Curious about why you choose to scare-quote "tragic": I would hope you feel that there's nothing contentious about death on such a massive scale as being anything short of tragic.
I scare-quoted "tragic" because the tragedy of this pandemic was not the lives lost due to the introduction of a new head cold into our ecosystem - it was the illegal, violent, and world-upending implementations of fascism that governments engaged in, essentially declaring war on its own taxpaying citizens.
I am in the "epicenter" of the virus - NYC. Everyone I know who has contracted the virus - male, female, old, young, thin, fat, black, and white - had about one day of illness followed by 12 hours of recovery. On day two, all of them awoke to feeling pretty much entirely over it.
Anybody who's even remotely healthy has nothing to worry about with this pandemic. If people are truly being killed off by COVID-19, we have much bigger public health problems to be addressing than this stupid virus. By not ever addressing immune system strengthening, healthier diet and lifestyle choices, etc., to fight the virus, we enabled the pharmaceutical companies to continue to herd us in whatever way gives them the best chance at profits.
Obviously, it is this group of people to whom our governments are directing their attention. Obviously, these self-interested elites are using government as a vehicle for compulsive adoption, turning huge profits in the meantime.
The people that died from COVID were going to die of the very next infectious disease they contracted. To have died of COVID, you had to be on death's door already, or so statistically unlucky as to make your suffering a rounding error. If this is a truly global crisis, we're all fucked anyway.
A typical US president amasses a 1mil+ kill count by the end of their first term in office. I am far, far more concerned by these tragic deaths. And I am quite lonely sometimes holding that contention. But I know I am right. Notice how nobody is talking about foreign policy, and hasn't for the entire year, thanks to this pandemic.
>Anybody who's even remotely healthy has nothing to worry about with this pandemic.
Absolutely untrue: [1]Otherwise healthy people have died from COVID-19. And [2], healthy, asymptomatic carriers have infected friends and family members who have themselves died from it.
The parent comment is misleading, dangerous, and should be removed.
> Otherwise healthy people have died from COVID-19.
I never said they didn't. In fact, I directly acknowledge the healthy cases:
>> To have died of COVID, you had to be on death's door already, or so statistically unlucky as to make your suffering a rounding error.
Sorry if this was too much of a value judgment for you, but I do not consider any respiratory illness with a less than 0.5% death rate to be something which we need to bring the world to a halt over. I do not think that these unlikely deaths, nor the even more unlikely "asymptomatic spread" purportedly part of this virus's nature, can be used as evidence to the contrary without some actual analysis on your part.
I'm sorry you experienced that, but it's not ok to break the HN guidelines like this, despite how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. If users become this aggressive with each other, this community will not survive.
Even without direct illness, my ~35yr old relative is a physician running a Covid unit and she is absolutely ruined by all the death that she's seen. She signed over 20 death certificates in one day last week. Just day after day, week after week of 'treating' patients that never get better and who are alone and scared is a massive weight we're putting on everyone in healthcare.
The selfishness of this attitude is unconscionable to me.
Death is horrifying. We in the "civilized" world _should_ know this better than anybody. We are shielded from so much death on a daily basis and yet have to deal not at all with the death we shower on others outside our borders.
We, the taxpayers from these countries, have been ruthlessly drone-bombing innocents, arming horribly violent terrorists in foreign conflicts, and running shadow campaigns against elected leaders for a century.
With extremely few exceptions, just about everybody from a North American or EU country is from a place complicit in these atrocities.
There is nothing new about the amount of death we are reported to be dealing with thanks to COVID-19. In fact, it's a walk in the park compared with the last 20 years of American & European foreign policy.
Maybe you and your relatives are all just a bit new to the whole "death" thing, but many of us have been aware of it for some time and it just doesn't hold quite the same weight.
Once you see a country's ruler getting sodomized by a bayonet until they die, a flu-like illness doesn't really read quite the same as you seem to perceive it.
Personal attacks are against the rules on HN. I realize you must feel extremely upset over the loss of your friend, but the data is extremely clear on this. A recent study examined the relationship between comorbidities and deaths from COVID. Of the deceased COVID-19 patients in the study, 83.29% had a preexisting comorbidity, while only 16.71% did not.[1]
Age is also a major risk factor. According to the CDC's latest numbers, people 65+ account for 79.6% of all COVID deaths in US.[2]
It's fucking obvious that less healthy people die more easily. I don't need data to know that. I'm disputing the claim that healthy people have, quoting, "nothing to worry about".
I was pretty clear with what I wrote. You should have read my entire post.
> To have died of COVID, you had to be on death's door already, or so statistically unlucky as to make your suffering a rounding error.
Your friend falls under the category of the latter - the rounding error. Your experience is far from typical, but your foolish, fanciful insults, I'm afraid, are the "new normal."
I do not think it is controversial to suggest that a virus with a death rate of under 0.5% is nothing to worry about for a healthy person. It would be unhealthy and rather unhinged behavior to worry about it.
This sort of aggressive posting is not ok on HN, and we've had to warn you about it many times before. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules in the future.
Emotions are high, everyone is affected, and people are under pressure. It's all understandable. But we need HN users to react to this by being more thoughtful and kind to each other, not less—and the only way to really do that is to work on it regardless of how badly other commenters are behaving.
