9 ms·

> It's pretty rational for someone to understand that and make personal choices... No, it's not; it's arrogant. All of the epidemiologists and experts seem t

• bazzert 6y ago
  >> We're approaching the total death toll of World War II[3]. assuming you mean the US death toll also bear in mind the median age of WW II casualties was something like 26; while the median age for covid victims is 75+. Not to diminish the latter but they are very different.
  • dijit 6y ago
    > while the median age for covid victims is 75+. You mean 48. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/pdfs/mm6924e2-H.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/pdfs/mm6924e2-H.pdf
    • motbob 6y ago
      No, that's the median cases age.
    • karagenit 6y ago
      I think the link you cited states that 48 is the median age of infections, whereas the person you're replying to is talking about deaths. I don't have national data, but in my state (Indiana) 51.4% of deaths are 80+ years old according to coronavirus.in.gov
    • bazzert 6y ago
      what ? " After exclusions, data for 1,320,488 (94%) cases were analyzed.Median age was 48 years"
  • cowpig 6y ago
    Does your figure include people who couldn't get medical attention because the health system is completely overwhelmed? Is it possible there are other issues you're not aware of, and that the people who spend their lives studying and preparing for these situations are?
    • just-juan-post 6y ago
      > Does your figure include people who couldn't get medical attention because the health system is completely overwhelmed? Do you have any articles about people being turned away from hospitals due to lack of capacity?
      • stinkytaco 6y ago
        Explicitly being turned away? I have not seen those. The New York Times did an analysis of the overall death rate, however, and setting aside COVID deaths, it is up. It's not an unreasonable assumption to assume at least some of those are lack of medical care for whatever reason. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronavirus-missing-deaths.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...
        • mattmanser 6y ago
          It's because people are afraid to go to hospital or call paramedics, they actually did a mini-campaign over here in the UK telling people it's still ok to call 999 (our 911) because they were so concerned about the deaths happening at home that could have been avoided.
    • bazzert 6y ago
      the health system was never "overwhelmed" except for brief periods and in specific locales. My spouse is in healthcare, they have still not recovered their normal census. If anything there will be a huge spike in cancer deaths due to late diagnosis etc as people have stayed away.
      • 6y ago
  • aflag 6y ago
    Not sure if I follow your point? Are you saying this is less of a tragety because these people lived 50 years longer?
    • treis 6y ago
      Is it not? To me, an 18 year old getting mown down on a beach is a much larger tragedy than an 85 year old dying.
      • snakeboy 6y ago
        Let's not even get started on abortion... Edit: I meant this as a joke, albeit in poor taste, I see it was not received well. That being said, I do think that relativizing deaths in terms of "opportunity cost" does lead to some somewhat unpalatable moral conundra.
        • ls612 6y ago
          The way my friend in an epidemiology program put it to me (two years ago) was "Everyone dies. The question then is when?" Hard to argue with it. But it does lead to some places mainstream american morality would consider unpleasant.
          • aflag 6y ago
            What's the point of the question? What would you argue? Yeah, obviously everyone dies, but when is the important part. It's generally agreed that shortening someone's time to live is one of the biggest offenses possible (if not the biggest). How does that question change that notion?
            • ls612 6y ago
              It directly implies that if we prefer dying later to dying sooner (in almost all cases) that older peoples lives would have statistically less value. Which is anathema to many Americans. The only way around it is to say you are indifferent to when death is for people, which is also anathema to a lot of people. It’s a paradox of our ethical system.
• polote 6y ago
  This is not the issue. Best case in term of covid related death is to keep everyone at home, no freedom and get food delivery directly at the door Worst case, is to do as nothing happened There are a spectrum of possible responses. But we have to accept that some people are going to die if we want other to live. Each group can put the cursor where it wants, but you can't have, no death and complete freedom. Some people prefer that a few people die if the rest of people is free, then some other prefer everyone to be alive and restrict the freedom of everyone else. You can't put the cursor for other people than you
  • abduhl 6y ago
    This post highlights my favorite part of the keep everyone home argument: "get food delivery directly at the door." Who delivers the food if we keep everyone home? There is a subtle classist underpinning to the entire "Stay The Fuck Home" message which really shows how little people value others, especially lower-class (food delivery) or blue collar (food supply) workers. Everyone needs to stay home, except for the deplorables that will grow, process, and serve food directly to my door.
    • eric_b 6y ago
      Yes. A thousand times this. I get so tired of the "stay at home" people ranting from their positions of work-from-home high-income privilege.
    • dredmorbius 6y ago
      Delivery and food prep are far lower-exposure activities than indoor sit-in full-service dining. People do need to eat. They don't necessarily require takeaway, but on a balance of risks this isn't unreasonable.
      • abduhl 6y ago
        This line of reasoning evades the real problem by trying to recast the issue as a balancing of risks rather than an undervaluing of a segment of our society. Let's return to the original poster's argument: there exist two extremes with one being "everyone stays at home" and the other being "no change due to COVID." Even in the extreme of "everyone stays at home" there is an implicit assumption that not everyone stays at home, just people with white collar jobs. That is the issue that I am calling out with my "subtle classist underpinnings" statement. Additionally, it is worth noting that the risk-based analysis you use is 1) an exercise in line drawing (giving everyone their own office while at work is certainly equal or less exposure than food delivery as long as people don't socialize at work) and 2) an after the fact justification for a policy that is undeniably inequitable across class, race, and sex lines.
• horns4lyfe 6y ago
  This is a gross mischaracterizatuon of the posters argument. They are claiming that, based on the information they provided, the people they’re referring to are making a rational choice. Working off of different information is a different matter. They also never claimed that covid is comparable to lightning, just that if you’re under 30 you’re more likely to be struck by lightning than die of covid (I cant speak to the statistical truth of this, but that’s beside the point).
