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Honestly? Fuck this. Millions of people are going to die. It's very likely some of your friends and family will be in that number. It's okay to mourn. It's expe

Honestly? Fuck this. Millions of people are going to die. It's very likely some of your friends and family will be in that number. It's okay to mourn. It's expected that we will all mourn. The world we get out of this is going to be different and it's going to be a worse one for almost everyone. You don't need to write King Lear or invent gravity. Just surviving will be a miracle enough.

johnmarinelli 7y ago
> millions wat
- danharaj 7y ago
  Mitigations in the US are taking too long. A lot of people are going to die.
- monksy 7y ago
  Yes.
- blattimwind 7y ago
  The current "best case" scenario of your government is 100k-240k dead; less than one order of magnitude is basically nothing in an exponential crisis. 240k to a million is just two doublings.
  - evan_ 7y ago
    also: there are countries other than the United States.
    - blattimwind 7y ago
      Conjecture unproven before man.
  - ecopoesis 7y ago
    And there are 6.7 billion folks not in the US who all matter too.
  - readme 7y ago
    Hate all you want, you know an American company will probably invent the vaccine.
    - johnmarinelli 7y ago
      and then an american will patent it and sell it for hundreds at the consumer level god bless the us :')
      - readme 7y ago
        I got a good laugh out of this.
        johnmarinelli 7y ago
        thank you for being one out of exactly 10 people on HN with a sense of humor i appreciate you
  - johnmarinelli 7y ago
    how did you know my nationality? did you extrapolate the fact that i'm from the USA from my dumbass-ery? because you're right and i respect your judgemental ability ;)
- wpietri 7y ago
  It's not at all absurd. Napkin math: 1% fatality rate * 60% infection rate * 7.8 billion people = 46.8 million deaths. You can plug in all sorts of adjustments, but millions is totally plausible. Or another way to look at it is that the US could easily see 100k deaths. [1] The us is about 1/20th of the world population, so scaling up we get 2 million deaths. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/world/coronavirus-live-news-updates.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/world/coronavirus-live-ne...
  - johnmarinelli 7y ago
    a world where we trust napkin math for fatality rates is a world i don't want to live in (before you downvote, please appreciate the subtle dark pun)
- WantonQuantum 7y ago
  The exponential growth can make it unintuitive but here are some numbers to consider: In the last 5 days (data from CSSEGISandData) the total number of deaths (excluding china) has doubled from 20679 to 38798. In the 5 days before that, the total number of deaths (excluding china) also doubled. So worldwide (excluding china) the total number of deaths looks like this: In 5 days: 77,596 In 10 days: 155,192 In 15 days: 310,384 In 20 days: 620,768 In 25 days: 1,241,536 Unless things change really really quickly.
gruez 7y ago
>Just surviving will be a miracle enough. I get the tone you're trying to convey, but a 98% event isn't a miracle.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  Exactly. Most of us will live through this. Yes, the world will be a bit different, but different is not always worse. There may be some good things to come out of this around the world. Keep calm. Wash your hands. Wear masks if you got 'em. Help out your friends and neighbors where you can.
- brink 7y ago
  The latest number I saw was 99.4%. https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/30/health/coronavirus-lower-death-rate/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/30/health/coronavirus-lower-deat...
- nostromo 7y ago
  99.4% is the current best estimate. If you're under 50 or healthy, it's effectively 100%. That's not to minimize the very real human tragedy though. Just a bit of context. Remember that 650,000 people die of heart disease every year, and a lot of those deaths are preventable.
toomuchtodo 7y ago
“People die, make the best of it” was what I took from it.
- andreilys 7y ago
  "Annus mirabilis, the year of wonders, that is the name of this period in which calculus, law of gravitation, the color spectrum, these discoveries changed the world forever." "Let's all become Isaac Newton this month." Those comments come across pretty tone deaf to me. I imagine the person who wrote it doesn't have any young children and enjoys a relatively high degree of privilege.
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    Depends on how empty or full you think the glass is I suppose. Nothing wrong with encouraging others to be their best version of themselves in a time of crisis. Like I said, people die every day. More are going to die during April. It sucks. Make the most of a bad situation. As an individual, nothing you do can move the needle (besides the social distancing and other guidance), so look inward.
    - Gene_Parmesan 7y ago
