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There are facts here. Things like Covid 19 and climate change are both real and current or impending disasters. The "left" has solutions and the "right" pretend

There are facts here. Things like Covid 19 and climate change are both real and current or impending disasters. The "left" has solutions and the "right" pretends they don't exist. The US right has slipped further and further from understanding of what is actually happening around them and under trump specifically fell into a disinformation black hole. I hope that future repoublican leaders are more based in reality.

logicchains 6y ago
>the "right" pretends they don't exist. Most people in the right don't disbelieve the coronavirus exists, they just think it's not dangerous enough to warrant massive government impingement on people's rights to free movement, association and commerce.
- 0xB31B1B 6y ago
  Most people in the right don't disbelieve the coronavirus exists, they just think it's not going to kill them, its going to kill someone else. FTFY
  - muzika 6y ago
    Just like regular flu. It kills lots of people every year. So do car accidents - lets just ban driving?
    - techsupporter 6y ago
      > So do car accidents - lets just ban driving? Yes. Or, to be less hyperbolic about it: do a lot more things that change us towards being a society where travel via single-occupant vehicle is not the default, or the highest-prioritized use of a space when many other options are cleaner, safer, more efficient space uses, encourage better health, and are not as environmentally and socially damaging. So, to link it back to coronavirus: taking steps to mitigate a harm that we know exists, that we can predict coming, and that absolutely involves making changes to how we conduct our daily lives but if a lot of us make a little change, we make a dramatic effect.
    - 0xB31B1B 6y ago
      Ok, looking at first reply to my post, they reference "commercial freedoms", which I support. Look at COVID 19, commerce (measured in restaurant reservations and retail purchases) dropped like 90% before the government lockdowns. The way to improve the economy and provide "commercial freedom" is to defeat the virus. The way to defeat the virus is though, amongst other tools like masks and vaccines, lockdowns. You could remove all the restrictions you want and things won't go back to normal for business or their patrons until the risk serious illness from a disease is small enough that you don't need to think about it when making evening plans. Additionally, when you reference "banning cars", cars used to be extremely dangerous. We have cumulatively spent millions of hours and hundreds of thousands of human lives developing engineering solutions to make cars safer. Things like masks are like seatbelts, and "suspending indoor dining" is like adding a crumple zone to the front of the car and we do ban cars that aren't sufficiently safe.
      - jeofken 6y ago
        Since this pandemic began, I’ve never understood this line of reasoning. I invite you to enlighten me. Let’s say we use the governments force to close business down, in order to hinder the virus from spreading there. When the government later stops applying this force and business can reopen with persecution, will the virus not just continue from where it left off? In March they said “flatten the curve to not temporarily overload hospitals”, which I get, but the reasoning for keeping the forced lockdown only seems logical if you never reopen. For this reason I’m glad my country is one of very few that never locked down. More have died here than in the neighbour countries, but I fail to see why they won’t catch up when they reopen.
        ouchjars 6y ago
        The virus can't "continue from where it left off" if there's nobody left in the country infected by it. If it turns out there were a few infections left, or one slipped through quarantine for arriving travellers, the health system has enough capacity to perform testing for anyone with even mild symptoms, and comprehensively contact trace. This has worked for several countries.
    - bendmorris 6y ago
      >lets just ban driving? Or maybe let's infringe on your freedoms by: requiring a license to drive, requiring use of a seatbelt, setting safety standards for car manufacturers...
      - arnoldsing 6y ago
        Yeah! Let’s do that! Muahahaha
    - heavyset_go 6y ago
      > Just like regular flu. It kills lots of people every year The worst flu killed 80k people in a year, and normally kills about 20k a year. It hasn't even been a year and three times as many people have died compared to the worst flu season, and 1,600+ Americans die every day from COVID. This epidemic so far has been more than twelve times worse than the average flu season. > So do car accidents - lets just ban driving About 38k people die in car accidents in the US, and the average person drives 1 million miles before getting in an accident. And that's with practically every person in the country driving that can. In contrast, only 3% of Americans have had COVID, yet 237k of them have died in less than a year. If the majority of Americans get COVID, millions of people will die.
