I will give it my best shot at clarifying:
Preventable refers to what a given society can be expected to manage given its limited resources and given other moral constraints, such as not impinging on people's freedoms unnecessarily. A number of the terms I have used have vague meanings that can't be clarified (not by me at least) within the scope of an HN comment. A good faith interpretation of my statement would be that a society should hold saving lives as its highest priority, as long as this does not cause catastrophic costs or dystopian levels of population control. Some temporary economic costs and some temporary restrictions on certain freedoms should be accepted, I think.
> in this thread people are quite stubborn about interpreting things literally, or misinterpreting them all together.
My complaint is a bit different. I'd say "preventable deaths should be prevented" and people will interpret that as if it said "all". I reply that if I meant "all" I would have said "all".
Your case is a bit different, because you said "all" but did not mean "all".
That's my impression about the Internet as a whole these days...
What's a preventable death? Everybody dies eventually, there's no such thing as a preventable death. There's delaying death, but everyone dies. Period.