1. HN is not "an informed audience", it's literally the public. And it's common for software developers to mistake themselves for domain experts on any domain but they aren't.
2. It's not an informed audience if misinformation is not challenged, it's a misinformed audience.
3. The flu is a bad parallel. The flu, while annually killing lots of people, does not overwhelm hospitals like a novel virus does. At best it makes people think this is like swine flu, while it has quickly shown to be nothing like swine flu.
Regarding 3, upper estimates for the 2009 swine flu are north of 500k deaths and the 1918 Spanish flu is 50 million.
Flus can be very deadly and the poster obviously did not intend to use the word in a diminutive way. You added that interpretation, knowing it is wrong, and then challenged it.
The whole post was playing down the effects of the current pandemic on society. The whole conclusion was that "a flu won't cause [society to break down]".
So yes, the poster was using flu in a diminutive sense. And yes, flu is deadly and a lot worse than a lot of people (who've probably never had flu) realise. But even given that, even recent novel flu strains haven't stressed and shut down the global economy like this pandemic has.
>The whole conclusion was that "a flu won't cause [society to break down]"
This does not minimize the harm a flu can do, it puts it in perspective. Nuclear bombs going off over LA, London, New York, and Beijing probably would not cause society to break down. That does not mean that does not mean that it wouldn't be terrible, deadly, and disruptive.
When planning for how to prepare and deal with this pandemic, people should not be preparing for some Mad-Max scenario where an assault rifle is their most valuable possession.
While the death toll remains smaller, at this point the global consequences of this pandemic are worse than LA, London, New York and Beijing getting glassed (assuming this hypothetical scenario was some kind of a terror attack, and not the first strike in WWIII).
To respond to "Clayton" in this thread, we did not have much of an option for reacting to the virus once it got to our land. Legally, the federal government cannot shut down the country and order lockdowns, only cities and states can do that. We could have taken the need for testing and equipment preparation more seriously, but we didn't.
In the absence of data around who is sick, who is not, and who is immune, there is no way to slow the spread of the virus during an outbreak except to keep everyone away from everyone else.
This is juxtaposition, a form of literary style. He is sarcastically downplaying the _flu_ in comparison to the world wars because the _flu_ is already significantly lesser than the holocaust or an atomic bomb landing in Japan.
