The selfishness of this attitude is unconscionable to me.
We, the taxpayers from these countries, have been ruthlessly drone-bombing innocents, arming horribly violent terrorists in foreign conflicts, and running shadow campaigns against elected leaders for a century.
With extremely few exceptions, just about everybody from a North American or EU country is from a place complicit in these atrocities.
There is nothing new about the amount of death we are reported to be dealing with thanks to COVID-19. In fact, it's a walk in the park compared with the last 20 years of American & European foreign policy.
Maybe you and your relatives are all just a bit new to the whole "death" thing, but many of us have been aware of it for some time and it just doesn't hold quite the same weight.
Once you see a country's ruler getting sodomized by a bayonet until they die, a flu-like illness doesn't really read quite the same as you seem to perceive it.
Age is also a major risk factor. According to the CDC's latest numbers, people 65+ account for 79.6% of all COVID deaths in US.[2]
[1] https://s3.amazonaws.com/media2.fairhealth.org/whitepaper/as...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
> To have died of COVID, you had to be on death's door already, or so statistically unlucky as to make your suffering a rounding error.
Your friend falls under the category of the latter - the rounding error. Your experience is far from typical, but your foolish, fanciful insults, I'm afraid, are the "new normal."
I do not think it is controversial to suggest that a virus with a death rate of under 0.5% is nothing to worry about for a healthy person. It would be unhealthy and rather unhinged behavior to worry about it.
Age is pretty much the only risk factor - the average age of death from COVID-19 is higher than the average age of death. [0]
Emotions are high, everyone is affected, and people are under pressure. It's all understandable. But we need HN users to react to this by being more thoughtful and kind to each other, not less—and the only way to really do that is to work on it regardless of how badly other commenters are behaving.