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Comment by sam0x17 | Hacker News Reader

There is no "mass-delusion" on the far left. We are literally at a point where the current daily cases mean that a month from now we will be having around 3-4k deaths per day based on how many people are already infected NOW. That's a 9/11 terrorist attack per day in deaths. Anyone who doesn't acknowledge that is delusional.

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Please don't escalate rhetoric like this on HN, or do ideological battle here generally. It's against the site guidelines, makes discussion more boring (even as it creates a feeling of activation) and leads to predictable places, regardless of how right you are or feel.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Don't believe me, do the math yourself. Extrapolating from data on https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality we get:

U.S. mortality rate is 2.29%. Average daily cases for the past week have been hovering around 140k (https://covidtracking.com/data/charts/us-daily-positive).

140,000 * 0.0229 = 3,206 deaths per day. 9/11 was just 2,977 deaths (https://www.google.com/search?q=9%2F11+deaths)

So once the cases from the last few days progress further, we will have 3206/2977 = 1.07692307692 9/11s a day in deaths.

note: corrected above, should have said 3k not 9-10k. Misremembered my calculations from earlier this week. Analogy still accurate

The delusion of the left is that central planning and control will prevent the spread of the virus. That's not exactly wrong -- it just has to be the level of government control that China has. A lot of Americans, myself included, won't tolerate that. (And for the record, I wear a mask.)

It's more of a battle of public opinion -- if people on the right were consistent about mask wearing, and didn't believe that they are immune or the virus is fake or whatever, our ability to contain this would be much greater. Sure, we can't force mask wearing at a federal level, but it sure would help if everyone on Fox and Newsmax were working to encourage the use of masks. That would have more weight than any federal or local mandate unfortunately, so it's unproductive to raise the point you're raising, though I agree.

This also comes down to enforcement. Even if a federal mandate were somehow passed, if the people's hearts aren't in it in red areas, cops won't enforce it in those areas and it will be a joke. It really is 100% about public opinion.

To your point though, I'm pretty extreme left, and I don't think we are going to have an easy time containing it by any means. It is going to continue to rise months and possibly years into a Biden administration, but I think we'll still have a lot less deaths. No one on the left thinks this is magically going away, even with a vaccine. Distribution and production of a vaccine is incredibly difficult logistically, and these things need to be refrigerated. So at best we're looking at like a year from now we all get a vaccine imo.

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