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Comment by tasuki | Hacker News Reader

> The pandemic taught me a lot about apocalypse.

I don't think it has taught you much. All things considered, despite all the suffering by unlucky individuals, when you consider humanity as a whole, covid is an insignificant blip. If it's significant at all, it's only because of our response to it.

> Covid looked nothing like a pandemic film, thank god.

Covid was not 1% as bad as any pandemic featured in a film. Humanity has seen way worse, and we could still see way worse in the future.

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What COVID taught me is that the human ability to not give a fuck is apparently infinite. I have trouble processing the fact that a million people died (in the USA) and there is no mourning, no shared sense of tragedy or loss, no looking more kindly on other people, just a madder, faster dash on cash and even more finger-pointing.

> Covid was not 1% as bad as any pandemic featured in a film.

I'll be generous and not dwell on this stunning example of this age's inability to get bothered by anything unless it hits harder than film. Look on the bright side I guess, despite how soulless, empty, and glib we have to be do so!

Something like 5 million people die every year, should we be in permanent mourning?

I know you're trolling, but I'll respond. Part of growing up and moving from just a mere legally-licensed adult is being able to hold heavy things. They never stop getting heavier. They just keep unfolding, and if you are willing to grow just a little deeper--not bigger, but deeper, like the roots of you being able to feel things, then maybe all that learning to deal with loss, tragedies, loved ones dying, aging, your parents and uncles and cousins and friends dying--and yet not letting it destroy you, might be worth something. Though, for a moment, you can be devastated on the inside and hold yourself up without breaking. You don't need to cry your eyes out every day, but man, what the hell if we can't reflect on such a grievous time that has befallen us--all of us--over the past two years, without clawing someone else's face off or storming off in a huff. But if you need to feel not bothered at all, go ahead, you aren't the subject of this one.

Lately, I've been thinking about the role of nihilism as a natural force in society and its use as a tool of renewal. At its best, it's a power to take only that which strengthens so that we don't take on the collective emotional debt of past generations. It's why we're finding new ways to do old things all the time and why we aren't living in guilt over the deeds of past generations.

At its worst, nihilism throws the baby out with the bath water and you get holocaust deniers. This has been the hardest part of aging for me, because seeing this evolve in real time has left me in despair for our world at times. I have to remind myself that this force has been at work for centuries, and when I was young I didn't think it was all that bad. We'll probably be ok.

> what the hell if we can't reflect on such a grievous time

You made the assumption the rest of us aren't. You've written a number of emotionally-laden statements about the lack of virtue amongst the rest of us, but I'm "trolling" when I point out you ignore greater loss of life happening yearly.

Unfortunately you are still trolling, and I hope you are aware enough to see it.

I'm not going to do all the work for you, because I'm tired and certainly tired of teaching critical thinking to adults, but take a look at _excess_ deaths since the COVID-era started[1].

That is key, just like all the fears of a devastating food shortage on the horizon because Putin needed to get his gun off.

Outside of math class, you can't play "Direct cause of death from COVID" vs. "people starved to death by their own government" or <insert issue you have feel the need to play "well, actually..." tonight>.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid

you "grown ups" locked me indoors for months and didn't let me see my family. spare me your sanctimony.

The world contains more people than just you and your family.

I was bummed to not see mine as well, but I (and they) also understood that a shared sacrifice was necessary to make.

a "shared sacrifice" that accomplished nothing.

That's not what the likes of the poster you reply to want. They want you to be in permanent acceptance of whatever agenda they support with their virtue signalling.

> Something like 5 million people die every year,

Then why do we mount anything at all, death count of all terrorist attacks and shooting combined is insignificant

Why have we spent $2 trillion so far on Iraq (even if you believed it was linked to 9/11 and 3000 deaths) when Alzheimer's disease costs $200B annually and costing about 5 million a few decades of life? (I'm approximating lost QALY as ~5 million/year, or about 20x 9/11s every year)

We should be investing in high ROI life-saving actions, not emotional impulses. Let's put serious money behind defeating aging, which currently has a 100% fatality rate and was highly comorbid with COVID-19.

https://www.alzheimers.net/research-spending-vs-annual-care-...

Defeating aging sounds like a horrible idea as long as we aren't able to conquer space. The planet is badly overpopulated already as it is.

The world is nowhere near overpopulated, most countries are going to see population crashes if anything.

“Overpopulation” is a meme from the 60s coming from a book (Population Bomb) that was disproved the instant it was published. It is, however, a big reason for single family zoning in California - they literally thought it would encourage people to stop moving there and having kids.

Overpopulation - a number - is the wrong metric. Instead, we should be looking at the mix of factors (which include overpopulation) that cause the destruction of ecosystems, all the way up to climate change. So that would include: mono-agriculture ('monoculture'), technology powered by fossil fuels (such as logging machines, strip mining machines, etc.), and global transport networks (which hugely enable demand to outstrip supply).

