10 ms·

Coronavirus kills more people in the US in one day than on September 11

113 points by karimford 6y ago

roenxi 6y ago
While it is true that a 9-11/day is a high rate of death I feel compelled to point out that 9-11 only happened once. This seems to me to be trying to make coronavirus into an emotional threat, which I'm sure is arguably a good idea. But this comparison is, fundamentally, nonsensical. 9-11 is not a good measure of deaths. The damage 9-11 did was never the number of deaths, it was the symbolism and the hysterical response that caused the real losses of life, liberty and prosperity.
- spoonjim 6y ago
  Yes, the game theoretically optimal response to 9-11 would have been to do absolutely nothing. The damage is in the response.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    Bombing the ever loving fuck out of Afghanistan was the right strategy.
- pseudalopex 6y ago
  The article was superficial. The comparison is good though. It invites asking why the response was what it was in 2001 and is what it is in 2020.
_jgdh 6y ago
I think the 2020 experience has taught us a bit more about people. 9/11 was horrifying and traumatising, but perhaps less because of the death toll (3000) and more because you could see footage of those people dying, played over and over. Sure, 3000+ people died of Covid yesterday, but they all did it out of sight. So it’s possible for some people to dismiss it for any number of reasons - statistics aren’t accurate, those people had other underlying health issues, they would have died of the flu anyway. Most of all, we only see the statistic. We don’t have to actually watch someone die because the virus prevented them from breathing, far away from their family. Speaking of which, this is also probably why the BLM movement gained widespread support. Statistics showing unequal policing have existed for a long time, but they are easy to ignore. Any person who watched the 8:46 video of a man being suffocated couldn’t ignore it. We like to think we’re data driven, but we’re actually emotionally and visually driven. Statistics should convince people, but it doesn’t. A video of towers falling or a man being suffocated are much more likely to change people’s minds.
- andi999 6y ago
  Also usually on any given day in the US on average 7500 people die.
  - yread 6y ago
    Yes, the worst hit areas (Northern Italy, Belgium, Czech Republic) usually get to doubling the usual death rate. So, there is still room to grow. US is much larger and more diverse though so you would have to have a massive surge in all states at once
- ergocoder 6y ago
  On an unrelated matter that also shows strong out-of-sight-out-of-mind attitude is tipping. You often only tip if you see the person. If you don't see them(e.g. line cook), you don't tip. Such a strange way of compensating people.
  - DoctorOetker 6y ago
    Here in Belgium tipping is not really conventional, except in higher echelons of society. Some people do give tips sometimes. Usually its preagreed to pool all the tips into one pot for the shift and then divided amongst the employees. (a girl from the middle east working in the kitchen of a bar here in Belgium told me thats how they do it)
    - CaptainZapp 6y ago
      > Usually its preagreed to pool all the tips into one pot for the shift and then divided amongst the employees That, probably, is restaurant specific. Some places pool the tips and the kitchen staff is also part of the pot in other places the server gets to keep the tips. The American model of tipping (like 20% essentially mandatory) really annoys me. I say that as a person who usually tips quite generously, but it's really not my business as a paying patron to be responsible for the staff salaries. Raise the damn prices already and let a tip really be a tip.
TaylorAlexander 6y ago
I spend a lot of time thinking about the fact that Vietnam took all appropriate precautions and in a country with 95 million people they’ve only had about 35 total deaths of covid. And they experienced positive economic growth this year. Meanwhile in the USA I think wealthy people were worried that these measures would harm the economy so we let states and counties all decide on their own how to handle things. And the issue of mask wearing became weirdly politicized. And actually I learned recently that in 1988 George HW Bush gave this passionate speech about how the USA needed to fight climate change head on... but by the time republicans got the presidency again the party sided with oil companies on a pro fossil fuel message. Why do we politicize science like this? Or is it inherently political? Is it just that lobbyists influence political parties differently and so issues that have nothing to do with Democrat or Republican end up getting attached to those identities? I don’t really know what the answer is. But I do think if the USA had all taken the science seriously and did not politicize the issue we’d have at least 100,000 more Americans alive today.
