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Comment by rwcarlsen | Hacker News Reader

These specific changes won't be permanent - I agree. But the precedent they set for the future will be. And, in the mean time - these mitigations have and are having a huge personal impact on me, my wife, and my children - among others. Just because a lot of these things might not be a big deal to you, doesn't mean they're not a big deal to others. And I'm tired of people telling me that these things aren't a "big deal" to me. How the hell can they know how big of a deal they are to me? That's up to me to decide.

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You know the irony of refusing to take precautions for concern about the future is it makes the future worse. More people get sick when we are not careful.

If you were in a region with Ebola you would wash hands, wear a mask and more. And for 300k dead Americans, this essentially was Ebola. Right now is a once in a hundred year event where the whole world has to endure this pandemic. These are temporary steps that no one takes lightly to make the future better.

What makes you think I'm refusing to take precautions? I take precautions consistent with how I perceive the risk to myself and others - just like I always have my entire life. Just like you have your entire life. Ebola is a completely different risk/tradeoff profile than covid. Consider how many quality of life years have been lost due to things "saving" us from the pandemic. I'd wager we've had at least a ~10% reduction in quality of life for everyone in the U.S. (that's where I live so I'll use the example). That's 300+ million people for about a year. That's 30 million quality of life years lost. How many people will we have saved? Maybe 500,000? On average they had maybe 3 years left to live each. Also, people dying tended to not have a great quality of life (i.e. they were near the end of their life anyway) - but just to keep the estimate conservative we won't discount/reduce the worth of their final years. So we saved 1.5 million quality of life years. What kind of moronic tradeoff is that?

> people dying tended to not have a great quality of life (i.e. they were near the end of their life anyway)

Who are you to say a grandparent is not enjoying the best years of their life seeing their children raise children, or a great grandparent for that matter? And, children may well enjoy sharing the experience of parenthood with their parents, so the premature loss of one life can hurt many people.

Your whole take is based on a bunch of assumptions that everyone is miserable towards the end of their lives, that children and community feel no loss when elders die, and that just is not true. Life takes on a different meaning as we grow, and no age is of less worth.

My entire take was explicitly _not_ based on discounting the value of older people's years. Also, the loss from death is felt by loved ones regardless and is approximately the same whether someone dies this month, next month or next year. Generally, w.r.t. the pandemic we are very rarely talking about someone that is losing more than a couple years. I explicitly said I was not discounting the value of older people's years - for the sake of conservative argument. You aren't arguing against my point. You just found a way to turn it into an emotional issue. I care about old people. I have 3 grandparents in their mid 80s who I love very much. Although it might be easy to allow yourself to dismiss my argument because you can convince yourself that I just don't care about my fellow man and the aging population - that is simply not the case. I was saying that a reasonable argument could be made for discounting those years, but I didn't for my numbers arg. My point still stands.

> the loss from death is felt by loved ones regardless and is approximately the same whether someone dies this month, next month or next year.

Again, who are you to make such assumptions? You don't know the ongoings of other peoples' lives or how they feel.

In the absence of evidence either way, I think it's a pretty reasonable assumption. Without some level of assumptions, we would be paralyzed and useless - never able to make decisions. Use the data we have - make reasonable assumptions, revise assumptions as new information is available. I can speak from the experience of myself and those I know - which is that death hurts - period. It's also inevitable. Make your peace with it. Don't let your fear of death ruin your life (and the lives of others). Who are you to assume that these mitigations are less bad for society than the alternative? Because you also make assumptions. I'm just saying some people feel and assume differently than you. Just because they disagree with you doesn't mean that they aren't reasonable, well-read, thoughtful, people that have good reason to feel/think differently than you.

We can make do with help from the government during this emergency, and there is no need to threaten shortening people's lives.

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