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Comment by greycol | Hacker News Reader

You'd bet wrong 1.3 million traffic deaths in a year. double it to 2.6 m for 2 years.

In the 2 years of covid we have had 4.25 million deaths with still 90% us and 97% of the rest of the world left to catch it.

You only need a unmasked person to have an R value 1.64 times higher than a vaxed/masked for the proportional deaths to not reach parity even with 90% people vacinated.

That's completely ignoring the fact that driving is actually a productive activity with a goal. Where as most of the reasons people give for not wearing a mask are either easily debunked or work just as well as a retort to someone asking you "why are you continuously punching yourself?".

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Where are you getting 90%? The CDC estimates that 36% of Americans have been infected.

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

WHO confirmed cases so using your numbers that does change it to just another 1.2 million dead americans assuming no change in death rate due to other strains the vaccine rather than another 5.5 million.

And you are assuming that the next variants will be more deadly.

>> That's completely ignoring the fact that driving is actually a productive activity with a goal

And most antivaxers and the unmasked are welfare cases with nothing to do but look at reddit, and so are a burden on the state and a direct cost to me as a taxpayer even when there isn't a pandemic. Hey, maybe this will work out great in the end.

> In the 2 years of covid we have had 4.25 million deaths

And how many of those were of fully vaccinated people?

If we have 100 people responsible for a bad thing happening to 10 people in that group that is proportionally the same as 10 people being responsible for a bad thing happening to 1 person in that group and having 90 unrelated people to the side when we are divvying up blame.

Yes and no; if you're accusing unvaccinated-by-choice people of recklessly endangering others, then it's quite different whether they're endangering random other people or only other unvaccinated-by-choice people. (Similarly I have no problem with drivers on private car-only roads, only those who endanger pedestrians and cyclists on the public roads).

Also the dynamics of how far any given infection would spread are very different in a post-vaccination world.

Sure now your only recklessly endangering those who can't get vaccinated and those who opt in. So maybe at steady state the numbers do work out in favour of it being less dangerous than driving proportionally(excluding the people who opt in to this danger). But you realise we're talking about driving, an activity that actually accomplishes something, as opposed to not getting vaccinated which accomplishes at most nothing. If driving accomplished nothing you can bet you wouldn't be able to do it in the city were you are involving others it'd be relegated to tracks.

Technically, I was talking about drunk driving, which kills a lot fewer people than (productive) driving. That's why I selected the limited case of people who innocently die because of a driver's wilful negligence, which is exponentially fewer than those who die because of antivaxers' wilful negligence. Probably even when there isn't a pandemic with an R6 replication rate.

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