[henrikschroder]

Heart disease and cancer combined kill four times as many people every year, than what covid-19 has done this year.

About 10% of all the people who died in the US this year will have died from covid-19. Why are those 10% of deaths so much more terrible, so unimaginably horrible, that we're focusing exclusively on those, and completely ignoring the remaining 90% of deaths?

[uoaei]

You can't catch heart disease and cancer by standing for 10 minutes in the same room as someone who is afflicted by either of those.

[t-writescode]

Because it's an infectious disease spread through droplets in the air; because it's abnormal and therefore new and scary; and because it's more deadly than our other regular disease, the seasonal flu.