Did you not read my reply, or did you simply ignore what it said? Unless governments do a great deal more than shut down bars, this virus will kill far more than 50,000 people – probably a thousand times that. When you say what you just said here, downplaying the threat is exactly what you’re doing.
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I did read it. And it’s completely irrelevant to what i said. Are you reading or just ignoring my statements?
What do you think my post was about?
Is my post about downplaying the virus or is my post about how people are already downplaying millions of deaths a year? Is my post about we are taking to much action with how we are handling the virus or that we take very little action in comparison to work on other problems as individuals and as countries and as civilization as whole?
Your post said that the virus is not going to kill more than 50,000 people worldwide. Do you understand that that’s completely wrong?
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So you think before it’s over the virus is going to kill a significant amount more than 50,000?
Let’s just go ahead and change the number to 1,000,000.
My argument is still the same.
This virus probably won’t even kill 1,000,000 people and then blah blah all the rest of my same statements.
I get it. You’re stuck in this rut that my post is about the corona virus. It’s not. It’s so clearly not. The posts are clearly about how people freak out about one thing, such as the corona virus since that’s what is all over the news atm, and then the same people and organizations do next to nothing about other things that are killing way more.
Pretend instead of the corona virus it was people are worried about vaccinating their kids but then they do these dozens of other things that kill just as many or more.
Or let’s say it’s the bird flu and when the bird flu is around people go into this crazy spree of hand sanitizers , toilet paper, and not hanging out with others in groups of blah blah because they don’t want to die so they sit at home and smoke or eat lots of fat sugary food.
Or what about the ridiculous KY2?
You have tons and tons of people flooding Walmart and other places and trying to get credit cards to buy tons of batteries and canned foods and so on scared that the world is about to shut down over a computer being confused and they are trying to do whet the can out of a delusional fear to make sure their families are safe but as soon as it passes, and way before it even became a thing, those same people live check to check and don’t even try to save money. They will spend $50 a week on fast food and blockbuster ( back in the day ) but want even try to put $25 into a savings account all year.
Or you had millions of people tripping out and movies coming out and tons of people
Scared over some ridiculous Mayan 2012 serpent alien attack or whatever it was supposed to be and things like gun sales went through the roof but those same people potentially look at all the evidence for global warming and invasive plants destroying habitats and oil spills taking out thousands of miles of coast and so on and are just like ehh… the science is not clear.
So what I am talking about is how I find it ridiculous that people latch onto whatever is the popular fear on the media at the moment and as soon as it’s over they stop worrying and while it’s happening they are still doing things that will end their lives short.
Regardless how inconsistent that might make people who seem nonchalant regarding other known dangers, we should want to see them take the danger seriously. Breath in all the toxic fumes you like on a job site and you’re not going to increase the number of vectors in the population for doing the same. That makes this virus different.
What is ridiculous is to say anything to people that can be interpreted as “unless I clean up my safety in all areas, I may as well ignore safe practices where the corona virus is concerned too”.
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No, make it 50,000,000 or 100,000,000. That was the implication of my post above. I think preventing 100,000,000 deaths warrants more extreme measures than preventing 1,000,000 deaths. Do you disagree?
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On a world wide level for everyone? Ofcourse. But it makes no difference on what I was mentioning and how individuals are responding out of fear to one thing and ignoring a dozen other things that we have known about for decades.
So what do I think is ridiculous and what is it that I’m talking about repeatedly.
These two situations.
- You have people who are getting scared and violent over masks and a virus but they still smoke cigarettes and breath in dust and smoke around their kids. It’s ridiculous on a personal level correct? It’s like a drunk driver worried about riding a bicycle on the side of the road because he may get hit.
You have people angry over not being able to work for two weeks and talking about the government failing them and workers still going to work and getting arrested and fined and they are all mad. But they never even bothered to put away 5% of their income for the last two years that would easily have them covered for the month they are out of work.
So the first thing I was talking about is how ridiculous it is for individuals to only care about a single aspect of their health and what could possibly go wrong and completely blow off everything else.
Such as a parent scared to vaccinate their kids because they are afraid their kids will get autism but they are totally relaxed and not worried about their kids getting a preventable disease or their kids getting other kids sick from it.
The second thing I mentioned was beyond the individual level. It’s amusing to me that the government shuts down buisness over the virus but then outside of basically just California they do next to nothing to prevent or encourage healthier products to build homes. There are millions of examples. Nothing I am saying is downplaying anything except for how individuals and companies and organizations and even the government treat fear.
The corona virus was mentioned in my statement solely because that’s the common most popular fear.
In three years the same people freaking out about hand sanitizer not being available to kill the corona
Virus they may get from a portable toilet will be the same people who grab a handle to the door and open it and use the restroom and then leave and won’t even think about hand sanitizer.
