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Comment by deregulateMed | Hacker News Reader

If you don't know statistics, it's time to learn.

Coronavirus was never a big deal unless you were old, sick, or obese. Even with these demographics, it had a 1% death rate, the same order of magnitude as various viral illnesses.

We really should have not blown this out of proportion. I think when people realized we could work from home, people faked fear to enjoy a mini vacation. Media loves fear. Politicians wanted to use this.

Do we spend trillions of dollars a year on safer cars? No, but apparently if we use statistics we should.

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> Coronavirus was never a big deal unless you were old, sick, or obese.

Or unless you happen to require hospitalisation at the same time than a lot of "old, sick or obese" people where saturating the available beds and ICUs of every hospital.

There are second order effects on the wave that we experienced. The most dramatic probably has been in India, where the lack of available oxygen produced a lot of deaths. And we will start to discover next year what other effects like undetected conditions, or worsened after a year of delaying treatment, will cause.

A 1% of a considerable chunk of the population is a lot of people.

A lack of ICU beds is a healthcare industry issue. If anything this should be a red flag that our healthcare cartels have created a shortage.

But also my metro area of 5 million people never ended up having a shortage, and our area had a bunch of anti maskers.

This comment makes me want to bet money that you don't work in the health space and you aren't friends with a single practicing healthcare provider.

> Do we spend trillions of dollars a year on safer cars?

The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's annual budget exceeds $1T (EDIT: $1 billion, not trillion, thanks KptMarchewa) [1], and that's just part of government spending on highway safety -- far from the full picture of "vehicle safety." Your homework is to look up the safety R&D spending of the top automotive manufacturers in the USA. "We" absolutely do spend a ton of money and research on vehicle safety, and it's paid off in the form of an exponential drop in deaths per unit distance traveled.

[1] PDF Page 11 of https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2020-02/F...

You're wrong by three orders of magnitude. It's 1B, billion.

> I think when people realized we could work from home, people faked fear to enjoy a mini vacation.

Or, you know, people who have "old, sick, or obese" people in their family and maybe don't want to get them killed?

Wear an n95 mask.

The lockdowns didn't work. N95 masks do work.

The overreaction was anti science from statistics to actual implementation.

Only properly fitted n95 masks, which require professional training to use properly.

I don't disagree. If we spent 4 trillion dollars on n95 masks and training, we'd have 1% more people alive and saved money.

Also, all involved in close contact need a mask, as infected people with a mask are much less likely to infect others.

> Do we spend trillions of dollars a year on safer cars? No, but apparently if we use statistics we should.

Yes, we probably do, if you consider the cumulative cost of better engineering and safety technology on all the cars sold and serviced in a year, plus highway construction standards.

And that's before considering that personal car transport is probably _inherently_ dangerous, and most cities are trying to move to a higher percentage of walking and cycling.

Lots of people who were perfectly healthy can't even get out of bed now.

It's not a small problem. And neither is having 1% of your population sick and dying in such a short time.

Citation needed. This should be flagged for fear mongering.

Edit- And the ambiguity of the word "lots" is particularly unhelpful

I'm sorry, you yourself haven't provided a single citation either. You are requiring others to have a stronger level of evidence than the level of evidence you are providing for your claims.

I don't find it to be in particularly good faith that as soon as someone disputes your claims, you immediately ask them to do research work that you didn't want to do.

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