We're really not though. World War II killed somewhere in the ballpark of 75 million people. COVID-19 has a bit under 800,000 known deaths. Even if we say that for every person who is known to have died of covid, 5 additional people died and were recorded as deaths from other causes (and it's not that high, you can check the excess mortality stats to confirm for yourself that it couldn't possibly be that high), the number of covid deaths _still_ wouldn't even be 10% of the total number of WWII deaths.

Unless by "approaching" you mean "getting closer to because it's currently below that number and increasing" in which case the number of people killed by vending machines is also "approaching" the number of people killed by WWII.

Hyperbolic statements like this just serve to undermine trust, and trust is already in pretty short supply, especially around the pandemic. Messaging around the pandemic has had a pattern of people making whatever statements they think is most likely to get people to comply with public health guidance, even if those statements are false or misleading.

For example, there's a great deal of news lately about how COVID-19 can cause Multisystem Inflammation Syndrome (MIS-C) in children, and that 80% of children who develop MIS-C require intensive care, and that the existence of MIS-C as a possible complication of covid means you should worry more about kids getting covid. What these articles neglect to mention is that only about 300 cases of MIS-C have been observed in children, out of what is probably low-millions of children infected with covid.

When you make misleading statements in order to induce compliance through panic, it'll work the first few times, but eventually people will start noticing, and stop trusting anything you or anyone who sounds like you says, even if it's true. This is the moral of the "Boy Who Cried Wolf" story, and it's been seen again and again in real-life contexts as well (see for example how DARE actually _increases_ drug use).

Making false-but-alarming statements about public health sucks the air out of the room for true-and-alarming statements about public health, and is the moral equivalent of crying wolf except with millions of lives on the line instead of just one village.

Please stop crying wolf.

Even if you don't count or differently count indirect deaths, I'd still say going from 0 to 170K in 6 months with no end in sight definitely constitutes "approaching". We'll get there before this is all over, for sure.

By contrast, the US _is_ one of the countries hit hardest by covid -- the US has about 5x the number of deaths per capita as the world average.

It's a little less egregious if the original poster meant "US casualties in WWII vs US deaths from covid" but it's still a misleading comparison.

Past that, at some point it's hard for me to take this sort of thing too seriously. OP probably doesn't have a copy editor for the online comments he's writing from the shitter/waiting for the coffee brewer.

It's a reasonable comparison because, sans COVID context, literally every American would answer "yes" to the question "did lots of Americans die in WWII?"

Not disputing your overall point, but this is with preventative measures, such as lockdown, quarantine, use of masks, social distancing, etc.

I have seen various estimates with factors such as 35x the number of cases without preventative measures. Right now, there are 5.5 million cases and 172,000 deaths in the USA.

With a more conservative factor, like 15x, a quick ballpark at current ratios of cases/deaths puts that at 82.5 million cases and 2.4 million deaths without preventative measures in the USA, and more considering worldwide cases. Not as bad as WWII, but it is in the range of the Korean War (est 1.5 to 4.5 million deaths) or the Vietnam War (est 2.4 to 4.3 million deaths).

For the 35x number to be true, all of the following have to be true. Those assumptions are, with maximum generosity

1: With no preventative measures, at least 60% of the US population would be infected with COVID-19 (assumes no further infections after today and that 100% of people infected, including asymptomatic people, have tested positive for COVID-19).

2: At least 60% of the people in the US who will be infected with COVID-19 have already been infected with COVID-19 (assumes 100% of the population would be infected without preventative measures, and that 100% of people infected, including asymptomatic people, have tested positive for COVID-19).

3: At least 60% of the people in the US who have been infected with COVID-19, including asymptomatic people, have tested positive (assumes no further infections after today and 100% of the population would be infected without preventative measures).

Note that while "all of the following are true" is _necessary_ for the 35x number to be true, they're not _sufficient_ -- evenly distributing the burden, change all of the "60%"s to "84%"s to get an example of what a world where the 35x number is accurate.