My statements are not some mind blowing jab at corona virus. However, I’m not going to keep explaining it. If my statements are over heads they are overheads. I feel more than confident my statements and the issues I was voicing was clear.
I agree. That’s exactly what I have been saying and nothing more.
It’s ridiculous how inconsistent people are about fears over things that will kill them… only difference is that I found no need to explain the second part because it was beyond what I was talking about. We said the same exact thing only ive had to say it four or five times and use dozens of examples and still be treated like in downplaying something about the corona virus.
Also I completely disagree with the split from the vaccine thread and my comments to here. My comments was significantly more relative to how ridiculous the fear of vaccines are vs taking the corona virus serious.
It makes a difference because you kept saying that the dozen other things we’ve known about for decades are actually worse than the virus. They’re not. Deciding how seriously to take different threats first requires having some handle on how dangerous they actually are, and your estimate was off by a good factor of thousand when it comes to this virus. Given the amount of confusion out there about this outbreak, getting things right matters.
Correct, more or less. The lifetime risk of dying from smoking is higher than the risk from this virus. (On the other hand, the risk of dying in the next year is higher for the virus.) People do indeed react more strongly to new threats. The risk of dust or second-hand smoke is a lot lower, though.
Sure, people are irrational in lots of ways.
I pointed out that some of your statements were factually incorrect and corrected them. That is all I did.
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Unless you spell it out I’m afraid a quick read of what you wrote could be interpreted as equivocation that might lead some people to treat COVID-19 as casually as they do those other known dangers.
That would be rather silly on their part since everything I said was about how I think it’s stupid so many people don’t take other things serious and never mentioned once about taking anything not serious. I never said we are doing to much to prevent anything but pointed out I feel like we don’t do enough to prevent hardly anything.
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No, I’m pretty sure your statements are not over anyone’s heads.
Yes, sometimes people get riled up about things in a disproportionate way because they seem more acute. I can’t stop climate change right this minute, but I can go out to the grocery store and buy toilet paper (at least, I could a few weeks ago). COVID-19 is not like Y2K. Comparing the two is apples and oranges, and not really helpful if you’re aiming to look like you’re taking it seriously.
Also, as I implied above, sometimes poverty or living paycheck to paycheck makes it a lot harder for people to take action against more chronic and pervasive things. Your statement about how people just “haven’t bothered” to put money away for a catastrophe is pretty ignorant if you think it’s as simple as all that.
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I do think it’s a very simple concept that it’s ridiculous that grownups go years and years and years without putting even 5% of their income away for general emergency purposes and then get mad when they are told to not go to work to stop a virus being spread and then they go to work anyways against the law and get arrested and lose their business licenses and then instead of taking any fault of their own they say it’s the governments fault.
That’s what I wrote right?
Then what did I say about corona virus and y2k? Did I say I’m comparing them as events or that I’m showing how in several different events, and I mentioned a several, that you can see these waxes and wanes of fear in the general population over things such as a guy who never buys a mask while cutting wood and cement fiber and is breathing in dust all day everyday that has warning on them and then that same person who dismisses all of that gets into a fist fight over masks because he does not want tinted the corona virus?
Let’s be contextual and logical with exactly what I said and what it was about.
Yes I do feel it went over most people’s head because they are arguing points I never made and was never the focus.
I was bringing up how ridiculous it is for people to disregard their life and well being and the life and well being of others for the majority of their year and then when something pops up that’s all over they fixate on it and then move past it back into the same willful disregard.
Nothing I’ve said today had anything to do with taking the corona virus less serious. I pointed out how amusing it is that for the same amount of effort and for things we’ve known about for decades the people seem to ignore it.
It would be nice if all of life was so simple. But you can’t put away money you don’t have, and minor emergencies are pretty common for many people. Very few people in the world are in a financial position to weather a global crisis, and that’s not necessarily their fault.
I get that you’re lamenting how humans often focus more on the acute than the chronic, but that may be because it’s difficult to have the energy for both at once. Maybe this crisis will help highlight how we are capable of fighting things like climate change more aggressively, and encourage the average person to put more pressure on those in power to take it seriously. Or maybe we’ll be so burned out from taking COVID-19 seriously, as we should be, that climate change will take a back seat for a while, further highlighting how difficult it is to fight chronic problems.
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Actually … might it be true that nothing has done so much to help mitigate our bad contributions toward climate change as the coronavirus? Not saying we want it around for that reason. But it should give us all sober pause to reflect on how health for the planet means doom and woe on Wall Street; and alternately our social health (‘health’ on Wall Street) means doom and woe for our ecological future. Not exactly a great recipe for long-term prospects when we have such a dichotomous choice.
[Mother nature will always win in the end.]
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This horrible virus is just a prelude to the full ravages of climate change.