- jfoster 6y ago
  US politics has become so tribal that it's pulling new issues in. Anything that makes it into the media will accordingly have two opposing stances on it. I think the real question is, why is US politics becoming even more extreme than it already was?
  - prawn 6y ago
    Could it be anything other than the internet? Social media, YouTube, ease of publishing, etc. Has anything else relevant changed so much in the last decade or two?
    - krapp 6y ago
      >Has anything else relevant changed so much in the last decade or two? No. Not a thing. Certainly not the election of an African American President, the Republicans normalizing conspiracy theories like birtherism in a cynical race-baiting attempt to regain power through neo-revolutionary proxy movements like the Tea Party, or the election of an extremely divisive President who pushed the Overton window of American political and social discourse so far to the right that beliefs which would have been too insane for talk radio are now standard discourse. Definitely do not look too deeply at American culture itself and study the deeply rooted, endemic issues which have been festering for decades and only allowed to burst forth in a pusculent river of hate and paranoia when the lunatics started running the asylum. It has to be social media and cannot be anything but social media. Everything is Google's fault.
just-juan-post 6y ago
Hospitals are paid extra if the primary cause of death is listed as Covid. I have seen a handful of posts on Reddit from hospital employees who have been told to put Covid as the cause of death if the person tests positive but I won't link them here as they are not as verifiable. From FactCheck.org's article: [1] > “If we think it’s presumptive … we can go ahead and put down COVID-19,” Jensen said, “or even in some situations, even if it’s negative.” He pointed to the example of a 38-year-old man in Minnesota whose death was attributed to the coronavirus even though he tested negative. There are direct financial incentives to list a person who has Covid as deceased by Covid. [1] - https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/hospital-payments-and-the-covid-19-death-count/ https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/hospital-payments-and-the-...
- richeyryan 6y ago
  From the very same article you posted > "As for the accuracy of the death toll, other experts have previously told us that while it’s true that some deaths attributed to COVID-19 likely would have occurred regardless of the disease, other factors — like the deaths of undiagnosed COVID-19 victims, including those that occur at home — contribute to a more significant problem of under-counting the deaths."
  - scottlocklin 6y ago
    Funny I have friends "on both sides of this issue" so I went out and did the common sense thing of adding up the CDC deaths, subtracting the baseline average deaths and noticing that the difference between 2020 and previous years is pretty much exactly the number of deaths the CDC attributes to Covid. You don't need to be an expert to do that. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/#S2 https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/#S2
- dylkil 6y ago
  >Hospitals are paid extra if the primary cause of death is listed as Covid. such nonsense
- doctor_eval 6y ago
  That doesn't explain why more people in general are dying. Like, if you look at the number of people who died in the past week in the USA, and compare to the number who died during the same period last year, the first number is much more bigger than the second one. Financial incentives might skew the numbers, but that's why statisticians look at multiple sources of data.
once-in-a-while 6y ago
https://www.ordo-militaris.net/2020/12/09/exposing-the-scamdemic-as-a-diabolical-plot-against-humanity/ https://www.ordo-militaris.net/2020/12/09/exposing-the-scamd... The above would be the Truth, if only someone on HN had the balls not to fight it to death. BTW: this headline will become very popular soon: + + + RIP MSM. Cause of death: the TRUTH + + +
BestCatalonia 6y ago
Most think those dead people just went to meet God. So not a Big deal.
tedk-42 6y ago
Regardless of the dismissive comments from other HN posters, I'm still shocked at how incredibly inept the US has been at containing the virus. From the president down to the people, there's a fundamental problem in the US society in how people view this as a 'non-issue'
- PurpleFoxy 6y ago