Going in order on my objections to those assumptions, and what I think more realistic numbers look like:

> 1: With no preventative measures, at least 60% of the US population would be infected with COVID-19:

The R0 of COVID-19 is probably between 2.79 and 3.28[1]. We'll go with the higher of these two numbers (3.28) for our upper bound. That means each infected person, in a population with no infected people, will spread the disease to 3.28 other people. In a world of uncontrolled spread, the spread stops when the average infected person comes in contact with less than one person who is susceptible to the disease, so once 1 - 1/3.28 (~70%) of the population has been infected, the spread stops. This gives us an upper bound of 70% for what fraction of the population gets infected.

In real life, that R0 is made up of some people who will spread the disease to an average of 50 people, and others who will spread it to an average of 0.1 people. People who are likely to spread COVID widely are more likely to be the people spreading the disease and are also more likely to be the people infected people "try to" spread the disease to -- a cashier who interacts with 1000 customers a day has 1000 chances to catch COVID from one of their customers, and 1000 chances to pass it on, so they're likely to be infected early on. The people most likely to catch COVID will, in the long term, be the most likely to be immune, lowering the effective rate of spread much more rapidly than the naive model would predict. Estimates for the actual herd immunity levels vary, but as a lower bound let's go with the number Gomes et. al. come up with[2] and say 10% is our lower bound.

Being very rigorous and scientific, let's split the difference between our upper and lower bounds and say 35% of the population would get COVID-19 if the spread was uncontrolled.

Moving on:

> 2: At least 60% of the people in the US who will be infected with COVID-19 have already been infected with COVID-19

Assuming no third wave, cases per day will continue to trend down over time. Currently, it looks like cases per day are decreasing by something like 0.5% per day, and there are about 50,000 cases per day currently in the US. If that trend continues, we end up at about 15M total positive tests. If the trend accelerates to about a 1.2% per day decrease in positive tests, we do end up with only about 9.5M positive tests, so "60% of the positive tests that will happen, in total, have already happened" is not _completely_ outside the realm of possibility. On the other hand, if there _is_ a third wave, we're gonna end up with more than 15M positive tests.

I'll use the "no third wave, 0.5% decrease per day" estimate of 15M positive tests when all is said and done.

> 3: At least 60% of the people in the US who have been infected with COVID-19, including asymptomatic people, have tested positive

This one seems extremely implausible to me. Tests are fairly hard to come by, expensive, and discouraged for people who have not been in contact with someone known to have COVID-19, at least in the US. Furthermore, a significant fraction of cases are either asymptomatic or very mild, and those people are unlikely to be tested. It's hard to get an exact estimate of the fraction of total cases that are tested, but several researchers have taken a crack at it (example[3]), and estimate that between 3 on the low end and 24(!) times as many people have been infected as have tested positive.

We'll go with a factor of 5, because that's a nice round number on the low end of the range and really the 24 number sounds pretty implausible. Maybe back in April when tests were in very short supply, but certainly not now.

Putting all these numbers together, we get

5.6M * 5 = 28M people in the US have caught COVID-19 so far. 15M * 5 = 75M people in the US will catch COVID-19 when all is said and done. 328M * 0.35 = 115M people in the US would have caught COVID-19 if the spread was left unchecked.

So by a back-of-the-envelope calculation, we should expect the precautions have decreased the spread by a factor of 115M / 75M ~= 1.5, with a fairly wide margin of uncertainty (but I'd say almost certainly not higher than ~3 or lower than ~1). Certainly not a factor of 35 or even a factor of 12.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7073717/ [2] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/medrxiv/early/2020/05/21/202... [3] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

assuming you mean the US death toll also bear in mind the median age of WW II casualties was something like 26; while the median age for covid victims is 75+. Not to diminish the latter but they are very different.

Edit: I meant this as a joke, albeit in poor taste, I see it was not received well.

