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Comment by jupp0r | Hacker News Reader

Death rates are still quite high - 1500 deaths per day, the maximum were around 3000 in February 2021. This is in times where lots of precautions were still in place (school masking for example).

Life expectancy in the US dropped by a year in 2020 [1], with much worse drops for minority populations (3 years for the latino population) and 10 years of progress of equalizing white and non-white life expectancies has been reversed.

Is this an acceptable steady state for society? I don't think it should be. This is all preventable and we otherwise spend lots of resources on improving these metrics.

What you are saying sounds like people being done with lung cancer and start smoking again.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014746118

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If diet related illnesses were unknown before COVID they'd have had an even more dramatic impact on those numbers.

We've not only decided that's an "acceptable steady state", but actively embraced it.

> Life expectancy in the US dropped by a year in 2020.

In other words: it dropped around 1/10th as much as the difference between today and 1970.

Do you think the average person in 1970 would have accepted 10x the invasiveness of the measures we've had for the last couple of years to reach parity, or were they just used to the "normal"?

You can argue that we should or shouldn't do something, but claiming that human beings aren't fine with perpetually dealing with this level of risk is rather absurd.

> In other words: it dropped around 1/10th as much as the difference between today and 1970.

Another way of putting it: We're back to where we were as recently as 2007.

Another way to put it: How many Americans in 2018 were clamoring to spend massive amounts of GDP on reaching parity with countries like Peru, Costa Rica, Austria, France, South Korea and Japan? Those countries have (respectively) around 1-6 additional years of life expectancy compared to the US[1].

Or, to put it another way: Life expectancy peaked in the US in 2014[2], while it kept rising in most peer countries. That certainly made the news, and something was being done about the root causes of that, but by and large it was being ignored politically.

Again, none of this is an argument for or against any particular COVID measures. I'm just pointing out that it's a particularly egregious case of historical blinders & end-of-history thinking to think that human beings as a species can't get used to the relatively small (in a historical context) rise in risk the world has seen in the last couple of years.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe... 2. https://thesoundingline.com/in-brief-us-life-expectancy-peak...

Your reasoning is unsound. We spent massive amounts of GDP to only have roughly a million people die of this disease over the last two years. It could have been much worse if we hadn’t done as much a we had.

World war 2 lowered life expectancy by 3 years. Is 1.5 ok for COVID?

> We've not only decided that's an "acceptable steady state", but actively embraced it.

I’m not sure what you mean by that but nobody I know thinks it’s perfectly fine to have half a million people per year die unnecessarily.

> claiming that human beings aren't fine with perpetually dealing with this level of risk is rather absurd

People are dealing with those risks all the time. About ~90% of people were voluntarily wearing mask when I went grocery shopping earlier today. People had their seat belts on on the roads there. Their kids were in child seats even though it’s quite inconvenient to put them in there. We do lots of things to mitigate risks. Some of them are pure theater (letting the pilot go through airport security), others are really effective (having a co pilot in the cockpit).

How is it preventable beyond what we have in place today?

Vaccine mandates would probably be the most effective strategy. This would reduce the death toll and also otherwise severe disease (and also long covid from the data we are seeing) by a factor of 10. At that point, we might as well drop all other measures and live with 10k dead people from this per year. Currently, it's still at an unacceptable level for society, even if one is only considering the economic impact and doesn't care about human suffering.

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