You do make a good point about the general behavior patterns of the vaccinated vs. the unvaccinated.
Even though the severity is lower with omicron, I’m all for some restrictions to get us through this insane frequency to lessen the burden on HCWs and the system. I’m going all-in a little longer for this “final?” wave.
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Long term, I think depends on how the virus mutates. Something we still don’t know much about.
Short term, I still think mask mandates, widespread closures, and vaccine mandates are doing little to keep our vulnerable people from eventually catching omicron.
I did say “and recovered”, which it sounds like your son had not done. Obviously someone is contagious while sick.
I wasn’t going to name names, but I was going to comment to Nick that the data around the vaccines suggest they almost uniformly (relative to their prior risk) reduce people’s risk for a time, NOT that they reduce everyone’s risk to a uniform level. Unvaccinated healthy children are at lower risk than most vaccinated (& boosted) adults. Elderly & people with certain conditions can still be at higher (relative) risks of severe outcomes even after vaccination (& boosters) than otherwise healthy vaccinated adults.
In some cases, what you term “personal choice of risk” has societal implications due to scarcity of resources. Depending on how the parameters stack up (vaccines safety/efficacy -both in transmission and impact on severity-, virus R0, resource availability) I can envision either enforcing a mandate or not. But I think a mandate is not inherently illegal, nor would it be immoral.
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Less impact on resources could be less spread and/or less severity of disease.
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That’s an ableist viewpoint. There are vaxxed and boosted people who aren’t as confident in that protection. Maybe you don’t care. Maybe you care but not enough to be inconvenienced. But don’t pretend that every vaccinated and boosted person is going to have one day of minimal symptoms and then be totally fine, because that is an absolute fallacy.
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Incorrect.
And you probably know this is incorrect.
And you don’t care.
Ass.
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I think nick is accepting the reality of where we are and wanting to move back to normal. I think we all want that. The debate is if we are there yet. We have vaccines and boosters, but we don’t have much else to hold out for to delay that return to normal.
There is also the question of what normal looks like and if it will ever again be like 2019. With omicron I think we can say we still probably have another year or two of putting on masks during surges and possibly other light mitigating measures, but those points between should be pretty normal.
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Example of effect of Omicron on health care system.
It won’t be 100%. Many large companies are going to continue with some form a hybrid of having folks “work from home” and “work in the office”.
Even if the desire of company officers is to go back to everyone working in the office, they’re going to face pressure from seeing their (best) talent going to other companies with a hybrid model.
I think fundamentally, people have never remotely agreed on how much we should sacrifice to stay alive.
This isn’t necessarily a selfish thing but a straight up disagreement on the tradeoff between longevity and quality-of-life.
And of course people are irrational on top of disagreeing. Putting uneven values on lives and changing their values as soon as death comes knocking. Or denying that death is even occurring. Or seeing it everywhere once it does occur.
If we did have some clear cut definition, then maybe we could say “well this mandate costs X and saves Y life-years under Alpha and Z life-years under Omicron, therefore we should…”. Then we would have some idea of when to return to normal, if ever. But we just don’t have any idea, and never have.
Obviously during a pandemic is a particularly dumb time to approach death with cold reason.
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IFYP; a subtle but important distinction, IMO.
I agree with the rest of your post, though.
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Eh, I don’t think it’s wrong as he wrote it. Implies society at large. Which includes others as well as yourself.
Certainly when you get behind the wheel of a car, if you’re by yourself at least, the person you are most likely to kill is you. But virtually all of us are unwilling to sacrifice the convenience of driving our cars for the small chance of avoiding our own death.
And even not wearing a mask… you are endangering others more than you are endangering yourself, but you are also increasing your own risk.
I’m also reading it from a perspective of having a loved one go through a voluntary termination of life process. I think the issues at hand creating all of the contention is more specific to what I suggested, not just “survival as a society”.
I chose those words because I think our way of thinking about our own lifespan is more rational than how we think about our family’s. It’s not clouded by selfishness, selflessness, love, or law. It’s closer to a true preference.
I also think (although this could be a big point of contention) that we want society (laws, taxes, mandates) to treat us how we’d treat ourselves.
So, while I might make unreasonable sacrifices for family, I don’t want society to make sacrifices that I wouldn’t make for myself.
(Arguably, though, we do conveniently shift the conversation between self and family depending on how we want to see Covid,)
This is all about the principle of it. No one is saying that masks are unbelievablely hard thing to do. It’s not like wearing 80lbs of protective armor and munitions, walking patrol in the MidEast in temperatures of 100 degrees. It’s an emotional thing, not a physical hardship.
So how is a mask mandate starkly different than a military draft? Whether you agree with the war objectives or not, whether you are worried you might get killed or maimed, or even if you’re just plain scared…either enter the draft or go to jail. Even religious exemptions are nasty rare - just ask Muhammad Ali.
So, if you believe mask mandates are an infringement of your basic rights, do you feel the same about draft dodgers? I’m trying to understand what principle we are talking bout.
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Not sure if this was a response to me? I do not think it is a basic right.
I do think it is a big thing to push onto millions of people, and it’s worth asking specifically how many lives are being saved and whether it’s worth it that cost, same as any other regulation or taxation.
There seems to be a fair amount of evidence that mask mandates reduce covid cases and subsequent hospitalizations and deaths. Medical grade masks are pretty cheap, I think I paid $8-10 for 50 of them.
For example…
I’m not sure that you should be using deaths alone as your metric. Getting to the point where you need a covid test or have to make a doctors visit to get treatment for your symptoms likely exceeds the cost of having to wear a mask in the first place.
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I agree that there’s big issues besides death, and it’s complicated by vaccination.
That said, the only person I know that wears a mask right now is my kid. And she needs to get tested all the time anyway. And will probably get covid anyway.
(Just noticed your study there-- it’s good, but pre-omicron)