Edit: So "TV news" covering the newest iPhone release would probably be off-topic too then based on this reasoning, but this seems to reliably hit the front page of HN everytime Apple does so. Apologies for the bad example.
That's worse. Political issues as at least typically have different perspectives to discuss, people-facts do not. This doesn't need to be on the front page.
If people-facts do not have different perspectives to discuss, then why would the death of someone (regardless of who they are) be relevant to HN (even though they are routinely on the frontpage)? Or as user "bdcravens" wrote above, then "Articles about Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, or Chelsea Manning would also be subject to those rules", but are also routinely on the frontpage.
Consider that HN is all about intellectual curiosity. Imagine that the hostname is intellectualcuriosity.ycombinator.com rather than news. Debating product design is more likely to yield interesting thoughts/comments and much less likely to lead to a useless flame war.
The newsworthiness of a submission - which is huge in this case, as you noted - is a relatively minor factor for whether something is a good fit.
For comparison, the HN story announcing that Trump was chosen as president-elect had 1800 upvotes and 2200 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12907201
When was the last time a sitting US President contracted a deadly disease with no know cure?
And happened to be within spitting (and therefore contagion) distance of the other Presidential candidate who, if he contracted the disease was also at great risk?
And it’s likely the VP is also at risk.
You have a situation where the President and the VP may be incapacitated. You may have a situation where the presidential candidates for both the major parties may have to drop out of the elections.
And that’s just my immediate thoughts about unprecedented possibilities.
While it's always possible that HN, or some HN readers, or just yours truly are in a bubble, it's not a good-faith interpretation of my comment. Heck, I don't think it's even a neutral interpretation :-) And bubble or not, a one-line "zinger" regresses the conversation.
The guidelines probably needs to be changed here then.
Boris Johnson's bout with COVID-19 didn't make the HN front page despite being headline news elsewhere. Why would this be different?
Agreed. This is selective censorship by the HN moderators (which is fine, as it's clearly up to them as to what's deemed important here, but the rules for being flagged need to be more clear in this manner then).
But moderators do sometimes manually save a thread from being flagged dead, which apparently they chose not to do in this case.
If you work at Twitter you might want to get to work and stop this state sanctioned attack on his account.