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A comment on The Plague Year. Parent comment

Re:The Plague Year by doliveira on Saturday January 02, 2021 @07:03PM (#25617939)
It's disturbing to realize that, given the current zeitgeist, a virus with a higher fatality rate would probably have killed way fewer people. This virus really hit the sweet spot: not as inoffensive as to be trivially managed, not as lethal as to dissolve any political spin.
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Re:The Plague Year by IfOnlyYouKnew on Saturday January 02, 2021 @07:18PM (#25618049)
Yeah, that take seems to be making the rounds in the tech community right now.

It's probably wrong in a number of ways, though. The new variant overtaking the UK may cause 10 times as many deaths in the first months if it's really 50 % more infectious (the magic of compound interest).

Are people going to adequately react to such a change in risk? I have my doubts. This isn't even meant as a cynical indictment of humanity: I myself currently behave more less exactly as I did during the summer, even though local infection rates have changed by two orders of magnitude in the meantime.

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Re:The Plague Year by cartoonfoxes on Saturday January 02, 2021 @07:43PM (#25618211)
>Are people going to adequately react to such a change in risk?

Reactions track with the perception of danger, not risk. We would all behave differently if the danger was a flesh-eating hemorrhagic zombie virus, rather than moderate-to-severe flu symptoms, even if the risk was unchanged.

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Re:The Plague Year by doliveira on Saturday January 02, 2021 @07:27PM (#25618109)
Yeah, probably wishful thinking to think that there would be a threshold of fatality rate beyond which any politicization would be impossible.

I do think it would be harder, though, and it would likely involve less literally pro-plague attitudes

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