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Comment by nickthemagicman | Hacker News Reader

Covid is a classic trolly problem.

Pull the lever and destroy the economy, put the government in debt, destroy businesses, send millions into poverty, hurt individuals futures, increase infant mortality, increase drug use/overdoses, hurt artists and destroy museums, increase suicides, and more.

Don't pull the lever and kill a .01 percent of people above the age of 55 who won't stay quarantined.

I think he thinks pulling the lever is the wrong decision, and he's moving to a place with like minded thinkers.

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No, no it isn't. There are a lot more than 2 options to choose from.

Oh I completely agree.

But these two options seems to be the choices that are being discussed by the media and government.

You're either pro Covid restrictions or you're a granny killer.

I personally think we should quarantine the age 55+ crowd and let the people under 55 go about their business.

The under age 55 group is like 80% of the population who have only 20,000 covid fatalities which is less than car accident fatalities so why are they being locked up?

How do you propose to isolate the > 55 age group when no one younger is isolating? Nurses, doctors, people they live with will be a vector and pass it to them. And the under 55 age group (at .11% IFR) is still not going to want out and blindly get infected as that is still hundreds of thousands of deaths - leading to them avoiding being out in sizable numbers and still causing economic problems.

[Source: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...]

The economic problem due to lockdown > than the economic problem hundreds of thousands of deaths.

The recession started before the first lockdown.

Most people don't spend money on things/do stuff when they are afraid of dying while doing so. Hundreds of thousands of deaths due to uncontrolled population spread, randomly (nearly) amongst the population is going to cause the economy to crater - and even the possibility of it already did before any lockdowns happened.

The lockdowns just stopped the 25% (guess) of the population that is going to YOLO anyway from causing even more damage. The businesses were still going to get a huge hit regardless.

This is all false. The S and P 500 was breaking records before Covid.

The s and p 500 is actually breaking records now WITH Covid.

Pretty much everything you just said seems to be inaccurate and no citations are provided.

The corporations are doing great.

The small businesses and individuals are being crushed.

Here's the beauty of it. We don't forcefully isolate anyone.

We give the people the information and let them make up their own minds.

People can choose to leave quarantine or not.

We don't use government force.

Just like cigarettes.

We give them the information and let them think for themselves.

Giving people the freedom to think for themselves is a beautiful thing.

It's the basis of John Lockes natural rights which the founding fathers used as as a principle when writing the constitution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_thought

It's actually a trolley problem within a trolley problem!

The decision whether to ban or approve the vaccines as they were developed was another example. The status quo is to ban vaccines until they meet criteria.

Ban a vaccine for those over 65, avoid the possibility of a side effect 100x than ever experienced (there has never been a vaccine entering phase 1 trials with over 1 in 100,000 expected risk of death).

Allow high risk people to voluntarily take the vaccine, most will work (about 85% of vaccines tested for efficacy succeed).

Society chose to ban the vaccine, killing hundreds of thousands of lives that could have been prevented. This pandemic is effectively solely a problem caused by this decision.

your take is one of the nuttier ones i've seen during the pandemic

"Society chose to ban the vaccine, killing hundreds of thousands of lives that could have been prevented. This pandemic is effectively solely a problem caused by this decision."

you say this of literally the fastest development of a vaccine in the history of our planet. vaccines only work if people take them. people only take them if its safe. (and even when they are safe, anti-vax crowd actively works against uptake).

so your proposal is to give an untested vaccine to the entire planet, because the harms of doing that would be fewer in number in the short term while completely destroying the ability for society to deliver any vaccine in the future.

scenario plan for this: the next pandemic is 10x worse than this one and you blew all of society's goodwill on an untested vaccine this time around. nobody takes vaccine. everyone dies.

I'm open to people making their own minds instead of the government banning things in general!

We don't need daddy government'to keep us safe' or do things 'in our best interest'.

Every restriction of freedom is always couched as improving safety.

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