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> far, far more people die of very common things

More people die of those things in a year than have died of COVID-19 so far but that's the wrong comparison. There's real science and math behind predictions of a much higher toll which would make the comparison look very different.

There's also an aspect of who has control over outcomes. People can protect themselves from various ills by eating right, exercising, not smoking, etc. There's no connection to other people's actions or outcomes. With communicable disease, the person who's not worried about their own outcome can cause the literal death of other people who had no choice about being born with certain medical conditions that made them more susceptible. You might feel you're Living Right and you're at no risk yourself, but - as has been pointed out many times but apparently not enough - It's Not Just About You. Your actions are connected to others' outcomes. There's a social responsibility to avoid becoming a vector for infection.

I agree that we're not looking at a year's worth of data, but that was also kind of the point... we're not looking at a year's worth of data.

If 97 people have died in the US so far... you've got a _long_ way to go, even looking at an exponential growth rate, to even approach the top 10 causes of death in the US. According to the CDC 47,000 people killed themselves in 2017 [1], and that's #10. Also 100% preventable.

You also have control over your own susceptibility and spread of something like the flu or the common cold, but no one in the US ever wears a mask to prevent that (though in other countries that is a common sight).

1: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm

Edit: It wasn't 8 people who have died, it was 97 according to the CDC. My bad.

> even looking at an exponential growth rate,

Do you know how exponential growth works? The exponent matters. A lot. There's a big difference between 1% growth per week and 10% growth every day. According to the actual math and models being used by epidemiologists, over four million people could need ICU-level care for COVID-19.

https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20200317.45791...

Since we don't have anywhere near that many ICU beds, and there's an even more acute shortage of ventilators, a high percentage of those people wouldn't get the care they need and would therefore die - eclipsing even heart disease in the list you cite. So no, measures to reduce that exponent are not unreasonable. We need to reduce both the number of contacts people have per day and the likelihood that each contact will lead to infection. Please study some math beyond what you've only partially remembered from grade school.

> You also have control over your own susceptibility and spread of something like the flu or the common cold

Those are far less likely to reach a level where they require hospitalization, let alone ICU-level care. Yes, they're preventable (not 100% BTW), but there's no danger of affecting others by increasing strain on scarce hospital resources, so it's not a very constructive comparison.

It's amazing how many epidemiologist don't understand the difference between exponential and polynomial growth.

> You also have control over your own susceptibility and spread of something like the flu or the common cold, but no one in the US ever wears a mask to prevent that (though in other countries that is a common sight).

The mask culture in the US is lacking as you point out. But there is a flu vaccine. They give those out free at every corner/office in the country, pretty much. Yet the US still sees 10s of thousands of dead per year. Also of note, the flu is less fatal (case level) & less transmittable than COVID-19.

> If 97 people have died in the US so far

160[0]

Look back at 1918, 1957, 1968 flu pandemics[1]. 1918 isn't too recent, but the last two mentioned killed 100k+ in the US, and at least 1 million worldwide.

If we get less deaths from COVID-19 than we do with seasonal flu - that doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't worth reacting to.

With how easy COVID-19 spreads, the relatively high % of required hospitalization, and lack of a vaccine is exactly why Hubei/Lombardy got in the state they did. Some would prefer to "wait and see" if it gets to those levels in the US, but many would rather act now instead of later.

It will certainly be interesting to see how the COVID-19 situation pans out. For the record, I hope you end up being correct!

[0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_pandemic#Influenza_p...

This social responsibility argument is vague and will stay there, because the flu still kills many people, so why are we letting so many people die instead of locking down? Why don't we lock down the schools for the flu to protect those who have immune weaknesses? Where's the moral line or set of criteria for when people's deaths are treated as routine numbers?

When economies shut down, at some point people will also start dying and suffering. Is there a quantification for that? How do we trade those lives with other lives? Do we have a morally clear picture of who we're trading for whom?

> because the flu still kills many people

As I've already pointed out, that's a false equivalence. COVID-19 != flu. We can (and I believe should) respond differently to different things. It's so simple a child could get it.

Yes, I'm asking for what moral reasoning you use to determine that the yearly deaths attributed to the flu shouldn't warrant similar action. Are the numbers there... not high enough for you? Are you okay being a disease vector for the flu because the numbers aren't high enough for you? Is that okay for the immune-privileged?

And how many people are dying from economic damage? How does one quantify that? Does one bother to quantify that at all? Do share.

If you have a sense of moral clarity, why don't you just share it, instead of hinting that things are so obvious that a child can understand it?

> Are the numbers there... not high enough for you?

They're not high enough to put strain on hospital resources, and therefore to move from a mostly-individual to a mostly-collective type of problem. Nobody else is likely to die because you didn't get a flu shot (BTW the existence of a vaccine is also a factor here) and tied up a ventilator that they also needed. That's a real concern with COVID-19.