      - JoshuaDavid 6y ago
        > The worst flu killed 80k people in a year I think you're about 3 orders of magnitude off. COVID is pretty bad, but the 1918 flu was horrifyingly awful. Flus can get pretty bad.
        heavyset_go 6y ago
        I was thinking of the 2017/2018 flu season which killed 80k in the US. H1N1 tends to get singled out as itself, Spanish Flu or swine flu.
    - cycomanic 6y ago
      9/11 killed a minuscule amount of deaths in comparison and warranted huge cut of freedoms, multiple massive military interventions, the US starting to normalise torture and black prisons, but somehow requiring people to distance and wearing masks is a step too far? Let's not forget it Trump suggested to slaughter Muslims using bullets dipped in pigs blood, so he is definetly not a antiwar as some here suggest.
      - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
        It would be a spectacular failure of logic to evaluate someones record on war based on a flippant comment (which you misrepresented) as opposed to, oh I don’t know, maybe if they started any wars. Considering that he is the first president in at least a century to not engage in any new wars, I think that might be a better signal.
        Fumtumi 6y ago
        At least we learned for the last 4 years that certain values are no longer uphold. It shouldn't be hard for a sharp upstanding human being not to throw out 'flippant' comment. That actually surprised me the most. That exactly what you said, stopped to matter. It shouldn't and we shouldn't allow it.
        lawnchair_larry 6y ago
        The comment was made in response to the Barcelona terrorist attacks and was very specifically joking about what we should do to domestic terrorist groups that mass murder. It was also not his original thought. He cited a myth regarding what he thought someone else famously did to terrorists and said maybe we should do that. Getting upset about what he actually said and in what context seems like faux-outrage or someone with motivated reasoning to try and find something to get upset about.
        Fumtumi 6y ago
        I would be more curious on why this is not bothering you at all. You do like it doesn't matter. Does it?
    - Fumtumi 6y ago
      If you drive drunk and make an accident with me and i get hurt, holy shit you might go to prison. Knowing that there is a virus, not doing anything about it and then spreading it onto me, should also have consequences. As it is not possible to do so, might be a good idea to mandate mask wearing and cautions someone might think.
    - Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
      It's been well-known for MONTHS that COVID is significantly more deadly than the regular flu. To still try to downplay COVID and act like it's no worse than a regular flu is, quite frankly, willful ignorance.
      - heavyset_go 6y ago
        > To still try to downplay COVID and act like it's no worse than a regular flu is, quite frankly, willful ignorance. I've found that it isn't ignorance, it's that they just don't care. I know highly educated people who are more than capable of understanding the statistics underlying COVID infections, and they still say "it's just the flu". These were people who knew about COVID in January, and were talking about what a threat it could be. Yet months later they're repeating the President's talking points. They simply don't care.
    - thomastjeffery 6y ago
      > It kills lots of people every year. So do car accidents COVID-19 has killed more Americans this year than all accidents. It's the third leading cause of death. That's much more significant than influenza.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ergwwrt 6y ago
    Actually the coronavirus does not exist at all.
  - petertodd 6y ago
    They are correct in thinking that. For most people it's unlikely that a COVID-19 infection would kill them. The CDC's estimates for infection fatality rate by age are: 0-19 years: 0.003% 20-49 years: 0.02% 50-69 years: 0.5% 70+ years: 5.4% Source: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena... For younger ages, that's comparable to influenza: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm#table1 https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm#table1
    - Fumtumi 6y ago
      Are you sure? https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2019-2020.html https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2019-2020.html 38 Million infected, 18 Million visits and 22k death due to influence. Corona now has 10 Million cases 240k death. I mean, don't get me wrong, even if its 0.02% for 20-49 year old in USA: 1. Thats still a lot of people if we hit Millions of infections 2. you can also see that the death rate was much higher at the beginning: https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid 3. we are still not trying to get everyone from the street so they are not dying, we are getting them from the street that if they are dying, they are not dying because of full hospitals. And of course doctors are getting better every day fighting it and learning more about it. I personally absolutly don't mind sitting around for a year to wait this out. I only have one live and i don't want to have covid right now nor any long term issues from it. Covid showed something quite interesting to me: You are better of in dooms day scenarios if you can sit it out a little bit.
