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0 pointsdavesque4y ago0 comments

Lol, really? A pandemic doesn't count?

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"The previous century" includes the Great Depression, WWII, the Cold War, a bunch of nuclear war close calls, and 9/11. Also if you include the whole 20th century, WWI and the Spanish Flu.

And those are just of the top of my head, I'm sure I've missed some.

Personally, I'm not sure this pandemic qualifies as "one of the most difficult"...

davesqueOP4y ago

It's almost as though you're responding to a different statement than the one that I made. What about what I said would have denied that any of those things you mentioned were not also terrible things that are among the worst things in the past century?

ModernMech4y ago

In terms of death toll for my family, more people died in the last year due to Covid than all of those events combined. So yeah, I would put Covid right up there at the top.

hn_throwaway_994y ago

I think the issue is that, as has been widely reported, the pandemic effects have been so vastly different from person to person.

I'll volunteer myself. I work for a tech company, stuff was hard for me originally when pretty much everything shut down (e.g. office, my gym, school where I took evening classes, etc.), but beyond that I don't have kids so I don't have to worry about home school, things actually opened up for the most part many months ago, I still have a good paying job, etc.

Compare that with someone that lost family to Covid, or who was working in the ICU throughout, or who was working in a grocery store and got sick, etc.

Yes, the pandemic has been a huge, gargantuan event, but I'm not about to pretend that my typing from home on my couch in my underwear is remotely comparable to a relative who had to worry about how to home school her kids while she worked in a hospital the past year.

foobarian4y ago

Perhaps that should say "this century" because the 21st century has got nothing on the 20th.

davesqueOP4y ago

Sorry, but I think I can objectively say that a year in which a global pandemic occurred that took millions of lives and completely upended normal life for the majority of people counts as one of the worst years since 1920. The fact that anyone would question that in this forum is, I think, extremely telling.

username904y ago

Are you just ignoring all the wars with more than a million casualties, all the famines with many millions of casualties etc, during the past 100 years? 2020 doesn't even make it to the top 10 possibly not even top 20. Maybe it was one of the worst for USA, but not if you take the world overall.

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FredPret4y ago

...knock on wood!!

sleepybrett4y ago

Compared to two world wars both of which lasting longer than a year and change?

Muromec4y ago

One could argue that being shut off from in-person interaction is not as big of a challenge, as escaping a genocide or being drafted into an army to fight $ideology on the other side of the globe.

Pandemic is sure bad, but not "half of all men in your country being killed in war" bad.

LocalH4y ago

One could also argue that the reduction of in-person interaction is in some ways worse, if not as heinous, because of the long term harm that it will cause.

evilduck4y ago

Does something really have to be equal to or greater than WWII in damage to qualify as a bad year or two? That's quite a high bar to set.

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Izkata4y ago

"The previous century" includes the Great Depression, WWII, the Cold War, a bunch of nuclear war close calls, and 9/11. Also if you include the whole 20th century, WWI and the Spanish Flu.

And those are just of the top of my head, I'm sure I've missed some.

Personally, I'm not sure this pandemic qualifies as "one of the most difficult"...

davesqueOP4y ago

ModernMech4y ago

In terms of death toll for my family, more people died in the last year due to Covid than all of those events combined. So yeah, I would put Covid right up there at the top.

hn_throwaway_994y ago

I think the issue is that, as has been widely reported, the pandemic effects have been so vastly different from person to person.

Compare that with someone that lost family to Covid, or who was working in the ICU throughout, or who was working in a grocery store and got sick, etc.

foobarian4y ago

Perhaps that should say "this century" because the 21st century has got nothing on the 20th.

davesqueOP4y ago

username904y ago

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FredPret4y ago

...knock on wood!!

sleepybrett4y ago

Compared to two world wars both of which lasting longer than a year and change?

Muromec4y ago

One could argue that being shut off from in-person interaction is not as big of a challenge, as escaping a genocide or being drafted into an army to fight $ideology on the other side of the globe.

Pandemic is sure bad, but not "half of all men in your country being killed in war" bad.

LocalH4y ago

One could also argue that the reduction of in-person interaction is in some ways worse, if not as heinous, because of the long term harm that it will cause.

evilduck4y ago

Does something really have to be equal to or greater than WWII in damage to qualify as a bad year or two? That's quite a high bar to set.

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