  It’s exposed a fundamental flaw in US culture. Americans aren’t capable of dealing with a problem where their actions impact others more than themselves. Individualism breaks down when you have to do something more for everyone else than yourself.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    > Americans aren’t capable of dealing with a problem where their actions impact others more than themselves. Lol, what a crock of shit. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-us-is-the-most-generous-country-but-americans-say-debt-is-keeping-them-from-giving-more-to-charity-2019-10-18 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-us-is-the-most-generou... The issue is not individualism, it’s that a significant portion of the country literally thinks COVID is overblown and that we are shutting down for “a bad flu”. I’m extremely individualist but I take covid seriously and don’t spread it to others. Individualist != selfish.
    - sverhagen 6y ago
      Yeah, there's a lot of charity in the US. Which is then often used as an argument for low taxes, so it may be a net loss. But people here do get to tout their individual donations a lot.
    - kingofpandora 6y ago
      I'd be interested what counts as a charity ... I bet there are a lot that wouldn't qualify as charities by my own personal sensibilities.
  - throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
ageofwant 6y ago
As an Australian it has been extraordinary to witness the end of the American hegemony in this particular way. The pandemic was not a black swan by any means, the American response to it was. My American model of capability and competence turned out to be horseshit. I had a view of Americans as brash, somewhat obnoxious but generally genial, certainly industrious. The incredulous, self-centered and fundamentally deluded zeitgeist that seems to define current American society was a surprise to me. I think many people were sensing the decline of American society, certainly Americans, and MAGA perversely tapped into that. America's decline is already affecting Australians with China signalling its disapproval of Australia's current 'republican' rhetoric with the current trade war. I suspect this year was a turning point for geopolitics and it won't favor western style democracies, not as what used to be the ultimate model of those turned out to be the way it has.
- viraptor 6y ago
  While it may look like that, I wonder how much of it comes from the leadership and how much from "average US person" behaviour. Thought exercise: how different do you think the collective US behaviour would be if every state (our county) leader was replaced with a Dan Andrews clone, ignoring how he'd get elected? (I don't have an answer, I can imagine many paths)
  - ageofwant 6y ago
    Yea I recon that matters a lot. But here, even the Lib run states generally had a decent response, with a bit of a 'fuck-off' to Morrison when he started his predictable bullshit. And as a rule, Australian's sense of civic duty carried the day, not so with Americans - as far as I can tell through the media lens anyway.
    - jim-jim-jim 6y ago
      It's cute to frame the death toll discrepancy in terms of national character, with Americans who don't even _believe in science_ coughing on everybody as their scooters whirr merrily to the nearest hamburger depository, but at the end of the day, most Americans and Australians were killed by the same thing: their precarious positions in society. It's not like private nursing homes, increasingly casualized work, and an insane weath gap aren't a thing in Australia either. Everybody slobbering Dan's knob conveniently forgets that the second outbreak could have been avoided if the government hadn't subcontracted out all the hotel security. Australia's neoliberal death march has yet to reach the brutal conclusion that America arrived at, but it's trodding along. And smug complacency certainly won't reverse that course.
sto_hristo 6y ago
The terrorist attack was an act of murder - controlled, planned, deliberate, malicious, vindictive. The other is a normal natural occurrence that has been happening since cellular life began and every living thing lives with. And just because the consequences of either can be described with numbers, doesn't mean they can be compared. You can do a better job comparing apples and oranges as they do correlate on the basis of nutrition value. Modern media is just... pathetic.
- Broken_Hippo 6y ago
  Refusing to do even the simplest of measures - like requiring masks - turns a disease into murder. Heck, we've used disease as agents of terror and murder. Smallpox blankets, anyone? I'd also argue that folks have been killing others for centuries, including in terrorist-like attacks, so you could argue that 9/11 was just a natural part of being human. These things can be compared, even without using numbers. But more importantly, we are often reminded of the death toll of 9/11, so it is apt to be compare the two. This isn't the "pathetic media". IT is people not wanting to die because others refuse to do basic things to help others.
  - WildParser 6y ago
