Hacker News Reader

The problem is that you don’t know what someone else’s needs are. Wearing a mask doesn’t protect you, it protects the people around you.

You choosing not to wear one puts everyone else at risk, even if they’re wearing one. And if someone is a caretaker/family of a person with elevated risk, they still have to go outside sometimes (groceries, pharmacy, etc). If you’re a carrier of covid and are unaware of it, and you choose not to wear a mask, that person is helpless to your spit droplets that you’re spraying everywhere.

Sapping joy from the world and the prosperity of future generations in the name of a year or two of extra life is wrong. That is basically what we’re talking about here. If all the old-but-independent had food dropped off at their doorstep for two months while the rest of us just let ourselves get sick, this thing would have been over very quickly with not that many deaths.

Instead, young healthy people are hysterical and irrationally think they are going to die from this.

If your family is all being smart and doing the right things, you may be able to have small family gatherings (easy access to fast, accurate testing would make this even safer). The problem is that this virus is very contagious, so while your age group may be fine, it's easy for you to pass it onto to someone who will not be fine.

I'm also so tired of this fake dichotomy of either live your life like there is no pandemic or hide inside. There is a huge gradient between the two with varying levels of risk.

> I’m definitely not letting the government tell me whether I can have a family party or not.

It's sad that so many people have forgotten what it means to be a good neighbor or citizen. Instead it's all about 'me', and screw everyone else.

Family members can leave their medications and food on their door step and walk away. People can get groceries delivered. Nursing homes have extensive precautions.

Cuomo said his ultra lockdowns would be justified “if they saved even one life” (lol!). Maybe we’ve just become a little too uncomfortable with our own mortality. Life is a bitch and then you die. Get over it. Almost all the deaths are in the extremely old, a massive percent already in hospice. This virus is small time stuff, mostly taking out the already dying. But between TDS and hysterical media coverage in general, so many young and healthy people are TERRIFIED. It’s a disgrace.

> Maybe we’ve just become a little too uncomfortable with our own mortality.

Maybe we’ve just become a little too uncomfortable with being inconvenienced.

> Life is a bitch and then you die. Get over it.

And yet here you are complaining about not being able to throw a party. Maybe you ought to take your own advice to heart here.

It’s not inconvenience. Millions of people’s lives are on hold. This is awful for our happiness, our culture, our productivity. Children are kept home behind a computer screen, or even worse, sent to schools that have become more controlled and joyless than prisons, screamed at for playing with their friends. This is evil.

> This is awful for our happiness, our culture, our productivity.

Maybe, but I don’t think I can respond better than what someone already said: "Life is a bitch and then you die. Get over it."

I really hope this generation is never asked for actual sacrifice. People who lost their jobs are the ones who have it really bad right now. For everyone else, it's an inconvenience. Using words like 'evil' and 'joyless prisons' shows a complete lack of perspective.

I dont know why you are getting downvoted, the mortality rates are on the WHO / CDC website etc. FOR EVERYONE TO READ!

Because it's not all about the mortality rates. Just because the bug doesn't literally end your life doesn't mean you won't be left with long term (expensive) complications or handicaps, that could very well kill you years after you get over the virus.

Per the CDC [1]:

>Among patients with COVID-19, 76.8% had respiratory complications, including pneumonia (70.1%), respiratory failure (46.5%), and ARDS (9.3%). Nonrespiratory complications were frequent, including renal (39.6%), cardiovascular (13.1%), hematologic (6.2%), and neurologic complications (4.1%), as well as sepsis (24.9%) and bacteremia (4.7%); 24.1% of COVID-19 patients had complications involving three or more organ systems. Among COVID-19 patients, nine complications were more prevalent among racial and ethnic minority patients, including respiratory, neurologic, and renal complications, even after adjustment for age and underlying medical conditions.

This isn't the fucking flu, and at this point, it is intentionally dishonest to downplay the effects of the virus.

[1]:https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6942e3.htm#:~:text=....

That’s hospitalized patients, which are a small fraction of all patients that get Covid.

And the CDC literally has a webpage that calls out all the similarities between the flu and COVID-19. Including the risk of long term complications from the flu.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/symptoms/flu-vs-covid19.htm

You're 100% right, "the fucking flu" still holds the record for people killed in a pandemic by a long shot.

There is no evidence that long term complications are worse than those from particularly nasty flu seasons. Nothing you posted says otherwise.

We're all aware of the mortality rate, but not everyone finds sacrificing hundreds of thousands of sick and elderly to be viable just because the denominator is sufficiently large.

It's the same reason we don't tell wheelchair users to "just stay home" if they can't deal with a world that only has stairs.

We're trying to be a more advanced civilization with structures to ensure quality of life for as many as possible, not only the young and healthy. We're evolving beyond the raw survival of the fittest that determined who lived and who died when we were essentially animals.

Many of us spend most of our lives healthy enough not to need help, but either we care that others do, or else we selfishly recognize that we could find ourselves needing help someday for unexpected reasons outside our control. So it's in our best interest to invest in these social structures.

It's like a society-wide marshmallow test.

We all die. Let that idea sink in. Even you will one day cease to live and the important thing won’t be the extra year or two you lived by sapping the prosperity of future generations. Life isn’t worth extending at all costs.

I'm young and healthy myself, and feel the temptation of that mindset on a base emotional level.

But I'm also smart enough to realize that someday I might be 62 and benefit from living in a society that doesn't give up on addressing a pandemic that can be mitigated by something as simple as wearing masks. Should ideology not get in the way.

I could have 20 quality years of life ahead of me before attempts to keep me alive become needlessly heroic.