I think it’s a cause for concern, yes — and the current reaction is miles beyond what can reasonably be described as “concern”.

I think heart disease — the #2 cause of death in the US — is serious too, but I still don’t think sensationalism and panic about it is helpful.

Marking cardiac arrest as cause of death is like filling in the blank with “died by not living anymore”.

Therefore it is not a meaningful stat to say the heart disease is the #1 or #2 cause of death. I cringe when that is used by fitness gurus to justify their videos or when scientific discussions are derailed by making the comparison.

Your comment compares apples to oranges. Heart disease has no way to grow exponentially. COVID deaths can.

We shouldn't panic, we should make decisive decisions based on the best information we have, and we should seek to reject fear-driven reactions just because something's new and scary.

R_0 really isn't relevant, we're all in all of these together.

Even if after the fact it looks like the pandemic didn't have catastrophic long term effects, it was still rational to be extremely cautious.

Car accidents don't have the potential to collapse society. A car crash has a chance to cause other crashes but that correlation dies off exponentially fast over relatively small time and distance scales. A pandemic in our modern connected world is basically scale invariant without mitigations.

With exponential phenomena, if you wait for evidence of extreme downside it'll already be too late. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. You can't wait, you have to act on your ignorance. This is not "panic".

Rationality is not just about reasoning about what you know, it's about reasoning about what you don't know as well. In typical, mundane processes you can act on ignorance by collecting evidence. In extreme, self-propagating processes, one needs to apply the rationality of ignorance: extreme value theory and the statistics of extreme distributions.

Panic isn't helpful and you can't sustain it.

Disregard is just plain stupid - it's a lethal disease that messes up a lot of young and healthy people pretty seriously.

What definitions of “a lot” (using actual numbers, not anecdotes) and “messes up” are you using here?

We just spent two decades being terrified of terrorism, giving up hard won civil rights and spending trillions on needless wars. Terrorism never even approached the damage caused by a damn bat virus. 9/11 killed about 2000 people and caused a tiny fraction of the economic damage, and that was by orders of magnitude the largest terror attack.

Same goes for random mass shootings, serial killers, most drugs (except maybe fentanyl), street crime, and so on.

It makes more sense to be alarmed about this than any of those things, yet many of the same voices that were in utter panic over that stuff are dismissive of this.

The fact that a lot of people are hypocrites for being dismissive of COVID-19 is true, but completely unrelated to whether being dismissive of it is rationally warranted.

Conservatives who thought starting wars because of terrorism was justified and liberals who think shutting down civilization for months because of a moderately lethal viral pandemic is justified might both be wrong.

Not a reasonable description of stay at home orders with electricity, running water and (for many anyway) grocery deliveries.

Sorry for not making it clear that what I was saying wasn’t intended to be applicable internationally.

Any potential source of division in the US gets seized upon by the utterly massive partisan propaganda machinery (of both parties) and turned into a fault line with which to segment the electorate. Nothing is immune, and the process is advanced, scientific, industrial scale, and highly effective.

The reason billions are spent to do this to us is that elections are largely decided by whose base is most fired up to actually bother to vote. That means it's less about debating issues or convincing anyone and more about firing up the base with fear, hate, or other base emotions that tend to translate easily to action.

Ultimately it seems to be about what fits the government's narrative, more than anything else. Whatever they can use to spread fear is something they perceive as good - it deflects from real issues at home, and can be used to justify otherwise dubious actions (e.g. having a populace scared of terrorism was the perfect situation for invading Iraq).

Another classic example: Few people fear dying in a car accident, but many people fear dying a plane crash, despite the relative probabilities being skewed entirely in the other direction. This irrationality is not part of any government narrative, it is simply fueled by fear.

Humans are terrible at rationally evaluating risks and, especially when trained by the media they consume, fear the dumbest things (dying in a mass shooting vs. dying in a police shooting, plane crashes vs. car crashes, immigrants vs. other community members, brain-eating amoebas vs. swimming pools, etc. etc.).