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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. |