Yeah, we have the data that 447,000 Americans have been killed by Covid. That is data.
The main thing I've concluded based on people's reaction to the death tolls is that much of our population has not come to terms with their mortality and hate being reminded of it.
So i guess we don't need drunk driving laws... only about 10,000 people a year die in the US from drunk drivers, they were going to die anyway. The world keeps on moving.
No reason to work on curing cancer. Dead someday anyway.
Yes, death comes to us all. That has no bearing on whether we should work to prevent death.
So assuming that 400k figure is excess mortality, that means 17% more people died last year than normal.
That is tragic, but the way it gets talked about, you would think we were at 10x or more.
Then again, we've invaded foreign countries and sacrificed our civil liberties ("war on terror") for way less deaths than that.
Makes you wonder why we are always so quick to trade away our freedoms...
Also, we did not ‘lose’ a year of life.
We have more data now. If you're under 70 the chances of you dying, if you don't already have a massively serious disease are statistically almost irrelevant. It's a standard coronavirus like the common cold, that's 2-3 times deadlier than the flu, and predominately only deadly to the very elderly. People are wise now that their claims of how scary it is is provably wrong and are now turning to the much more ambiguous claim about "don't you know that X% have long lasting problems afterwards?". Hogwash. The only thing they have to back that up is that they heard someone else say it. They'll never link to data that says that, because there isn't any.
We have the data now. What I gave is the data. It comes straight from the CDC, not your emotional facebook friend. Any rational human being, who proports to "follow the science", should act in accordance to the data. The data doesn't care about your feelings. The data doesn't care what people on Twitter tell you you should think. We have the data now.
It's to the point where the parent comment and my comment will be downvoted to oblivion because we encourage people to follow the data. Downvoted and censored by people claiming they "follow the science". For pointing out the science. This is not a good situation for us to find ourselves in.