That being said, I do think that relativizing deaths in terms of "opportunity cost" does lead to some somewhat unpalatable moral conundra.

Hard to argue with it. But it does lead to some places mainstream american morality would consider unpleasant.

This isn't a perspective exclusive to young people either. Last year my grandfather died and my cousin had a miscarriage. My grandmother was far more distraught over the latter because she understood that her husband, who she'd loved for nearly 60 years, had already lived a full happy life. She said as much explicitly.

Anyway, I'd say my grandfather and cousin deaths (non-covid related) had about the same impact on me. Dying is the tragedy of being alive, I suppose.

Is it possible there are other issues you're not aware of, and that the people who spend their lives studying and preparing for these situations are?

Do you have any articles about people being turned away from hospitals due to lack of capacity?

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...

So it’s fair to attribute those deaths to covid then.

     -sarcasm

Apparently coronavirus pays well for hospitals, also some people want the death due to cornoviruis to be as high as possible.

You mean 48.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/pdfs/mm6924e2-H.pdf

" After exclusions, data for 1,320,488 (94%) cases were analyzed.Median age was 48 years"

Is it beside the point? It's false. Lightning kills about 50 people a year in the US [1]. It's frankly fairly rare to get struck by lightning [2]. More people under 34 have died from COVID-19 per month since April than die from lightning in a year [3] (quick note that the breakdown is 25-34). That's to say nothing of long term health impacts from the disease. If you are going to argue that it's a rational choice, you need to be working from correct assumptions.

And more importantly than that, getting struck by lightning does not mean you will make other people get struck by lightning. Making a choice that makes sense for you does not mean it makes sense for society. That's why we have laws.

[1]: https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-victims

[2]: https://www.cdc.gov/disasters/lightning/victimdata.html

[3]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm

OP said "hit by," not "killed by." I wasn't able to find a number for people being struck by lightning in a cursory search other than "hundreds more" than are killed by lightning.

Assuming you believe these numbers to not be somewhat inflated despite widespread reporting of such incidents, the odds of dying from COVID as a 25-34 year old in the US are 1 in ~33,000. This is ~15x times the odds of being struck by lightning. However, I would imagine those odds go down significantly further among 25-34 year olds with no risk factors, and it is largely the people with no risk factors that are going to speakeasy gyms.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/disasters/lightning/victimdata.html

[2] https://data.cdc.gov/widgets/9bhg-hcku

[3] https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/demographic-statistics

Re:the relevance of the comparison, I was just responding to the conversation.

Cherington, J. et al. 1999: Closing the Gap on the Actual Numbers of Lightning Casualties and Deaths. Preprints, 11th Conf. on Applied Climatology, 379-80

Moral theories that do not demand intellectual character are broken. Sincerely believing in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion does not excuse anti-semitism. Sincerely believing whatever nonsense is coming out of a youtube recommendation k-hole does not excuse ignoring the advice of public health experts.

Moral character does not exist without intellectual character.

> They also never claimed that covid is comparable to lightning

Yes they did.

> just that if you’re under 30 you’re more likely to be struck by lightning than die of covid.

That is a comparison.

> (I cant speak to the statistical truth of this, but that’s beside the point).

~50 deaths due to lightening strikes across all age groups. We were already close to 1000 confirmed COVID deaths for folks under 34 in mid-June.

These are super-emotional topics, something on par with politics. My view is that even if it would be just out of respect of older generations who made the world we live today, raised us, protected us, guided us, we should be considerate.

Now we might end up in economical tragedy vastly worse then just letting them die, but that's a threshold we didn't yet cross according to most people here/out there. Hence all the reactions like closures and restrictions and vast majority complying with them.

Another aspect is utterly incompetent leaders, who's countries they mismanage seem to be, purely from rational point of view, currently holding premium places in covid charts. US, UK, Brazil, Russia etc. Seems like some pattern about how far lying and plain stupid ignorance can get you when confronted with something as little caring as virus.

