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Comment by jennyyang | Hacker News Reader

If 85%+ of the people are getting infected with mild or no symptoms, and those most susceptible to death are quarantined (those over 60 years old), then you have a best case scenario where the death rate is around 0.5%. What we need right now is a test to determine who that sub-10% are below the age of 60 that will get severe symptoms or worse, and isolate them as well.

We have no idea how successful a vaccine will be. If it's 50% successful, that means that people will be getting Covid-19 regardless, so it seems we might as well front load the infections now.

In addition, recently they found a new variant of SARS-CoV-2 with a mutation in the spike protein. If the spike protein mutates enough such that the vaccine no longer works, then we really have no choice but to reach herd immunity.

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0.5% is not a low death rate at all. For Sweden (total population ~10M, assuming just 60% of all people infected are enough for herd immunity) that would mean thirty thousand fatalities in the group of people who are least affected by it. That's not even taking the harm of long term complications into account.

I really do not understand how people can possibly justify such a course of action but obviously they do.

I just hope it is because they haven't properly thought it through - and not because of a disregard for human life.

A 1/200 chance of dying in a free and open society, meeting like-minded friends in the pub, the restaurant. Or two years (if you're lucky) masked, being barked at by Covid wardens, locked down at home for a month in three. If I had the choice I know which I'd take. That's rather the point, the lockdown advocates will not give me that choice.

> That's rather the point, the lockdown advocates will not give me that choice.

That's because it's not a choice you can make just for yourself in isolation without affecting others.

Unlike, say, not wearing a seatbelt in a single passenger vehicle, where its only your own life at stake, if you choose to take risks with an infectious disease, you're also making a choice to endanger others--the emergency services and healthcare workers who have to care for you, the people you come into contact with while you're asymptomatic, etc.

So, by your making that choice, you are also choosing to increase the risks of those around you.

There's a famous quote: Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.

Alas, it seems like some people care more about their personal freedom to swing their fists than they do about the welfare of their fellow citizens...

It seems to me that it is the maskers who interfere with the noses of others, and quote Mill while they do it.

This is true!

The question is: what's the consequence of those two violations of individual liberty?

In one case, it's the inconvenience of your having to put a cloth covering over your face in some circumstances, or being curtailed from having a beer in a public place.

In the other, it's the possibility of my death or disability resulting from your actions.

This bears a resemblance to many many other trade-offs we make between individual freedoms. For example, while curtailing your individual liberty, you are punished for driving drunk, firing a gun into the air, or defecating in public places, due to those actions endangering the health and safety of others.

Yet, for some reason, masks and lockdown orders are the hill folks are choosing to die on (in some cases quite literally).

But, I have to admit that in a world that appears hopelessly infected by American-style hyper-individualism, at a time when it seems we're more distant and disconnected from one another than ever before, and yet paradoxically pushed apart by greater and greater extremes of partisanship and tribalism, while sad and disappointed, I'm not terribly surprised that some prioritize their own convenience over the safety of strangers.

Well, until they're on a ventilator facing their own mortality. That does seem to turn folks around on the whole thing...

Please let's keep this civil, "die on a hill", "infected by American-style hyper-individualism", "on a ventilator". I'd hope to have a conversation here, to exchange views, to increase understanding.

The idea that you masking me is reasonable is predicated on its triviality, "it's only a cloth" right? But it is you that decides that it is trivial, I have no say in that. If I were to demand that you wear a pork chop on your head, equally trivial, would you? No, you must insist that there is some scientific basis that you masking me protects your health, but those numbers are thin on the ground. Some high profile scientist believe that this is the case, some do not, so it is your adherence to this particular group of pro-mask scientists which justifies your (self admitted) denial of my liberty. I adhere to the other group of scientists. (Masks don't work, the second wave in a masked Europe demonstrates that, but that is besides the point, mine is a reasonable belief, as is yours.)

So your beliefs lead you to think you can take my liberty, and to trivialise that. My beliefs say you will not. We call this situation bullying, and this is the reason why the unmasked push back against the maskers, simply because that is the only way to treat bullies: when they instruct you to draw a cock on your own forehead, to do so it to invite more of the same ("it's only a cock, don't be such a baby", sound familiar?).

> Please let's keep this civil

Frankly, no.

I refuse to answer incivility with civility. That way lies the paradox of tolerance.

And make no mistake, your choosing to prioritize your convenience over my safety is fundamentally uncivil.

> Some high profile scientist believe that this is the case, some do not,

The data on this is clear:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02801-8

Go ahead, pull the other one.

> Frankly, no.

To be honest, this is not a surprise.

lols

As soon as a behaviour endangers others, the choice is no longer solely that of one person.

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