[TheGrim-999]

This is the rational approach to take. At the beginning it was an unknown, and I was more cautious than anyone I knew. I was gathering supplies and locking down in January. There were videos of people in China having seizures in the middle of the road (whatever happened to those videos, by the way?). The correct response was to be overly cautious until we had more data.

We have more data now. If you're under 70 the chances of you dying, if you don't already have a massively serious disease are statistically almost irrelevant. It's a standard coronavirus like the common cold, that's 2-3 times deadlier than the flu, and predominately only deadly to the very elderly. People are wise now that their claims of how scary it is is provably wrong and are now turning to the much more ambiguous claim about "don't you know that X% have long lasting problems afterwards?". Hogwash. The only thing they have to back that up is that they heard someone else say it. They'll never link to data that says that, because there isn't any.

We have the data now. What I gave is the data. It comes straight from the CDC, not your emotional facebook friend. Any rational human being, who proports to "follow the science", should act in accordance to the data. The data doesn't care about your feelings. The data doesn't care what people on Twitter tell you you should think. We have the data now.

It's to the point where the parent comment and my comment will be downvoted to oblivion because we encourage people to follow the data. Downvoted and censored by people claiming they "follow the science". For pointing out the science. This is not a good situation for us to find ourselves in.

[cortesoft]

> We have the data now

Yeah, we have the data that 447,000 Americans have been killed by Covid. That is data.

[war1025]

Honestly, death comes to us all. My dad died five years ago this week. Death is tragic, but the world keeps moving.

The main thing I've concluded based on people's reaction to the death tolls is that much of our population has not come to terms with their mortality and hate being reminded of it.

[cortesoft]

This is strange logic... since we all are going to die anyway, we shouldn't worry about causes of preventable death?

So i guess we don't need drunk driving laws... only about 10,000 people a year die in the US from drunk drivers, they were going to die anyway. The world keeps on moving.

No reason to work on curing cancer. Dead someday anyway.

Yes, death comes to us all. That has no bearing on whether we should work to prevent death.

[war1025]

I just looked up the CDC data and it says ~0.7% of the US population dies each year. Out of ~330 million people, that's 2.4 million people each year.

So assuming that 400k figure is excess mortality, that means 17% more people died last year than normal.

That is tragic, but the way it gets talked about, you would think we were at 10x or more.

[gruez]

>That is tragic, but the way it gets talked about, you would think we were at 10x or more.

Then again, we've invaded foreign countries and sacrificed our civil liberties ("war on terror") for way less deaths than that.

[war1025]

> Then again, we've invaded foreign countries and sacrificed our civil liberties ("war on terror") for way less deaths than that.

Makes you wonder why we are always so quick to trade away our freedoms...

[thebigspacefuck]

I’ve been wondering if we’ll see a drop in deaths in the future too. A lot of the deaths are people that wouldn’t live much longer anyway. If 2 years from now the death rate is 17% lower we only lost an average 2 life-years of the 17% population, which is tragic, but is it more tragic for the other 99.3% of people to lose 1 life year because of that?

[cortesoft]

For one thing, we lost 447,000 so far WITH all of the quarantining and shut downs... that number would have been WAY higher if we had done nothing. The hospitals would have been completely overwhelmed, and many who survived would have died.

Also, we did not ‘lose’ a year of life.

[cortesoft]

17% more people dying every year is a huge increase. Why do you feel the need to downplay it?