      - appleseed538 6y ago
        > Covid showed something quite interesting to me: You are better of in dooms day scenarios if you can sit it out a little bit. Yeah this is actually really interesting because in a non-pandemic world taking the more conservative (lowercase c) approach to safety is less useful, but in our current world with a lot of genuine uncertainty and numerous catastrophes it actually nets better. > I personally absolutly don't mind sitting around for a year to wait this out. I only have one live and i don't want to have covid right now nor any long term issues from it. Yes, Please continue to have discipline and hold out against peer pressure to lower your guard. As someone who got covid, early 20s, exercise daily, low-processed food diet, no history of health issues, I got a mild case of Covid and the post-covid stage for me is much worse than the actual illness period and this phenomenon is very underrated in people’s discourse about risk assessment. Most people on this forum feel great arguing the pandemic on paper but have no lived experience of what this does to your body. 70, 80 days out where you feel super fucked up, new symptoms arise, random shit like pressure in your heart and chest, body aches day after day, extreme sensitivity to the cold.[0] Imagine if covid were named HIV instead and people said, “look! After 10 months all these young people haven’t died. It must not be a big deal. Probably the flu”. Which is to say we still don’t know much about the virus. Most people in this forum are used to a world where every major disease of humanity has been studied for 20+ years,[1] so it’s sort of a confusion they have that they think the science is figured out. If you aren’t a biologist or studied biology heavily, science all seems like magic to you so it must be hard to tell the difference between something that is understood and not understood yet [0] PS and still recovering [1] source: my ass
  - o-__-o 6y ago
    Most people don't disbelieve the coronavirus exists, they just think it's not going to kill them, its going to kill someone else. FTFY
    - dfilppi 6y ago
      And they are wrong. It's most likely not going to kill them or anyone they know.
      - o-__-o 6y ago
        Keep coping. Next year is going to suck. I hope I’m still alive next year and covid complications don’t kill me :/
- muzika 6y ago
  This. Closing all playgrounds in my state for many months was just pushing it a little too far, for example.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- carapace 6y ago
  > people ... don't disbelieve the coronavirus exists, they just think it's not dangerous enough to warrant [quarantine] That's operationally the same thing. In other words, if that belief is wrong they're still killing people. Let's be cautious. Once we have good testing we can know where the virus is and contain it without such a drastic quarantine. That's the rational, non-partisan thing to do.
  - crooked-v 6y ago
    We know where it is. It's everywhere, because huge parts of the country have given up on even trying to keep it contained. As of today we're at about 10 million cumulative cases (a full 3% of the country's entire population), 132,000 cases per day, and the cases-per-day count doubling every 20-30 days. That's a progression that gives you millions of new cases a day just by May.
    - petertodd 6y ago
      > 10 million cumulative cases Known cases. True numbers are likely to be much higher than that. For starters, the estimated percentage of entirely asymptomatic infections is around 18% to 80%(1), with many more getting only mild symptoms. Many if not most people with mild symptoms will never bother to get tested. It would not be surprising if 100 million Americans have in fact been infected already. That's the kind of ratio of known to actual cases that antibody testing has repeatedly found. And even that may be an underestimate, as antibody testing doesn't measure T-cell response. 1) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7470698/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7470698/
      - appleseed538 6y ago
        Your order of magnitude is off (log2 = n + * 3)
    - JoshuaDavid 6y ago
      132000 cases per day, doubling every 30 days, would be about 328 million additional verified infections by the beginning of May. You may note that exceeds the total number of Americans who have not already tested positive, which gives a pretty good hint that model can't actually reflect reality for that long. Additionally, the 10M number is the number of people who have tested positive, not the number who have been infected, which is probably several times higher than that even. So yeah. I doubt we have even two more doublings ahead of us, at least as measured by hospitalizations (positive tests are a bad measure because early testing was very lacking). Less than one wouldn't surprise me.
