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Comment by jszymborski | Hacker News Reader

ELI5 for those of use who don't reddit/haven't seen the subreddit before?

TLDR open everything up/antivax/antimask subreddit

There is also a hefty dose of "if seatbelts work why do i have to wear one by law, why isn't other people wearing one enough" type of logic.

I'm interested in why people are downvoting. Is the conclusion wrong? I'm unable to view the subreddit and the barrage of downvotes on seemingly correct comments does nothing to explain what it actually is.

A subreddit that questions whether using 1984 as a playbook to quash a disease with a 99.97% survival rate is the right trade-off.

Which policies in particular do they find 1984-esque?

Also I'm not sure where 99.97% is coming from, I'm getting ~98.3% from the CDC's Data Tracker page. Of course unreported cases could increase that, but it still seems significantly different from whatever source that's from.

The actual CDC best estimate is a 99.4% survival rate overall in the US since the pandemic started.

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

Of course the survival rate is much higher than that now for vaccinated people.

If you genuinely think that the fight against COVID-19 is like 1984 i’m certain you haven’t engaged deeply with Orwell’s writings.

I don't think that he is implying that COVID == 1984, but rather that there are some massive (surface-level) similarities between the handling of the COVID pandemic and general US policies and the policies in 1984.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com