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You've just described the world's attitude to Coronavirus.

by LeCow 6y ago

bbarnett 6y ago
Not even remotely true. The world has responded with "lockdowns", "masks", and more, which is the result of an unprecedented, 100 year class event, that being a pandemic. Your comment isn't really about normality, but instead about an extreme edge case scenario. The only thing worse than a pandemic, might be nuclear war, a massive nuclear accident, or large-scale disaster. Normality need not be conflated with actions during emergency scenarios. Lastly -- imagine if people DID engage in more, "only affected themselves' risky behaviour. It would mean more hospital visits, therefore more hospital capacity, more doctors/nurses/etc etc, which would mean more ability to absorb and deal with large scale emergency issues.
jen729w 6y ago
Perhaps not the greatest example given that it’s killed one-point-six million people to date. That’s an awful lot of people, and if you don’t think that’s a terrible thing then I don’t know how you sleep at night.
- bluecalm 6y ago
  It's terrible but similar number of people die every year in car accidents yet there is no moral panic. We can't even agree on finally enforcing speed limits but with the virus we closed the whole world. I mean pollution in major cities is a bigger health problem objectively than the virus and yet we still allow old diesels to drive in most of them. What I am saying is not that we shouldn't treat the virus seriously but that we really need a lot not urgency when dealing with topics like speeding and pollution.
  - jen729w 6y ago
    That “similar number of people” still die despite the enormous amount of work that goes in to road death reduction! We are doing things, and we are affecting the road toll. A quick look at Australia shows that from the worst years, 1970s, where ~3,500 died a year, we’re now down to ~1,200. That’s a 3x reduction because we did something. (Airbags, improved car design, improved road design, improved compliance, etc.) If only we had some sort of analogue for doing something vs. not doing something re: COVID. Oh wait, we do. - Number of Australians dead: 908. - Population adjusted, 13.1x: 12,000. - Number of Americans dead: 298,000. That’s 25x as many. We did something, America didn’t. Spotting a pattern?

You've just described the world's attitude to Coronavirus.

by LeCow 6y ago

You've just described the world's attitude to Coronavirus.

Not even remotely true. The world has responded with "lockdowns", "masks", and more, which is the result of an unprecedented, 100 year class event, that being a pandemic. Your comment isn't really about normality, but instead about an extreme edge case scenario. The only thing worse than a pandemic, might be nuclear war, a massive nuclear accident, or large-scale disaster. Normality need not be conflated with actions during emergency scenarios. Lastly -- imagine if people DID engage in more, "only affected themselves' risky behaviour. It would mean more hospital visits, therefore more hospital capacity, more doctors/nurses/etc etc, which would mean more ability to absorb and deal with large scale emergency issues.

jen729w 6y ago

Perhaps not the greatest example given that it’s killed one-point-six million people to date. That’s an awful lot of people, and if you don’t think that’s a terrible thing then I don’t know how you sleep at night.

bluecalm 6y ago
It's terrible but similar number of people die every year in car accidents yet there is no moral panic. We can't even agree on finally enforcing speed limits but with the virus we closed the whole world. I mean pollution in major cities is a bigger health problem objectively than the virus and yet we still allow old diesels to drive in most of them. What I am saying is not that we shouldn't treat the virus seriously but that we really need a lot not urgency when dealing with topics like speeding and pollution.
- jen729w 6y ago
  That “similar number of people” still die despite the enormous amount of work that goes in to road death reduction! We are doing things, and we are affecting the road toll. A quick look at Australia shows that from the worst years, 1970s, where ~3,500 died a year, we’re now down to ~1,200. That’s a 3x reduction because we did something. (Airbags, improved car design, improved road design, improved compliance, etc.) If only we had some sort of analogue for doing something vs. not doing something re: COVID. Oh wait, we do. - Number of Australians dead: 908. - Population adjusted, 13.1x: 12,000. - Number of Americans dead: 298,000. That’s 25x as many. We did something, America didn’t. Spotting a pattern?