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Comment by thathndude | Hacker News Reader

I think your point cuts both ways. People can’t appreciate how big the US population is and the normal death rate. Every year around 2.8 million people die in the US from all causes. Around 7,500 people every day. So 450 a day isn’t that incredible of a number given the scale of the population.

When an airplane crashes, the reaction is less about loss of 100-300 lives, but the way in which it happens. If a loaded 747 crashed every day, the negative reaction wouldn’t be primarily because people died (that happens en masse daily), but because the safest mode of travel just became unsafe.

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That is a good point. Somewhat similar, we seem to accept in the range of 10,000-11,000 drunk driving deaths a year as fairly normal [1]. Because it is, for the most part, a widely spread out set of events with a few cars crashing by themselves, or into one other car... Yet we still drive everywhere. But if you ask people, someone might tell you that they're more nervous flying (despite statistics clearly showing that per hour of driving, or per hour riding in a 777, you're far more likely to die in the car).

1: https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/drunk-driving

How about 1,300 deaths a day from smoking?

https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast...

I consider this somewhat different because people who smoke knowingly do it onto themselves. If people think the benefits outweigh the risks, I don't see that as a "failure" in any way.

Passive smoking is the main cause of harm to _other_ people and is unsurprisingly also the thing that's the most regulated. (Smoking in bars etc.)

At this point, isn't non-mask-wearing somewhat similar? The death risk to vaccinated people (for now) is lower than for getting the flu (even with the flu vaccine). So, the risk is only significant to unvaccinated people, who have had plenty of opportunity to get the shot. So the risk here to those people isn't from themselves (like in smoking), but from others - but the risk is their own choice to take?

It always amazes me how casual people are about traveling at 70+ mph with opposing traffic traveling at similar speeds, sometimes less than 4 feet to your left with no protection other than a few inches of paint. There are some places that you could die just from losing focus for less than a second.

USA roads are seriously scary. It's no small wonder that drunk drivers kill so many people.

I don't think "the safest mode of travel just became unsafe" is really what is going on. If 400 people die in a single incident, it doesn't matter so much what people's association of how safe what they are doing is. If that many die in a fire, or a ship sinking, or a flood, or whatever.... the reason we care is because it is a singular event.

You could the logic of broken precedent of assumed safety to people shopping in a grocery store and contracting Covid. What's safer than buying groceries or hanging out at a friend's BBQ? No one was doing anything ostensibly dangerous or out of the ordinary.

The only thing that makes sense is if we admit that there is a deliberate attempt to deprogram the masses and politicize science. People are indifferent because they're instructed to be on a daily basis by the talking heads.

Agree. To add, 450 individuals dying separately from different causes in different places is not as newsworthy as 450 people dying in one event in one place in spectacular fashion.

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