For one, we don't even understand all the long term effects of having COVID as it is: there's heart damage, lung damage, brain damage, extended fatigue, and that's just what we're seeing evidence of now. [0]
If another disease like COVID strikes in a couple years, it could still tear through the surviving population and cause similar long lasting effects. The thousands that're suffering a terrible death daily, separated from their families and straining our healthcare systems to the breaking point--their deaths are not somehow making our populaitons safer from another disease.
EDIT: your analogy also supposes it's somehow the old/vulnerable populations that're the reservoir for the virus in our populations, when data indicates the opposite: it's far more likely younger populations are the carriers/vectors for COVID, especially since they are more often asymptomatic (w.r.t. acute effects) than more vulnerable chunks of the population. Future bugs will have plenty of population to travel through.
[0]: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...
In the analogy the dry brush are the vulnerable that die. Once the dry brush is gone, it can't burn a second time. Just like small pox wiped out all the vulnerable native americans, but then the offspring of the survivors were increasingly more resilient. Except in this case the fatality rate is 1% (or less) instead of 90%.
> For one, we don't even understand all the long term effects of having COVID as it is: there's heart damage, lung damage, brain damage, extended fatigue, and that's just what we're seeing evidence of now.
This just seems like fear of the unknown. On the contrary, for the vast majority of healthy humans, it seems like the immune-system is well equipped to deal with the virus so there isn't much reason to fear IMO (i.e. most people recover at home with no modern medicine needed). I have several family members that had it and recovered with seemingly no other long term effects, so there is no reason to believe they are going to be screwed later in life.
> If another disease like COVID strikes in a couple years, it could still tear through the surviving population and cause similar long lasting effects.
More fear of the unknown. Novel viruses don't come along very often. Getting sick is not a bad thing, natural selection is not a bad thing, it's the very mechanism that has allowed humans to survive this long on planet earth.
No, the dry brush is what makes the fires get out of control and cause more damage than they "ought to," implying that if the brush is regularly dealt with then the broader population of trees will be better off.
But (a) we're not talking about trees, we're talking about people, and (b) letting swaths of the population die from a disease does not imply the surviving population will be better off in the future.
People can't die twice because we only have a single life, and callously saying "welp, you would have died later anyway, might as well die now so our stats look good" is so unbelievably short-sighted I can't believe I'm seeing this argument made by multiple people on HN.
> This just seems like fear of the unknown..
Uh, yes, it's fear of what the largely unknown disease will do to us. We shouldn't blindly assume that it's "not that bad" if it occasionally rips through the population off of some belief it'll make us safer if we're routinely exposed to pandemics--as follows from your brush-and-forest-fire analogy--when we don't understand the effects of those diseases.
> Natural selection is not a bad thing
I do not understand this point at all. Should we not have allergen warnings on food packaging? Or glasses for folks with bad eyesight? There are plenty of reasons we intervene in the "natural course" of events to make people's lives better. Citing "natural selection" is not in any way a valid defense for just letting diseases meander through populations.
Wait, am I making the analogy, or you? You can't just take my analogy and twist it until it fits your view. Make a new analogy, but don't correct mine.
> I do not understand this point at all. Should we not have allergen warnings on food packaging? Or glasses for folks with bad eyesight? There are plenty of reasons we intervene in the "natural course" of events to make people's lives better
Sure, but where do you draw the line? Should we move heaven and earth to artificially prolong the life of people extremely vulnerable to common diseases? Or just let them die and be replaced with more resilient humans?
My whole point is your analogy is flawed and you shouldn't use it for this purpose because it trivializes significant components of the issue at hand. You said:
> Once all the old/vulnerable wood is burned up, it's much more difficult for another forest fire of the same magnitude to happen ...
Which is demonstrably wrong when you liken _people_ to the dry brush, which is exactly what you did. We aren't optimizing to minimize deaths in individual years (or else we'd just kill everyone right now and the death rate would spike and then drop to zero), we're optimizing for general well-being of the population.
Your analogy is flat wrong, which is why I'm poking holes in it. It also belies a shocking lack of empathy for your fellow humans, which I frankly find alarming.
> Where do you draw the line?
I have no idea, and I don't think this is the venue to argue it, but I definitely don't think we're at it yet, and I would much rather err on the side of trying too hard to protect people's lives than not trying hard enough.
