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Comment by threatofrain | Hacker News Reader

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?

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> 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.

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.

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