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Comment by zmgsabst | Hacker News Reader

Sure — but life is a risk tradeoff, ie cost versus benefit. So we should focus our attention on the most dangerous things, not panic over everything.

There’s also contrary examples to your general rule, eg, catching cowpox protected you from smallpox — so you were better off being exposed to the relatively weaker cowpox, even if it wasn’t risk free.

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What would you characterize as more dangerous than a threat like this? What are you seeing that you'd characterize as panic?

Enemy tanks rolling along your street. A mandate to stay indoors with food delivery organized by the army and finding out your family is not on the list to get any.

There are a lot of more dangerous threats than another flu virus.

Id say collapse of societal functions in general is what you should worry about (be it pandemics, climate change or rampant egomaniac billionares). Giving it a "government bad" spin at least still implies some form of order, thus is not the worst case and so imo misses your point of "more dangerous things than the flu".

Btw, that erosion of trust in societies, combined with cluelessness and learned helplessness facing known, serious yet solvable issues (like pandemics) esp. in democracies worries me the most.

Sure but i'm many orders of magnitude times more likely to die from a virus than "enemy tanks".

A threat like what?

This particular virus is asymptomatic without known fatalities.

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