For example, when death numbers from COVID were first being released, people compared them to car fatalities, going "Why are we so worried? Car crashes kill 100x as many people in the same timeframe." The point is not "we should not worry about COVID because other things are more deadly" but "there is an alarming new source of deaths, and we should be working to reduce death as much as we can in the interests of maximizing the population's happiness."
EDIT: I mean, consider, the sitting US president called COVID "a hoax" for a good two months, then kept downplaying it for another two ("it'll be gone after November, you'll see"), and overall completely failed to make a plan at the federal level to, I dunno, provide more sick leave for people so they could actually avoid spreading it to their co-workers, or rent assistance for those out-of-work because we shut down the industries with high levels of communication, or support just wearing a mask when you go outside. We are so far and away from even a reasonable level of response to this it seems wholly disingenuous to pose the "but where do we _stop_ intervening?" argument.
I disagree. If we were optimizing for general well-being of the population we wouldn't be doing things that will push hundreds of millions into poverty[0] and drive up suicide rates[1].
From my perspective all the evidence points to us optimizing either for healthcare capacity or for minimizing covid-19 deaths.
> "there is an alarming new source of deaths, and we should be working to reduce death as much as we can in the interests of maximizing the population's happiness."
Well, clearly a huge % of the population is not happy with the current actions and policy being performed in the name of saving lives as evidenced by this thread.
[0] https://unu.edu/media-relations/releases/covid-19-fallout-co...
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/japan-suicide-coronavirus-more-...
Fair enough, I wasn't clear: we _should_ be optimizing for general well-being, and among other things I think minimum-effort disease-prevention (masks, distancing, reasonable sick leave) are completely reasonable asks.
Similarly, we probably shouldn't be relying on a mega-consumerist culture that, when suppressed for whatever reason, has far-reaching economic effects that doom millions in developing countries to hunger/whathaveyou.
But these issues are not in opposition, we just have a crappy system that doesn't deal with both of them well at the same time. I think it's unreasonable to frame it as "well we can only address these issues in degrees, lest we make the other worse" and not question the system that somehow frames disease prevention and feeding people as opposing goals.
It's certainly possible to address this disease without such drastic impacts, but it relies on the population having an empathic mentality. Look at Japan, as an example[0]: Similar in terms of development, but with a much less invasive response they've only suffered around 2.3k deaths _total_, when the US is already seeing that number daily.
You are completely correct that "a huge % of the population is not happy with the current actions and policy being performed," because we have examples of cultures that are weathering this storm FAR better than those of us in the USA are.... but I think attitudes like yours are contributing to our failure to deal with this pandemic well.
[0]: https://www.economist.com/asia/2020/12/12/the-japanese-autho...
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/spanish-flu-largest-influenza-pan...
> Other large influenza pandemics
> The Spanish flu pandemic was the largest, but not the only large recent influenza pandemic. Two decades before the Spanish flu the Russian flu pandemic (1889-1894) is believed to have killed 1 million people.
> Estimates for the death toll of the “Asian Flu” (1957-1958) vary between 1.5 and 4 million. Gatherer (2009) published the estimate of 1.5 million, while Michaelis et al. (2009) published an estimate of 2–4 million.
> According to a WHO publication the “Hong Kong Flu” (1968-1969) killed between 1 and 4 million people.
> Michaelis et al. (2009) published a lower estimate of 1–2 million.
> The Russian Flu pandemic of 1977-78 was caused by the same H1N1 virus that caused the Spanish flu. According to Michaelis et al. (2009) around 700,000 died worldwide.
> What becomes clear from this overview are two things: influenza pandemics are not rare[...]
Heck, ebola was a decade ago with 300k deaths. Novel viruses appear all the time.
The other side of the problem is that lawmakers have no incentive to set aside money/time/resources for pandemic preparedness.
A quote from HHS Secretary under Bush, Mark Leavitt sums up part of the problem nicely:
> “In advance of a pandemic, anything you say sounds alarmist. After a pandemic starts, everything you’ve done is inadequate.”
Another example of lawmakers having no incentive to think about the future:
>The Public Health Emergency Preparedness program’s funding has gone from about a billion dollars in 2003 to $675 million this year, while the Hospital Preparedness program has gone from more than $500 million at its peak in 2004 to less than $300 million today.
Fairly frequently.
> So far it's once-in-a-lifetime (or less)...
No, it's not, even if you restrict yourself to novel betacoronaviruses that become significant human public health concerns (e.g., SARS, MERS, SARS-CoV-2).