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Pollution causing more deaths than Covid, action needed, U.N. expert says

reuters.com

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Re: Pollution causing more deaths than Covid, action needed, U.N. expert says

#91

Post by gjulianm »

gyulai wrote: post #77
gjulianm wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure how many man-years would have been lost if nobody had done anything regarding COVID.

We will never know since we can't measure the magnitude of an outcome that never happened. Adverse effects from fearmongering, however, did happen.

But we know what happened even with actions taken. In my city all hospitals were saturated, there were so many dead people that the army had to help and move corpses to an old ice rink. And that was stopped only by a full lockdown. I don't need to measure the exact magnitude to know that without taking any measures, it would have been terrible.

Re: Pollution causing more deaths than Covid, action needed, U.N. expert says

#92

Post by gyulai »

palae wrote: post #83
gyulai wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't think we should call the "environmental crisis" a "crisis". For example, smoking probably causes more deaths than Covid. So, while it may be perfectly true that things like smoking and pollution are bigger public health issues than Covid, we never spoke of a "smoking crisis", and justifiably so. The thing that makes a crisis into a crisis is that it's highly discrete in time and there is a temporally v…

> The thing that makes a crisis into a crisis is that it's highly discrete in time and there is a temporally very limited window of opportunity to take action. That is your definition, but not necessarily the one meant by others. From Merriam-Webster ( https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/crisis ): "Essential Meaning of crisis : a difficult or dangerous situation that needs serious attention" [...] Definition 3…

My point exactly. The dictionary editors must have noticed that "environmental crisis" entered into common parlance, and didn't fit the pre-existing definitions of "crisis", so they had to invent a new definition to be able to cover it.

Besides: The definition is a really bad one, as it's circular.

Re: Pollution causing more deaths than Covid, action needed, U.N. expert says

#93

Post by MattRix »

gyulai wrote: post #55
Synaesthesia wrote: post #8

Wow 9 million a year die prematurely. The environmental crisis is manifold: we have the destruction of species and habitats, the global warming problem, and now also just trash - overuse of plastics is a huge problem, air pollution is pretty terrible.

I really don't think we should call the "environmental crisis" a "crisis". For example, smoking probably causes more deaths than Covid. So, while it may be perfectly true that things like smoking and pollution are bigger public health issues than Covid, we never spoke of a "smoking crisis", and justifiably so. The thing that makes a crisis into a crisis is that it's highly discrete in time and there is a temporally v…

It was discrete in time and there was a limited window of time to take action. We’re already too. It’s also going to affect humanity in ways much stronger than any amount of smoking ever could.

Re: Pollution causing more deaths than Covid, action needed, U.N. expert says

#94

Post by tonyedgecombe »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #35
severino wrote: post #10

Maybe we can keep using masks? Now that we already got used to them, we may reduce the effects of pollution with good filtering masks. Of course this doesn't mean we shouldn't address what's causing the pollution in the first place.

This is really the reason why masks were common in Asia. Except Japan. But their pollution is a lot higher than ours. Pollution here in Barcelona is not high enough that I'd consider wearing a mask for it. And the upcoming bans of old diesels and two stroke scooters will make things even better. I'll never get used to masks anyway. They'll always be an extreme annoyance. I wear them because it's mandatory and I agree…

>Especially outside.

Who wears masks outside? That's never been required in the UK.

Re: Pollution causing more deaths than Covid, action needed, U.N. expert says

#95

Post by Robin_Message »

tebbers wrote: post #88
gfd wrote: post #80

Given the virality and case fatality rate we knew at the time, we were on track to lose hundreds of millions of lives from covid back then (assuming no vaccines and hospital infrastructure collapse). Even with those worst case scenarios, there was still significant pushback to taking immediate global actions. And this is no where near the same scale of a threat.

We were nowhere close to losing hundreds of millions of lives to Covid. So much exaggeration.

CFR was something like 1% early on, and higher in Wuhan where there was a partial collapse of health systems. World population is >7 billion, so 1% gets you 70 millions deaths.

If hospitals collapsed and treatments hadn't been found, a not inconceivable 2-3% fatality rate would get us to "hundreds of millions".

(This estimate is unrealistic in other ways though, e.g. communities would begin imposing their own and hoc lockdowns if hospitals were overwhelmed, and global spread might have been slowed.)

Re: Pollution causing more deaths than Covid, action needed, U.N. expert says

#97

Post by palae »

gyulai wrote: post #92
palae wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing that makes a crisis into a crisis is that it's highly discrete in time and there is a temporally very limited window of opportunity to take action. That is your definition, but not necessarily the one meant by others. From Merriam-Webster ( https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/crisis ): "Essential Meaning of crisis : a difficult or dangerous situation that needs serious attention" [...] Definition 3…

My point exactly. The dictionary editors must have noticed that "environmental crisis" entered into common parlance, and didn't fit the pre-existing definitions of "crisis", so they had to invent a new definition to be able to cover it. Besides: The definition is a really bad one, as it's circular.

What about the "essential meaning"? It's non-circular and (to me) fitting.

Re: Pollution causing more deaths than Covid, action needed, U.N. expert says

#98

Post by oneoff786 »

Robin_Message wrote: post #95
tebbers wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We were nowhere close to losing hundreds of millions of lives to Covid. So much exaggeration.

CFR was something like 1% early on, and higher in Wuhan where there was a partial collapse of health systems. World population is >7 billion, so 1% gets you 70 millions deaths. If hospitals collapsed and treatments hadn't been found, a not inconceivable 2-3% fatality rate would get us to "hundreds of millions". (This estimate is unrealistic in other ways though, e.g. communities would begin imposing their own and hoc…

No it wasn’t. The samples just weren’t random samples.

Re: Pollution causing more deaths than Covid, action needed, U.N. expert says

#99

Post by MattRix »

rosndo wrote: post #56
gyulai wrote: post #34

We're not even squarely on the other side of Covid yet, and I'm already sick and tired of the "worse than Covid" trope.

It’s a very reasonable comparison though. Billions of man-years have been ruined by the COVID fearmongers. It’s perfectly reasonable the much scarier stuff we aren’t panicking about.

This logic is so clearly flawed. It’s much too easy to say we overreacted to Covid while pointing at death numbers that are much lower precisely because of the “fearmongering” measures that were taken. I’ve seen anti-vaxxers and freedom convoy members make this mistake quite often recently.

Re: Pollution causing more deaths than Covid, action needed, U.N. expert says

#100

Post by rosndo »

MattRix wrote: post #99
rosndo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a very reasonable comparison though. Billions of man-years have been ruined by the COVID fearmongers. It’s perfectly reasonable the much scarier stuff we aren’t panicking about.

This logic is so clearly flawed. It’s much too easy to say we overreacted to Covid while pointing at death numbers that are much lower precisely because of the “fearmongering” measures that were taken. I’ve seen anti-vaxxers and freedom convoy members make this mistake quite often recently.

>This logic is so clearly flawed.

I think you are imagining an argument that nobody here is making.

> I’ve seen anti-vaxxers and freedom convoy members make this mistake quite often recently.

Ah, yep.

What possible good could come out of you bringing up these groups? Why would you bring up discredited extremist points of view in this conversation?

Are you trying to attack my character by implying that I might be associated with those idiots?

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