
Is the Cure Killing Us? How History Can Help Us Rethink Our Covid Response - elijahparker
https://www.peterhaas.org/is-the-cure-killing-us-how-history-can-help-us-rethink-our-covid-response/
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bfung
My opinion is that the article is misguided in many ways.

1\. A viral pandemic is very different than a major fire.

Fires are visible and generally localized. To compare viral infections to fire
catastrophes as equivalent is not understanding the exponential way infections
spread -- in this era, it's global and cannot be localized. A better analogy
is like if a city caught on fire, and anyone who tried to run away from that
city carried the fire to where they went. The non-visible nature of it makes
it hard for people to understand compared to a hot, visible flame.

2\. A flawed comparing number of deaths and other cases of undesirables.

Take for example, the estimated number of deaths due to drug overdose, which a
majority percentage are opioids: ~70k in 2018 [1], a whole year. The normal
flu death estimates on the high end are 60k in 6 months[2]. Covid-19 deaths
are estimated at ~90k as of today, starting April 14, 2020. That's ~90k deaths
in 1 month. Let's be generous and say covid-19 in the US started in end of
February; that's still less than 3 months.

We are living out 1 year worth of deaths due to a single cause in two-ish
month. And it will continue for at least several months.

Is the current cure killing us? A lot slower than if we didn't act, inferring
from the numbers above. What action would you take otherwise and not knowing
the information we know in these short 2.5 months? If California didn't act
early, if Washington state didn't act early, the rest of the country would've
been infected far worse than it currently is due to all the travel and
commerce that happens. Imagine a situation worse than it currently is!

Is it better to trade this covid curves for other curves? From an overall
population standpoint, yes it is, the sheer quantity and magnitudes are
completely different. Someone's carrying fire, and it's not always clear who's
carrying that fire, ready to burn cities and towns down.

Is the blanket response SIP orders reasonable? This one is less clear, but on
the whole, yes, it's reasonable - most people don't critically think to
survive these days. If they did, a lot of things in our country would be
different...

It would've been better had all of us been prepared with masks and having
stock piles of supplies ready. It's a small lesson out of many the US and
citizens should take out from this situation.

Take some time and ask oneself now -- if you went out, caught the coronavirus,
then hung out with your parents, and one of them could die, how much money
would you spend to get them out of the danger zone? Does money even mean much
in that scenario?

[1]
[https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/statedeaths.html](https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/statedeaths.html)
[2] [https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-
season-e...](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-
estimates.htm) [3] [https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-
updates/case...](https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-
updates/cases-in-us.html)

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redis_mlc
This article repeats what I've been saying for months, but will help provide
context for people who don't study history, or who didn't live through
previous disasters like SARS-1, etc.

The response to date for SARS-2 will be laughed at for centuries.

Non sequitur is a word to get familiar with:

Non sequitur: The argument itself could have true premises, but still have a
false conclusion.

In the case of corona, yes it's fatal to a very small percentage of people,
but vaporizing the US economy when we don't have nearly adequate testing,
tracing or vaccines for a highly infectious disease makes no sense, aside from
the political optics of "I tried to do something, so re-elect me."

I would argue we have dishonored those who died from corona by also tanking
our economy, for no benefit.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_fallacy)

If you think I'm being cynical about politicians, it turns out the Falkland
War was solely about Thatcher getting re-elected - residents of the Falklands
aren't British citizens. (Now it turns out there's massive oil and gas fields
there, so it worked out fine for Britain.)