    Even more disturbing is that people outright refuse to take a look at numbers to check what measures actually did. Just mentioning datasources and asking people to look can attract a lot of downvotes. People just suppose the data might point into a direction they don't accept - nobody looks at the data.
  - donatj 6y ago
    Smallpox blankets are a myth. They were an idea proposed in military correspondence but there is no evidence to support their actual use. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/plag/5240451.0001.009/--did-the-us-army-distribute-smallpox-blankets-to-indians?rgn=main;view=fulltext https://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/plag/5240451.0001.009/--did-the...
    - Broken_Hippo 6y ago
robert_foss 6y ago
3k Americans died, we all know what that means. It's time to invade some unfortunate oil producing country and kill 200k of its population. Maybe Scotland? Or Brasil?
- asadkn 6y ago
  Indeed. Or destabilize a whole region killing almost a million: https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human
supernova87a 6y ago
Well, as pointed out by others, we do poorly when a threat is: -- Diffuse vs. concentrated in who is affected -- Slow and steady vs. acute and sudden -- Apparently familiar / understood vs. unknown / frightening Maybe this is just our vulnerability as a species, and takes inordinate amount of effort to fight against. Confronting climate change falls into the same category of course.
- xeyownt 6y ago
  Not all countries react poorly, some even reacts pretty well, so that's not an attribute of our species. If anything, that's more an attribute of the maturity of a society.
jhanschoo 6y ago
I think what's outrageous is that the deaths per capita from COVID in that one day in US is comparable to total COVID deaths per capita in some countries. US COVID deaths per capita ~~ytd~~ yesterday: 0.0009% SK COVID deaths per capita: 0.001% NZ COVID deaths per capita: 0.0005% SG COVID deaths per capita: 0.0005% TW COVID deaths per capita: 0.00002%
- PixyMisa 6y ago
  So, step one: Be an island.
  - lifeformed 6y ago
    Are land borders the issue in America? Canada is closed, the infections came in by plane, and exploded locally.
  - jhanschoo 6y ago
    Malaysia: 393/31530000 = 0.0012% Vietnam: 35/95540000 = 0.00003% Thailand: 60/69799978 = 0.00009%
- spuz 6y ago
  Could you explain these numbers a bit more? Why is it important that they are roughly the same?
  - apexalpha 6y ago
    He is showing that more people (per capita) die of Covid19 in the U.S. every day compared to the total deaths per capita in some other countries.
    - jhanschoo 6y ago
      I'll qualify that to be every day for the last few days, since this is the worst spike.
- p1mrx 6y ago
TheButlerian 6y ago
Lockdowncels out of control once again.
oxplot 6y ago
The arguments for number of death seem to always miss an important part: quality of death. One cannot ignore the difference between dying in a hospital bed, most likely next to loved ones and under some kind of drug to alleviate as much pain as possible, vs being burnt alive next to others burning alive or jumping off a building "on purpose" to avoid the said fiery death.
- timbit42 6y ago
  People who die of COVID-19 do not die next to loved ones. They die without their loved ones nearby.
CryptoPunk 6y ago
Coronavirus victims tend to be much older, and generally closer to the natural end of their life. Every day thousands in the same demographic die from cancer and heart disease too.
- DanBC 6y ago
  In the first wave we saw that covid was taking people on average 12 years before they would have died otherwise, and most of them needed no assistance in their day to day living before they were hospitalised and died. That's not the frail cohort you're making them out to be. And that was only true of the first wave. The second wave is seeing death in younger people.
  - CryptoPunk 6y ago
    I don't know about the US statistics, but the average age of death of coronavirus victims in the UK and Italy was 79. Deliberately not mentioning that amounts to fearmongering, no matter how noble the intentions. I haven't seen any evidence that the infection fatality rate for younger demographics is higher for the second wave. Do you have any raw statistics to back that up?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - e12e 6y ago
      Looks like that dovetail pretty well with gp's point - people loose 10 year or so of their expected life span (or a little over one tenth of their time on this earth) - if I put in 79 and male here, I get an average expectancy of 90: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/healthandlifeexpectancies/articles/lifeexpectancycalculator/2019-06-07 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
      - dragonwriter 6y ago
        Yeah, too many people, for some reason, don’t understand that “Life expectancy at age N” is not at all the same, in general, as “Life expectancy at birth minus N”.

