[__blockcipher__]

> It's not as if we decided out of thin air the virus was dangerous.

But this is kind of exactly what we did. Go look at a yearly all-cause mortality chart going back the last 110 years. You’ll see this year is a noticeable but not so great uptick (of which many of the deaths will be overdoses, suicides, lack of medical treatment for preventable diseases etc btw). Whereas say the 1918 Flu pandemic was much more deadly in absolute and relative terms both.

Remember we’re talking about a disease that for many is so mild that they never realize they have it. For others like the very elderly it can be very bad, with a 5% chance of dying if infected, but it’s no surprise that surveys that ask people to estimate COVID-19 mortality show that on average people overestimate the fatality by between 10-100x.

SARS-2 is real, but the real virus really is in our minds. I hope one day you will come to see things my way too.

I also hope more commenters here will go mode out what happens when you perform universal rather than targeted mitigation measures: universal ends up with more mortality by slowing down infections in those who are not at risk, which delays hers immunity for almost no benefit.

[supernovae]

In the worst flu seasons we have 50k people die. In the easiest flu seasons we have 3k people die.

So if you take the worst flu season - which we count as a year - we're almost 5x that with covid and its not even a full year yet...

If you take the best flu year, we're pushing 100x that.

Where are we over estimating anything when we break it down into simple terms?

Which btw, these current death rates are with active measures in place. If we didn't have these measures then the trends set early on would be off the charts by now.

[__blockcipher__]

> Which btw, these current death rates are with active measures in place. If we didn't have these measures then the trends set early on would be off the charts by now.

Sweden contradicts this.

> So if you take the worst flu season - which we count as a year - we're almost 5x that with covid and its not even a full year yet...

The way we count COVID deaths is fundamentally different from how we count Flu deaths.

It's much better to look at total deaths and compare to previous years. You'll see we've experienced an uptick this year but not one that is nearly as massive as you would predict based off the hysteria

[supernovae]

Sweden doesn't contradict anything. Search for the news right now and you will see their cases are increasing and they're dealing with trying to control it.

Really, the only hysteria there is, is from people like you projecting it.

Wearing a mask and socially distancing is rational.

[bart_spoon]

> Search for the news right now and you will see their cases are increasing and they're dealing with trying to control it.

This applies to all of Europe though. Places like France, Germany, Belgium, and Italy are all seeing skyrocketing daily cases.

From what I remember, it’s not that Sweden didn’t encourage mask wearing or social distancing, it just didn’t make anything mandatory, and it didn’t enforce any lockdowns. It hasn’t particularly saved their economy from any damage, although it didn’t seem to cause them to have rates of infection or deaths to get much worse than the average in Europe, and their hospitals didn’t get overwhelmed.

If anything, it seems to demonstrate that the idea that avoiding lockdowns will save the economy isn’t realistic, and the economy, but lockdowns aren’t going to help much either.

At this point it seems like all anyone can do is wear a mask, do what you can to socially distance while living a relatively normal life, and wait for either a vaccine or the pandemic to pass its course.

[curlypaul924]

I'm not a big fan of the word hysteria (literally "condition of having a uterus"), but that said, the two are not mutually exclusive. Wearing a mask is rational, and there are also people acting irrationally out of fear (remember how hard it was to get toilet paper?).