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Comment by i_no_can_eat | Hacker News Reader

> Restrictions are all but gone at least in Europe and society is still functional. And it would have been sans restrictions too

Society was functional during the Spanish flu as well; that's really not the point. The point of the restrictions was reducing the overall number of deaths.

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Which, in the case of COVID, is not exactly a great argument for the restrictions either considering that after two years of COVID the world has experienced less than 7 million recorded deaths [0] compared to, at a minimum, after two years of the Spanish Flu we were looking at 17 million deaths (though it could be closer to 50 million) [1]. And that's with a global population that is an estimated 3-4x greater than the world population of 1918 [2] and with far easier global travel.

[0]https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu [2]https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-populat...

I don’t get that argument, reducing the number of deaths is quite a good argument regardless of previous pandemics.

Also I wouldn’t compare Covid deaths with Spanish flu deaths. The access to health care and the quality of health care is totally different today than in 1918.

I think it’s wrong todo such comparisons as an argument against the restriction.

I could also imagine that the number of flu death went down due to restrictions (would be good to know if this is true).

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