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Comment by murgindrag | Hacker News Reader

I empathize with most of what you wrote, but there are two errors:

"I also know what to expect from a respiratory virus, because I've had those a number of times."

No one whom I know who has had COVID describes it like any normal respiratory virus, and it attacks multiple systems. I'm terrified of brain damage, and before-and-after MRIs shows brain damage in >10% of people who contract COVID19.

"If I get covid, darn that sucks but people get sick and that's life"

And if you kill a loved one by sharing COVID19? Or give them brain fog? That's not something I could live with.

The deeper argument, though, is about herd immunity. If we don't stop the spread, really bad things happen.

I'll mention: Do you use proper masks? N95 and proper nanofiber masks are widely available, and appear to do more to stop the spread than the vaccine. They're also risk-free.

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I know a fairly large number of people who have had it. Zero hospitalisations, zero deaths, zero long term effects.

>And if you kill a loved one by sharing COVID19? Or give them brain fog? That's not something I could live with.

The odds of this are far less than the odds of me killing my wife by taking a drive with her. In the same way that I can live with the risk of driving a car with her in it, I can live with this risk. Of course if that actually happened I would feel terrible, in both cases. But life is about weighing risks, and for now I'm comfortable with the risk of remaining unvaccinated.

No, I don't wear masks. That's a different ethical discussion. I don't feel or accept a moral burden for potentially spreading a virus in any case. I wouldn't walk about while sick of course, or have uninformed sex if I had an STD, but if I'm asymptomatic and end up accidentally giving someone an illness in the course of normal life, sorry, but that's just life. People who spread the flu accidentally are not immoral people, whether they get the flu shot or not. Likewise here.

Your numbers are way off, as is your moral compass. I hope I never meet you, or anyone like you. To use your driving analogy, the way I respond to your message is if someone told me they drove around drunk and high, without headlights, and without really doing any car maintenance, and didn't accept any moral responsibility if they hit someone because car accidents happen, and sorry, that's life.

As a baseline number, about a half-million Americans died of COVID already. For comparison, there were about 40k car deaths in the US. For someone like yourself, taking no precautions, the odds of catching COVID19 are way more than 10x of a fatal car accident.

The more critical problem is a systemic one. If no one takes precautions, nearly 10 million people in the US will die. If everyone does, virtually no ones needs to die. It's like polluting or littering.

And COVID19 isn't flu. The flu doesn't leave a quarter of people with brain fog 9 months later.

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