavirus.in.gov

what ?

" After exclusions, data for 1,320,488 (94%) cases were analyzed.Median age was 48 years"

Does your figure include people who couldn't get medical attention because the health system is completely overwhelmed?

Is it possible there are other issues you're not aware of, and that the people who spend their lives studying and preparing for these situations are?

> Does your figure include people who couldn't get medical attention because the health system is completely overwhelmed?

Do you have any articles about people being turned away from hospitals due to lack of capacity?

Explicitly being turned away? I have not seen those. The New York Times did an analysis of the overall death rate, however, and setting aside COVID deaths, it is up. It's not an unreasonable assumption to assume at least some of those are lack of medical care for whatever reason.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...

It's because people are afraid to go to hospital or call paramedics, they actually did a mini-campaign over here in the UK telling people it's still ok to call 999 (our 911) because they were so concerned about the deaths happening at home that could have been avoided.

the health system was never "overwhelmed" except for brief periods and in specific locales. My spouse is in healthcare, they have still not recovered their normal census. If anything there will be a huge spike in cancer deaths due to late diagnosis etc as people have stayed away.

So your saying that people are dying from cancer due to covid?

So it’s fair to attribute those deaths to covid then.

     -sarcasm

I am saying people will die from cancer, because covid kept them out of the hospitals and clinics. Its better now, but back in march thru june many hospitals were laying off staff due to the cancellation of almost all routine procedures etc. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/04/10/metro/tracking-lay-of...

I was pondering if certain people will start marking cause of deaths as coronavirus.

Apparently coronavirus pays well for hospitals, also some people want the death due to cornoviruis to be as high as possible.

Not sure if I follow your point? Are you saying this is less of a tragety because these people lived 50 years longer?

Is it not? To me, an 18 year old getting mown down on a beach is a much larger tragedy than an 85 year old dying.

Let's not even get started on abortion...

Edit: I meant this as a joke, albeit in poor taste, I see it was not received well.

That being said, I do think that relativizing deaths in terms of "opportunity cost" does lead to some somewhat unpalatable moral conundra.

The way my friend in an epidemiology program put it to me (two years ago) was "Everyone dies. The question then is when?"

Hard to argue with it. But it does lead to some places mainstream american morality would consider unpleasant.

What's the point of the question? What would you argue? Yeah, obviously everyone dies, but when is the important part. It's generally agreed that shortening someone's time to live is one of the biggest offenses possible (if not the biggest). How does that question change that notion?

It directly implies that if we prefer dying later to dying sooner (in almost all cases) that older peoples lives would have statistically less value. Which is anathema to many Americans. The only way around it is to say you are indifferent to when death is for people, which is also anathema to a lot of people. It’s a paradox of our ethical system.

If you consider that shortening someone's life is not a continuum but discreetly bad, then there is no paradox. Moreover, I consider that to be the only ethical way to view it. If you take the life expectancy of the victim when judging the killer, you may find yourself giving lighter sentences for those who kill impoverished people, who have a shorter life expectancy, than those who kill rich people.

Yes, it is less of a tragedy when an old person dies. Old people have less of their life to lose and have less remaining potential to contribute to society. The death of children is always more tragic than the death of elderly people.

This isn't a perspective exclusive to young people either. Last year my grandfather died and my cousin had a miscarriage. My grandmother was far more distraught over the latter because she understood that her husband, who she'd loved for nearly 60 years, had already lived a full happy life. She said as much explicitly.

It may be a cultural thing too. It is a lot faster to produce young unqualified people than a really senior person. We are losing minds like John Conway.

Anyway, I'd say my grandfather and cousin deaths (non-covid related) had about the same impact on me. Dying is the tragedy of being alive, I suppose.

God bless your grandmother, I wept reading this post.

I don't know if they were saying it, but they would have been correct to do so if they were.

This is not the issue.

Best case in term of covid related death is to keep everyone at home, no freedom and get food delivery directly at the door

Worst case, is to do as nothing happened

There are a spectrum of possible responses. But we have to accept that some people are going to die if we want other to live.

Each group can put the cursor where it wants, but you can't have, no death and complete freedom. Some people prefer that a few people die if the rest of people is free, then some other prefer everyone to be alive and restrict the freedom of everyone else. You can't put the cursor for other people than you

This post highlights my favorite part of the keep everyone home argument: "get food delivery directly at the door."