> hinting that things are so obvious that a child can understand it?

I wasn't hinting.

> You might feel you're Living Right and you're at no risk yourself, but - as has been pointed out many times but apparently not enough - It's Not Just About You. Your actions are connected to others' outcomes. There's a social responsibility to avoid becoming a vector for infection.

How is it clear that we shouldn't organize as an entire society to deal with influenza? Because hospital resources aren't taxed? That makes it enough of "your" problem vs "our" problem, when tens of thousands die per year?

Remember, when kids go to school sick, it's not some "individual" matter. Tens of thousands of people die per year from influenza. One might say it's a kind of murder. Oh wait, it's not. They're not overtaxing the medical system, what am I thinking. This is an individual matter. It's so clear now. This is truly moral clarity for children.

Lives are at stake -- so put the numbers on the table and explain who is sacrificing for whom. How many people are going to die from economic downturn? Five?

You seem to be setting up a false dichotomy between your original position ("that's too vague to justify destroying the economy") and your current one ("we should do this all the time for other diseases"). I reject that, as anyone who believes in logic should. There are places we can draw a line that affects behavior. I believe that one such line is between an immediate danger of someone dying for lack of life-saving resources vs. a situation where any such danger is more attenuated. You might think the line should be elsewhere, and that's fine, but you don't even seem to be trying to define one. Instead you seem to be looking only at the extremes, and using both as an excuse to argue with anything in between. Pretty low even for HN.

BTW, I have actually discussed this with children, and they have no trouble understanding how the current situation is different than flu. Maybe that's because they're not obfuscating for the sake of argument itself.

> You might feel you're Living Right and you're at no risk yourself, but - as has been pointed out many times but apparently not enough - It's Not Just About You. Your actions are connected to others' outcomes. There's a social responsibility to avoid becoming a vector for infection.

Influenza kills tens of thousands per year, and people are getting sick through social contact. The fact that the medical system is having trouble doesn't change the how -- sick people getting other people sick. That's the part that makes it a social problem, the part where one person's actions potentially kills another.

The "logic" can be made pretty clear but you just prefer to respond with... "logic" instead of figures. I've asked who is paying for whom and how much. That is the uncertainty I see in the situation, and the discussion which I see lacking.

There's not even a 6-month vision for what's going to happen.

You want figures? I've already cited a report estimating a possible 4.4M people needing ICU-level care. That's vs. ~85K ICU beds and ~62K ventilators.

https://www.healthaffairs.org/pb-assets/documents/blog/blog_...

http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/resources/COVID-19/20...

Even if those patients were spread evenly over the whole year and across hospitals, which is totally unrealistic, that's tens of thousands who couldn't get the care they need and would probably die. This has already happened in Italy, which has a better ratio of resources to population than the US. BTW, that doesn't even count the people who need those resources for completely separate reasons (including the flu you pretend to care about), or those who get a bed/ventilator and die anyway, or those who never even get as far as the hospital. Add all that up and COVID-19 could exceed even heart disease as the year's #1 killer - as I already said.

By contrast, hospitals have been absorbing the congruent load related to flu, on top of the normal load from everything else, for years. "More than we can handle" vs. "less than we can handle" is a pretty basic kind of difference, and a good example of the quantitative becoming qualitative. And if you had spent half the effort looking these numbers yourself that you've spent stealth-advocating for one position by attacking its opposite (didn't see you giving chrismeller this much of a hard time for a less-supported answer) you'd be familiar with those numbers already.

> one person's actions potentially kills another

The set of actions that could potentially kill another is vast. Making that the standard without addressing likelihood or intent or anything else is solipsistic.

> I've asked who is paying for whom and how much

Ah, always with the dollars. I won't even dignify that with a detailed response. It's your turn to take an actual stand, and defend it as you demand others defend theirs. What numbers are you assuming for the economic collapse you've predicted? What rational basis is there for believing that the cure is literally worse than the disease? Can you debate with facts instead of "avoid bad things" and emotion?

>What numbers are you assuming for the economic collapse you've predicted? What rational basis is there for believing that the cure is literally worse than the disease? Can you debate with facts instead of "avoid bad things" and emotion?

You won't get an answer because they realize that putting an actual dollar amount on the lives of those who will die isn't quite acceptable yet, even on a libertarian paradise site like HN.

Why are you completely ignoring the exponential nature of coronavirus? The amount of deaths have doubled fairly quickly and are now at 10k worldwide. The number of cases worldwide continues to grow exponentially.

7 more doublings, which could happen as soon as 5 weeks from now (I believe the doubling rate is around ~5 days) would bring us to 1 million deaths. And there is no particular reason it would stop there.

