[apatters]

This seems pretty reasonable to me. Ultimately there are many reasons that lockdowns and blanket bans on assembly and commerce can't continue, aside from the collateral damage and the legal questions, anyone who thinks they're even enforceable beyond a few months lives in a fantasy land. Violations are growing by the day.

If we try to just go back to normal, though, a lot of people are going to get sick and die.

The solution has to be policies which seek to protect people from the virus with minimal collateral damage. This is no different from other spheres of public policy - for example we have speed limits on the road, and we have road deaths. We could lower all speed limits to 5mph and prevent all deaths, but the roads would become practically useless and society would grind to a halt. So we've selected limits that we feel are a reasonable compromise between safety and practicality.

The vast majority of COVID-19 fatalities are people who are over 65 and/or have the mentioned chronic conditions. So it makes sense to do everything we can to protect these people.

As an aside, since cars are pretty dangerous, I think we're very lucky that social media and the 24/7 news cycle didn't exist when they were invented. What with the panic these mediums generate, you have to wonder if cars would have gotten off the ground and become commonplace or if they would have just been panic banned.

[CydeWeys]

I think you're taking exactly the opposite lesson on cars there. They are incredibly dangerous, killing tens of thousands in the US alone each year, yet we're immune to the carnage because it's always been that way. They should have had that kind of scrutiny on them from the beginning.

[xwdv]

Agreed, the fact that we ignore so many gruesome vehicle fatalities is doing society no favors. The nation has been designed for cars from the ground up, but if we had been more privy to their risks, perhaps we would have built more pedestrian focused cities instead, and more emphasis on robust mass transit solutions.

[lvnfg]

Designing cities around cars is a great mistake of urban planning imo. Ideally there should be no motorized vehicles above ground within a city's boundary. The improvements to safety, air quality, and quality of life in general would be immense and would make cities infinitely more livable. There are European cities that have been moving in this direction: https://www.fastcompany.com/90456075/here-are-11-more-neighb....

[mikepurvis]

> What with the panic these mediums generate, you have to wonder if cars would have gotten off the ground and become commonplace or if they would have just been panic banned.

They tried: https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/murder-machines/

It was opposed by a concerted effort from car companies and other advocates to depict car skeptics as out of touch and paranoid, and to simultaneously lobby for a bunch of new laws around right of way, jaywalking, and so on. It may well be that if YouTube and cable news had existed then, the concerned advocates would have carried the day and North America might have built a robust, high speed rail network instead of the interstates, with every major metro area having the comprehensive regional rail needed to bring commuters in from suburbs without private vehicles.

We can't know exactly what that alternate present would have looked, but there are many for whom it might have been much better (though definitely not car companies or airlines, of course).

[m463]

> As an aside, since cars are pretty dangerous

Ironically this is happening now with Tesla autopilot:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot#Incidents

I wonder if these kinds of lists will appear in relation to covid.

[cossatot]

Horses are pretty dangerous too.

[m4rtink]

Horses are actually quite deadly & an occupational hazzard for cavalry officers & related roles:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladislaus_Bortkiewicz

[Alex3917]

> The vast majority of COVID-19 fatalities are people who are over 65 and/or have the mentioned chronic conditions.

So far the 5-year survival rate for people under 65 is 0%.

[AstralStorm]

Are you seriously suggesting COVID-19 might have such long term repercussions in "recovered" patients?

[Alex3917]

A lot of recovered patients have already died, we have no idea how many more will in the future.

[_ea1k]

I'd need a citation, as I do not know what "a lot" is in this context. Greater than 0 is a "lot" in a sense, but I'd like to know if these are actually common.