Who delivers the food if we keep everyone home? There is a subtle classist underpinning to the entire "Stay The Fuck Home" message which really shows how little people value others, especially lower-class (food delivery) or blue collar (food supply) workers. Everyone needs to stay home, except for the deplorables that will grow, process, and serve food directly to my door.

Yes. A thousand times this. I get so tired of the "stay at home" people ranting from their positions of work-from-home high-income privilege.

Delivery and food prep are far lower-exposure activities than indoor sit-in full-service dining.

People do need to eat. They don't necessarily require takeaway, but on a balance of risks this isn't unreasonable.

This line of reasoning evades the real problem by trying to recast the issue as a balancing of risks rather than an undervaluing of a segment of our society. Let's return to the original poster's argument: there exist two extremes with one being "everyone stays at home" and the other being "no change due to COVID." Even in the extreme of "everyone stays at home" there is an implicit assumption that not everyone stays at home, just people with white collar jobs. That is the issue that I am calling out with my "subtle classist underpinnings" statement.

Additionally, it is worth noting that the risk-based analysis you use is 1) an exercise in line drawing (giving everyone their own office while at work is certainly equal or less exposure than food delivery as long as people don't socialize at work) and 2) an after the fact justification for a policy that is undeniably inequitable across class, race, and sex lines.

Fair point.

I was addressing the comparative risks of delivery vs (presumably the same worker cohort) offering sit-down service. Delivery is a net reduced risk exposure.

That still leaves the net cohort differential, pre-Covid to Covid, of (shared-workspace, public-facing) essential service workers, and work-from-home office and profesional workers. That's a real concern.

I'd identify concerns as both those of fairness and net commonweal. I'm willing to sacrifice choice in consideration both interests, at least during exigent circumstances.

Commonweal demands reducing net risk. This means both maintaining work-from-home policies for those capable of doing so, and providing delivery and bulk-service preparation (foodservice, manufacture, delivery, etc.).

Keep in mind that whilst the pandemic is worldwide, it is not felt equally in all locations. This makes geographic arbitrage onnthe basis of risk possible: manufacturing and services which can be exported from quarantine zones should be. The resulting downtime can be mitigated via social benefits.

Safety measures can and should be implemented in workplaces. I'm well aware that this is often not the case.

Differential unavoidable essential risks borne by one cohort can be compensated by others, through raised wages, tax hikes or credits, or other financial means.

The possibility of "immunity passports" has been suggested from early in the outbreak. It's still not clear that this is realistically an option, but there are 15 millions worldwide and 3 millions in the US who've recovered from Covid at this writing. That is a sizable potential high-exposure workforce.

And finally, there is the option of mandating rotations in high-exposure roles. This most directly addresses equity, and might build community through common bond, shared experience, and sense of collective risk and responsibility. Sort of a Covid Draft or Covid Lottery.

Would any of these address your concerns, or do you have additional suggestions?

This should be the highest rated comment!

Though I agree it is classist (and probably a fair number of other "ists") and it's something that I as a white collar worker am keenly aware of, the fact is that if I can stay home, it's better for everyone -- including food service workers -- if I do. My class guilt will not protect people from infection.

I really don't know what the answer here is, but risk mitigation has to be part of the debate. It feels like the culture wars of class, personal freedom, social risk, public shame, etc have supplanted questions of "how do we keep all of the people who keep the engine of society running safe and how do we compensate them fairly for their work?" and "how do we ensure that everyone else does not engage in risky activity simply because they must do so to live."

This is all starting to get away from the core point of the article, which is that people will always find a way to engage in any activity that is illegal, but perhaps if we could address the issues above, the question of speakeasy gyms wouldn't seem so critical because we'd be safe in other areas of our life.

Not to mention the majority of people in this nation cannot afford to use ubereats on a daily basis.

I find in practice that the people in my life better for my long term health set the cursor more towards "prevent needless death with relatively simple changes to behavior", and less towards "Raven in Snow Crash embedding a nuclear weapon into his body that will detonate if anyone tries to kill him".

I'm not sure where that opinion fits in a rigidly logical argument that prohibits sound judgment due to its ambiguity.

