Heart disease is the leading cause of death because heart stoppage is the definition of death and the “default” value when the actual cause of death is unknown.

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.

Sure. Replace that with the third, fourth, or fifth cause of death, and my point is the same.

Not really. You’d have to replace it with the third, fourth, and fifth COMBINED. Since your point is that Coronavirus concerns are overblown, you might want to reconsider it.

What’s the R0 value for heart disease? They’re entirely different beasts.

Heart disease isn’t contagious, so the R_0 is zero. Can you explain what this has to do with my comment?

The point: If heart disease was contagious, we’d probably treat that with what you’re describing as “panic” too.

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

If heart disease were contagious the panic would be justified because it would way more people than COVID-19.

The the panic over COVID is justified, as it has already exceeded heart disease for the #1 spot… and it’s contagious.

One risk is self limiting whereas the other is self propagating with unknown long term consequences.

This is quintessentially the human propensity to fear the new/unknown more than the known. Over your life 3,500,000 people will die in car accidents in the US, 6,000,000 will die of the flu. 7,000,000 will die of opioid overdoses. Each of these has serious, long-term consequences.

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.

As I have mentioned in another thread, when you're dealing with an extreme process with exponential growth and a large absence of information, """"fear"""", also known as respecting your fucking ignorance, is most rational.

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.

I've settled on "healthy fear" as my view of the proper reaction.

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.

> 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?