Best case in term of covid related death is to keep everyone at home, no freedom and get food delivery directly at the door

Worst case, is to do as nothing happened

There are a spectrum of possible responses. But we have to accept that some people are going to die if we want other to live.

Each group can put the cursor where it wants, but you can't have, no death and complete freedom. Some people prefer that a few people die if the rest of people is free, then some other prefer everyone to be alive and restrict the freedom of everyone else. You can't put the cursor for other people than you

Who delivers the food if we keep everyone home? There is a subtle classist underpinning to the entire "Stay The Fuck Home" message which really shows how little people value others, especially lower-class (food delivery) or blue collar (food supply) workers. Everyone needs to stay home, except for the deplorables that will grow, process, and serve food directly to my door.

People do need to eat. They don't necessarily require takeaway, but on a balance of risks this isn't unreasonable.

Additionally, it is worth noting that the risk-based analysis you use is 1) an exercise in line drawing (giving everyone their own office while at work is certainly equal or less exposure than food delivery as long as people don't socialize at work) and 2) an after the fact justification for a policy that is undeniably inequitable across class, race, and sex lines.

I was addressing the comparative risks of delivery vs (presumably the same worker cohort) offering sit-down service. Delivery is a net reduced risk exposure.

That still leaves the net cohort differential, pre-Covid to Covid, of (shared-workspace, public-facing) essential service workers, and work-from-home office and profesional workers. That's a real concern.

I'd identify concerns as both those of fairness and net commonweal. I'm willing to sacrifice choice in consideration both interests, at least during exigent circumstances.

Commonweal demands reducing net risk. This means both maintaining work-from-home policies for those capable of doing so, and providing delivery and bulk-service preparation (foodservice, manufacture, delivery, etc.).

Keep in mind that whilst the pandemic is worldwide, it is not felt equally in all locations. This makes geographic arbitrage onnthe basis of risk possible: manufacturing and services which can be exported from quarantine zones should be. The resulting downtime can be mitigated via social benefits.

Safety measures can and should be implemented in workplaces. I'm well aware that this is often not the case.

Differential unavoidable essential risks borne by one cohort can be compensated by others, through raised wages, tax hikes or credits, or other financial means.

The possibility of "immunity passports" has been suggested from early in the outbreak. It's still not clear that this is realistically an option, but there are 15 millions worldwide and 3 millions in the US who've recovered from Covid at this writing. That is a sizable potential high-exposure workforce.

And finally, there is the option of mandating rotations in high-exposure roles. This most directly addresses equity, and might build community through common bond, shared experience, and sense of collective risk and responsibility. Sort of a Covid Draft or Covid Lottery.

Would any of these address your concerns, or do you have additional suggestions?

I really don't know what the answer here is, but risk mitigation has to be part of the debate. It feels like the culture wars of class, personal freedom, social risk, public shame, etc have supplanted questions of "how do we keep all of the people who keep the engine of society running safe and how do we compensate them fairly for their work?" and "how do we ensure that everyone else does not engage in risky activity simply because they must do so to live."

This is all starting to get away from the core point of the article, which is that people will always find a way to engage in any activity that is illegal, but perhaps if we could address the issues above, the question of speakeasy gyms wouldn't seem so critical because we'd be safe in other areas of our life.

I'm not sure where that opinion fits in a rigidly logical argument that prohibits sound judgment due to its ambiguity.

Raven in Snow Crash had a sensor in his body. The warhead was in the passenger compartment of his motorcycle.

Close to 500,000 military personnel (read: military-aged) died in WW2. Sorry to be crude, but what the f*ck are you smoking?

1. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm

Edit: Keeping the vulgarity for posterity, but on reflection it was quite unnecessary. Apologies.

What about how many people other infectious diseases kill? What about how many people other sources of preventable deaths kill? Why haven't we thrown away our civil liberties in the past, or destroyed our economy, to tackle those problems?

If we had not taken steps to stop it, the projection was millions dead. That is why.