113 points by karimford 6y ago

While it is true that a 9-11/day is a high rate of death I feel compelled to point out that 9-11 only happened once. This seems to me to be trying to make coronavirus into an emotional threat, which I'm sure is arguably a good idea. But this comparison is, fundamentally, nonsensical. 9-11 is not a good measure of deaths. The damage 9-11 did was never the number of deaths, it was the symbolism and the hysterical response that caused the real losses of life, liberty and prosperity.

spoonjim 6y ago
Yes, the game theoretically optimal response to 9-11 would have been to do absolutely nothing. The damage is in the response.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Bombing the ever loving fuck out of Afghanistan was the right strategy.
pseudalopex 6y ago
The article was superficial. The comparison is good though. It invites asking why the response was what it was in 2001 and is what it is in 2020.

_jgdh 6y ago

I think the 2020 experience has taught us a bit more about people. 9/11 was horrifying and traumatising, but perhaps less because of the death toll (3000) and more because you could see footage of those people dying, played over and over. Sure, 3000+ people died of Covid yesterday, but they all did it out of sight. So it’s possible for some people to dismiss it for any number of reasons - statistics aren’t accurate, those people had other underlying health issues, they would have died of the flu anyway. Most of all, we only see the statistic. We don’t have to actually watch someone die because the virus prevented them from breathing, far away from their family. Speaking of which, this is also probably why the BLM movement gained widespread support. Statistics showing unequal policing have existed for a long time, but they are easy to ignore. Any person who watched the 8:46 video of a man being suffocated couldn’t ignore it. We like to think we’re data driven, but we’re actually emotionally and visually driven. Statistics should convince people, but it doesn’t. A video of towers falling or a man being suffocated are much more likely to change people’s minds.

andi999 6y ago
Also usually on any given day in the US on average 7500 people die.
- yread 6y ago
  Yes, the worst hit areas (Northern Italy, Belgium, Czech Republic) usually get to doubling the usual death rate. So, there is still room to grow. US is much larger and more diverse though so you would have to have a massive surge in all states at once
ergocoder 6y ago
On an unrelated matter that also shows strong out-of-sight-out-of-mind attitude is tipping. You often only tip if you see the person. If you don't see them(e.g. line cook), you don't tip. Such a strange way of compensating people.
- DoctorOetker 6y ago
  Here in Belgium tipping is not really conventional, except in higher echelons of society. Some people do give tips sometimes. Usually its preagreed to pool all the tips into one pot for the shift and then divided amongst the employees. (a girl from the middle east working in the kitchen of a bar here in Belgium told me thats how they do it)
  - CaptainZapp 6y ago
    > Usually its preagreed to pool all the tips into one pot for the shift and then divided amongst the employees That, probably, is restaurant specific. Some places pool the tips and the kitchen staff is also part of the pot in other places the server gets to keep the tips. The American model of tipping (like 20% essentially mandatory) really annoys me. I say that as a person who usually tips quite generously, but it's really not my business as a paying patron to be responsible for the staff salaries. Raise the damn prices already and let a tip really be a tip.

TaylorAlexander 6y ago

I spend a lot of time thinking about the fact that Vietnam took all appropriate precautions and in a country with 95 million people they’ve only had about 35 total deaths of covid. And they experienced positive economic growth this year. Meanwhile in the USA I think wealthy people were worried that these measures would harm the economy so we let states and counties all decide on their own how to handle things. And the issue of mask wearing became weirdly politicized. And actually I learned recently that in 1988 George HW Bush gave this passionate speech about how the USA needed to fight climate change head on... but by the time republicans got the presidency again the party sided with oil companies on a pro fossil fuel message. Why do we politicize science like this? Or is it inherently political? Is it just that lobbyists influence political parties differently and so issues that have nothing to do with Democrat or Republican end up getting attached to those identities? I don’t really know what the answer is. But I do think if the USA had all taken the science seriously and did not politicize the issue we’d have at least 100,000 more Americans alive today.

