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[Dunamisdeos]

Wow man, did you make a Google and find that death existed before 2020? "Nobody I know is dying, so I don't have to care. I am so brave. Here's some cheap haiku bullshit to make you feel better about your family dying. Mike drop lol." Maybe I can put "The fearful man dies a thousand times" on my aunt's tombstone.
 
Let me know when you get to watch a couple married 55 years move into their last home and die next to each other a month later because some posturing simpleton like you is too brave to wear a mask. The executive director of their assisted living building quoted statistics while refusing to stock PPE. Thanks for supporting that.

And no, McTraveller, I haven't done those things. I have, however, worn a mask, made sure my relatives have masks, checked on my friends and family in my area to make sure they are ok and don't need anything, and made sure my own kid gets whatever he can while at home. Turns out basic forms of personal responsibility is all anyone has been asking for. Nobody's asking you to be a one-man charity service for your community, and I'm sorry if "people are dying constantly" isn't rational enough for you.

[Shazbot]

Charmingly patronising as that may be, the damage prevented to countries by attempting to control the virus does in fact largely outweigh the negatives of lockdowns. Impressive as your ability to divide large numbers is, the experts are really the people to go to here.


As a mathematician, I do feel compelled to point out a teeny flaw in your calculations:

250,000 / 330,000,000 = 0.00075757575 = 0.076%
Not 0.00076%.

I hope this isn't rude of me - I hate to correct adults. Feel free to take this to PMs if you need a little refresher on how percentages work.

Oh, the correction itself wasn't rude. It is good trained mathematicians exist to mind the location of decimal points without dipping into veiled invective as lesser minds might. I'm just grateful you caught this for me.

[feelotraveller]

Also don't discount the massive long-term adverse effects of severely disrupted education, especially for the poor populations.

Yeah, the effects of Trump will be with us for decades. 

(Never mind the ongoing health problems experienced by those who 'recovered' from covid and the strain that will place on the nation.)

[McTraveller]

I think it is that people are always dying constantly... so why are we flipping out (as Shazbot said) that slightly more people are dying than we are used to, when it really is due to a diffuse illness, not some isolate acute event like an act of war or major accident.  The same (probably more) number of people die due to climate- and pollution-related effects every day, but we don't track that or lock ourselves up over it.

It's just... I do feel that part of it is over politicized.  It has worn on me...

[Shazbot]

"Nobody I know is dying, so I don't have to care."

On the contrary. Everyone I know is dying, as am I, as are you. I made that abundantly clear.

[MrRoboto75]

"But people die anyway" has to be the stupidest argument I've read on the internet in a long time.  Real master debater hours here.

[feelotraveller]

Fun fact/stuff with numbers.  According to the CDC the annual death rate per 100 000 people in the US is 867.8.  Getting the decimal point right that is an annual death rate of  0.8678%.  An increase from Covid of 0.076% is actually getting close to a 10% increase in death, and remember a full year has yet to pass and the disease is accelerating.  It's hardly a trivial a few extra deaths.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

DAE blood sacrificing a million grannies makes you a real man?

Like god damn, I'm a boomer-hating socialist and even I'm not that callous.

[Max™]

Incidentally, no, we don't have 250k excess deaths this year, we have ~270k COVID-19 deaths this year, we're getting close to 400k excess deaths right now.

Why worry about it when cardiovascular illness, auto accidents, cancer, and aging take more lives?

I WORRY ABOUT THOSE TOO, aging is a disease we need to cure, but the thing about a pandemic like this is, it was preventable.

We're looking at between half a million and a million extra deaths this time next year due to Trump being a stupid fucking garbagesack, but that's just in the US!

Note that the Obama administration KNEW shit like this was going to happen sooner or later and had shit in place which they passed on to the next administration.

Had that been Hillary, it would have remained in place, the cooperation with Chinese infectious disease agencies would have been intact, this outbreak would have been identified quite possibly back in december before it even went wild in Wuhan.

Even if it had gotten that far, it would have definitely been shut down before it could spread further BECAUSE SHE KNEW HER FUCKING SHIT AND WAS EXACTLY THE RIGHT PERSON TO HANDLE THIS SHIT. The most qualified candidate ever, who would have done every right thing might have stopped this shit before it left China, saving AT LEAST 1.5 million lives.

Instead we get Dumbfuck McStupidturd and his Malevolent Menagerie of Mumblefucks and Morons.

They dismantled the early warning shit.
They gutted and shut down the pandemic response team.
They killed funding for anything related.
They would have gotten rid of fucking obamacare if they weren't constantly kicking themselves in the dicks.
Then when it started spreading around the world they did every wrong thing instead of anything to make it better.
Then when it got here they ignored it and did every thing they could to make it worse.
Then after watching all of this he somehow got over 70 million dumbfucks to jump at the chance to have another go around on the failboat because apparently we're just that goddamn fucking stupid here in the states.

The rest of the world saw the outbreak start and in that sort of situation they are used to having the US jump in and say "aight, we got this, who wants to help out?" and instead they find the president eating paint chips and punching himself in the nuts while blaming them for it.

