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Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

This is strange logic... since we all are going to die anyway, we shouldn't worry about causes of preventable death?

So i guess we don't need drunk driving laws... only about 10,000 people a year die in the US from drunk drivers, they were going to die anyway. The world keeps on moving.

No reason to work on curing cancer. Dead someday anyway.

Yes, death comes to us all. That has no bearing on whether we should work to prevent death.

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I just looked up the CDC data and it says ~0.7% of the US population dies each year. Out of ~330 million people, that's 2.4 million people each year.

So assuming that 400k figure is excess mortality, that means 17% more people died last year than normal.

That is tragic, but the way it gets talked about, you would think we were at 10x or more.

17% more people dying every year is a huge increase. Why do you feel the need to downplay it?

>That is tragic, but the way it gets talked about, you would think we were at 10x or more.

Then again, we've invaded foreign countries and sacrificed our civil liberties ("war on terror") for way less deaths than that.

> Then again, we've invaded foreign countries and sacrificed our civil liberties ("war on terror") for way less deaths than that.

Makes you wonder why we are always so quick to trade away our freedoms...

I’ve been wondering if we’ll see a drop in deaths in the future too. A lot of the deaths are people that wouldn’t live much longer anyway. If 2 years from now the death rate is 17% lower we only lost an average 2 life-years of the 17% population, which is tragic, but is it more tragic for the other 99.3% of people to lose 1 life year because of that?

For one thing, we lost 447,000 so far WITH all of the quarantining and shut downs... that number would have been WAY higher if we had done nothing. The hospitals would have been completely overwhelmed, and many who survived would have died.

Also, we did not ‘lose’ a year of life.

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