Small correction:

Raven in Snow Crash had a sensor in his body. The warhead was in the passenger compartment of his motorcycle.

This is a gross mischaracterizatuon of the posters argument. They are claiming that, based on the information they provided, the people they’re referring to are making a rational choice. Working off of different information is a different matter. They also never claimed that covid is comparable to lightning, just that if you’re under 30 you’re more likely to be struck by lightning than die of covid (I cant speak to the statistical truth of this, but that’s beside the point).

Making a rational choice from what angle? If you consider death of your fellow countrymen just a statistic, maybe.

These are super-emotional topics, something on par with politics. My view is that even if it would be just out of respect of older generations who made the world we live today, raised us, protected us, guided us, we should be considerate.

Now we might end up in economical tragedy vastly worse then just letting them die, but that's a threshold we didn't yet cross according to most people here/out there. Hence all the reactions like closures and restrictions and vast majority complying with them.

Another aspect is utterly incompetent leaders, who's countries they mismanage seem to be, purely from rational point of view, currently holding premium places in covid charts. US, UK, Brazil, Russia etc. Seems like some pattern about how far lying and plain stupid ignorance can get you when confronted with something as little caring as virus.

> (I cant speak to the statistical truth of this, but that’s beside the point)

Is it beside the point? It's false. Lightning kills about 50 people a year in the US [1]. It's frankly fairly rare to get struck by lightning [2]. More people under 34 have died from COVID-19 per month since April than die from lightning in a year [3] (quick note that the breakdown is 25-34). That's to say nothing of long term health impacts from the disease. If you are going to argue that it's a rational choice, you need to be working from correct assumptions.

And more importantly than that, getting struck by lightning does not mean you will make other people get struck by lightning. Making a choice that makes sense for you does not mean it makes sense for society. That's why we have laws.

[1]: https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-victims

[2]: https://www.cdc.gov/disasters/lightning/victimdata.html

[3]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm

> Lightning kills

OP said "hit by," not "killed by." I wasn't able to find a number for people being struck by lightning in a cursory search other than "hundreds more" than are killed by lightning.

Wikipedia gives a fatality rate of ~10% with the citation below.

Cherington, J. et al. 1999: Closing the Gap on the Actual Numbers of Lightning Casualties and Deaths. Preprints, 11th Conf. on Applied Climatology, 379-80

The CDC link he posted for lightning data [1] said that your odds of being struck by lightning are 1 in 500,000. Also according to the CDC [2], a total of 1,201 out of a population of ~40 million US people aged 25-34 [3] have died in a “COVID related death” in the US between February 1 and August 19. This represents 3.2% of deaths from all causes during this time period in this age range.

Assuming you believe these numbers to not be somewhat inflated despite widespread reporting of such incidents, the odds of dying from COVID as a 25-34 year old in the US are 1 in ~33,000. This is ~15x times the odds of being struck by lightning. However, I would imagine those odds go down significantly further among 25-34 year olds with no risk factors, and it is largely the people with no risk factors that are going to speakeasy gyms.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/disasters/lightning/victimdata.html

[2] https://data.cdc.gov/widgets/9bhg-hcku

[3] https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/demographic-statistics

It seems strange to compare getting hit by lightning to dying from COVID-19. That doesn't strike me as a particularly useful comparison. That's also not comparing similar groups. People 25-34 are 1.83 times more likely to die from COVID than all people who are struck by lightning, regardless of age group.

I thought about that, and actually my original answer was the 1.83x number. But then I realized that the apples to apples comparison is 1 in 33,000, because among the 25-34 age group, 1201 out of 40 million in that age group have died. If we are looking solely at this age group, then we can’t dilute the number and say it’s 1201 out of the entire population across age groups.

Re:the relevance of the comparison, I was just responding to the conversation.

Thing is... death by lightning strike is rare because we get out of the rain. If we took no preventative measures, then that number would increase dramatically.

> Working off of different information is a different matter.

Moral theories that do not demand intellectual character are broken. Sincerely believing in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion does not excuse anti-semitism. Sincerely believing whatever nonsense is coming out of a youtube recommendation k-hole does not excuse ignoring the advice of public health experts.

Moral character does not exist without intellectual character.

> They also never claimed that covid is comparable to lightning

Yes they did.

> just that if you’re under 30 you’re more likely to be struck by lightning than die of covid.