      I think that telling the millions of people living in poverty -- many of whom still have to go into the world and work in the face of great risks, others who will be out of work and struggling to feed their families -- that this is an opportunity for them to be like Isaac Newton is pretty tone deaf. A statement like this only works if you are only talking to people who have the privilege of a safety net. There are approximately 40 million US citizens living in poverty. Try going to their houses and telling them that Isaac Newton invented calculus during the plague, so they should look at this as an opportunity for them to learn a foreign language or program an app. You might want to plan an escape route before you do so, though.
  - dx87 7y ago
    Sounds like they're advocating not sitting around playing video games or trying to make viral TikTok videos, and instead using the government mandated alone time to try and work on things that are difficult in our always-connected world. Just because not literally everyone can make use of this time doesn't mean they are tone deaf.
rabryan 7y ago
Millions? Where and when? Plus why criticize something thats advocating staying home in order to save lives.
- mdavidn 7y ago
  The US expects at least 100,000 deaths. Extrapolated to the world population at the same rate, that's 2.4 million deaths.
  - klingonopera 7y ago
    That's just over a quarter of the annual deaths due to malnutrition. Is it okay for me to just shed the equal amount of tears, or are people then going to accuse me of being emotionally stunted?
    - rabryan 7y ago
      Definitely an okay sentiment in my opinion. First world countries haven’t had to face reality in a while apparently...
- WantonQuantum 7y ago
  The exponential growth can make it unintuitive but here are some numbers to consider: In the last 5 days (data from CSSEGISandData) the total number of deaths (excluding china) has doubled from 20679 to 38798. In the 5 days before that, the total number of deaths (excluding china) also doubled. So worldwide (excluding china) the total number of deaths looks like this: In 5 days: 77,596 In 10 days: 155,192 In 15 days: 310,384 In 20 days: 620,768 In 25 days: 1,241,536 Unless things change really really quickly.
  - rabryan 7y ago
    Its an s-curve with parameters that are changing by the hour and is sensitive to so many other variables. I’m definitely advocating as extreme a response as possible, but I see those numbers more as a pessimistic upper bound (necessary for people to take appropriate action). And I as well hope things are changing quickly...
readme 7y ago
At the time you wrote this comment, approximately 45k people have died as a result of the coronavirus worldwide. Glass is half empty for you then, right?
- scrooched_moose 7y ago
  And the Trump administration's estimates from today are 100,000 to 240,000 deaths in the US alone: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/01/coronavirus-could-kill-more-americans-than-some-wars.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/01/coronavirus-could-kill-more-... Several million worldwide seems very possible. People downplaying this for too long is a large part of why it's gotten so bad already. Why worry? There's only 15 cases in the US. Why worry? There's only 15 cases in my state. Why worry? There's only 15 cases in my county. Who knows what it will look like in 2 weeks.
  - Kye 7y ago
    This is correct. There were 1.9k new cases on the first of March. The dashboards I checked were out of date, but the latest is 75k new cases on the 30th. The curve ramped up around the 12th. And that's only people who were able to get a test. We have no idea how big this thing is. Anyone would recognize that kind of growth as a breakout success if it were users on an app, but somehow they don't recognize the pattern with a disease.
    - oxide 7y ago
      I thought it would hit people how serious it was when sports stopped, movies stopped releasing, kids couldnt go to schools and people started scalping toilet paper.
- soperj 7y ago
  45k was 21k a week ago, and under 10k a week before that. Today it'll be ~+5k more. That number is increasing every day.
- Kye 7y ago
  The curve is steep and moving steadily up. We're still weeks out from seeing if the very late extreme measures were enough.
brink 7y ago
Everyone is going to die. I know that this will make it sooner than we thought for some, but for those who are going to die from this, this was always going to be their death date. I'm not trying to be insensitive and I'm not saying we shouldn't try our hardest to mitigate problems. We absolutely should. But when problems happen, lamenting has it's place, but only does so much good before it starts to do harm.
op00to 7y ago
How do you know it will be worse for almost everyone? Parents will die, children will inherit windfalls (family farm? Dads truck?). Boomer politicians die, we see new blood in politics.
JauntyHatAngle 7y ago
