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> With the Spanish flu a century ago, people adapted their individual behavior, but social life proceeded more or less as before. “Public places of amusement” w

• kortilla 6y ago
  Shootings in Chicago are not randomly spread across the population though. Most is gang violence and is relatively easy to avoid. The DC shooter was different because it was arbitrary across the population. It was no longer about “avoiding the bad neighborhoods” or “not crossing a drug dealer”. Covid is a little similar in that it’s a new class of risk (different group dying than do from heart disease and all of the other known risks). It also doesn’t help that people on the Internet are calling others murders for being a potential transmission vector.
  • awinder 6y ago
    Also happened in the aftermath of 9/11 and the anthrax mailings which was a big thing in the dc-region, and involved targeting a school which again ups fear factor. Local economies at large were unaffected, everything is/was fine, life went on. People freak out and act economically differently and _have always and will always_ during catastrophes, no one is going to change that.
  • tathougies 6y ago
    Sure.. Easy for you to say. You're likely white so statistically 'avoiding' it for most people on hacker news is simply existing as a white person. Try growing up in a poor minority neighborhood in Chicago... Not so easy.
    • kortilla 6y ago
      I did grow up in a shitty neighborhood, I’m speaking from experience. Moving when I was in middle school changed my environment from seeing police responding to violence multiple times a month and watching friends getting pulled into gangs to seeing no violence at all without the city level stats changing. Being white does not help when you’re that poor. Anyway, you’ve missed my entire point. Even when you’re in the shitty parts of a city, you learn how to keep your head low and can reasonably avoid violence. Despite all of the murders in Chicago, people still live there, even in the South. The odds of getting murdered if you aren’t in the game just aren’t that high.
      • tathougies 6y ago
        Sure, and that's true everywhere, but 'keeping your head low' often means neglecting the very activities that may bring you out of poverty. It's hard to 'keep your head low' if you wanna start a business, or another initiative to make the community better. So, yes, certainly you can lay low and be safe, but this sense of safety comes at the price of prosperity.
• jjnoakes 6y ago
  The DC shootings were mostly random; are most Chicago shootings random? If not then I don't think it is a fair comparison. I'm not arguing for or against your reasoning, but I know I would be more worried about infrequent random shootings than I would be about frequent targeted shootings, mostly because I believe I'm no one's target.
  • imgabe 6y ago
    Even targeted shootings occasionally miss their targets and hit random bystanders. The odds would probably be comparable to being shot by someone choosing victims at random.
    • jjnoakes 6y ago
      Only if the targeted shootings happen in random places. I haven't checked but I'm skeptical that that is the case.
• clairity 6y ago
  high five on the call to rationally assess risks. many have closed their ears, but let's keep reminding people that life is plenty full of risks that we manage just fine without panicking. that's not to say completely ignore dangers and live obliviously, just put them in their proper place.
  • perl4ever 6y ago
    I'm bewildered by people who continually comment on the internet as though the epidemic is in the rear view mirror, for months now. Currently the doubling time is slightly over a month. A baseline requirement for sane discussion, in my opinion, is that one not talk as if it might disappear tomorrow.
• jacobolus 6y ago
  > lost ability to rationally think about small additional chances of dying What price would you put on a 5% chance of death plus higher chance of permanent chronic health problems for each of your friends and relatives over age 70? (That may even be an underestimate of the Covid IFR for elderly people.) Even for healthy young people, we are talking about a 1/1000 chance of death and rather higher chance of long-term organ damage. If this virus ends up infecting 60% of the population, as it will if people carry on their pre-pandemic lives, we’ll end up with something on the order of 2–4 million deaths in the USA, and the aggregate healthcare costs over the next few decades will be an outrageously large burden. In my opinion the biggest problem the pandemic has highlighted is that many countries have a limited ability to collectively think rationally before getting into a crisis, and adequately prepare so we don’t get hammered so badly by entirely predictable risks of large-scale problems. As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. > usual set of killers, from old age to cancer to traffic, It would be great if we would also spend a significant amount of societal resources on reducing traffic deaths, firearm deaths, set agricultural policy to promote healthy diets and stave off cardiovascular disease, stop companies from dumping carcinogens into the environment, and so on. As a society we could save a lot of money and lives with some systemic changes and investments.