That is a comparison.

> (I cant speak to the statistical truth of this, but that’s beside the point).

~50 deaths due to lightening strikes across all age groups. We were already close to 1000 confirmed COVID deaths for folks under 34 in mid-June.

> We're approaching the total death toll of World War II[3].

We're really not though. World War II killed somewhere in the ballpark of 75 million people. COVID-19 has a bit under 800,000 known deaths. Even if we say that for every person who is known to have died of covid, 5 additional people died and were recorded as deaths from other causes (and it's not that high, you can check the excess mortality stats to confirm for yourself that it couldn't possibly be that high), the number of covid deaths _still_ wouldn't even be 10% of the total number of WWII deaths.

Unless by "approaching" you mean "getting closer to because it's currently below that number and increasing" in which case the number of people killed by vending machines is also "approaching" the number of people killed by WWII.

Hyperbolic statements like this just serve to undermine trust, and trust is already in pretty short supply, especially around the pandemic. Messaging around the pandemic has had a pattern of people making whatever statements they think is most likely to get people to comply with public health guidance, even if those statements are false or misleading.

For example, there's a great deal of news lately about how COVID-19 can cause Multisystem Inflammation Syndrome (MIS-C) in children, and that 80% of children who develop MIS-C require intensive care, and that the existence of MIS-C as a possible complication of covid means you should worry more about kids getting covid. What these articles neglect to mention is that only about 300 cases of MIS-C have been observed in children, out of what is probably low-millions of children infected with covid.

When you make misleading statements in order to induce compliance through panic, it'll work the first few times, but eventually people will start noticing, and stop trusting anything you or anyone who sounds like you says, even if it's true. This is the moral of the "Boy Who Cried Wolf" story, and it's been seen again and again in real-life contexts as well (see for example how DARE actually _increases_ drug use).

Making false-but-alarming statements about public health sucks the air out of the room for true-and-alarming statements about public health, and is the moral equivalent of crying wolf except with millions of lives on the line instead of just one village.

Please stop crying wolf.

I think he meant US deaths because his source is a list of WWII deaths by country. That is actually fairly accurate: 170K direct, he assumes ~2x if you count indirect, so ~400K which is indeed approaching total US WWII casualities (460K or so).

Even if you don't count or differently count indirect deaths, I'd still say going from 0 to 170K in 6 months with no end in sight definitely constitutes "approaching". We'll get there before this is all over, for sure.

Ok, but WWII wasn't really a horrifying war because of the number of _American_ casualties. The US lost 0.35% of its population as casualties to WWII, which was pretty close to the percentage of the _world_ population, _including non-participating countries_, that died in WWII (0.33%). Russia, which _was_ a good example of a country that got hit hard by WWII, lost 15%.

By contrast, the US _is_ one of the countries hit hardest by covid -- the US has about 5x the number of deaths per capita as the world average.

It's a little less egregious if the original poster meant "US casualties in WWII vs US deaths from covid" but it's still a misleading comparison.

I agree "US casualties in WWII vs US deaths from covid" is far more appropriate. OP forgot to say US and you were right to point this out.

Past that, at some point it's hard for me to take this sort of thing too seriously. OP probably doesn't have a copy editor for the online comments he's writing from the shitter/waiting for the coffee brewer.

It's a reasonable comparison because, sans COVID context, literally every American would answer "yes" to the question "did lots of Americans die in WWII?"

When I saw the first statistic was US only I assumed the WWII statistic was also US only. Nonetheless, JoshuaDavid made a great speech. Favorited.

COVID-19 has a bit under 800,000 known deaths

Not disputing your overall point, but this is with preventative measures, such as lockdown, quarantine, use of masks, social distancing, etc.

I have seen various estimates with factors such as 35x the number of cases without preventative measures. Right now, there are 5.5 million cases and 172,000 deaths in the USA.

With a more conservative factor, like 15x, a quick ballpark at current ratios of cases/deaths puts that at 82.5 million cases and 2.4 million deaths without preventative measures in the USA, and more considering worldwide cases. Not as bad as WWII, but it is in the range of the Korean War (est 1.5 to 4.5 million deaths) or the Vietnam War (est 2.4 to 4.3 million deaths).

