from Hacker News

Coronavirus kills more people in the US in one day than on September 11

by karimford on 12/10/20, 8:02 AM with 102 comments

• by _jgdh on 12/10/20, 8:53 AM

  I think the 2020 experience has taught us a bit more about people. 9/11 was horrifying and traumatising, but perhaps less because of the death toll (3000) and more because you could see footage of those people dying, played over and over. Sure, 3000+ people died of Covid yesterday, but they all did it out of sight. So it’s possible for some people to dismiss it for any number of reasons - statistics aren’t accurate, those people had other underlying health issues, they would have died of the flu anyway. Most of all, we only see the statistic. We don’t have to actually watch someone die because the virus prevented them from breathing, far away from their family.

  Speaking of which, this is also probably why the BLM movement gained widespread support. Statistics showing unequal policing have existed for a long time, but they are easy to ignore. Any person who watched the 8:46 video of a man being suffocated couldn’t ignore it.

  We like to think we’re data driven, but we’re actually emotionally and visually driven. Statistics should convince people, but it doesn’t. A video of towers falling or a man being suffocated are much more likely to change people’s minds.

• by tedk-42 on 12/10/20, 9:10 AM

  Regardless of the dismissive comments from other HN posters, I'm still shocked at how incredibly inept the US has been at containing the virus.

  From the president down to the people, there's a fundamental problem in the US society in how people view this as a 'non-issue'

• by roenxi on 12/10/20, 8:49 AM

  While it is true that a 9-11/day is a high rate of death I feel compelled to point out that 9-11 only happened once.

  This seems to me to be trying to make coronavirus into an emotional threat, which I'm sure is arguably a good idea. But this comparison is, fundamentally, nonsensical. 9-11 is not a good measure of deaths. The damage 9-11 did was never the number of deaths, it was the symbolism and the hysterical response that caused the real losses of life, liberty and prosperity.

• by TaylorAlexander on 12/10/20, 8:54 AM

  I spend a lot of time thinking about the fact that Vietnam took all appropriate precautions and in a country with 95 million people they’ve only had about 35 total deaths of covid. And they experienced positive economic growth this year. Meanwhile in the USA I think wealthy people were worried that these measures would harm the economy so we let states and counties all decide on their own how to handle things. And the issue of mask wearing became weirdly politicized.

  And actually I learned recently that in 1988 George HW Bush gave this passionate speech about how the USA needed to fight climate change head on... but by the time republicans got the presidency again the party sided with oil companies on a pro fossil fuel message.

  Why do we politicize science like this? Or is it inherently political? Is it just that lobbyists influence political parties differently and so issues that have nothing to do with Democrat or Republican end up getting attached to those identities?

  I don’t really know what the answer is. But I do think if the USA had all taken the science seriously and did not politicize the issue we’d have at least 100,000 more Americans alive today.

• by supernova87a on 12/10/20, 9:51 AM

  Well, as pointed out by others, we do poorly when a threat is:

  -- Diffuse vs. concentrated in who is affected

  -- Slow and steady vs. acute and sudden

  -- Apparently familiar / understood vs. unknown / frightening

  Maybe this is just our vulnerability as a species, and takes inordinate amount of effort to fight against.

  Confronting climate change falls into the same category of course.

• by ageofwant on 12/10/20, 9:10 AM

  As an Australian it has been extraordinary to witness the end of the American hegemony in this particular way. The pandemic was not a black swan by any means, the American response to it was.

  My American model of capability and competence turned out to be horseshit. I had a view of Americans as brash, somewhat obnoxious but generally genial, certainly industrious. The incredulous, self-centered and fundamentally deluded zeitgeist that seems to define current American society was a surprise to me. I think many people were sensing the decline of American society, certainly Americans, and MAGA perversely tapped into that.

  America's decline is already affecting Australians with China signalling its disapproval of Australia's current 'republican' rhetoric with the current trade war. I suspect this year was a turning point for geopolitics and it won't favor western style democracies, not as what used to be the ultimate model of those turned out to be the way it has.

• by jhanschoo on 12/10/20, 10:03 AM

  I think what's outrageous is that the deaths per capita from COVID in that one day in US is comparable to total COVID deaths per capita in some countries.

  US COVID deaths per capita ~~ytd~~ yesterday: 0.0009%

  SK COVID deaths per capita: 0.001%

  NZ COVID deaths per capita: 0.0005%

  SG COVID deaths per capita: 0.0005%

  TW COVID deaths per capita: 0.00002%

• by robert_foss on 12/10/20, 9:46 AM

  3k Americans died, we all know what that means. It's time to invade some unfortunate oil producing country and kill 200k of its population. Maybe Scotland? Or Brasil?

• by oxplot on 12/10/20, 12:48 PM

  The arguments for number of death seem to always miss an important part: quality of death. One cannot ignore the difference between dying in a hospital bed, most likely next to loved ones and under some kind of drug to alleviate as much pain as possible, vs being burnt alive next to others burning alive or jumping off a building "on purpose" to avoid the said fiery death.

• by BestCatalonia on 12/10/20, 9:08 AM

  Most think those dead people just went to meet God. So not a Big deal.

• by CryptoPunk on 12/10/20, 2:28 PM

  Coronavirus victims tend to be much older, and generally closer to the natural end of their life. Every day thousands in the same demographic die from cancer and heart disease too.

• by sto_hristo on 12/10/20, 9:14 AM

  The terrorist attack was an act of murder - controlled, planned, deliberate, malicious, vindictive. The other is a normal natural occurrence that has been happening since cellular life began and every living thing lives with. And just because the consequences of either can be described with numbers, doesn't mean they can be compared.

  You can do a better job comparing apples and oranges as they do correlate on the basis of nutrition value.

  Modern media is just... pathetic.