As a reader of HN for several years now, it blows my mind how polarized we all are on this issue. Something smells here, you're not allowed to question anything without being down voted to oblivion, one way or another.
Why?
Why?
On top of that, in the US, the previous president was so politically polarizing that literally any statement he made was aggressively opposed by many people. A lot of SARS-CoV2 response got caught up in this dynamic.
Wide segments of the population are simply misinformed of basic scientific facts, and slick charlatans (like the author of this article) twist information in subtle ways to scare people. Terrified people are naturally going to be more volatile, and this has been exploited throughout the last year and half.
It isn't equivalent, it is politics. In the end I suspect the last 15+ months will be a story of:
10% disease mitigation, 20% intellectual error, 30% media fear mongering and 40% politics.
Now, people overcompensate, if there is any questioning or hesitancy to take the vaccine, ask questions about origins etc you might be a...Trump guy, or a nut and so you need to be told by the Non-Trump guys what' up, by being downed.
It's Kind of like Post-Trum-Stress-Disorder, PTSD. It's really quite fascinating.
Obviously, taking a position that is the opposite of an illogical person makes you just as illogical, but it's much easier than thinking.
Also, let's face it, no one likes to lose karma :)
Unfortunately well educated knowledgeable people are falling prey to this tribalism as well. I don't view a pandemic as at all political. There's a balance as to what amount of financial, social, and loss of liberty pain we should take versus the harm COVID 19 causes. And there should be a healthy debate about that, and opinions should change with statistics coming out and changing conditions. Meaning hardline anti-vaxers should probably soften up a bit as the vaccines have been shown to be extremely effective and safe and hardline lock down the world adherents should look at the dramatic drop in deaths and hospitalizations, and compare the risk of COVID with other risks we take in our life like driving.
The broader world-wide phenomenon, visible also here, is that most people got divided into two camps:
1) "COVID-19 is so dangerous that we must restrict freedoms", "the other camp is a harm to society's health"
2) "COVID-19 is not that dangerous, mortality below 2% (or even lower depending on how it is calculated) and young and healthy people are safe from it, so we must preserve the freedoms", "the other camp is destroying democracy and freedoms".
You can see this in U.S. and in Europe too.
Camp 1) was right at the start of the pandemic when we had little knowledge and people were dying in large numbers. But as time advances, treatments and vaccines are developed, the narrative naturally shifts. Eventually Camp 2) will be seen as the correct one.
Now we're somewhere in the middle it seems.
1) COVID-19 is not a static, singular disease. Now that it is circulating widely in the human population it has the potential to mutate, as it already has several times. SARS had a mortality rate on the order of 10%. MERS was above 30%. Part of the miscommunication seems to come from camp 2 assuming that things will largely continue as they are, while those remaining in camp 1 are saying "If we let this keep going, things could get much worse".
2) What about people who aren't healthy and young? Do we just permanently shut immunocompromised people out of society?
3) Developing a vaccine is not the same as actually getting the population vaccinated, as the last six months have demonstrated. Nobody in camp 1 wants society to stay locked down for its own sake. If 99% or even just 80% of the population was vaccinated, I think you would find a huge majority of camp 1 move to camp 2. Unfortunately the attitude of camp 2 has turned out to be the biggest obstacle to actually getting that done.
That sounds somewhat overly deterministic. The situation is always evolving and you can’t predict what will really happen especially with new variants etc. Of course you may argue that no variant will ever be so dangerous as to warrant lockdowns in a country whose population is largely vaccinated, but a problem as this article pointed out (accurately or with exaggerations) is that if a large portion of the population refuses to be vaccinated, how things will play out doesn’t seem certain.
I can't imagine why it would get worse. Immunity of people gets better with time, and so do treatments.