Quote:
Originally Posted by Mecca
I completely listen to that argument, but his thing is "people are dying!" that's overblown.
|
I recently read a book called
Factfulness that tries to point out all of the weird (wrong) perceptions we have about how awful the world is. One of the concepts the author puts out there is that we should always be skeptical of "lonely numbers" - numbers that sound really bad, but we don't have any context for.
This is definitely a time for that. While
2,814 deaths from Coronavirus sounds bad,
the flu kills between 291,000 and 646,000 each year, so we're nowhere near that level for now. It's just a question of how long it'll keep growing as fast as it is now.
The book also points out another common issue - people always assume that things will keep growing linearly. At some point, the spreading will taper off either due to human intervention or just because most of the vulnerable people have already been infected. It's just a matter of how long it takes us to get to that point.