I can't say I agree there. The intent of the website is to motivate people to make the most of what they've got. Does it work for everyone? No. Of course not. But a "fuck this"? Why? If it works for people, good, if not, move on. No reason to bring down someone for trying.
- wpietri 7y ago
  The reason is that people should not feel additional pressure to do amazing things right now. If they don't have the energy to learn Cantonese and build an app while their relatives are in ICU, that should be fine.
  - JauntyHatAngle 7y ago
    This isn't pressure. It's a motivational post. It's clearly aimed at people feeling down and unmotivated by the current environment. You'd have to be willfully misinterpreting the intent to think this was aimed at people dealing with personal loss.
    - wpietri 7y ago
      You really think pressure to do something and motivation to do something are entirely unrelated? I get the guy's intent. Some people will like and be excited by this. Some people will feel sad and guilty. But even if he only had the first group in mind, he's addressing the whole world. The reaction from ecopoesis is a valid one, because it's not the message he needs. Where we aim doesn't matter as much as what we hit.
      - JauntyHatAngle 7y ago
        I think the pressure is non existent unless you somehow believe this webpage is aimed at people going through serious personal torment and/or turmoil rather than an equally large (or larger) number of people who are cooped up trying to adapt their daily life. It would take some serious self righteousness to take this as a message to the former. The issue I had with the response was the direct attack on the author's intent e.g. "fuck this". There are plenty of other comments that state their disagreement or why it didn't land with them without taking it to the level of shutting down the op. I don't understand the need to diminish the attempt at a potentially helpful mindset. It's helpful to some, pointless for others.
wpietri 7y ago
Agreed. This is a very stressful time already, and we've got at least another year of this. If some people are insanely productive, great! Lucky them. But if the best people can do is staying home, taking care of themselves and their families, and not freaking out, they get a gold star as far as I'm concerned. No need to raise expectations.
api 7y ago
Finding things to be happy about is part of how people cope with things.
dntbnmpls 7y ago
> Millions of people are going to die. Maybe. So far only a few thousand have died so how about toning down the fearmongering hysteria? Also, 60 million people die every year. Every single year with or without the pandemic. Actually, it's more likely we'll have a lower death total around the world as a result of this pandemic as quarantine has prevented people from dying in car crashes, other diseases, etc. > It's very likely some of your friends and family will be in that number. No. It's very unlikely even in your worst case scenario. Unless you have the loosest definition of "friends". > The world we get out of this is going to be different and it's going to be a worse one for almost everyone. The world isn't going to be different. People are still going to eat, sleep, go to work, etc. Life will go on. Just like it did after the spanish flu, ww2, vietnam war, iraq wars, 9/11, etc. > Just surviving will be a miracle enough. Oh god. Stop watching the news. Unless you are paid to spread lies and fear, you aren't benefiting one bit from the hysteria. It doesn't help you, the toxic hysteria only hurts you.
11235813213455 7y ago
There's the short-term: thousands of unfortunate deaths due to a respiratory virus and the mid-term: environmental issues caused by the over-consumerism and excessive activity in our societies. We can feel it with those lockdowns, improvement in air quality, noise stress reduction, etc.. those factors cause millions human deaths every year, as soon as this frenzy will start again, let alone for the rest of animals and vegetables
kiliantics 7y ago
> it's going to be a worse one for almost everyone It could be, if we let it go that way. Or we could use this crisis to our advantage, learn from it and restructure things to be better for people in future. This situation has exposed many problems that were already pervasive but just not as destructive to so many people as they are now showing to be under the stress our social system is being subjected to. The fact that so many people live paycheck to paycheck, that so many have poor access to healthcare, and generally have little to no safety net when times get just a little bad, through no fault of their own. The pandemic has really shown how undervalued many of the most important workers in our society are and how fragile the systems we have in place are, due to the mismanagement of our institutions and the disproportionate power we have given to very greedy and callous people. We have an opportunity to reject the institutions in their current state and hold those in power to account for the crimes they are committing which are the same crimes they have been committing all along.