Every fucking bit of this catastrophe is on him and his fucking supporters, and trying to diminish the magnitude of this requires ignoring none of it had to happen.

Sorry, literally everyone else on the planet, we fucking failed, we fucking failed hard, and everyone is gonna be paying for it.

[JoshuaFH]

I think it is that people are always dying constantly... so why are we flipping out 

It probably has to do with a couple factors:

-Covid is an unknown quantity. Were it a disease that had plagued humanity for thousands of years, like tuberculosis or measles, we wouldn't be nearly as scared. Those have historically killed lots of people, but they're a known quantity. Covid is still largely unknown and seems to have a multitude of bizarre symptoms and long lasting health complications that won't be known until we've gotten to live with it for a few decades.

-It's crashing the healthcare system. This means that a lot of deaths are indirect deaths, just from the healthcare system being overloaded with covid patients, and therefore other emergencies are forcibly neglected.

-It was in fact largely preventable. What other purpose does a society and government exist to do other than to protect the largest number of its own? That may mean instituting mandatory masks and quarantines, but that seems a rational course of action for a collective to take against individuals. Even ants know to try to self-isolate to try to curb disease in their own colony.

I can see where you're coming from Mctraveller, but it's not a sentiment that can be converted into policy.

[feelotraveller]

What other purpose does a society and government exist to do other than to protect the largest number of its own? That may mean instituting mandatory masks and quarantines, but that seems a rational course of action for a collective to take against individuals.

Which nicely brings us back to the Benjamin Franklin "quotation that defends the authority of a legislature to govern in the interests of collective security."  Rather than some pitiful parody of, 'but mah freedoms...'

[Shazbot]

I think it is that people are always dying constantly... so why are we flipping out 

It probably has to do with a couple factors:

-Covid is an unknown quantity. Were it a disease that had plagued humanity for thousands of years, like tuberculosis or measles, we wouldn't be nearly as scared. Those have historically killed lots of people, but they're a known quantity. Covid is still largely unknown and seems to have a multitude of bizarre symptoms and long lasting health complications that won't be known until we've gotten to live with it for a few decades.

-It's crashing the healthcare system. This means that a lot of deaths are indirect deaths, just from the healthcare system being overloaded with covid patients, and therefore other emergencies are forcibly neglected.

-It was in fact largely preventable. What other purpose does a society and government exist to do other than to protect the largest number of its own? That may mean instituting mandatory masks and quarantines, but that seems a rational course of action for a collective to take against individuals. Even ants know to try to self-isolate to try to curb disease in their own colony.

I can see where you're coming from Mctraveller, but it's not a sentiment that can be converted into policy.

Measles isn't thousands of years old though. Its first records are in the 7th Century AD. Smallpox was first clearly recorded in the 4th. Covid begins in the 21st.

The ants, I note, have the good sense to continue working so the colony does not starve. Likewise, the etymologist seems to have good sense as well.

“I think we could learn from the social insects about ways to decrease transmission of disease at the scale of the population,” says Stroeymeyt. Although she concedes that the ants are good role models only up to a point. “We can’t really ask sick people to sacrifice themselves by dying in isolation like the ants do.”

[Eschar]

Interestingly, the virus's relatively low death rate (for general population) is one reason why it has killed three hundred times as many people total as its cousin SARS (i.e. the old SARS; I'm aware this one is a SARS virus.)

[Starver]

In many places people did do the lockdown - back in March or April - and it didn't seem to do much.

How are you quantifying that?  Not from you, specifically, but I do hear some anti-lockdown 'commentators' saying this sort to reason that lockdowns don't do anything, without any actual proof (or possibility of proof) that no-lockdown would have been no worse.

(Even worse when they simultaneously complain about the "models said there would be millions of deaths, and there were only thousands[1], so the models are wrong", quoting the exact model that projected what little or no change in behaviour would give, and thus from which we intentionally diverted by doing something. Again, not you, but I'm fed up barking back at the unlistening radio when someone opines with such a stupid argument.)

[1] Adjusted to whatever orders of magnitude they deem applicable.

[McTraveller]

My home state of Michigan: we were one of the few states that imposed any kind of lockdown, and it lasted from just before Easter until into June.  It definitely flattened the curve or whatever - but now we have four to five times as many new cases per day as we had back then, just as many fatalities; we also had an attempted kidnapping of our governor, we still have one of the highest case fatality rates in the country due to Wayne County and its poverty and systemic issues, etc, and were a very close swing state in the presidential election.  We may have had some damping effect on things, but that 100+ day lockdown we had ended up breeding all kinds of nasty social issues, and now we're not even doing well against the virus.

I literally in the grocery store today heard some people (they were wearing masks, to my amazement) complaining loudly about how "everything the Trump administration has been done is going to be undone by that idiot and the Liberals."

So that's what I mean - those lockdowns arguably hurt things more than they helped in the long run. Maybe not in lives, but in the "intangibles" that are definitely worse off...