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If we wouldn’t get daily updates from the news about how many people are dying daily would we notice the pandemic with our own eyes
eyes prob not, but we’d hear of enough ppl that wed suspect something is up
Not nearly as much.
We noticed Ebola in 2014 with two deaths total.
My family in Lakewood says there is no need for updates from the goyishe press or radio, let alone the treife internet. Whatever we need to know, HKBH will make sure we find out.
I would like to here also more about people who were sent home from hospital and were taken off the ventilator.
If one considers that 1% of the population dies every year (in the US, that means roughly three million, in New York City, about 70,000 per year), if the press covered each and every death as they did Coronavirus deaths, it would clearly cause panic. In historic plagues (e.g. “Black death” or “Smallpox” in a place that never had it before), the death rate would be much higher (for example, in a typical Boro Park apartment building, at least one or two people would die daily, and after a few months, the building be largely empty) – but that isn’t happening (even if the mass media prefer to look at the current virus in apocalyptic terms).
Halacha actually gives us a definition of דבר בעיר. People have been quoting various sources about what to do in a time of דבר, but they ignore the definition. According to the halacha, דבר exists when on three consecutive days the death rate exceeds one death per 500 working-age men. So if we assume 1/4 of the population consists of men of working age, that would be one death per 2,000 people, or 50 per 100,000, each day.
Of course the current epidemic has not come anywhere near that. Which means the halachos of דבר do not apply, and through Hashem’s mercy what we are experiencing, however bad it is, is nothing like what our ancestors used to experience routinely every 15-20 years if not more often. May we never see such times, and may our current suffering be enough to atone for all our sins and to achieve whatever it is supposed to.
Rava- i agree that many people totally don’t get it. If you dont live in areas with frequent levayas it is not as blatant. On the other hand, although my community has been fortunate in regard to it’s residents, the shiva notices regarding their loses has been overwhelming. And as a hatzalah dispatcher I have found this epidemic to be the cause of many sleepless nights.
The photos this week of the bodies of those who were niftar from the virus piled into rented box trucks on Brooklyn streets outside funeral homes should help get the message across to those who might be skeptical or who are fortunate to not know anyone struck with the mageafah.
If not, probably nothing will help communicate the scope of this tragedy.Rava, nowhere that I have seen does it say that women, children, and the elderly don’t count for the numerator in this deadly equation. It says they don’t count for the denominator. That’s why I wrote that if we assume working-age men are 1/4 of the population then the threshold for a plague is a daily death rate of approximately 1/2,000, or 50/100,000. But those deaths can be those of women, children, and elderly men.
Dear Rava,
If we would be in a nursing home we could be seeing it a lot.
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