I find myself doubting the 35x number, and even the 15x number. For the 35x number, there are 328M people in the US. Divide that by 35, and you get 9.3M. Under the most generous possible assumptions, with no preventative measures, 100% of the US population would get COVID, and with the current preventative measures, there will be no new COVID cases after today. Under those assumptions, there could be no more than 9.4M people who have caught COVID in the US. There are currently 5.6M people who have tested positive in the US, so that means that under the most generous possible assumptions, at least 60% of the people who were infected with COVID have to have been tested, tested positive, and had that positive test recorded in the statistics.

For the 35x number to be true, all of the following have to be true. Those assumptions are, with maximum generosity

1: With no preventative measures, at least 60% of the US population would be infected with COVID-19 (assumes no further infections after today and that 100% of people infected, including asymptomatic people, have tested positive for COVID-19).

2: At least 60% of the people in the US who will be infected with COVID-19 have already been infected with COVID-19 (assumes 100% of the population would be infected without preventative measures, and that 100% of people infected, including asymptomatic people, have tested positive for COVID-19).

3: At least 60% of the people in the US who have been infected with COVID-19, including asymptomatic people, have tested positive (assumes no further infections after today and 100% of the population would be infected without preventative measures).

Note that while "all of the following are true" is _necessary_ for the 35x number to be true, they're not _sufficient_ -- evenly distributing the burden, change all of the "60%"s to "84%"s to get an example of what a world where the 35x number is accurate.

Going in order on my objections to those assumptions, and what I think more realistic numbers look like:

> 1: With no preventative measures, at least 60% of the US population would be infected with COVID-19:

The R0 of COVID-19 is probably between 2.79 and 3.28[1]. We'll go with the higher of these two numbers (3.28) for our upper bound. That means each infected person, in a population with no infected people, will spread the disease to 3.28 other people. In a world of uncontrolled spread, the spread stops when the average infected person comes in contact with less than one person who is susceptible to the disease, so once 1 - 1/3.28 (~70%) of the population has been infected, the spread stops. This gives us an upper bound of 70% for what fraction of the population gets infected.

In real life, that R0 is made up of some people who will spread the disease to an average of 50 people, and others who will spread it to an average of 0.1 people. People who are likely to spread COVID widely are more likely to be the people spreading the disease and are also more likely to be the people infected people "try to" spread the disease to -- a cashier who interacts with 1000 customers a day has 1000 chances to catch COVID from one of their customers, and 1000 chances to pass it on, so they're likely to be infected early on. The people most likely to catch COVID will, in the long term, be the most likely to be immune, lowering the effective rate of spread much more rapidly than the naive model would predict. Estimates for the actual herd immunity levels vary, but as a lower bound let's go with the number Gomes et. al. come up with[2] and say 10% is our lower bound.

Being very rigorous and scientific, let's split the difference between our upper and lower bounds and say 35% of the population would get COVID-19 if the spread was uncontrolled.

Moving on:

> 2: At least 60% of the people in the US who will be infected with COVID-19 have already been infected with COVID-19

Assuming no third wave, cases per day will continue to trend down over time. Currently, it looks like cases per day are decreasing by something like 0.5% per day, and there are about 50,000 cases per day currently in the US. If that trend continues, we end up at about 15M total positive tests. If the trend accelerates to about a 1.2% per day decrease in positive tests, we do end up with only about 9.5M positive tests, so "60% of the positive tests that will happen, in total, have already happened" is not _completely_ outside the realm of possibility. On the other hand, if there _is_ a third wave, we're gonna end up with more than 15M positive tests.

I'll use the "no third wave, 0.5% decrease per day" estimate of 15M positive tests when all is said and done.

> 3: At least 60% of the people in the US who have been infected with COVID-19, including asymptomatic people, have tested positive

This one seems extremely implausible to me. Tests are fairly hard to come by, expensive, and discouraged for people who have not been in contact with someone known to have COVID-19, at least in the US. Furthermore, a significant fraction of cases are either asymptomatic or very mild, and those people are unlikely to be tested. It's hard to get an exact estimate of the fraction of total cases that are tested, but several researchers have taken a crack at it (example[3]), and estimate that between 3 on the low end and 24(!) times as many people have been infected as have tested positive.

