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Comment by effie | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed this is not U.S. specific, so it is not a political polarization in the traditional sense.

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.

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The way I see it, the camp 1 is at fault only if they are not revising their stance. Otherwise there is nothing to discuss and no two camps story at all. There is only one camp, camp 2.

If the War on Terror serves as any example, those freedoms and rights lost, will never be returned.

There are a few issues here.

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.

I think both camps have solutions for these issues, but unsurprisingly, they don't agree on which is most appropriate.

> Eventually Camp 2) will be seen as the correct one.

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.

OK that's fair. Assuming the COVID disease impact does not get substantially worse than it has been, the camp 2) will be seen as the correct one.

I can't imagine why it would get worse. Immunity of people gets better with time, and so do treatments.

Your point is well taken: I want to argue with you that Camp 2 will never be seen as correct, but as I see restrictions lifted despite the large number of unvaccinated individuals which remain, I can't help but wonder if it will actually play out as you say.

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