For the Covid-19 false-equivalency crowd.
[Image ID: A screenshot of an interaction on Facebook. The original poster stated: “Cancer and heart disease EACH killed more people in the US last year than Covid.”
There are two responses to the post. The first says “Yea, but it’s not other peoples’ fault if I get heart disease or cancer. Its on me. Covid is spreadable.”
The second response says “Heart disease is a blanket term for a cluster of approximately 30 deadly illnesses. Cancer is a blanket term for a cluster of over 100 separate diseases. Another common comparison is Flu, which is a blanket term for about 60 different illnesses.
Covid-19 is one disease. No single strain of Flu, no single type of heart disease, and no individual cancer come close to the casualty rate of Covid.
The sort of comparison you’re making is called an ecological fallacy. Which means you’re comparing statistics across two very different and incompatible levels of analysis. A comparable would be if I said “Wow, New York has a lot of people.” And you replied “Actually, Asia has a lot more people than New York.” Technically true, but you’re comparing city to continent which is fucking dumb. Same thing if you compare 1 disease to a group of 100.
But that’s the thing. Covid is so fucking bad that people who don’t realize this have a natural compulsion to compare it to something like cancer. That’s how many people it’s killing, that it’s in the same ballpark as as all 100+ cancers or all 30+ heart diseases COMBINED.”
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