[JJzD]

There is so much wrong with this. Let's start with the apparent numbers you are accepting. Millions of Americans will die directly from infections, millions will need life support, and an additional ten million will die as a direct consequence of an overwhelmed health care system. With those numbers it's hard to imagine a family not hit with these enormous consequences, where you seem to gloss over.

Secondary, the virus has no will of it's own, it will just randomly mutate, and if a stronger variant appears it will do so, if there are vaccins or not. However, you are advocating to roll the dice millions time more, just because there was already a very small chance this gets worse, and you think that is a good idea?

[cryptica]

At least 329 million Americans will die over the next 100 years no matter what we do; that's 3.29 million per year on average. So far less than 800K people died from COVID19 in almost 2 years... That's 400K per year; ~12% of all deaths... OK, this is a very rough/approximate calculation but is it worth ruining people's lives and taking away people's freedoms over a slight increase in death rate? This isn't the black plague. Personally, I wouldn't accept any significant change in my lifestyle for anything less than 100% (2x) increase in my chance of death... So I won't even bat an eyelash over a 12% increase (and I'm in a not-at-risk group so it's probably way less for me); and especially if I have some control over the risk... Some smokers take on much bigger risks by continuing to smoke; the risk is worth it to them - Who are we to judge?

This pandemic has been blown out of proportion. The media emotional 'contagion' has had a bigger negative impact on people's lives than the actual virus. Did everyone suddenly forget the emotional 'contagion' study which Facebook did some years ago? https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17470161155795...

The result of that study was that people's emotions could be manipulated without their knowledge... How do we know that what we're dealing with now isn't just Facebook and the media putting the results of that study into practice? It sure looks that way. I can definitely feel myself being manipulated by the media and I suspect that others who are more suggestible than me are even more so and less likely to notice it...

[YossarianFrPrez]

According to the CDC and the national vital statistics system, the number of deaths, in America, in 2019 was 2,854,838. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm

Using your math, there have been 738k deaths in ~1.7 years, or roughly 434k deaths per year yielding 15%, or 1 out of 6 deaths.

I just want to point out that death is not the only bad outcome of Covid. Medical researchers are finding evidence of memory loss and brain fog, long term disability, and long recovery times. https://www.foxnews.com/health/covid-side-effects-could-incl...

Also, 2x chance of death is a pretty high threshold! (I don't mean any criticism, just surprise.)

But this all focuses on the role of an individual and not the on role of a community. Smokers don't just harm themselves; second-hand smoke harms other people. Indoor smoking bans are for communal health, they aren't primarily meant to impact the individual smokers, who just go outside. Similarly, Covid-19 harms others if they get infected, and it also harms people who have put off non-emergency surgeries when hospitals are overcrowded.

..

Re: Emotional Contagion. If I remember correctly, the effects that were reported in the Facebook study were small, on the order of a change from 5.1 to 5.3 positive emotion words. (But it has been a while, so take that with a grain of salt.)

> How do we know that what we're dealing with now isn't just Facebook and the media putting the results of that study into practice?

This is an interesting question. Consider that lumping 'the media' together with Facebook means that most media outlets in every country (hundreds of thousands of people with their own agendas, political slants, biases, motivations, and who don't speak the same language) are now cooperating with one of the few companies widely credited with decimating newsroom web-traffic and by extension newsroom profits.