Comment by silicon2401 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by silicon2401 | Hacker News Reader

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People believe what's comfortable/convenient, not what's true.

In very early 2020, when I was following the news of the virus development in Wuhan, China, I felt like a conspiracy theorist pointing out to friends and coworkers that a bad epidemic spreading in one of the most crowded parts of the world. They thought it was ridiculous to say that hospitals were getting overwhelmed, people were being quarantined etc. Don't even think about suggesting it'll spread outside of China, or that the virus may have come from the lab that just so happened to also be in the origin of the epidemic, a lab which specialized in highly infectious diseases.

Not even 2 years later and where are we now? The entire world got sick and pretty much every country has done lockdowns/quarantines/shutdowns. Not to mention the lab theory of the virus origin still can't be ruled out.

Even after the pandemic started, people still had no problem sticking their head in the sand. It's not a big deal; it's 2020, we have technology and medicine and we'll just make a vaccine and get back to normal. Well now it's almost 2022 and somehow things just keep getting worse.

We can reasonably say the Black Death killed 30% of Europe's population. We can't reasonably say covid won't do the same. All optimistic projections so far have been proven wrong, so all we can say for sure is that humans are terrible at predicting the future.

> We can reasonably say the Black Death killed 30% of Europe's population. We can't reasonably say covid won't do the same

I was going along, nodding my head in agreement until this. Do you realize how bad medical care was during that era? Hygiene? Knowledge of how to slow transmission in a community (we Americans have not yet even BEGUN to really take COVID seriously)? Do you realize how vastly more deadly than Black Death that COVID will have to become to cause a 30% death rate among the general population? It's absurd.

> It's absurd.

People said that about the idea that covid would become a pandemic too, you just proved my point.

That doesn't prove your point at all. The fact that someone disagrees with you doesn't prove you're right.

It's one thing to say something is unlikely; to completely dismiss it out of hand without acknowledging there could be a chance is exactly what I was talking about originally.

That's just fear mongering nonsense, like claiming that we can't reasonably say that aliens won't invade the Earth tomorrow. I mean I can't prove it's impossible but come on. There's no scientific evidence that a coronavirus can be both highly contagious and have a 30% fatality rate. CDC data clearly shows that the fatality rate in the US has been 0.6%, largely because we have a lot of vulnerable elderly people with serious co-morbid conditions. The fatality rate in countries with younger, healthier populations is far lower. And for vaccinated people of all ages the death rate is close to 0.

Yes I'm aware of what today is like, now tell me what tomorrow will bring, because not many people have been able to do that so far. Instead, as I said, optimism is proven wrong as things just keep getting worse. But I'm sure you're right, all the other mis-steps to this point were flukes, this time you know for sure what the future holds.

>We can reasonably say the Black Death killed 30% of Europe's population. We can't reasonably say covid won't do the same. All optimistic projections so far have been proven wrong, so all we can say for sure is that humans are terrible at predicting the future.

I think Black Death had quite a bit higher mortality than any version of covid we will see

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