- larl 6y ago
  While anti-science exists at both ends of the political spectrum, only one of the major us political parties seems to embrace conspiracy theories with gusto. And that party has a not insignificant number of adherents that accept the belief that covid is a hoax. But notice that you've shied away from the climate change claim; the scientific consensus has not gotten softer in the last 20 years, but as recently as a few years ago one party denied the existence of climate change. Even recently a considerable majority of the strong adherents of one particular political party disbelieve that climate change is happening.
  - Frondo 6y ago
    One more data point in terms of political parties' views on science: there are two people in the White House now who believe that evolution is a hoax, Mike Pence and Mark Meadows, both of whom derive that belief from their religious practices. Does a leader need to believe that evolution is a process that happens to be an effective leader? Not necessarily, though it may hinder their ability to make informed choices when, e.g. dealing with a pandemic whose causal agent is evolving. (Does a leader need to accept a heliocentric model? Again, probably not, very little in the way of political life depends on the leader's cosmology at that scale, but for some reason it would make me deeply uncomfortable if we ended up with a president some day who insisted the sun revolved around the earth.)
    - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
      There's also a large percentage of the population whose religious beliefs preclude a belief in evolution, especially in certain regions of the country. In a democracy, you don't get to suppress certain viewpoints or beliefs because science disagrees with them. You get a representative of the people.
  - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
    You mean like the silly Russia conspiracy theory we wasted so many years on?
    - 6y ago
- tromp 6y ago
  It's very much "dangerous enough" if it completely overwhelms hospitals, which we've seen it do before harsh measures were taken. The people's rights to free movement, association and commerce should not infringe upon the right of others to safely breathable air and to medical care if needed.
  - dfilppi 6y ago
    Except there is no right to medical care. However, there are actual rights to the other things.
- o-__-o 6y ago
  As someone who experienced covid in a bad way, I’m just going to say a lot of Americans on both sides of the political aisle don’t believe the virus is dangerous. They are just worried about their parents or grandparents. Oxymoron, I know, but the inconsistent message and conflicting cross talk from multiple parties has created this situation.
- Terretta 6y ago
  > Most people in the right don't disbelieve the coronavirus exists, they just think it's not dangerous enough to warrant massive government impingement on people's rights to free movement A little bit like how one could feel about the 3,000 casualties of 9/11 versus one’s rights to free movement over the past 20 years. Examples such as this suggest we’re not arguing from probabilities but from partisanship.
ghthor 6y ago
I believe in climate change. But were also seeing major changes on the rest of the planets in the solar system as well and last time I checked, we weren't burning fossil fuels on Mars the past century. The sun is the shared interface we have with the other planets, and I think its the main driver of climate change we are seeing. And above that the galactic magnetic sheet is likely driving the sun and driving the magnetic fields changes were seeing. Pollution isnt cool, but co2 is the least of our concerns right now. The 12000 year cycle here and it's going to be a rough ride.
- mambru 6y ago
  [citation needed]
- Fumtumi 6y ago
  This 12k year cycle you are mentioning, is part of climate change calculations. You are not a minority genius who did a few calculations on back of a notepad, is reading the internet and now is smarter than real experts. Real experts spend there daily life with it and actually know what to calculate. And yes it is co2.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
blub 6y ago
No, the "left" doesn't have solutions as can be seen by the current course of the pandemic in Europe.
- amanaplanacanal 6y ago
  We could probably learn from countries that have successfully handled the situation though, regardless of whether we consider ourselves “left” or “right”.
  - blub 6y ago
    I doesn't seem that we can. Most of Europe has failed to do that and now needs to lock down to different degrees. And of course this isn't related to left vs. right, but rather being competent, geography, having a disciplined population and political will. I was merely replying to someone who said that the left has solutions and offered the counter-evidence.
    - 0xB31B1B 6y ago
      Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have had very successful strategies and outcomes.
dang 6y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25023021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25023021.
- 0xB31B1B 6y ago
  not arguing, just curious why? Did I violate something? Something I can do better next time? I'm highly supportive of the content moderation procedures here.