jfoster 6y ago
US politics has become so tribal that it's pulling new issues in. Anything that makes it into the media will accordingly have two opposing stances on it. I think the real question is, why is US politics becoming even more extreme than it already was?
- prawn 6y ago
  Could it be anything other than the internet? Social media, YouTube, ease of publishing, etc. Has anything else relevant changed so much in the last decade or two?
  - krapp 6y ago
    >Has anything else relevant changed so much in the last decade or two? No. Not a thing. Certainly not the election of an African American President, the Republicans normalizing conspiracy theories like birtherism in a cynical race-baiting attempt to regain power through neo-revolutionary proxy movements like the Tea Party, or the election of an extremely divisive President who pushed the Overton window of American political and social discourse so far to the right that beliefs which would have been too insane for talk radio are now standard discourse. Definitely do not look too deeply at American culture itself and study the deeply rooted, endemic issues which have been festering for decades and only allowed to burst forth in a pusculent river of hate and paranoia when the lunatics started running the asylum. It has to be social media and cannot be anything but social media. Everything is Google's fault.

just-juan-post 6y ago

Hospitals are paid extra if the primary cause of death is listed as Covid. I have seen a handful of posts on Reddit from hospital employees who have been told to put Covid as the cause of death if the person tests positive but I won't link them here as they are not as verifiable. From FactCheck.org's article: [1] > “If we think it’s presumptive … we can go ahead and put down COVID-19,” Jensen said, “or even in some situations, even if it’s negative.” He pointed to the example of a 38-year-old man in Minnesota whose death was attributed to the coronavirus even though he tested negative. There are direct financial incentives to list a person who has Covid as deceased by Covid. [1] - https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/hospital-payments-and-the-covid-19-death-count/ https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/hospital-payments-and-the-...

richeyryan 6y ago
From the very same article you posted > "As for the accuracy of the death toll, other experts have previously told us that while it’s true that some deaths attributed to COVID-19 likely would have occurred regardless of the disease, other factors — like the deaths of undiagnosed COVID-19 victims, including those that occur at home — contribute to a more significant problem of under-counting the deaths."
- scottlocklin 6y ago
  Funny I have friends "on both sides of this issue" so I went out and did the common sense thing of adding up the CDC deaths, subtracting the baseline average deaths and noticing that the difference between 2020 and previous years is pretty much exactly the number of deaths the CDC attributes to Covid. You don't need to be an expert to do that. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/#S2 https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/#S2
dylkil 6y ago
>Hospitals are paid extra if the primary cause of death is listed as Covid. such nonsense
doctor_eval 6y ago
That doesn't explain why more people in general are dying. Like, if you look at the number of people who died in the past week in the USA, and compare to the number who died during the same period last year, the first number is much more bigger than the second one. Financial incentives might skew the numbers, but that's why statisticians look at multiple sources of data.

once-in-a-while 6y ago

https://www.ordo-militaris.net/2020/12/09/exposing-the-scamdemic-as-a-diabolical-plot-against-humanity/ https://www.ordo-militaris.net/2020/12/09/exposing-the-scamd... The above would be the Truth, if only someone on HN had the balls not to fight it to death. BTW: this headline will become very popular soon: + + + RIP MSM. Cause of death: the TRUTH + + +

BestCatalonia 6y ago

Most think those dead people just went to meet God. So not a Big deal.

tedk-42 6y ago

Regardless of the dismissive comments from other HN posters, I'm still shocked at how incredibly inept the US has been at containing the virus. From the president down to the people, there's a fundamental problem in the US society in how people view this as a 'non-issue'