johnmarinelli 7y ago

> millions wat

danharaj 7y ago
Mitigations in the US are taking too long. A lot of people are going to die.
monksy 7y ago
Yes.
blattimwind 7y ago
The current "best case" scenario of your government is 100k-240k dead; less than one order of magnitude is basically nothing in an exponential crisis. 240k to a million is just two doublings.
- evan_ 7y ago
  also: there are countries other than the United States.
  - blattimwind 7y ago
    Conjecture unproven before man.
- ecopoesis 7y ago
  And there are 6.7 billion folks not in the US who all matter too.
- readme 7y ago
  Hate all you want, you know an American company will probably invent the vaccine.
  - johnmarinelli 7y ago
    and then an american will patent it and sell it for hundreds at the consumer level god bless the us :')
    - readme 7y ago
      I got a good laugh out of this.
      - johnmarinelli 7y ago
        thank you for being one out of exactly 10 people on HN with a sense of humor i appreciate you
- johnmarinelli 7y ago
  how did you know my nationality? did you extrapolate the fact that i'm from the USA from my dumbass-ery? because you're right and i respect your judgemental ability ;)
wpietri 7y ago
It's not at all absurd. Napkin math: 1% fatality rate * 60% infection rate * 7.8 billion people = 46.8 million deaths. You can plug in all sorts of adjustments, but millions is totally plausible. Or another way to look at it is that the US could easily see 100k deaths. [1] The us is about 1/20th of the world population, so scaling up we get 2 million deaths. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/world/coronavirus-live-news-updates.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/world/coronavirus-live-ne...
- johnmarinelli 7y ago
  a world where we trust napkin math for fatality rates is a world i don't want to live in (before you downvote, please appreciate the subtle dark pun)
WantonQuantum 7y ago
The exponential growth can make it unintuitive but here are some numbers to consider: In the last 5 days (data from CSSEGISandData) the total number of deaths (excluding china) has doubled from 20679 to 38798. In the 5 days before that, the total number of deaths (excluding china) also doubled. So worldwide (excluding china) the total number of deaths looks like this: In 5 days: 77,596 In 10 days: 155,192 In 15 days: 310,384 In 20 days: 620,768 In 25 days: 1,241,536 Unless things change really really quickly.

gruez 7y ago

>Just surviving will be a miracle enough. I get the tone you're trying to convey, but a 98% event isn't a miracle.

bilbo0s 7y ago
Exactly. Most of us will live through this. Yes, the world will be a bit different, but different is not always worse. There may be some good things to come out of this around the world. Keep calm. Wash your hands. Wear masks if you got 'em. Help out your friends and neighbors where you can.
brink 7y ago
The latest number I saw was 99.4%. https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/30/health/coronavirus-lower-death-rate/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/30/health/coronavirus-lower-deat...
nostromo 7y ago
99.4% is the current best estimate. If you're under 50 or healthy, it's effectively 100%. That's not to minimize the very real human tragedy though. Just a bit of context. Remember that 650,000 people die of heart disease every year, and a lot of those deaths are preventable.

toomuchtodo 7y ago

“People die, make the best of it” was what I took from it.

