Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

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What sort of things will health checks be used for in the future? Once Covid is gone, I don't think people will really care about your health information beyond entities that already care (health insurance providers denying coverage because of preexisting conditions, etc.) Certainly, The Mets won't care if you got your flu shot this year, and your local bar probably won't care that you didn't get your annual physical. If unrelated companies start caring about your health information after the pandemic, we should tell them to fuck off.

Covid is a public health crisis -- the single most dangerous existential threat we as a society are currently facing -- and we have great tools to kill it dead. Letting it spread right now is just stupid, because we can end this plague once and for all. While we're working on it, I think it's totally fair to let someone check your vaccination status before you pack yourself into close quarters with them. It's not a matter of the government or the corporate overlords wanting your health information. As the person standing next to you in a crowded bar, I don't want you there if you're not vaccinated. If indoor businesses won't check customers, then I won't go to those indoor businesses, and if enough people think like me, those businesses are gone forever.

Get vaccinated or stay home. You have a choice!

(The real threat during crises like these is things like "we shouldn't have a free press, because nutjobs are spreading misinformation". That is an exceedingly dangerous line of thinking and we should push back against that hard, because the cure is worse than the disease. That's not the case with Covid -- the cure is much better than the disease.)

> What sort of things will health checks be used for in the future? Once Covid is gone (…)

Will it be gone? As far as I understand, the Delta variant remains contagious even among vaccinated people, so it will likely stay around. Now that there’s vaccines, it’s just less dangerous (to the vaccinated). But any system of health checks you set up now could stay in place for a long time.

> The Mets won't care if you got your flu shot this year

The flu shot is a pretty interesting example. People die all the time because others didn’t get their flu shot. Where I live only half of the healthcare workers get it. The Mets could save lives by requiring that their patrons get it. And yet we don’t get very worked up about these jabs. Maybe covid showed us that we should? I don’t know, but it shows that covid isn’t some unique phenomenon, and that the way we deal with will have repercussions how we deal with other health issues going forward.

You're exaggerating. COVID-19 is a serious public health problem that we need to address, but in no way an existential crisis. CDC data shows an overall 99.6% survival rate, with the vast majority of deaths being elderly people with serious co-morbid conditions.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

Due to privacy concerns I certainly won't be sharing my health information with random businesses.

Once a system is in place, it'll be repurposed and never go away. Also, "Once Covid is gone". By what metric will it be "gone"? Are you talking zero COVID? That's never ever happening.

Macron in France set the goal at 90% vaccination. At that level across a continent, Covid could be gone.

Rule #1 in politics: Always set the bar to success at idealistic level, so you can fail and blame it on the scapegoats who didn’t trust the government. “BECAUSE some people didn’t vaccinate, we must lock down everyone again and ruin your economy. Blame it on them!” (Mao revolution failed because there were still some naysayers; Saving women fails because there are still some men opposed to true equality defined by unreachable levels of compliance, etc).

But politicians are talented: When you can’t actually solve a crisis (and Covid can’t be solved because it’s out there, now), you’d better quickly find a scapegoat to concentrate everyone’s blame on.

We could honestly probably save billions in healthcare costs if we mandated a yearly physical and cancer screening. It would lift our economy catching these costly diseases and health issues while they are still easily and cheaply treatable.

You'd also save billions, if you forced diets on people, forbid cigarettes, stopped selling sugar water with colorings, forbid driving, forbid skiing, hiking, climbing, and all other dangerous sports, keep social isolation every flu season, forbid casual sex (stds, unwanted children),... you'd just somehow have to stop suicides in the end.

Why? Suicides would save you even more. Corpse removal would get cheaper at scale.

All that money would be gone towards border control, though.

The solution here is for healthcare coverage to offer you a discount if you submit to any testing that the parent comment said was mandatory. That gives you the freedom to take on more risk at personal financial cost to yourself

> Once Covid is gone

It will never be completely gone though, like terrorism.

> Once Covid is gone,

Covid will _never_ be gone.

Ever.

If this were an existential threat to society maybe that would justify mandatory vaccination, but it’s not even close to that. Even the most badly battered countries have not only managed to survive, but found a way to cope with the pandemic.

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