PurpleFoxy 6y ago
It’s exposed a fundamental flaw in US culture. Americans aren’t capable of dealing with a problem where their actions impact others more than themselves. Individualism breaks down when you have to do something more for everyone else than yourself.
- kortilla 6y ago
  > Americans aren’t capable of dealing with a problem where their actions impact others more than themselves. Lol, what a crock of shit. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-us-is-the-most-generous-country-but-americans-say-debt-is-keeping-them-from-giving-more-to-charity-2019-10-18 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-us-is-the-most-generou... The issue is not individualism, it’s that a significant portion of the country literally thinks COVID is overblown and that we are shutting down for “a bad flu”. I’m extremely individualist but I take covid seriously and don’t spread it to others. Individualist != selfish.
  - sverhagen 6y ago
    Yeah, there's a lot of charity in the US. Which is then often used as an argument for low taxes, so it may be a net loss. But people here do get to tout their individual donations a lot.
  - kingofpandora 6y ago
    I'd be interested what counts as a charity ... I bet there are a lot that wouldn't qualify as charities by my own personal sensibilities.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago

ageofwant 6y ago

As an Australian it has been extraordinary to witness the end of the American hegemony in this particular way. The pandemic was not a black swan by any means, the American response to it was. My American model of capability and competence turned out to be horseshit. I had a view of Americans as brash, somewhat obnoxious but generally genial, certainly industrious. The incredulous, self-centered and fundamentally deluded zeitgeist that seems to define current American society was a surprise to me. I think many people were sensing the decline of American society, certainly Americans, and MAGA perversely tapped into that. America's decline is already affecting Australians with China signalling its disapproval of Australia's current 'republican' rhetoric with the current trade war. I suspect this year was a turning point for geopolitics and it won't favor western style democracies, not as what used to be the ultimate model of those turned out to be the way it has.

viraptor 6y ago
While it may look like that, I wonder how much of it comes from the leadership and how much from "average US person" behaviour. Thought exercise: how different do you think the collective US behaviour would be if every state (our county) leader was replaced with a Dan Andrews clone, ignoring how he'd get elected? (I don't have an answer, I can imagine many paths)
- ageofwant 6y ago
  Yea I recon that matters a lot. But here, even the Lib run states generally had a decent response, with a bit of a 'fuck-off' to Morrison when he started his predictable bullshit. And as a rule, Australian's sense of civic duty carried the day, not so with Americans - as far as I can tell through the media lens anyway.
  - jim-jim-jim 6y ago
    It's cute to frame the death toll discrepancy in terms of national character, with Americans who don't even _believe in science_ coughing on everybody as their scooters whirr merrily to the nearest hamburger depository, but at the end of the day, most Americans and Australians were killed by the same thing: their precarious positions in society. It's not like private nursing homes, increasingly casualized work, and an insane weath gap aren't a thing in Australia either. Everybody slobbering Dan's knob conveniently forgets that the second outbreak could have been avoided if the government hadn't subcontracted out all the hotel security. Australia's neoliberal death march has yet to reach the brutal conclusion that America arrived at, but it's trodding along. And smug complacency certainly won't reverse that course.

sto_hristo 6y ago

The terrorist attack was an act of murder - controlled, planned, deliberate, malicious, vindictive. The other is a normal natural occurrence that has been happening since cellular life began and every living thing lives with. And just because the consequences of either can be described with numbers, doesn't mean they can be compared. You can do a better job comparing apples and oranges as they do correlate on the basis of nutrition value. Modern media is just... pathetic.

Broken_Hippo 6y ago
Refusing to do even the simplest of measures - like requiring masks - turns a disease into murder. Heck, we've used disease as agents of terror and murder. Smallpox blankets, anyone? I'd also argue that folks have been killing others for centuries, including in terrorist-like attacks, so you could argue that 9/11 was just a natural part of being human. These things can be compared, even without using numbers. But more importantly, we are often reminded of the death toll of 9/11, so it is apt to be compare the two. This isn't the "pathetic media". IT is people not wanting to die because others refuse to do basic things to help others.
- WildParser 6y ago
  Even more disturbing is that people outright refuse to take a look at numbers to check what measures actually did. Just mentioning datasources and asking people to look can attract a lot of downvotes. People just suppose the data might point into a direction they don't accept - nobody looks at the data.
- donatj 6y ago
  Smallpox blankets are a myth. They were an idea proposed in military correspondence but there is no evidence to support their actual use. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/plag/5240451.0001.009/--did-the-us-army-distribute-smallpox-blankets-to-indians?rgn=main;view=fulltext https://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/plag/5240451.0001.009/--did-the...
  - Broken_Hippo 6y ago

robert_foss 6y ago

3k Americans died, we all know what that means. It's time to invade some unfortunate oil producing country and kill 200k of its population. Maybe Scotland? Or Brasil?