andreilys 7y ago
"Annus mirabilis, the year of wonders, that is the name of this period in which calculus, law of gravitation, the color spectrum, these discoveries changed the world forever." "Let's all become Isaac Newton this month." Those comments come across pretty tone deaf to me. I imagine the person who wrote it doesn't have any young children and enjoys a relatively high degree of privilege.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  Depends on how empty or full you think the glass is I suppose. Nothing wrong with encouraging others to be their best version of themselves in a time of crisis. Like I said, people die every day. More are going to die during April. It sucks. Make the most of a bad situation. As an individual, nothing you do can move the needle (besides the social distancing and other guidance), so look inward.
  - Gene_Parmesan 7y ago
    I think that telling the millions of people living in poverty -- many of whom still have to go into the world and work in the face of great risks, others who will be out of work and struggling to feed their families -- that this is an opportunity for them to be like Isaac Newton is pretty tone deaf. A statement like this only works if you are only talking to people who have the privilege of a safety net. There are approximately 40 million US citizens living in poverty. Try going to their houses and telling them that Isaac Newton invented calculus during the plague, so they should look at this as an opportunity for them to learn a foreign language or program an app. You might want to plan an escape route before you do so, though.
- dx87 7y ago
  Sounds like they're advocating not sitting around playing video games or trying to make viral TikTok videos, and instead using the government mandated alone time to try and work on things that are difficult in our always-connected world. Just because not literally everyone can make use of this time doesn't mean they are tone deaf.

rabryan 7y ago

Millions? Where and when? Plus why criticize something thats advocating staying home in order to save lives.

mdavidn 7y ago
The US expects at least 100,000 deaths. Extrapolated to the world population at the same rate, that's 2.4 million deaths.
- klingonopera 7y ago
  That's just over a quarter of the annual deaths due to malnutrition. Is it okay for me to just shed the equal amount of tears, or are people then going to accuse me of being emotionally stunted?
  - rabryan 7y ago
    Definitely an okay sentiment in my opinion. First world countries haven’t had to face reality in a while apparently...
WantonQuantum 7y ago
The exponential growth can make it unintuitive but here are some numbers to consider: In the last 5 days (data from CSSEGISandData) the total number of deaths (excluding china) has doubled from 20679 to 38798. In the 5 days before that, the total number of deaths (excluding china) also doubled. So worldwide (excluding china) the total number of deaths looks like this: In 5 days: 77,596 In 10 days: 155,192 In 15 days: 310,384 In 20 days: 620,768 In 25 days: 1,241,536 Unless things change really really quickly.
- rabryan 7y ago
  Its an s-curve with parameters that are changing by the hour and is sensitive to so many other variables. I’m definitely advocating as extreme a response as possible, but I see those numbers more as a pessimistic upper bound (necessary for people to take appropriate action). And I as well hope things are changing quickly...

readme 7y ago

At the time you wrote this comment, approximately 45k people have died as a result of the coronavirus worldwide. Glass is half empty for you then, right?

scrooched_moose 7y ago
And the Trump administration's estimates from today are 100,000 to 240,000 deaths in the US alone: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/01/coronavirus-could-kill-more-americans-than-some-wars.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/01/coronavirus-could-kill-more-... Several million worldwide seems very possible. People downplaying this for too long is a large part of why it's gotten so bad already. Why worry? There's only 15 cases in the US. Why worry? There's only 15 cases in my state. Why worry? There's only 15 cases in my county. Who knows what it will look like in 2 weeks.
- Kye 7y ago
  This is correct. There were 1.9k new cases on the first of March. The dashboards I checked were out of date, but the latest is 75k new cases on the 30th. The curve ramped up around the 12th. And that's only people who were able to get a test. We have no idea how big this thing is. Anyone would recognize that kind of growth as a breakout success if it were users on an app, but somehow they don't recognize the pattern with a disease.
  - oxide 7y ago
    I thought it would hit people how serious it was when sports stopped, movies stopped releasing, kids couldnt go to schools and people started scalping toilet paper.
soperj 7y ago
45k was 21k a week ago, and under 10k a week before that. Today it'll be ~+5k more. That number is increasing every day.
Kye 7y ago
The curve is steep and moving steadily up. We're still weeks out from seeing if the very late extreme measures were enough.

brink 7y ago

Everyone is going to die. I know that this will make it sooner than we thought for some, but for those who are going to die from this, this was always going to be their death date. I'm not trying to be insensitive and I'm not saying we shouldn't try our hardest to mitigate problems. We absolutely should. But when problems happen, lamenting has it's place, but only does so much good before it starts to do harm.

op00to 7y ago

How do you know it will be worse for almost everyone? Parents will die, children will inherit windfalls (family farm? Dads truck?). Boomer politicians die, we see new blood in politics.

