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Comment by spyspy | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotally, my parents keep bringing up this narrative every time we talk on the phone. I've reminded them that while me and my fiance dutifully haven't left the house since last Sunday they've happily gone to the grocery store multiple times, attended a funeral, and had wine at their neighbor's house. They also refused to stop babysitting my niece and nephew until I called my brother and convinced him to stop dropping them off. But no, young people are the reckless ones.

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As a parent of a young man. I understand why your parents have these fears. They know what they are doing, but they don´t know what you are doing other than what you tell them. Even if they trust you, this is a deeper fear. You could start lecturing your parents about how dangerous this is, so they are convinced that you are taking it seriously.

As the parent of adult children currently living at home... one of ours keeps going out to be with friends. I understand she needs to get out of the house sometimes, but it's unnerving, knowing the points of contact (she often goes to her boyfriend's house, with his five currently-unemployed roommates).

Then again, she works in a children's health clinic. I know what vector is probably going to bring COVID into our house.

It'd be interesting to understand what evolutionary pressures the combined behaviors of population have on COVID-19.

Distancing arguably should create evolutionary pressure towards a weaker, asymptomatic, more contagious virus. And reckless behavior in the segments of population unaffected by the virus may put evolutionary pressure to make it a stronger, but not as contagious virus.

(an uninformed opinion of a software engineer / researcher)...

> Distancing arguably should create evolutionary pressure towards a weaker, asymptomatic, more contagious virus

This doesn't make sense to me. Distancing reduces number of cases and chances to spread infections, reducing chances for successful mutations.

It seems that instead of having multiple strains you will end up with most resilient strain in the end. But that's probably better as you have to fight a single strain then.

I would really hope that someone working in a health clinic would be more careful than that. Going over to other people's houses is exactly what people are not supposed to be doing.

From my observations, the people who are most flippant about this seem to be boomers and young adults 20-25. I still see groups of young adults on the sidewalks, clearly not roommates, even though our state is in lockdown, and we're right next to a state that's starting to overwhelm their hospitals because of this kind of behavior.

A healthcare worker I talked to had the opinion that she's getting exposed at work anyway so why not do what she wants outside of work.

shame that this healthcare worker apparently doesn't care for the other people she exposes. Perhaps the wrong profession?

You're at really high risk in that living situation.

Does she not have another place she can stay? I'm assuming she is aware of the risk to you?

Never met you before, but as a fellow human being that situation sounds very high risk for you.

I'm very glad that none of my dad's five kids boomeranged right now. I had to cancel visiting him. Terrible situation.

She's back at home temporarily (broke up with a boyfriend that left her in a bad financial situation, moved back home to recuperate). She was planning to move out this summer and move in with friends who were buying a house, but buying a house may not be viable for them now due to a job at risk.

Someone once gave me a definition of family... "If you have to go there, they have to let you in".

On the flip side, I think we're all going to get exposed sooner or later, over the course of the next year or so. I'll just get exposed sooner than ideal.

On the plus side, she may be moving entirely to work from home in the near future, as they'll be closing inpatient services at her clinic. On the minus side, her brother just got a job at a grocery store after losing his retail job at the mall (mall closed), so now he's probably an even worse vector than she is.

Lecturing is a good idea, even more so if you rarely lecture your parents back, which I assume a lot of children don't. This is something I did to my parents and it changed the way they are approaching this pandemic. Social distancing is happening here now and they have respected my thoughts and ideas since they're scared and trust the information I'm supplying them is valuable.

Another anecdote to put on the pile:

I spoke with my mother recently and we were lamenting how people were completely ignoring the "JUST STAY HOME" guidance. As the call was ending she mentioned how she was about to have her sisters and friends over for wine the next day. To which I replied that she was doing exactly what she was lamenting others doing.

I think most people just assume they are the exception and can be trusted to do this correctly, when in fact the guidance is the way it is explicitly because that is not the case.

Maybe they care more about your life than their own.

I've been hearing "I rather die from Coronavirus than live my life in fear of it" from some at risk people who don't wish to isolate. Which I suppose is their decision. They'll unfortunately change their tack pretty fast when it becomes hard to breathe.

Unfortunately once infected, that risk-taker will infect others and accelerate disease growth rate.

Infecting others who have no option to completely isolate or are just plain unlucky. Some of which will have possibly life-long lung damage. And some will die who would have otherwise survived.

Responsible people isolate, because they don't want to harm or worse, kill others.

It's not about living in fear. We're not quarantined because of fear. We're quarantined because of knowledge - we know how contagious this is, we know what the hospitalization rates are, we know our medical resources will be quickly depleted and we know how to slow the spread until we're better able to respond. The question we need to ask ourselves is why weren't we prepared?

The fear is of the unknown chance that it will be serious for you or someone close to you. I think everyone is resigned to the fact that they'll get it eventually.

Personally, I'm more in fear of having some non-coronavirus related emergency and not being to get good healthcare.

Don't meet anecdotal evidence with anecdotal evidence.

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