asadkn 6y ago
Indeed. Or destabilize a whole region killing almost a million: https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human

supernova87a 6y ago

Well, as pointed out by others, we do poorly when a threat is: -- Diffuse vs. concentrated in who is affected -- Slow and steady vs. acute and sudden -- Apparently familiar / understood vs. unknown / frightening Maybe this is just our vulnerability as a species, and takes inordinate amount of effort to fight against. Confronting climate change falls into the same category of course.

xeyownt 6y ago
Not all countries react poorly, some even reacts pretty well, so that's not an attribute of our species. If anything, that's more an attribute of the maturity of a society.

jhanschoo 6y ago

I think what's outrageous is that the deaths per capita from COVID in that one day in US is comparable to total COVID deaths per capita in some countries. US COVID deaths per capita ~~ytd~~ yesterday: 0.0009% SK COVID deaths per capita: 0.001% NZ COVID deaths per capita: 0.0005% SG COVID deaths per capita: 0.0005% TW COVID deaths per capita: 0.00002%

PixyMisa 6y ago
So, step one: Be an island.
- lifeformed 6y ago
  Are land borders the issue in America? Canada is closed, the infections came in by plane, and exploded locally.
- jhanschoo 6y ago
  Malaysia: 393/31530000 = 0.0012% Vietnam: 35/95540000 = 0.00003% Thailand: 60/69799978 = 0.00009%
spuz 6y ago
Could you explain these numbers a bit more? Why is it important that they are roughly the same?
- apexalpha 6y ago
  He is showing that more people (per capita) die of Covid19 in the U.S. every day compared to the total deaths per capita in some other countries.
  - jhanschoo 6y ago
    I'll qualify that to be every day for the last few days, since this is the worst spike.
p1mrx 6y ago

TheButlerian 6y ago

Lockdowncels out of control once again.

oxplot 6y ago

The arguments for number of death seem to always miss an important part: quality of death. One cannot ignore the difference between dying in a hospital bed, most likely next to loved ones and under some kind of drug to alleviate as much pain as possible, vs being burnt alive next to others burning alive or jumping off a building "on purpose" to avoid the said fiery death.

timbit42 6y ago
People who die of COVID-19 do not die next to loved ones. They die without their loved ones nearby.

CryptoPunk 6y ago

Coronavirus victims tend to be much older, and generally closer to the natural end of their life. Every day thousands in the same demographic die from cancer and heart disease too.

DanBC 6y ago
In the first wave we saw that covid was taking people on average 12 years before they would have died otherwise, and most of them needed no assistance in their day to day living before they were hospitalised and died. That's not the frail cohort you're making them out to be. And that was only true of the first wave. The second wave is seeing death in younger people.
- CryptoPunk 6y ago
  I don't know about the US statistics, but the average age of death of coronavirus victims in the UK and Italy was 79. Deliberately not mentioning that amounts to fearmongering, no matter how noble the intentions. I haven't seen any evidence that the infection fatality rate for younger demographics is higher for the second wave. Do you have any raw statistics to back that up?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - e12e 6y ago
    Looks like that dovetail pretty well with gp's point - people loose 10 year or so of their expected life span (or a little over one tenth of their time on this earth) - if I put in 79 and male here, I get an average expectancy of 90: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/healthandlifeexpectancies/articles/lifeexpectancycalculator/2019-06-07 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      Yeah, too many people, for some reason, don’t understand that “Life expectancy at age N” is not at all the same, in general, as “Life expectancy at birth minus N”.