JauntyHatAngle 7y ago

I can't say I agree there. The intent of the website is to motivate people to make the most of what they've got. Does it work for everyone? No. Of course not. But a "fuck this"? Why? If it works for people, good, if not, move on. No reason to bring down someone for trying.

wpietri 7y ago
The reason is that people should not feel additional pressure to do amazing things right now. If they don't have the energy to learn Cantonese and build an app while their relatives are in ICU, that should be fine.
- JauntyHatAngle 7y ago
  This isn't pressure. It's a motivational post. It's clearly aimed at people feeling down and unmotivated by the current environment. You'd have to be willfully misinterpreting the intent to think this was aimed at people dealing with personal loss.
  - wpietri 7y ago
    You really think pressure to do something and motivation to do something are entirely unrelated? I get the guy's intent. Some people will like and be excited by this. Some people will feel sad and guilty. But even if he only had the first group in mind, he's addressing the whole world. The reaction from ecopoesis is a valid one, because it's not the message he needs. Where we aim doesn't matter as much as what we hit.
    - JauntyHatAngle 7y ago
      I think the pressure is non existent unless you somehow believe this webpage is aimed at people going through serious personal torment and/or turmoil rather than an equally large (or larger) number of people who are cooped up trying to adapt their daily life. It would take some serious self righteousness to take this as a message to the former. The issue I had with the response was the direct attack on the author's intent e.g. "fuck this". There are plenty of other comments that state their disagreement or why it didn't land with them without taking it to the level of shutting down the op. I don't understand the need to diminish the attempt at a potentially helpful mindset. It's helpful to some, pointless for others.

wpietri 7y ago

Agreed. This is a very stressful time already, and we've got at least another year of this. If some people are insanely productive, great! Lucky them. But if the best people can do is staying home, taking care of themselves and their families, and not freaking out, they get a gold star as far as I'm concerned. No need to raise expectations.

api 7y ago

Finding things to be happy about is part of how people cope with things.

dntbnmpls 7y ago

> Millions of people are going to die. Maybe. So far only a few thousand have died so how about toning down the fearmongering hysteria? Also, 60 million people die every year. Every single year with or without the pandemic. Actually, it's more likely we'll have a lower death total around the world as a result of this pandemic as quarantine has prevented people from dying in car crashes, other diseases, etc. > It's very likely some of your friends and family will be in that number. No. It's very unlikely even in your worst case scenario. Unless you have the loosest definition of "friends". > The world we get out of this is going to be different and it's going to be a worse one for almost everyone. The world isn't going to be different. People are still going to eat, sleep, go to work, etc. Life will go on. Just like it did after the spanish flu, ww2, vietnam war, iraq wars, 9/11, etc. > Just surviving will be a miracle enough. Oh god. Stop watching the news. Unless you are paid to spread lies and fear, you aren't benefiting one bit from the hysteria. It doesn't help you, the toxic hysteria only hurts you.

11235813213455 7y ago

There's the short-term: thousands of unfortunate deaths due to a respiratory virus and the mid-term: environmental issues caused by the over-consumerism and excessive activity in our societies. We can feel it with those lockdowns, improvement in air quality, noise stress reduction, etc.. those factors cause millions human deaths every year, as soon as this frenzy will start again, let alone for the rest of animals and vegetables

kiliantics 7y ago

> it's going to be a worse one for almost everyone It could be, if we let it go that way. Or we could use this crisis to our advantage, learn from it and restructure things to be better for people in future. This situation has exposed many problems that were already pervasive but just not as destructive to so many people as they are now showing to be under the stress our social system is being subjected to. The fact that so many people live paycheck to paycheck, that so many have poor access to healthcare, and generally have little to no safety net when times get just a little bad, through no fault of their own. The pandemic has really shown how undervalued many of the most important workers in our society are and how fragile the systems we have in place are, due to the mismanagement of our institutions and the disproportionate power we have given to very greedy and callous people. We have an opportunity to reject the institutions in their current state and hold those in power to account for the crimes they are committing which are the same crimes they have been committing all along.