For the record - Statistics grow more grim.

[Igel]

15. Well, yes.

Except one was intentional done out of spite, taking aim at an identity.

More people die in crashes on Texas highways every year than die on 9/11.

Ascribing agency to the attackers is fairly easy since they had some pretty clear motives and took actions that directly lead to the deaths. The other, not so much. Most of the "agency" in the case of COVID is both ascribed based on assumptions that we make and depends on ignoring everything outside our bubble. It's little different from the blaming of Chinese immigrants in the San Francisco plague in the early 1900s--"we" hated people, there's some connection to be found between "them" and bad things (ignoring everything else), there's fear, and so there's obvious blame and intent. Think of it as a human thing; and if you know it's a human proclivity and not just something "those people" do, and identify as human (not all of us do), it's on the checklist of things to consider looking for in one's own behavior.

This can be more or less extreme. Look at the folk who so disliked Bush II that they insisted LIHOP. Or, worse, accused Bush II &c of a cover up and going through the WTC buildings, drilling holes and planting explosives. Or thermite. Some go to extremes, some just fail to notice. Many are in the middle, as in any reasonably Gaussian distribution.


As for the annual Great Texas Road Kill, I await the national day of remembrance, the memorial, and the curbing of traffic until we're sure there's no more risk. Or the assumption that those doing the killing are especially out to kill. Because otherwise it's worse than 9/11 (yawn), like many other things that we don't give much of a hoot about.


Notice that we also haven't met the annual flu deaths yet. Not by a wide, wide margin. https://www.health.com/condition/cold-flu-sinus/how-many-people-die-of-the-flu-every-year is as good as any; early results for the first few months had it at at least 12k.

The official toll of the 2019-2020 influenza season won't be known for months—not that anyone is really fretting about that right now. Worries over the novel coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, have eclipsed many people's concerns about coming down with a case of the flu.

Not that you ought to take influenza lightly. Flu season in the US, which runs from October through May, claims tens of thousands of lives every year. This season CDC estimates that, as of mid-March, between 29,000 and 59,000 have died due to influenza illnesses. Add to that the misery of hundreds of thousands of flu-related hospitalizations and millions of medical visits for flu symptoms this season.

So 29k to 59k. Currently worldometer has deaths in the US at 3,573. We're at 1/8 of flu season. At best.