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Comment by morpheos137 | Hacker News Reader

Every human that ever lives will die someday. A good life involves a prudent balancing of risks and costs. Nobody alive can ever be 100% safe before or after the advent of covid. Covid maybe a good thing if it forces mature adults to deal with their inevitable mortality like mature adults. Instead we have been seeing pervasive infantilisation of society. Safety has a cost. The world is not black and white. Disclaimer: the above is my opinion. Not flaming.

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Well let's talk about infantilization then: I don't mind fearing or being at peace with death. Our society could use that.

It's just that we're in a global plague right now and a large chunk of people just want to do whatever they want no matter if others are affected by their actions. Basically a stage of development such as children before they realize others are also people. It's like ten people walking a tightrope and the last one is jumping up and down. A non-infantilized society is one where we can expect everyone to be a grownup and avoid the bad quadrant of the prisoner's dilemma, and guess what? We've found out that you get an infantile society if people are just asked nicely

I would respectfully submit that the death rate of covid does not justify the scale of the response. It is unreasonable to shut down society for a disease whose median age victim is about 80 and whose whole population case fatality rate is in the low single digit percent at worse.

The elderly and well off want to minimize their risk at the expense of the young and the poor. Who do you think delivered your Amazon packages while you worked from home?

At both extremes a part of the population is unwilling to compromise and is willing to force another part to pay for their "freedom." In my opinion the yuppies obessively using instacart and Amazon are just as selfish as the Trump supporters and rednecks who may have denied covid existed. Both groups want what they want the cost be damned.

Wuhan has been reopened for a long time now. We had every piece of information to make a good decision at the time in February 2020. Now we are thrashed about in a sea of half-measures, societal tension, and the total closing up of public life. We were so lost even by the time the CDC was encouraging people to not wear masks because it'll give you higher risk of contracting covid. Now our future's truly new.

Actually large sections of China are being locked back down again as they contend with new outbreaks. The whole concept of the Immaculate Covid Response has aged terribly as one "did it right" country after another either has had major outbreaks (Japan) or resorted to completely draconian and even militarized responses (Australia, NZ) to keep the spread down.

How is Taiwan doing?

Edit: Looks like they had a huge spike in May but are now around 7-day avg of 20 cases. With 7 day average of deaths around 2-3. Vax rate 1st - 40% 2nd 2.9%

Looks pretty good.

Sweden has a rolling 7 of 500 ~ 700. Rolling seven of deaths 0. Vax rate 1st 69.5% 2nd 59.2%

Interesting because they never locked down.

As usual, death rates for the last couple of weeks in Sweden must be taken with considerable amounts of salt, because of the lag in reporting.

Things have only gone this way recently because of the delta variant, if all countries had taken the virus as seriously as those countries the delta variant probably wouldn’t exist and these countries would now be able to effectively vaccinate their populations.

Yep, new variants are always the excuse. These perfectly designed and implemented "public health" measures would have worked to eliminate the virus if only India had put itself into a nationwide lockdown -- it might have caused tens of thousands to starve but we're just going to assume it somehow would have prevented the Delta variant from coming into existence!

What death rate would cause you to reconsider a lockdown?

Why would the onus work that way? What death rate do you think government should start restrictions at? Driving? Eating certain things? Smoking? The mental health fallout from living as some technocrat wants you to?

Smoking is a good example. My country has quite bad COVID numbers both in number of cases and deaths. Yet: in one and a half years of pandemic fewer than 4500 people died from COVID. About 6000 die each year from smoking-related diseases. You all probably know how different government takes on these issues are.

I think that the reaction we've seen was inevitable. It's less about covid in particular and more that (and I don't know a diplomatic way to say it) there was a risk averse, authoritarian, nanny-state, "we need to save people from themselves" advocate group waiting in the wings that just needed their cue to for the balance of power to shift and their views to be prioritized.

To be clear, I don't mean some coordinated cabal, I just mean that society's views have drifted that way, we haven't had anything bad happen for years, the significance of individual freedom has been forgotten, we're well into turning on ourselves anyway. And so now with a push, there is a new majority, and we're seeing politicians take advantage of strong views and fall in line to represent them, disregarding safeguards and norms that we previously had in place but were not updated to contemplate something like this.

And now viewpoints that would have been intolerant and completely out of line with western democracy, and ridiculed as some mid 20th century authoritarianism are suddenly applauded all over social media.

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