  - dang 6y ago
    Partly because we try to prune the heaviest subthreads by detaching their heaviest sub-subthreads, and partly because it was a step into partisan argument, which is a step away from curiosity. That doesn't make your comment wrong—I hope that's clear. It's just that curiosity is what we're trying to optimize for. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - 0xB31B1B 6y ago
      awesome thanks! Always interesting to see content moderation strategies in action IMO.

logicchains 6y ago

>the "right" pretends they don't exist. Most people in the right don't disbelieve the coronavirus exists, they just think it's not dangerous enough to warrant massive government impingement on people's rights to free movement, association and commerce.

0xB31B1B 6y ago
Most people in the right don't disbelieve the coronavirus exists, they just think it's not going to kill them, its going to kill someone else. FTFY
- muzika 6y ago
  Just like regular flu. It kills lots of people every year. So do car accidents - lets just ban driving?
  - techsupporter 6y ago
    > So do car accidents - lets just ban driving? Yes. Or, to be less hyperbolic about it: do a lot more things that change us towards being a society where travel via single-occupant vehicle is not the default, or the highest-prioritized use of a space when many other options are cleaner, safer, more efficient space uses, encourage better health, and are not as environmentally and socially damaging. So, to link it back to coronavirus: taking steps to mitigate a harm that we know exists, that we can predict coming, and that absolutely involves making changes to how we conduct our daily lives but if a lot of us make a little change, we make a dramatic effect.
  - 0xB31B1B 6y ago
    Ok, looking at first reply to my post, they reference "commercial freedoms", which I support. Look at COVID 19, commerce (measured in restaurant reservations and retail purchases) dropped like 90% before the government lockdowns. The way to improve the economy and provide "commercial freedom" is to defeat the virus. The way to defeat the virus is though, amongst other tools like masks and vaccines, lockdowns. You could remove all the restrictions you want and things won't go back to normal for business or their patrons until the risk serious illness from a disease is small enough that you don't need to think about it when making evening plans. Additionally, when you reference "banning cars", cars used to be extremely dangerous. We have cumulatively spent millions of hours and hundreds of thousands of human lives developing engineering solutions to make cars safer. Things like masks are like seatbelts, and "suspending indoor dining" is like adding a crumple zone to the front of the car and we do ban cars that aren't sufficiently safe.
    - jeofken 6y ago
      Since this pandemic began, I’ve never understood this line of reasoning. I invite you to enlighten me. Let’s say we use the governments force to close business down, in order to hinder the virus from spreading there. When the government later stops applying this force and business can reopen with persecution, will the virus not just continue from where it left off? In March they said “flatten the curve to not temporarily overload hospitals”, which I get, but the reasoning for keeping the forced lockdown only seems logical if you never reopen. For this reason I’m glad my country is one of very few that never locked down. More have died here than in the neighbour countries, but I fail to see why they won’t catch up when they reopen.
      - ouchjars 6y ago
        The virus can't "continue from where it left off" if there's nobody left in the country infected by it. If it turns out there were a few infections left, or one slipped through quarantine for arriving travellers, the health system has enough capacity to perform testing for anyone with even mild symptoms, and comprehensively contact trace. This has worked for several countries.
  - bendmorris 6y ago
    >lets just ban driving? Or maybe let's infringe on your freedoms by: requiring a license to drive, requiring use of a seatbelt, setting safety standards for car manufacturers...
    - arnoldsing 6y ago
      Yeah! Let’s do that! Muahahaha
  - heavyset_go 6y ago
    > Just like regular flu. It kills lots of people every year The worst flu killed 80k people in a year, and normally kills about 20k a year. It hasn't even been a year and three times as many people have died compared to the worst flu season, and 1,600+ Americans die every day from COVID. This epidemic so far has been more than twelve times worse than the average flu season. > So do car accidents - lets just ban driving About 38k people die in car accidents in the US, and the average person drives 1 million miles before getting in an accident. And that's with practically every person in the country driving that can. In contrast, only 3% of Americans have had COVID, yet 237k of them have died in less than a year. If the majority of Americans get COVID, millions of people will die.
    - JoshuaDavid 6y ago
      > The worst flu killed 80k people in a year I think you're about 3 orders of magnitude off. COVID is pretty bad, but the 1918 flu was horrifyingly awful. Flus can get pretty bad.
