Comment by beardbound | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beardbound | Hacker News Reader

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I completely agree. I'm single and have worked from home for years, minus a brief contracting gig in an office a few years ago. I made sure to make time for seeing people though. I have friends in my neighborhood and we would meet up for lunch or tea during the week and I would always go out on the weekends. With social distancing it's been really challenging.

I'm fortunate that I have friends that are also careful that live close to me that I can still see. It's not as safe as completely isolating, but I also weighed the risk of completely isolating myself from everyone and I decided that I had to be okay with a certain amount of risk of infection. People don't really talk about the death toll of mental health problems, but it's substantive in certain demographics. I keep telling my friends that you can't eliminate risk, just mitigate it to an amount that you're comfortable with, and that amount is different for everyone.

Complete isolation is not a sustainable plan. I've been looking at what my lifestyle is going to be like until we start getting this under control, which doesn't look like it's coming in the short to medium term.

I'm not telling you to completely isolate, but this is wrong:

> I keep telling my friends that you can't eliminate risk, just mitigate it to an amount that you're comfortable with, and that amount is different for everyone

This is a pandemic, any risks you consciously take are risks you're forcing the people around you to take too.

No single person can set the amount of risks he wants to take, it has to be decided globally.

>No single person can set the amount of risks he wants to take, it has to be decided globally.

This is preposterous. Each individual must evaluate their own risk tolerance.

If you're waiting on the world to decide something for you, you're playing life as a waiting game.

Please don't shame people for having a different risk tolerance than you.

The reason he's confused is that he's thinking of isolation in terms of its impact on community transmission rate. That should definitely be part of your personal calculations (evaluating your personal risk without concern for any risk you create for others is sociopathic, if common).

But the truth is that even the most basic measures of isolation would suffice to properly mitigate the community risk if the community would broadly take them, and the most severe personal isolation on my part will not protect the community in any meaningful way if they don't.

Wearing a mask when it's appropriate and avoiding crowded/unsafe spaces is really all we owe our community. Anything further you do should be based on your personal evaluation of risks - I'm more isolated because we have high-risk relatives that we see regularly.

Edit: It's worth noting that this position is specific to the pandemic in question - it's totally plausible that we will get another pandemic later that requires us all to take more stringent isolation measures. And the evidence suggests that we will probably all die.

You don't think that in the next one, people will be more willing to believe that all the freezer trucks full of bodies in the streets actually exist, and that the nurses and doctors all over the world saying "this is really bad" aren't crisis actors? Because I'm inclined to agree we're screwed.

I don't know about this argument in general: it seems about the same as saying we shouldn't criticize people for drinking and driving because they should decide their own risk tolerance. Sure they're deciding the risk to themselves, but they don't necessarily get to unilaterally decide their tolerance to risking others without criticism.

That's a solid metaphor but it ignores that there's a considerable downside to self isolating. No one has major mental health issues because they can't drink drive. If someone proved medically that they had to drink drive or feel suicidal I'd have a hell of a lot more sympathy for them risking it.

There are other risks around mental health, so you have to balance them. I’m a single person who is an extrovert and I get depressed when I’m not around people — to the point it’s hard to function.

The balance is different for each person. Being intentional about the people we share space with goes a long way; nobody I know is going to concerts or crowded bars which makes contact tracing a lot easier.

> No single person can set the amount of risks he wants to take, it has to be decided globally.

globally is a bit of a stretch, but people already do this on a local level. this is what is happening when the government imposes/relaxes restrictions on the number of people that can be at an indoor gathering, the types of businesses that are allowed to be open, whether restaurants can offer indoor seating, etc. as long as the person isn't exceeding the limits set by their democratically elected government, shouldn't they be free to set their own risk tolerance?

The fact that you're being downvoted shows how American HN is. You're plainly correct, and anyone who isn't indoctrinated in the Cult of Individualism knows it. The nations that have performed the best this year have been the more collectivist ones.

Which nations have performed the best? And by what metrics?

Vietnam, South Korea, New Zealand and probably some others I am forgetting. By the obvious metrics - fewer deaths, fewer cases, smaller impact on economy.

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