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Comment by dariosalvi78 | Hacker News Reader

> It is time for Europe to develop a coherent tech strategy. Can we build digital sovereignty while simultaneously undermining the protocols that enable it?

We should. The problem is that politics is messy and with lots of opposing views. See the GDPR versus this Chat Control absurdity. But _principles_ are those that stick, and I think that the principle that communication should be private _always_ should become sort of constitutional within the EU. We are the ones that vote, we are the ones that need to signal that we don't want to give up privacy for whatever "security" some, completely uninformed, want to promise.

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Anybody actually living in EU is absolutely tired of hearing "It is time for Europe to..." It's the standard sentence starter for every "bold proposal" for a decade+. Europe will keep fumbling around. The fragile unity that propelled the sweeping changes of the 90s/00s had fallen apart.

I don't see the EVP loose influence in the forseeable future. Democracy only works in theory.

>we don't want to give up privacy for whatever "security" some, completely uninformed, want to promise

You'd be surprised how easily people give up their rights for the made up security promises, without putting up a fight.

Let's go through a short list I experienced during my lifetime in my country, off the top of my head.

  -2001 Invasive airport checks after 911

  -2015 mandatory registration with ID of prepaid SIM cards after islamist terrorist attacks 

  -2020-2022 mandatory COVID vaccine ID, to be able travel and enter establishments

None of these saw any kind of major disruptive backlash against the government to convince them to backtrack, so chat control and digital ID to access the internet and comment online is only a matter of time, all it needs is another black swan or even a false flag event.

Sure there was the famous trucker protests in Canada against mandatory COVID pass, but the government cracked down on that, so your protests against systems of control are irelevant. Chat control is inevitably gonna happen with or without your approval.

People really like staying alive

Oh yes... there's a terrorist behind every bush! I had to chase awat 10 alrady this morning who were out in my garden!

As for corona, it's more or less common knowledge by now that unless you're 60+ a common cold is more dangerous.

> As for corona, it's more or less common knowledge by now that unless you're 60+ a common cold is more dangerous.

That's a lie. The reality is that Covid-19 is massively more fatal than the ordinary flu [1]:

> We take the comparison between Covid-19 and flu seriously by asking how many years of influenza and pneumonia deaths are needed for cumulative deaths to those two causes to equal the cumulative toll of the Covid-19 pandemic between March 2020 and February 2023—that is, three years of pandemic deaths. We find that in one state alone—Hawaii—three years of Covid-19 mortality is equivalent to influenza and pneumonia mortality in the three years preceding the Covid-19 pandemic. For all other states, at least nine years of flu and pneumonia are needed to match Covid-19; for the United States as a whole, seventeen years are needed; and for four states, more than 21 years (the maximum observable) are needed.

The reduction in CFR since 2022-ish can mostly be attributed to vaccines [2], but unfortunately it turns out that said vaccine protection only lasts for about 6 months - that is why we are seeing COVID "summer waves" [3] which hasn't been a thing for influenza... people get vaccinated in autumn and winter, which lessens the impact of Covid during the winter time, but once that partial immunity expires cases go up again.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10168500/

[2] https://www.rsm.ac.uk/media-releases/2023/risk-of-death-redu...

[3] https://www.npr.org/2025/07/22/nx-s1-5453516/summer-surge-in...

> That's a lie.

None of your links address the OP's claim. You'd need to consider < 60 mortality, not total. Replies like yours are not trust-building.

None of those links actually cite the mortality rate of covid vs the flu

The first one is sufficient to counter the completely unsubstantiated claim of the common cold/influenza being more dangerous than Covid, but I do agree that handing out exact numbers would have been better.

It isn't remotely sufficient. It cherry picks the first few years of COVID. Of course more people died because it's a novel virus. If you somehow genetically engineered an exact clone of the flu virus in every way except with it was completely novel to the immune system and released it, of course way more people would die of it in the first year.

> It cherry picks the first few years of COVID.

The original post this thread is about literally referred to these early years:

> 2020-2022 mandatory COVID vaccine ID, to be able travel and enter establishments

Claiming in this context that the common cold is more harmful is a lie, no matter what.

Yeah, the common cold statement is just wrong. Also COVID is actually more deadly than the flu by about 3x from what I have read when it adjusts for all the relevant factors. The problem I have with the whole thing is that the media and government whipped everyone up into a panic over it. If you said to people, "there's a virus 3x as bad as the flu, what should we do?" I thik very few would say "lockdown everything non-essential."