      - heavyset_go 6y ago
        I was thinking of the 2017/2018 flu season which killed 80k in the US. H1N1 tends to get singled out as itself, Spanish Flu or swine flu.
  - cycomanic 6y ago
    9/11 killed a minuscule amount of deaths in comparison and warranted huge cut of freedoms, multiple massive military interventions, the US starting to normalise torture and black prisons, but somehow requiring people to distance and wearing masks is a step too far? Let's not forget it Trump suggested to slaughter Muslims using bullets dipped in pigs blood, so he is definetly not a antiwar as some here suggest.
    - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
      It would be a spectacular failure of logic to evaluate someones record on war based on a flippant comment (which you misrepresented) as opposed to, oh I don’t know, maybe if they started any wars. Considering that he is the first president in at least a century to not engage in any new wars, I think that might be a better signal.
      - Fumtumi 6y ago
        At least we learned for the last 4 years that certain values are no longer uphold. It shouldn't be hard for a sharp upstanding human being not to throw out 'flippant' comment. That actually surprised me the most. That exactly what you said, stopped to matter. It shouldn't and we shouldn't allow it.
        lawnchair_larry 6y ago
        The comment was made in response to the Barcelona terrorist attacks and was very specifically joking about what we should do to domestic terrorist groups that mass murder. It was also not his original thought. He cited a myth regarding what he thought someone else famously did to terrorists and said maybe we should do that. Getting upset about what he actually said and in what context seems like faux-outrage or someone with motivated reasoning to try and find something to get upset about.
        Fumtumi 6y ago
        I would be more curious on why this is not bothering you at all. You do like it doesn't matter. Does it?
  - Fumtumi 6y ago
    If you drive drunk and make an accident with me and i get hurt, holy shit you might go to prison. Knowing that there is a virus, not doing anything about it and then spreading it onto me, should also have consequences. As it is not possible to do so, might be a good idea to mandate mask wearing and cautions someone might think.
  - Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
    It's been well-known for MONTHS that COVID is significantly more deadly than the regular flu. To still try to downplay COVID and act like it's no worse than a regular flu is, quite frankly, willful ignorance.
    - heavyset_go 6y ago
      > To still try to downplay COVID and act like it's no worse than a regular flu is, quite frankly, willful ignorance. I've found that it isn't ignorance, it's that they just don't care. I know highly educated people who are more than capable of understanding the statistics underlying COVID infections, and they still say "it's just the flu". These were people who knew about COVID in January, and were talking about what a threat it could be. Yet months later they're repeating the President's talking points. They simply don't care.
  - thomastjeffery 6y ago
    > It kills lots of people every year. So do car accidents COVID-19 has killed more Americans this year than all accidents. It's the third leading cause of death. That's much more significant than influenza.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ergwwrt 6y ago
  Actually the coronavirus does not exist at all.
- petertodd 6y ago
  They are correct in thinking that. For most people it's unlikely that a COVID-19 infection would kill them. The CDC's estimates for infection fatality rate by age are: 0-19 years: 0.003% 20-49 years: 0.02% 50-69 years: 0.5% 70+ years: 5.4% Source: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena... For younger ages, that's comparable to influenza: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm#table1 https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm#table1
  - Fumtumi 6y ago
    Are you sure? https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2019-2020.html https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2019-2020.html 38 Million infected, 18 Million visits and 22k death due to influence. Corona now has 10 Million cases 240k death. I mean, don't get me wrong, even if its 0.02% for 20-49 year old in USA: 1. Thats still a lot of people if we hit Millions of infections 2. you can also see that the death rate was much higher at the beginning: https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid 3. we are still not trying to get everyone from the street so they are not dying, we are getting them from the street that if they are dying, they are not dying because of full hospitals. And of course doctors are getting better every day fighting it and learning more about it. I personally absolutly don't mind sitting around for a year to wait this out. I only have one live and i don't want to have covid right now nor any long term issues from it. Covid showed something quite interesting to me: You are better of in dooms day scenarios if you can sit it out a little bit.