More complicated, but more accurate - and humanity is way past that threshold, even with population crashes.

Long lived organisms tend to procreate less. If you look at fertility of humanity right now, it is obvious that countries with the lowest life expectancy are experiencing the biggest population booms. Long lived nations aren't even sustaining themselves.

> Something like 5 million people die every year, should we be in permanent mourning?

That gives truth to Benjamin Disraeli's (attributed) "Lies, damn lies, and statistics". Very misleading.

It was the concentrated effects.

When bottled oxygen ran out in India.

When you could not get into a hospital in many American cities (my American geography is hazy - South Los Angeles hospital, I think, was crippled for weeks)

Running out of morgue space in New York city - mass graves in central park.

It was really very scary, and I am glad I was not in any of those places badly hit.

It's about 52 Million. Or 144k per day.

It's always fun to look back at how wrong people are about the future. It's almost happening in real time these days.

Still, historically people have died from diseases at a much higher rate than even during the worst of COVID pandemics. I think if anything people should be more accepting towards death, recognizing it as a part of life that is eventually unavoidable to us all.

I guess one problem is that nowadays in Western world people often spend their last times in a hospital, rather than at home and their local communities. This doesn't give space for healthy mourning.

Ah the Steven Pinker and Jordan Peterson argument. Be happy with what you have. Thus no progress any more.

I'd argue the opposite. If it's insignificant at all, it's only because of our response to it. Lots of people worked very, very hard for us to sit here typing "it wasn't that bad" unless you believe that our global covid response did very little to change the outcome. If you do believe that, though, there's probably little point in continuing this thread.

Yes, lots of people worked very hard to make the outcome better. I'm grateful to them for helping protect my aged relations. They did make a difference.

With that out, the Covid-19 pandemic, even without any measures at all, was still incredibly mild. Wikipedia says 0.1-0.3% global population lost [0]. It would have been I don't know, perhaps 0.5% without measures? Compare to the other pandemics on that list, you routinely see ones that wipe out 20-50% of the regional population - now that is significantly bad.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics

Those other pandemics are before we had any ability to defend ourselves or even know what was going on.

SARS-1 and MERS are quite fatal too but we stopped them from spreading.

> Those other pandemics are before we had any ability to defend ourselves or even know what was going on.

Yes, of course. And I'm simply adding that Covid-19 would be nowhere as bad as those even if we had no ability to defend ourselves.

Our response was actually what made it a much more insignificant blip (thanks public health + vaccines), and technically we aren't through it yet.

I'd argue that we are through it in the public health, government mandate, change how you live day-to-day sense of things. Everyone who is willing to get vaccinated is probably vaccinated at this point. There is very little support for more government intervention even as cases rise in various areas, regardless of political persuasion (at least in the US, maybe it's different in the UK and EU?)

The fact that COVID is still out there, infecting and mutating, is irrelevant to most people.

Wikipedia says 0.1-0.3% global population lost [0]. It would have been perhaps 0.5% without any response whatsoever. That's still insignificant compared to all the other pandemics, which seem to often kill 20-50% of the regional population.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics

Well I think that's using an assumption that if we had greater exposure (ie less public health measures/vaccines) for the virus it wouldn't mutate and cause more damage than it did in its current form and causing a step change in in impact.

Also wikipedia in and of itself is not a high quality source.

https://also.kottke.org/22/04/the-mass-delusion-of-the-pande...

We have a widely deployed vaccine.

COVID will live with us forever now, a pandemic has a few characteristics which make it so, one of which is capacity to overwhelm healthcare.

As soon as covid couldn’t overwhelm our healthcare systems it was over.

Now people will die every year with it, just like the flu.

Sad reality, but reality nonetheless, the fact we couldn’t handle a lock-down cemented that we would be living with it for the rest of human existence.

The vaccine only lasts six months. I am not sure how "widely deployed" it is anymore.

Children today, and their children, will gain immunity over an entire lifetime through repeated exposure.

So it is with all other coronaviruses, which have been around for millions of years and don't routinely kill older/vulnerable people.

T cell immunity lasts longer than that. The antibody counts are kind of like a “watched pot never boils” thing - we’ve just never bothered to look before so now everyone is stressing about it.

We still haven't really grappled with the aftereffects of long COVID. What we've done instead is say it's over because the acute phase is done with, and buried the reports of longer term issues. In other words, the health care system now simply returns wrong answers to triage its own capacity.

But that doesn't make it no longer a pandemic. We know quite well that we can normalize our way into wrong answers as a society. It'll only become clear where we stand after another year or two - either more and more people become disabled after their "mild" case, or it gradually trails off.

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