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Comment by TomSwirly | Hacker News Reader

There are over a million dead in the United States for whom your statement is not true.

My generous interpretation of OP is that during the covid pandemic our precautions that kinda-sorta slowed down covid were adequate to basically remove influenza from the human population as indicated by being the least amount of influenza activity on record[0]

[0]https://www.cdc.gov/flu/season/faq-flu-season-2020-2021.htm

It's not widely agreed upon that this was due to mitigations, and there's unfortunately no evidence they slowed down COVID either. All claims that mitigations slowed COVID fall apart when examined carefully (often they aren't even real, they're just model predictions being presented as if that was the same thing as empirical evidence).

Rather, there seems to be some mechanism by which some viruses push out others. This can also be seen in how new SARS-CoV-2 variants would often rapidly exterminate the prior variant within weeks, instead of co-existing.

That doesn't make sense. If that were the case then the cold & flu wouldn't intermingle, though they very much do. And now, when fewer mitigations are around, we see people hospitalized with COVID, influenza, and RSV. Why, when mitigations are removed, is COVID no longer so dominate it's pushing the flu out?

> Why, when mitigations are removed, is COVID no longer so dominate it's pushing the flu out?

Because nearly everyone has had it already. The mitigations were removed because Omicron so visibly ignored them that everyone just gave up at that point.

Here in Alberta it's still killing at nearly 5x the rate as the flu, so it's still very much present. Unfortunately, it's impossible to argue further because of the lack of population testing (Alberta only tests those hospitalized), but more people here were found to have COVID this season than influenza[1].

If we're now largely immune to COVID why isn't influenza now pushing it out?

https://www.alberta.ca/stats/dashboard/respiratory-virus-das...

I'm not being clear. The interference appears to be related to how recently you were infected with something else. If lots of people around you are getting COVID, then they aren't getting something else. Once most people are immune to it, they aren't getting infected with it anymore and other viruses can compete again.

> it's still killing at nearly 5x the rate as the flu

The way they define COVID deaths make such numbers incomparable.

Whatever the number of dead, it wouldn’t be true for them. If we don’t take precaution X then Y more people die, but that doesn’t mean every X is worth it.

Imagine how many more would have died if no one washed their hands.

Very few. Covid mass infection events happened mostly through the air, much less so through touching a surface. We learned that early in the pandemic. Hand washing after the first few months was mostly kept as hygiene theatre and for preventing transmission of infections other than covid.

> Very few. Covid mass infection events happened mostly through the air, much less so through touching a surface. We learned that early in the pandemic.

No, "we" didn't. The CDC and, by extension, much of the coverage was insisting on surface sanitization even though there was plenty of evidence for airborne transmission already. I distinctly remembered going with the CDC recommendations until a friend pointed me out to a bunch of published articles with a preponderance of evidence for airborne transmission. It took many months for the CDC and other agencies to change their stance, by which time the whole 'surface cleaning' was already entrenched in everyone's minds.

If you only wash your hands because of "hygiene theatre" please don't invite me to dinner.

That's not what they said. Read it again.

It is not clear to me that any significant number of deaths were prevented by lockdowns once vaccines were available, only delayed by a maximum of 3 years. Everyone still got covid. Some people didn’t make it through the filter, that’s what new diseases are like.

Given that people are still dying of COVID, "a maximum of 3 years" is incorrect.

A million dead people, sufficiently far from us in any particular dimension, don’t matter. It’s a funny piece of human psychology. Deaths years ago or years in the future, or in Africa or wherever. Just don’t matter to most people. Goes double when they are “other”.

“sufficiently far from us in any particular dimension” is where that falls apart, though. One million dead within the US alone means a lot of people were touched by COVID death.

Aren’t they not at all far from us, in any dimension whatsoever, except that they are not literally us?

99% of them are far from you physically. If you weren’t personally affected it probably doesn’t matter to you.

I was unlucky and lost 3 grandparents between my wife and I. Matters more to me probably.

I doubt that they're disproportionately far from my physically.

I am really aiming for density here. I don’t think it’s weird (or debatable) that humans don’t care as much about other humans that are far away. They care about ones that are closer.

The thing is lack of density was sufficient to trigger this lack of care. Kind of interesting.

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