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Comment by mns | Hacker News Reader

You can’t just put all the “many” people in the same bucket. I hate this so much now in various circles. I also saw someone else with a similar idea: “why is there a second wave, are so many people anti maskers and non COVID believers?”. No, people had enough of the fumbling and incoherent messages, people are tired and the world is made up not just of developers that can work from home and see this pandemic from their windows while ordering food online, most of the people can’t afford to lose their jobs or stay at home. The whole world adopted this toxic US us vs. they model where everyone who doesn’t agree with you on everything is an ignorant fool and your enemy.

Instead of acting with compassion and trying to convince people of the dangers of this disease, but also providing some sort of perspective of where we are going, we’re just calling everyone who has a different opinion an anti-* and be done with it.

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There's also the issue that while it's deadlier than the flu, it's not that much deadlier, so people are genuinely looking at death rates and making different value judgements on if various restrictions are worth it.

"while it's deadlier than the flu, it's not that much deadlier"

From just a week ago: "Covid deaths three times higher than flu and pneumonia"[1]

And that's taking in to account all the lockdown, mask-wearing, and social distancing measures. Without those it'd be even worse.

[1] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54463511

There's also the issue that cases of flu are remarkably low this year because of all the mask wearing, social distancing &c. Comparing apples to apples, coronaplague is about 10 times as deadly as annual flu.

"cases of flu are remarkably low this year because of all the mask wearing, social distancing &c."

And yet if COVID-19 was no more dangerous than the flu you'd expect to see equal result form those mask wearing and social distancing measures.. but you don't.

COVID-19 is just way more deadly.

COVID-19 is just way more deadly than the typical flu might be true, but it is telling not much more than claiming COVID-19 is way more deadly than the common cold.

Less than 217000 people died of COVID-19 during the epidemic in the USA while some 1.5 million people died from other causes in the same time frame. Why the obsession with COVID-19?

> coronaplague

Go ahead, make people not take you seriously.

Right, especially with the huge variability by age. Telling 25 year olds that they shouldn't socialize because they might infect someone who might infect someone who might infect someone who might infect a nursing home is nowhere near as persuasive as "if you get infected there's a significant chance it will kill you".

I thought that was the case too for a while.

I felt this was a really interesting piece explaining how covid deaths are reported deaths versus flu deaths are just estimated and how the two are very different numbers to base comparisons off.

I also kind of liked how the article was written with the narrative of the eureka moment in realising how the stats were not comparable.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing-...

> I decided to call colleagues around the country who work in other emergency departments and in intensive care units to ask a simple question: how many patients could they remember dying from the flu? Most of the physicians I surveyed couldn’t remember a single one over their careers. Some said they recalled a few. All of them seemed to be having the same light bulb moment I had already experienced: For too long, we have blindly accepted a statistic that does not match our clinical experience.

> The 25,000 to 69,000 numbers that Trump cited do not represent counted flu deaths per year; they are estimates that the CDC produces by multiplying the number of flu death counts reported by various coefficients produced through complicated algorithms. These coefficients are based on assumptions of how many cases, hospitalizations, and deaths they believe went unreported. In the last six flu seasons, the CDC’s reported number of actual confirmed flu deaths—that is, counting flu deaths the way we are currently counting deaths from the coronavirus—has ranged from 3,448 to 15,620, which far lower than the numbers commonly repeated by public officials and even public health experts.

Rough order of magnitude estimates suggest that corona will kill ten or so times as many people as a typical flu season by the spring of 2021. We have however spent hundreds of times as much on coronavirus mitigation than we ever did on flu mitigation in one year. This would imply that society places well over ten times the value on a life lost to covid than on a life lost to influenza.

"Instead of acting with compassion and trying to convince people of the dangers of this disease"

Like that hasn't been done non-stop since the world heard the term "coronavirus"?

A significant percentage of the population prefer not to listen to the science and instead believe in conspiracy theories. Science literacy in the general population is abysmal. That's just a fact.

Many people prefer to listen to what their morning talk show tells them than listen to the CDC.

This kind of ignorance could be overcome to some extent through massive information campaigns, but so far the US government at least is incapable or unwilling to do that. If anything, on some of the highest levels it's doing quite the opposite.

That kind of obviously harmful attitude is not just ignorant, it's borderline malicious.

People certainly have and will probably continue to die because of it.

> This kind of ignorance could be overcome to some extent through massive information campaigns, but so far the US government at least is incapable or unwilling to do that. If anything, on some of the highest levels it's doing quite the opposite.

I think at this point we have enough data to understand what happens when we try to force people to think or believe things on a massive scale. Its not great.

I think people can tell that bullshit has been spewed in all directions. Nobody is looking good here. Nobody is above reproach.

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