    - appleseed538 6y ago
      > Covid showed something quite interesting to me: You are better of in dooms day scenarios if you can sit it out a little bit. Yeah this is actually really interesting because in a non-pandemic world taking the more conservative (lowercase c) approach to safety is less useful, but in our current world with a lot of genuine uncertainty and numerous catastrophes it actually nets better. > I personally absolutly don't mind sitting around for a year to wait this out. I only have one live and i don't want to have covid right now nor any long term issues from it. Yes, Please continue to have discipline and hold out against peer pressure to lower your guard. As someone who got covid, early 20s, exercise daily, low-processed food diet, no history of health issues, I got a mild case of Covid and the post-covid stage for me is much worse than the actual illness period and this phenomenon is very underrated in people’s discourse about risk assessment. Most people on this forum feel great arguing the pandemic on paper but have no lived experience of what this does to your body. 70, 80 days out where you feel super fucked up, new symptoms arise, random shit like pressure in your heart and chest, body aches day after day, extreme sensitivity to the cold.[0] Imagine if covid were named HIV instead and people said, “look! After 10 months all these young people haven’t died. It must not be a big deal. Probably the flu”. Which is to say we still don’t know much about the virus. Most people in this forum are used to a world where every major disease of humanity has been studied for 20+ years,[1] so it’s sort of a confusion they have that they think the science is figured out. If you aren’t a biologist or studied biology heavily, science all seems like magic to you so it must be hard to tell the difference between something that is understood and not understood yet [0] PS and still recovering [1] source: my ass
- o-__-o 6y ago
  Most people don't disbelieve the coronavirus exists, they just think it's not going to kill them, its going to kill someone else. FTFY
  - dfilppi 6y ago
    And they are wrong. It's most likely not going to kill them or anyone they know.
    - o-__-o 6y ago
      Keep coping. Next year is going to suck. I hope I’m still alive next year and covid complications don’t kill me :/
muzika 6y ago
This. Closing all playgrounds in my state for many months was just pushing it a little too far, for example.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
carapace 6y ago
> people ... don't disbelieve the coronavirus exists, they just think it's not dangerous enough to warrant [quarantine] That's operationally the same thing. In other words, if that belief is wrong they're still killing people. Let's be cautious. Once we have good testing we can know where the virus is and contain it without such a drastic quarantine. That's the rational, non-partisan thing to do.
- crooked-v 6y ago
  We know where it is. It's everywhere, because huge parts of the country have given up on even trying to keep it contained. As of today we're at about 10 million cumulative cases (a full 3% of the country's entire population), 132,000 cases per day, and the cases-per-day count doubling every 20-30 days. That's a progression that gives you millions of new cases a day just by May.
  - petertodd 6y ago
    > 10 million cumulative cases Known cases. True numbers are likely to be much higher than that. For starters, the estimated percentage of entirely asymptomatic infections is around 18% to 80%(1), with many more getting only mild symptoms. Many if not most people with mild symptoms will never bother to get tested. It would not be surprising if 100 million Americans have in fact been infected already. That's the kind of ratio of known to actual cases that antibody testing has repeatedly found. And even that may be an underestimate, as antibody testing doesn't measure T-cell response. 1) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7470698/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7470698/
    - appleseed538 6y ago
      Your order of magnitude is off (log2 = n + * 3)
  - JoshuaDavid 6y ago
    132000 cases per day, doubling every 30 days, would be about 328 million additional verified infections by the beginning of May. You may note that exceeds the total number of Americans who have not already tested positive, which gives a pretty good hint that model can't actually reflect reality for that long. Additionally, the 10M number is the number of people who have tested positive, not the number who have been infected, which is probably several times higher than that even. So yeah. I doubt we have even two more doublings ahead of us, at least as measured by hospitalizations (positive tests are a bad measure because early testing was very lacking). Less than one wouldn't surprise me.
larl 6y ago
While anti-science exists at both ends of the political spectrum, only one of the major us political parties seems to embrace conspiracy theories with gusto. And that party has a not insignificant number of adherents that accept the belief that covid is a hoax. But notice that you've shied away from the climate change claim; the scientific consensus has not gotten softer in the last 20 years, but as recently as a few years ago one party denied the existence of climate change. Even recently a considerable majority of the strong adherents of one particular political party disbelieve that climate change is happening.
