[mplanchard]

This kind of cavalier attitude towards half a million people dying bothers me, particularly when it’s very likely that our death totals are significantly higher than they could have been with better adherence to guidelines, better guidelines to begin with, etc. Those excess deaths won’t be so quickly forgotten by people who have lost family and friends.

Should we be pragmatic in public policy? Of course. You can’t prevent all the deaths, and we’ve got to keep individuals and businesses afloat as well as we can. But we need to go into these discussions with clear eyes about the real cost that each of those lost lives represent, both in a compassionate sense and in a practical sense (a not insignificant proportion of those dying were still working, still contributing to society, were young with many productive years ahead of them, etc.).

I really don’t think we’ll look back on this and think, “Eh, a half a million people died, oh well,” particularly not with a more historical lens, but I could definitely be mistaken.

[umvi]

> This kind of cavalier attitude towards half a million people dying bothers me

> I really don’t think we’ll look back on this and think, “Eh, a half a million people died, oh well,”

Well, we look back on the past 2 decades (2000-2020) and think "eh, 700k+ people (mainly the elderly) have died from influenza, oh well." But actually most people don't even think that. Most people just... don't even keep track of how many people die of the flu because they don't care. Why would covid be any different 20 years from now? To be honest most people probably wouldn't even care how many people were dying of covid if the media wasn't shoving the statistic in everyone's face 24/7. Just like most people don't care to know how many people die in the USA per year in general (~3 million) and what the breakdown of those deaths are in terms of causes.

[mplanchard]

35k per year from influenza is literally an order of magnitude less than the current death toll (but we should still take it seriously! I hope COVID normalizes masks during flu season). You or I are much more likely to know or be connected to someone who died of COVID this past year than of the normal seasonal flu in any given year.

675k Americans died in the 1918 Flu, and we’re still talking about that one. We may very well surpass that in raw numbers (although not in percent of population) with COVID.

And lots of people care about the 3 million people that die every year! We’re constantly trying to make driving safer, investing in new therapies for heart disease and cancer, etc. I’ve seen many articles about the increase in suicide in the US over the past decade, written with the hope of stirring action and driving change. There’s no reason to accept potentially preventable deaths as a matter of course.

[umvi]

> 35k per year from influenza is literally an order of magnitude less than the current death toll

But it kills consistently year after year, decade after decade. Influenza has been consistently killing for how many years in a row before covid showed up? So really, the "current death toll" of the flu is in the many millions by now. Unless you reset the count after every year in which case covid's death count doesn't get to keep ticking up forever either and needs to reset to 0 at some year boundary.

> 675k Americans died in the 1918 Flu, and we’re still talking about that one.

And in 1918 America had less than one third the current population. 675k out of 100M is way deadlier than 500k out of 350M. Also we weren't really "talking about it" until very recently. Prior to 2020 almost nobody talked about it except people who study public health.

[willyt]

Well maybe you didn’t study have to study history at school. But I did and we learnt that the 1918 flu killed more people than WW1.

[umvi]

> But I did and we learnt that the 1918 flu killed more people than WW1.

Hmm, but I would argue there's a difference between young healthy people dying en masse (war) and mainly the sickly and elderly dying (pandemic). It feels awfully utilitarian to distill it down to this, but I'm sorry, a healthy 18 year old dying from a bullet is way worse than a 70 year old dying of a disease, especially from a "years of life lost" perspective.

In my view, with covid, it's mostly the elderly that got a few years cut short, but most of them would have died within the next decade anyway of something else (including "age") and I predict we will see "negative excess deaths" in the coming years for that very reason.

[mplanchard]

Same! And on top of this, 500k is more Americans than died in WWII. It’s true the proportions are a bit different due to population growth, but we can’t pretend like it’s anything but a staggering number of people

[orra]

> I really don’t think we’ll look back on this and think, “Eh, a half a million people died, oh well,” particularly not with a more historical lens, but I could definitely be mistaken.

Agreed, it's horribly callous.