  • ptero 6y ago
    > If this virus ends up infecting 60% of the population, as it will if people carry on their pre-pandemic lives, we’ll end up with something on the order of 2–4 million deaths in the USA, and the aggregate healthcare costs over the next few decades will be an outrageously large burden. On the economics front, USA just printed out $5 trillion of stimulus to fight the slowdown caused by lockdowns. I hear this is just a first step, stay tuned for more. I suspect the burden you mention would be smaller, but would love to hear an estimate. On the spread: how do you plan to avoid it? Every state and every country has carriers. Assuming the proportion of those with no symptoms is high, as recent studies indicate, people will keep spreading it around. Are we going to force folks wear masks (which, by the way they take off completely if eating in a restaurant) for a year? Outlaw all in person schools and university classes? All contact sports? Honest question.
• mjevans 6y ago
  I agree with you about rational weight of risks. However there is a possibly implicit meaning that you consider the current efforts of preventing transmission of the virus to be overkill. Possibly in other parts of the world a little more measure and give might have been the best response in hindsight, but knowing what we did know then, rather than now, I believe most places* (in the 'first' world) made the correct adjustments. The USA is one of the places that had a fragmented, and insufficient overall, response. History will record how things were historically the worst in this country due to many factors. Among those factors, anti-intellectualism as a driving force in politics, which contibuted to rigidly sticking to bureaucratic processes rather than scientific evidence and results oriented decision making. Another is an absolute failure to modernize and take a long-term investment stance across many government agencies and processes: often lead by a reluctance to be socially responsible.
  • jackcosgrove 6y ago
    There was a thread about the Swedish government's response a month or two ago which argued that Sweden was overly reliant on an evidence-based approach. The thrust of the argument being that there was insufficient evidence at the time to determine a meaningful response; we were flying blind. I'm bringing this up because the reasoning is the same as yours (policy should be evidence-based) and yet the outcome of that reasoning is so different.
  • tathougies 6y ago
    Overall... The vast majority of the states have done really well. The us average is thrown off by a few states -- not even the largest states. I'm not sure where people get this idea the us has done poorly. New York and surrounds did terribly mainly due to not following issued guidance. But even with them pulling up the average, the us has done fine. If new York had closed down when told and then followed federal guidance about sending people to nursing homes, the US would be lightyears ahead of other countries In terms of testing, death rate, positivity rate, death rate amongst confirmed vases, the us has done as well or better than many developed nations. Could the us have done better? Absolutely. But we also are doing at least average... If not downright better. Can you cite per capita numbers in relation to other developed globalized countries?
• skybrian 6y ago
  It's true that we care more about small risks of death than in 1918. After all, that was in the middle of a war, and even in peacetime, life was more dangerous. (There were a lot more people working on farms and much less emphasis on safety.) However, I don't understand why you think doing a lot to avoid COVID-19 is irrational. Around April it was the leading cause of death in the US, on a monthly basis. Currently it's below heart disease and cancer, but that's still a major risk. Furthermore, it's likely to go away next year, so it makes a lot of sense to temporarily change your lifestyle to avoid it.
• iakh 6y ago
  How brave of you to be willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of other people's lives. If only the rest of the world weren't irrationally trying to reduce the number of preventable deaths, I guess?
• CraigJPerry 6y ago
  > lost ability to rationally think about small additional chances of dying I’m not thinking I’ll die if i catch it but if i do catch it, how many people will i pass it on to, and how many will they infect. How many deaths would be attributable to me catching it? It’s pretty heavy when you think about it. I suppose someone has to be the 1 in 500 at my age. That would suck but like most people, i just assume it wouldn’t be me. I am however a bit concerned at the folks who take a long time to recover https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19positive/ https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19positive/ they don’t get much focus in the stats but the idea of being absolutely spent for 3 months doesn’t appeal. Another concern is the fact it seems impossible to avoid. The number of OCD types who almost take pleasure in turning their lives upside down to avoid the virus but then unexpectedly catch it is really disheartening. I read one guys series of posts on reddit about all the precautions he was taking, only going shopping once a fortnight at a quiet time and enforcing a 30 min limit to get in and out. wearing not just a mask gloves but a face shield and in a few of his posts he detailed his routine for bringing his shopping into the house which involves stripping off all clothing straight into the washing machine while leaving the shopping outside for 1 day before cleaning it and putting it in cupboards. I felt for the guy when he posted his positive test confirmation.