- Frondo 6y ago
  One more data point in terms of political parties' views on science: there are two people in the White House now who believe that evolution is a hoax, Mike Pence and Mark Meadows, both of whom derive that belief from their religious practices. Does a leader need to believe that evolution is a process that happens to be an effective leader? Not necessarily, though it may hinder their ability to make informed choices when, e.g. dealing with a pandemic whose causal agent is evolving. (Does a leader need to accept a heliocentric model? Again, probably not, very little in the way of political life depends on the leader's cosmology at that scale, but for some reason it would make me deeply uncomfortable if we ended up with a president some day who insisted the sun revolved around the earth.)
  - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
    There's also a large percentage of the population whose religious beliefs preclude a belief in evolution, especially in certain regions of the country. In a democracy, you don't get to suppress certain viewpoints or beliefs because science disagrees with them. You get a representative of the people.
- lawnchair_larry 6y ago
  You mean like the silly Russia conspiracy theory we wasted so many years on?
  - 6y ago
tromp 6y ago
It's very much "dangerous enough" if it completely overwhelms hospitals, which we've seen it do before harsh measures were taken. The people's rights to free movement, association and commerce should not infringe upon the right of others to safely breathable air and to medical care if needed.
- dfilppi 6y ago
  Except there is no right to medical care. However, there are actual rights to the other things.
o-__-o 6y ago
As someone who experienced covid in a bad way, I’m just going to say a lot of Americans on both sides of the political aisle don’t believe the virus is dangerous. They are just worried about their parents or grandparents. Oxymoron, I know, but the inconsistent message and conflicting cross talk from multiple parties has created this situation.
Terretta 6y ago
> Most people in the right don't disbelieve the coronavirus exists, they just think it's not dangerous enough to warrant massive government impingement on people's rights to free movement A little bit like how one could feel about the 3,000 casualties of 9/11 versus one’s rights to free movement over the past 20 years. Examples such as this suggest we’re not arguing from probabilities but from partisanship.

ghthor 6y ago

I believe in climate change. But were also seeing major changes on the rest of the planets in the solar system as well and last time I checked, we weren't burning fossil fuels on Mars the past century. The sun is the shared interface we have with the other planets, and I think its the main driver of climate change we are seeing. And above that the galactic magnetic sheet is likely driving the sun and driving the magnetic fields changes were seeing. Pollution isnt cool, but co2 is the least of our concerns right now. The 12000 year cycle here and it's going to be a rough ride.

mambru 6y ago
[citation needed]
Fumtumi 6y ago
This 12k year cycle you are mentioning, is part of climate change calculations. You are not a minority genius who did a few calculations on back of a notepad, is reading the internet and now is smarter than real experts. Real experts spend there daily life with it and actually know what to calculate. And yes it is co2.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

blub 6y ago

No, the "left" doesn't have solutions as can be seen by the current course of the pandemic in Europe.

amanaplanacanal 6y ago
We could probably learn from countries that have successfully handled the situation though, regardless of whether we consider ourselves “left” or “right”.
- blub 6y ago
  I doesn't seem that we can. Most of Europe has failed to do that and now needs to lock down to different degrees. And of course this isn't related to left vs. right, but rather being competent, geography, having a disciplined population and political will. I was merely replying to someone who said that the left has solutions and offered the counter-evidence.
  - 0xB31B1B 6y ago
    Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have had very successful strategies and outcomes.

dang 6y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25023021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25023021.

0xB31B1B 6y ago
not arguing, just curious why? Did I violate something? Something I can do better next time? I'm highly supportive of the content moderation procedures here.
- dang 6y ago
  Partly because we try to prune the heaviest subthreads by detaching their heaviest sub-subthreads, and partly because it was a step into partisan argument, which is a step away from curiosity. That doesn't make your comment wrong—I hope that's clear. It's just that curiosity is what we're trying to optimize for. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - 0xB31B1B 6y ago
    awesome thanks! Always interesting to see content moderation strategies in action IMO.