So? Few people think things through systematically. Most countries would have desperately struggled to accommodate the increased demand on ICUs and skilled staff care. In fact, despite lockdowns and the provision of Nightingale facilities in the UK, the NHS was often overwhelmed as infections periodically peaked. We're still suffering the ongoing effects of urgent care that could not be provided in a timely fashion as resources got diverted due to Covid. See e.g. https://www.bmj.com/content/385/bmj-2023-075613

I shudder to think what would happen if we hadn't locked down.

I think you are confusing the current variant with the early ones.

But even if, who are you to decide the 60+ don’t need protection?

And what about the people with Long COVID?

A few simple measures to reduce chance of death will be accepted by most people.

Of course if you ask them to eat properly and exercise to reduce a larger chance of death, that's a problem, but filling in an address when buying a sim card takes way less time than exercise

I’m still not sure what exactly the trucker protest people wanted (before they got co-opted by a bunch of additional groups with all their additional grievances). It was the U.S. requiring Canadian truckers to be vaccinated and have documentation if they wanted to cross the border. The federal government was responsible for making these documents available for truckers who wanted to do so.

If you enter someone‘s house you follow their ruled, but your smartphone is part of your home.

So your exampled don’t quite fit.

Try passing a law with daily house searches for security and you‘ll see the difference.

> -2020-2022 mandatory COVID vaccine ID, to be able travel and enter establishments

That one makes sense for any government valuing the lives of its citizens. COVID was one hell of a nasty bug for healthy people, and for those not in good health it often meant death.

COVID cost the lives of at least 7 million people worldwide, of which 1.2 million were in the USA. "The cost of <<freedom>>" one might say if one were absolutely cynical, simply because of the massive difference in deaths per capita to just about every other large developed country [1].

And that doesn't include the cost of lost productivity due to people being out sick, struck by Long COVID/MECFS or having to be caretaker for affected people.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...

> massive difference in deaths per capita to just about every other large developed country [1]

The US is mid-way down that list, below most of Eastern Europe. Sweden, with notably lax mask/distancing approach, is better than EU average.

> The US is mid-way down that list, below most of Eastern Europe.

That's why I specifically mentioned large and developed countries, of which the US is leading. Not to front Eastern Europe too much, I'm half Croat myself, but you can't expect the former USSR and Yugoslavian countries to be up to par with Western healthcare systems or with Western economies - even in Western countries, the socio-economic status has had a measurable effect on patient outcome during Covid [1] so it's reasonable to assume that the effect is just as pronounced if not worse comparing whole blocks of countries.

> Sweden, with notably lax mask/distancing approach, is better than EU average.

I'd rather say "notorious" instead of "notably". During the early pandemic phase, Sweden had 5x the mortality than Denmark [2], explained as follows:

> Behavioural data (Fig. 1b,c) suggest that the major difference between Sweden, the UK, and Denmark was the rapidity with which population contact rates were reduced, rather than the extent of this reduction

The study also mentions the UK as being similarly bad but I'm choosing to exclude the UK given the widespread reports of NHS being on the verge of collapse [3][4], which makes it harder to attribute deaths to Covid itself vs deaths that would have been preventable had the NHS not been in shambles even before Covid hit (as evidenced by polling showing NHS issues a greater pressure point than Brexit woes just right before Covid appeared on the global stage [6]).

Other evaluations of Sweden against other countries come to a similar conclusion, blaming lax policies for marked increases in excess deaths and the acute crisis duration [5]:

> Sweden is an interesting case because the country never introduced a formal lockdown. Excess mortality peaked at 49.2 percent and remained high for 12 weeks, i.e. longer than in Italy, which had much higher excess mortality. Looking at the figures for Sweden in comparison to especially Italy and Switzerland, it seems that the lockdown in the latter two countries did have a major impact, both as concerns the level of excess mortality and the duration of the recovery period.

[1] https://www.local.gov.uk/health-inequalities-deprivation-and...

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8358009/

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c78dl0xv7y2o

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/23/nhs-co...

[5] https://www.efta.int/media-resources/news/covid-19-excess-mo...

[6] https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/nhs-replaces-brexit-most-importa...

> -2020-2022 mandatory COVID vaccine ID, to be able travel and enter establishments

Imo this one was slightly different, because it was (at least where I live) a temporary emergency measure with an end date as a response to an active crisis.

But I agree that people can get blinded by security theater.

> -2020-2022 mandatory COVID vaccine ID, to be able travel and enter establishments

This never existed, you could also prove that have already been sick.

You're missing the point. You still had to exists in a "papers please" society. What if you've never been sick?

> What if you've never been sick?

That does not sound like an unfixable problem. :-)

> You still had to exists in a "papers please" society.

I agree and I didn't like that. This was far too fast to enact such a fundamentally change, even if it was an emergency.

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