Hacker News Reader

Comment by Wintamute | Hacker News Reader

Have you quantified that? How unsafe it is to your personally?

I don't know anything about your personal situation, but if you're healthy and relatively young the risk from Covid (first catching it, then having a bad time with it) in resuming these aspects of normal life may be extremely low, even compared to activities you wouldn't think twice about doing pre-pandemic - like taking a short car ride for example.

I think there are probably a lot of people struggling with this sort of thing. Cognitive behaviour therapy incorporating aspects of exposure therapy could be useful here.

View on HN

> How unsafe it is to your personally?

That's a very selfish way of looking at things. The problem with being a communicable disease is that even if I'm fine, others I give it too might not be. I'm trying to be a team player here.

Also, I'm not in a low-risk group personally anyway.

No, not selfish. See answer below

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26194718

There's currently around 80 people dying from COVID-19 per day here in NYC, and the highest death rates have been from food service workers. 80 is way too high (it's over 10X what it was late summer), and I'm not going to do anything to potentially contribute to that. And Cuomo the nursing home reaper doesn't exactly have the moral high ground here in saying what is and isn't safe.

I'm going to go back to my normal life once I've been vaccinated. At this rate there's only a couple more months to go. I've already made it 11 months, I can do a couple more.

Are the young as at big a risk as older folks? No. CAN THEY COMMUNICATE IT TO OLDER FOLKS? Yes. Yes they can.

This kinda falls into the 'social obligation' column. Just because it doesn't affect you personally, doesn't mean you shouldn't be part of the solution. Sooner or later something WILL happen to you and you'll benefit from being a member.

I understand that aspect. Vaccinations, social distancing, mask wearing, mass testing, self isolating with symptoms or while vulnerable - these are all tools designed to get society running again, while minimising risk. The OP said they felt unsafe about going into restaurants which were open in their region. My opinion is that is incumbent on all of us to get back to normality as swiftly as possible within the guidelines set out by our local governments. That is my idea of social obligation, thanks.

> within the guidelines set out by our local governments

Your local government may not care about you. I'd look to respected civilian experts or at least government agencies staffed by respected experts.

I'm basing this on Texas' Lt. Governor Dan Patrick being willing to tolerate a lot of death for the sake of the economy:

https://www.texastribune.org/2020/04/21/texas-dan-patrick-ec...

I understand that aspect too.

I mention local guidelines since I wouldn't want anyone to get in trouble with the state.

The economy is not an abstract thing, it represents living people and their lives. People who feel its important to prioritise the economy and a return to relative normality generally don't think that way because they're callous about Covid deaths, they're simply more concerned about the death, ill health and strife that result from a long term economic downturn. We can discuss the degree to which those views represent reality without impugning people's characters.

Local guidelines have been highly politicized throughout this pandemic though and a lot of governors have been making terrible decisions for political reasons. I'm not seeing any rational reason to listen to local guidelines when the guidelines are politically-motivated (not evidence-based) and are set way too loose even while COVID-19 was in the midst of tearing through a community.

Many of these states couldn't even get on board with masks, let alone anything else more stringent (like reducing capacity).

I'm from the UK, we have national guidelines and laws, so the situation is a bit different.

But I wonder what claim to authority or special knowledge you are using to feel confident your own attitude is purely rational, and uninfluenced by your political beliefs and personal biases?

Moreover, whatever you think about the balance of scientific evidence, science should not be used to directly drive policy. Elected politicians create policy, and science is one sort of advice that feeds those decisions. Policy created purely from scientific advice would be a recipe for arbitrary decisions, and technocratic undemocratic rule. The politically motivated aspect is a feature not a bug!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com