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Comment by spfzero | Hacker News Reader

Or, at least put it into a per-capita number. Normal flu season in the US is 40K+. Heart disease is. Cancer is. Auto accidents. Opiate overdose deaths. The population of the us is 18 X that of Sri Lanka, so all sorts of unfortunate, but non-collapse-level processes, hit numbers like 40K.

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Which is why "excess deaths" is a good metric to look at - heart disease, overdoses, cancer, and car crashes are all normal, routine causes of death.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

Are they routine? If we built our infrastructure like Japan we wouldn’t have those car crashes. If we had healthcare for all we wouldn’t have those opioid deaths, or that heart disease. A lot of these would be a lot lower.

yes and that, to prove the authors point, is also collapse. The opioid epidemic, the car deaths, the obesity, the cancer, and the heart disease they're avoidable, they're the result of desolation at a societal scale, they're cultural illnesses, which the public responds to with indifference and numbness and another drive through at McDonalds.

Hundreds of thousands maybe more preventable deaths, every year, written off as "per capita" statistics, as if we're talking about a bad quarter at the office, and not human lifes. Every year maybe .5% more. That's what the author means when he's saying that you're already collapsing without even realising it.

The author says "collapse", but all they discuss is civil war. People dying from a pandemic that is effecting the entire globe is not remotely close the the circumstances of the Sri Lankan civil war. Deaths from violent acts are still very low.

It is affecting the entire globe, yes, but unevenly. Canada and the US are similar countries, but the US is at 624 deaths/million and Canada is at 251 deaths/million. The countries doing worse than the US are countries generally considered to be on the “not very wealthy” end of the scale (except the UK...). For being probably the most wealthy nation in the world, something is going terribly wrong.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...

>which the public responds to with indifference and numbness and another drive through at McDonalds.

Look through the responses in this thread. At least 2-3 other people described that their approach to the impending collapse is...to ignore it...and to also make sure they enjoy the nice September weather and to ruminate on their impending richness from cashing in on stock options. I sincerely hope these comments were /s or a joke. If not...well, then maybe this is why we are in this situation now - a good portion of the public is severely lobotomized to care about anything else but frozen pizza.

Yes, something like what you wrote would do the trick. The sentence in the article warranted more explanation.

Deaths are only the most unfortunate part of it. Do you think life is going back to normal any time soon? I don't. What happens when this goes on for another couple years and people finally realize 2019 was probably the last "normal" year they'll experience for quite a while? Nothing good.

>Or, at least put it into a per-capita number

Ok. For comparison, Sri Lanka has had 13 total COVID deaths (0.599/1M). The US has had ~206,000 deaths (627.67/1M).

Alternatively: assuming Sri Lanka's death rate was applied to the US population, we would have 197 total deaths.

> per-capita

Sad that every comment explaining how numbers work is strongly downvoted.

Per-capita is the only way comparisons are made by the intellectually honest. And that's without even getting into the author's false equivalence of homicide (rebel fighting) and illness (Covid).

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