  • ptero 6y ago
    > I’m not thinking I’ll die if i catch it but if i do catch it, how many people will i pass it on to, and how many will they infect. How many deaths would be attributable to me catching it? It’s pretty heavy when you think about it. That is fair point, but its consideration should not be limited to COVID. I definitely not claim you do this, but in the USA I see people sending sick (with colds and flu) kids to school all the time. I see people coming to work sick (even when there is really, really, no penalty for staying home) and spreading the good stuff on everyone in the office including this lady in her 70s and that guy who just had chemo which hosed his immunity. We seem to ignore this "because that is what everyone does", but I personally know people who died from flu complications and there are real risks for others from this. We cannot ignore this, but give hell to folks who are not convinced that they must stay home to avoid infecting others with coronavirus; especially when they have no symptoms.
• scarmig 6y ago
  Your implication seems to be that COVID-19 is a "very small unusual danger"; but, your 650k number is in line with the (upper end, reasonable) estimates for how many lives it might take in the USA, this year. And heart disease is certainly something all of us should and do worry about. The point of the article is that the pandemic has opened the world of possibilities for these humdrum "oh it's just how the world is" social harms. Many things have been written off as impossible to fix, as it's too expensive for society to afford. But COVID-19 has shown that society can afford to dedicate huge amounts of social resources toward saving lives; particularly, we have the capacity to set a much higher value for USD/QALY that we're willing to save. E.g. eliminating HIV/AIDS mortality in the US and even the world becomes almost trivial with that amount of resources, using known technologies. Deaths from accidents? Stress from debt or unemployment? A bit trickier, but we can imagine putting a significant dent in them.
• js8 6y ago
  > During the last decades most people living in the "first world" (however you define it today) lost ability to rationally think about small additional chances of dying. I disagree. What do we have the technology for, if not to prevent dying? Why are we destroying the planet (I hope we can agree that having technological comfort requires quite a bit of material processing), if not for that? To me, to use the technology (which has downsides) to just have more "easy" or extra enjoyable life seems more childish than to use the technology to prevent dying (or in general, improving the living conditions). We can think of the tradeoff in terms of carbon emissions. Consider a coal miner. What would be better for him, to give him couple extra exotic vacations with airplane, or to close the mine and let him do something healthier, like installing solar panels? I argue that the latter is a better life. It's also interesting to note that many cities over the world experienced much cleaner air during the shutdown. I am not exactly sure what they have given up, but sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
• nine_k 6y ago
  The problem with a virus is that it's contagious. Car accidents do not multiply beyond a very low saturation point (3 cars, 5 cars? Never heard of 500 cars in a crash). Heart disease or old age do not infect people nearby at all. A virus can quickly spread if not contained. It literally grows by exponent until the majority of susceptible population is infected. At the height of the pandemic in the US (around early May) the weekly number of covid deaths was rather higher than the number of car death, if memory serves (I did check). If anything, the quarantine was enacted too late in most places, which made it longer. And we are up for a second wave. At least, so say my friends who study the pandemic professionally.
• DennisP 6y ago
  I'm currently reading 1918 by John Barry. People absolutely did not take the pandemic in stride. In fact, they "adapted their individual behavior" far more than people are doing today, because they were terrified. A large percentage of people simply stopped showing up for work, even in defense-related businesses during a world war. Social life "more or less" came to a halt, because people were afraid of each other. As for government actions, there were mask mandates, closures of businesses in some areas, and towns that posted armed guards at the borders to keep outsiders away.