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Comment by norwegianwhale | Hacker News Reader

It's actually very annoying to wear a mask.

Also, I don't want to be thinking 24/7 about the virus, and the mask reminds me of it.

I can't count how many hours I have personally wasted thinking about the virus this year. That surely must go into the bottom line of prevention measures.

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There are striking differences in infection rates between countries. If you think masks are not effective, then go find out what is effective and argue for the merits of that instead of just lazily spreading FUD about currently accepted best practices.

(At some point we need to start viewing these types of comments as likely coming from Anti-American disinformation farms.)

Sweden. No lockdowns, no mask edicts, real herd-immunity.

There is no real evidence of a significant herd immunity effect in Sweden yet. Swedish government policy has consistently focused on sustainable pandemic control measures based on the assumption that the virus will be with us for a long time to come. Their low death rate over the past 3 months is probably mostly a result of effective measures to protect the elderly. And the harvesting effect: many of the frailest people already died during the first wave.

A quick search says that Sweden still has a growing number of new covid cases. So no, it does not look like they have achieved herd immunity.

Herd immunity will likely never equal zero cases... the point is to prioritize herd immunity in the low-risk populace for the sake of the high-risk.

But herd immunity should not equal a rising number of cases, which is what mindslight said. Your reply therefore doesn't actually answer the parent's claim.

You're right -- I should have said "on their way to real herd-immunity." Their death rate is what you should be watching, not cases.

Why the death rate? If people are getting new cases, doesn't that mean that they weren't immune? And if the number of new cases is rising, doesn't that mean that the herd isn't immune?

I mean, yes, ultimately we care about deaths. But why do you think that deaths are the measure of herd immunity?

That's a nice hypothesis, but until it has been tested, that's what it remains. If Sweden is testing it that's nice for everyone else, but there's no need to run the experiment multiple times in parallel.

It's amazing to me that people so purportedly pro-freedom eagerly want the government to perform a public health experiment on the entire country. That's quite totalitarian if you ask me.

BTW by saying that mask wearing is opposed to herd immunity, you are tacitly agreeing that masks work to slow the spread.

How is me calling for less government totalitarian?

Deciding to run a large scale experiment of whether herd immunity is a worthwhile strategy for a novel disease is itself a top-down decision. It's not less government per se, just different government action.

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