My understanding is that it is not unlikely for something like half of the world to get infected if we can't contain it effectively. If the death rate is 1% -- which could easily be higher if the medical systems are overwhelmed -- then we are looking at 35 million dead.

Also, it's important to realize that a lot of our data is "old". The tests for "cases" were probably queued for many days, and even when there is a result, might take a day or two to show up in the official stats. Beyond that, the infected individual has probably already been infectious for a week or two (or more?) prior to the test.

Put all of that together, and a lot of our stats are stuck weeks in the past. Since the phenomenon itself is exponential and apparently has a fairly short doubling time (two to five days maybe), that delay is huge. We could be flying into the side of a mountain, and we probably wouldn't even know it.

Given that, it'd be difficult to "overreact".

I think the question isn't whether we're overreacting or not (we'll never know the counterfactual), but whether our reaction produces the correct results. It seems to me that taking extreme precautions, even if in error, produces an outcome that is the lesser of evils. Let's look at scenarios for favoring not "overreacting": (this is your camp)

-----

1) If you don't take extreme precautions (overreact), and COVID isn't worse than the flu = hospitals don't crumble, economy doesn't tank, life goes on.

2) If you don't take extreme precautions (overreact), and COVID is worse than the flu = hospitals crumble, economy is destroyed, many deaths occur, and our way of life is over.

-----

You're gambling that (1) is true. If you're right, great..... but if you're wrong, we'll end up with (2).

On the other hand, here are the scenarios for the "overreacting" gamble (what we're doing now):

-----

3) If you take extreme precautions (overreact), and COVID is worse than the flu = hospitals don't crumble, economy tanks but things eventually settle and there's a path to recovery.

4) If you take extreme precautions (overreact), and COVID isn't worse than the flu = hospitals don't crumble, economy tanks but the virus fizzles out and things eventually return to normal.

-----

This latter gamble, though expensive, provides us with a path to safety regardless of if we turn out to be right or wrong about COVID. Because we don't know enough about the virus and given the exponential spread we have to act on incomplete information, I would be in the camp of "overreacting".

That said, I do sort of understand where your sentiment comes from. It is a position reinforced by a (healthy) distrust of media sensationalism, and recognition of the widespread human suffering that results from the economy tanking. I think that's a reasonable position, and one that I'm sympathetic to. However, the cost of being wrong here is just so unspeakably high that there's just greater prudence to choosing the latter (safer) path.

I totally agree, in case someone brings up Italy and their current number of deaths to Corona - this article describes deaths to the common flu from 2013 through 2017, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197121....

The numbers look like this:

  Season - Deaths:
  2013/14 - 7,027
  2014/15 - 20,259
  2015/16 - 15,801
  2016/17 - 24,981

What makes Corona virus trigger lockdowns and panic is that the current 3,400 deaths has happened during a short timespan. But the total number of deaths is still a factor 7 less than the 2016/17 flu season, which was not covered nearly as extensive as the current Corona virus.

So while every death is tragic, the common flu is still a worse threat to the elderly and that is even though a vaccine is produced every year.

It has been over 3 months. We are going to look back and realize this disease isn't that deadly. The places that had excessive deaths like Italy will turn out to have been poorly managed, equipped, and staffed. Not to mention other things like majority of cases being 70+ yo with 3+ diseases.

But how will you know that the extreme measures weren't warranted, if they're successful?

The world's leaders are stuck between a rock and a hard place here: do nothing, and be known as the leader who didn't act and caused the deaths of thousands or millions. Act with appropriately extreme measures and prevent as many deaths, and everyone will think the measures weren't warranted because the measures were successful.

Because you’ll see other countries who didn’t and they aren’t dead.

Not only that, is that at what point, is current and future generations well being worth to save the population that’s largely impacted by this?

Meaning, it’s perverse to spend more resources on the elderly as opposed to the youth. This just dials up the perversion to an extreme.

What i don't get is that these rational thoughts backed up by hard facts that says Italy lost 60.000 people(!) over a three year period to the common flu, are being overheard/ignored in place of a response that threaten to throw organized countries into economic chaos.

You are so dumb that reading this hurts. Apparently you think this is a hoax. People like you that don't take this seriously right now will reel in the pure crisis and deaths that ensues. It's obviously worse than 1918 flu. The spread in the US is already very serious. Call anyone in NYC and ask.

Please everyone don't listen to this utter fool. My jaw is on the floor because this guy's math is so basically flawed. Google Italy and have a nice day.

Thanks. I respect your opinion, so very eloquently put, as well.

You're welcome. You'll see soon enough.

You can't attack someone else like this on HN, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. You owe the community much better if you're posting here. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't post like this again.