Comment by School-Cotton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by School-Cotton | Hacker News Reader

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> Given the risk level, on an average basis, the question seems to be, "Are you willing to kill off either yourself, or more likely someone you know, so that we can all enjoy the ability to go stand in stores?"

This is an absurd appeal to emotion — it implies that you should treat COVID-19 as something you will deterministically die from.

The correct framing is “what _probability_ of increased death for yourself or someone you know would you accept in order for the lockdown to be over?”

Well, “someone you know” is extremely vague, but just speaking for myself, I’d probably accept a 10% risk of my own death to end the lockdown (which is many orders of magnitude higher than the actual risk).

No I don’t think my grandma dying is worth all this being over. I do think some small risk of people dying is worth it, though. Everyone thinks that way about everything, even if it’s hard to admit. If they didn’t, they would never have gone outside even before COVID-19 was discovered.

> This is an absurd appeal to emotion — it implies that you should treat COVID-19 as something you will deterministically die from.

It's not an appeal to emotion at all. If we allow the virus to run unabated through the population, it's a statistical likelihood that someone you know will die from it. I think "someone you know" is generally understood to mean friends, acquaintances, near and extended family members.

Of course, we're only talking about probabilities and at the end of the day there would be people who would end up having no one they know die, and others who would see half their families wiped out.

> I’d probably accept a 10% risk of my own death to end the lockdown

Accepting a 10% risk of death to "end a lockdown", of all things, so that people can go stand in stores, is completely incomprehensible to me, which just goes to show that not everyone's risk tolerance is the same.

You can't dictate to others how they feel on this topic.

> Accepting a 10% risk of death to "end a lockdown", of all things, so that people can go stand in stores, is completely incomprehensible to me, which just goes to show that not everyone's risk tolerance is the same.

It is not about wanting to stand in stores. It is about avoiding long-term damage to the material conditions of millions, maybe billions, of people.

Do you not think the lockdown will cause a huge increase in poverty, homelessness, and starvation?

> Do you not think the lockdown will cause a huge increase in poverty, homelessness, and starvation?

Perhaps. But that's something that should be quantified and included as part of the risk assessment so that rational decisions can be made. It's also something that can be planned for and mitigated.

It also plays into the idea that the economy is "shutdown" or that there is a universal "lockdown" happening or that the economy needs to be "reopened" because it is no longer producing anything at all. Large parts of the economy didn't have to (and did not) shut down and they have continued full-steam ahead.

Yes. What you said.

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