An interesting implication of all this is that the authoritarian measures used to manage the pandemic are effectively a subsidy. Those who are young or healthy or have a nutritionally balanced diet are taking on pains (lockdowns, mandates) to create a lower risk situation for everyone else. Personally I feel it is better for governments to provide education and strong guidance, but to ultimately favor individual choice and stay away from top down measures. With COVID, those who are young have incredibly low IFR to begin with, and they could have gone about their lives and built up antibodies naturally, which would then make it safer for everyone else anyways.
The main point of restrictions was to reduce case numbers coming into hospitals and overwhelming them, since COVID patients who do get hospitalized tend to stay there a long time.
If you are a young person who gets into a car crash and you need immediate treatment in the ER, an overwhelmed hospital might either mean sending an injured person into a place crowded with COVID patients, or scrambling to find a hospital that has room. Even now there are still US hospitals turning away ambulances due to lack of capacity.
> and they could have gone about their lives and built up antibodies naturally, which would then make it safer for everyone else anyways.
“Built up antibodies naturally” is a coy way of saying kill the maximum number of people possible before reaching herd immunity.
Given the rapid pace of vaccine development, strict measures to slow the spread of the virus seemed reasonable. Some countries, like New Zealand and Taiwan, will largely escape the pandemic unscathed.
> “Built up antibodies naturally” is a coy way of saying kill the maximum number of people possible before reaching herd immunity.
This is absurd in the extreme. The proposition was that those that are the least impacted by covid--specifically, those like me who are healthy, young, getting adequate sunlight--should not have to bear the responsibility for those who are vulnerable.
Covid risk for people like me, and us healthy folk are a great large chunk of the population, is less than a typical flu.
Since we don't have as extreme policy responses to the flu, do you characterize that as well as "kill the maximum number of people possible"?
And saying that New Zealand came through unscathed I guess just shows how differently we think. The society has come to accept being forced into isolation, accept quarantines and curfews like their unruly teenagers, accept all manner of tyranny--to you, they're unscathed because they have fewer covid-related deaths. To me, covid-related deaths--which are dwarfed still in the USA by heart disease and cancer and other ailments, don't even rise to the level of general concern.
Then again, I live in Montana. Everyone doesn't care. Only on the internet and talking to Canadian or coastal friends does it come up. Around here, you say covid, and a lot of folks probably think it's a migratory bird--then again, hunting season just opened up.
And with all us ignoring this crazy pandemic, you know what? The world's not ending. No vaccine mandates. No mask mandates. Everyone's "unscathed".
> Covid risk for people like me, and us healthy folk are a great large chunk of the population, is less than a typical flu.
Is it? There sure seem to be a lot of long-term side-effects with covid that people do not get from the “flu” (and IMO most people say they had the “flu” when really what they had was a cold.)
> Everyone’s “unscathed”
JFC. 17 covid deaths a day this week, and everyone is “unscathed”? What a terrible and false claim to have made.
I won’t dwell on the thousands—likely tens of thousands, based on the state’s cases—of your fellow citizens who didn’t die, they’re just permanently disabled. “Unscathed.” Wow.
> This is absurd in the extreme. The proposition was that those that are the least impacted by covid--specifically, those like me who are healthy, young, getting adequate sunlight--should not have to bear the responsibility for those who are vulnerable.
We have radically different values.
Of course the strongest and most able in society have to bear the majority of the burdens. That simply seems morally obvious. The rich should pay more taxes than the poor. The young and healthy fight in the military and not the old and infirm. Adult children will make personal sacrifices to save their elderly parents. What about asking the healthy to make sacrifices to protect the weak is unjust?
A world view of “let the weak fend for themselves for the strong should take what they want” is utterly repugnant.
How are kids bearing responsibility? It seems to me kids are doing fine with social distancing, mask wearing and all. Parents complain about their kids masking up more than the kids do.
But the ultimate way kids are being forced to bear responsibility is their parents dying from covid and leaving them as orphans.
> Some countries, like New Zealand and Taiwan, will largely escape the pandemic unscathed
You've been lied to. It's an endemic disease which 100% of the population will eventually get. It's just that with vaccines a lot fewer older people will die, and a lot fewer middle aged people will experience health issues for an extended period of time. Before vaccines came to market, I could understand what they're doing, but now it doesn't make any sense: they're just postponing the inevitable - the only way out is through. They should vaccinate as many people as they can and remove all restrictions.
This was an observation amongst the vast sea of observations for over a year and a half. It still needed to be studied.
A year and a half ago, and partly even now, the kneejerk response has been "ah, it must be because people with low Vitamin D are doing other inactive things with poor diets and low sunlight" as opposed to something closer to "Vitamin D supplements are a cheap existing solution for a reason we still don't know yet"
Or it could be because the grandparent post contains the common non-sequitur about "individual choice". That rhetoric is pointless in a discussion about public health and ruins a perfectly good comment. An infectious disease does not care what your individual choice is.
It's obviously not a non sequitur, it's the essential tradeoff we're making. We could weld every person into their home for the next month and eliminate Covid, but we don't do that because we're trading off public health maximalism vs individual freedoms. The entire point of the political process is to decide where that line is.
An infectious disease doesn't care about any of that, it doesn't care what your political process is or where you draw the line. It's not a trade off of public health maximalism vs individual freedoms, it never is that simple. Every decision you make there trades someone else's individual freedom by increasing their risk of contracting the disease. Please let's stop dancing around that and trying to play politics here.
The only fool proof solution that exists is to totally quarantine people, but the grandparent post already took that off the table, so even if we wanted to have that discussion there is simply nowhere left for it to go. See what I mean here? This rhetoric doesn't do anything besides shut down the conversation.
No I am not, please stop this. You're jumping to the other extreme and that's exactly why I think that type of rhetoric is not helpful. If you have something nuanced you'd like to say then I'd love to hear it.
Personally if I was somewhere where there was an HIV outbreak, and we didn't have adequate resources to test and protect against it, then I would say that abstaining from promiscuous sex and promoting that as a public health measure would be a perfectly reasonable thing to do. That would actually probably help the situation in areas of the world where the ongoing HIV epidemic is particularly bad, which by the way is still a real thing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24912172
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23119949
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23023703
Another comorbidity is obesity, which can also cause Vitamin D deficiency.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26924786
An interesting implication of all this is that the authoritarian measures used to manage the pandemic are effectively a subsidy. Those who are young or healthy or have a nutritionally balanced diet are taking on pains (lockdowns, mandates) to create a lower risk situation for everyone else. Personally I feel it is better for governments to provide education and strong guidance, but to ultimately favor individual choice and stay away from top down measures. With COVID, those who are young have incredibly low IFR to begin with, and they could have gone about their lives and built up antibodies naturally, which would then make it safer for everyone else anyways.