  • saiya-jin 6y ago
    Making a rational choice from what angle? If you consider death of your fellow countrymen just a statistic, maybe. These are super-emotional topics, something on par with politics. My view is that even if it would be just out of respect of older generations who made the world we live today, raised us, protected us, guided us, we should be considerate. Now we might end up in economical tragedy vastly worse then just letting them die, but that's a threshold we didn't yet cross according to most people here/out there. Hence all the reactions like closures and restrictions and vast majority complying with them. Another aspect is utterly incompetent leaders, who's countries they mismanage seem to be, purely from rational point of view, currently holding premium places in covid charts. US, UK, Brazil, Russia etc. Seems like some pattern about how far lying and plain stupid ignorance can get you when confronted with something as little caring as virus.
  • stinkytaco 6y ago
    > (I cant speak to the statistical truth of this, but that’s beside the point) Is it beside the point? It's false. Lightning kills about 50 people a year in the US [1]. It's frankly fairly rare to get struck by lightning [2]. More people under 34 have died from COVID-19 per month since April than die from lightning in a year [3] (quick note that the breakdown is 25-34). That's to say nothing of long term health impacts from the disease. If you are going to argue that it's a rational choice, you need to be working from correct assumptions. And more importantly than that, getting struck by lightning does not mean you will make other people get struck by lightning. Making a choice that makes sense for you does not mean it makes sense for society. That's why we have laws. [1]: https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-victims https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-victims [2]: https://www.cdc.gov/disasters/lightning/victimdata.html https://www.cdc.gov/disasters/lightning/victimdata.html [3]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
• Chris2048 6y ago
  > All of the epidemiologists and experts seem to think otherwise. What do all the experts think about whether Epstein killed himself or not? People choose to believe what they want, because they can't rely on believing the government/media/public opinion.
• JoshuaDavid 6y ago
  > We're approaching the total death toll of World War II[3]. We're really not though. World War II killed somewhere in the ballpark of 75 million people. COVID-19 has a bit under 800,000 known deaths. Even if we say that for every person who is known to have died of covid, 5 additional people died and were recorded as deaths from other causes (and it's not that high, you can check the excess mortality stats to confirm for yourself that it couldn't possibly be that high), the number of covid deaths _still_ wouldn't even be 10% of the total number of WWII deaths. Unless by "approaching" you mean "getting closer to because it's currently below that number and increasing" in which case the number of people killed by vending machines is also "approaching" the number of people killed by WWII. Hyperbolic statements like this just serve to undermine trust, and trust is already in pretty short supply, especially around the pandemic. Messaging around the pandemic has had a pattern of people making whatever statements they think is most likely to get people to comply with public health guidance, even if those statements are false or misleading. For example, there's a great deal of news lately about how COVID-19 can cause Multisystem Inflammation Syndrome (MIS-C) in children, and that 80% of children who develop MIS-C require intensive care, and that the existence of MIS-C as a possible complication of covid means you should worry more about kids getting covid. What these articles neglect to mention is that only about 300 cases of MIS-C have been observed in children, out of what is probably low-millions of children infected with covid. When you make misleading statements in order to induce compliance through panic, it'll work the first few times, but eventually people will start noticing, and stop trusting anything you or anyone who sounds like you says, even if it's true. This is the moral of the "Boy Who Cried Wolf" story, and it's been seen again and again in real-life contexts as well (see for example how DARE actually _increases_ drug use). Making false-but-alarming statements about public health sucks the air out of the room for true-and-alarming statements about public health, and is the moral equivalent of crying wolf except with millions of lives on the line instead of just one village. Please stop crying wolf.
  • throwawaygh 6y ago
    I think he meant US deaths because his source is a list of WWII deaths by country. That is actually fairly accurate: 170K direct, he assumes ~2x if you count indirect, so ~400K which is indeed approaching total US WWII casualities (460K or so). Even if you don't count or differently count indirect deaths, I'd still say going from 0 to 170K in 6 months with no end in sight definitely constitutes "approaching". We'll get there before this is all over, for sure.
• TheGrim-888 6y ago
  You could make the same argument about the normal flu, pre-covid, which kills many tens of thousands of people in the US every year. The normal flu has killed many multiples the number of people that WWII did. And we never completely locked down the country for the flu. We never explicitly destroyed the economy for the flu. What about how many people other infectious diseases kill? What about how many people other sources of preventable deaths kill? Why haven't we thrown away our civil liberties in the past, or destroyed our economy, to tackle those problems?
  • ameister14 6y ago
    The flu, in a normal year, kills 35,000 people. Coronavirus, with all the steps we've already taken to stop it, has killed 5 times that. If we had not taken steps to stop it, the projection was millions dead. That is why.
• helaoban 6y ago
  There have been 1424 deaths "involving" coronavirus in the ages 0 - 34 in the US[1]. What happens to that number when you discount for underlying conditions? Close to 500,000 military personnel (read: military-aged) died in WW2. Sorry to be crude, but what the f*ck are you smoking? 1. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm Edit: Keeping the vulgarity for posterity, but on reflection it was quite unnecessary. Apologies.
• RobRivera 6y ago
  We are nowhere near the ww2 death toll, objectively speaking.
• richardknop 6y ago
  I don't think we are approaching the total death toll of World War II. Unless you mean only US casualties which were relatively small compared to other nations as US entered war very late when it was already decided (Soviet Union has already won decisive victories and lost tens of millions). Proclaiming that is actually arrogant, to use your own words.