We'll go with a factor of 5, because that's a nice round number on the low end of the range and really the 24 number sounds pretty implausible. Maybe back in April when tests were in very short supply, but certainly not now.

Putting all these numbers together, we get

5.6M * 5 = 28M people in the US have caught COVID-19 so far. 15M * 5 = 75M people in the US will catch COVID-19 when all is said and done. 328M * 0.35 = 115M people in the US would have caught COVID-19 if the spread was left unchecked.

So by a back-of-the-envelope calculation, we should expect the precautions have decreased the spread by a factor of 115M / 75M ~= 1.5, with a fairly wide margin of uncertainty (but I'd say almost certainly not higher than ~3 or lower than ~1). Certainly not a factor of 35 or even a factor of 12.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7073717/ [2] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/medrxiv/early/2020/05/21/202... [3] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

You could make the same argument about the normal flu, pre-covid, which kills many tens of thousands of people in the US every year. The normal flu has killed many multiples the number of people that WWII did. And we never completely locked down the country for the flu. We never explicitly destroyed the economy for the flu.

What about how many people other infectious diseases kill? What about how many people other sources of preventable deaths kill? Why haven't we thrown away our civil liberties in the past, or destroyed our economy, to tackle those problems?

The flu, in a normal year, kills 35,000 people. Coronavirus, with all the steps we've already taken to stop it, has killed 5 times that.

If we had not taken steps to stop it, the projection was millions dead. That is why.

There have been 1424 deaths "involving" coronavirus in the ages 0 - 34 in the US[1]. What happens to that number when you discount for underlying conditions?

Close to 500,000 military personnel (read: military-aged) died in WW2. Sorry to be crude, but what the f*ck are you smoking?

1. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm

Edit: Keeping the vulgarity for posterity, but on reflection it was quite unnecessary. Apologies.

We are nowhere near the ww2 death toll, objectively speaking.

I don't think we are approaching the total death toll of World War II. Unless you mean only US casualties which were relatively small compared to other nations as US entered war very late when it was already decided (Soviet Union has already won decisive victories and lost tens of millions). Proclaiming that is actually arrogant, to use your own words.

>The infectious mortality rate of Covid is at best twice that of the normal flu, which isn't nothing and warrants action but probably not 40M people unemployed and possible national depression.

This sounds like Y2K all over again. No one is disputing the mortality rate. But it's starting to look like all the people who are pulling out that strawman are ignoring the "infectious" part of that equation.[1]

Do we have enough healthcare capacity to support the people who get sick enough to need care until herd immunity is achieved?

And the same people like to bring up Sweden, all the while conveniently forgetting the social mores and jokes. The headline image from this[0] story makes it very clear that what worked in Sweden would not work anywhere else in the world.

[0] https://europost.eu/en/a/view/sweden-goes-it-alone-28030

[1] https://www.healthline.com/health/r-nought-reproduction-numb...

According to a review article published in BMC Medicine, the R0 value of the 1918 pandemic was estimated to be between 1.4 and 2.8.

But when the swine flu, or H1N1 virus, came back in 2009, its R0 value was between 1.4 and 1.6, report researchers in the journal Science.

The R0 for COVID-19 is a median of 5.7, according to a study published online in Emerging Infectious Diseases. That’s about double an earlier R0 estimate of 2.2 to 2.7

...

The researchers estimated a doubling time of 2 to 3 days, which is much faster than earlier estimates of 6 to 7 days. The doubling time is how long it takes for the number of coronavirus cases, hospitalizations, and deaths to double.

With an R0 of 5.7, at least 82 percent of the population needs to be immune to COVID-19 to stop its transmission through vaccination and herd immunity.

It's maybe rational if you're an Ayn Rand Objectivist and you think the older people you infect who die are not worth your time and energy to keep safe.

It's very much a selfish prioritization of the individual above everyone else to think you're under 30 so no precautions need to be taken even though someone under 30 is perfectly capable of passing it on to a whole bunch more people who might be older & vulnerable.

You're falling for the right wing deception here. This is a lot more deadly than the flu and the flu usually only kills those who would have died soon anyway. And even under 30 your odds of dying of Covid are worse than your odds of dying of a traffic accident. And even if you survive you might be damaged for life. It is not rational to fall for a scam.

You have to also account for the people who will survive but end up with some sort of permanent health damage due to it.

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