Is Covid-19 making us irrational? | Hacker News Reader

Is Covid-19 making us irrational?

simoncarne.substack.com

30 pointssimoncarne89 comments

We need more honest and direct leadership.

You will be exposed to Covid. You can’t do anything about that at this point. You will probably be exposed to it many times in the remaining decades of your life and will probably get sick a few times from it too.

So your decision now isn’t about avoiding it or not. It’s about staying healthy, maybe losing some weight and getting vaccinated so it’s not a huge deal when you’re exposed.

Pretending you can wear masks and stay home and this will end is a fantasy and has been for months. But leaders are living in a fantasy world.

Honestly I agree with all points besides mask wearing. It's a habit that has been in other countries (speaking from US perspective here) to wear masks when sick. This is a good habit to have.

I think people should wear masks whenever they like and I’m glad that has been normalized as ok.

I also think it’d be a good norm to ask people to wear it when sick.

What I oppose is this idea that we should all wear it all the time by law.

I couldn't agree more. The lack of foresight of many people and leaders about this disease distresses me

It's quite bizarre how otherwise intelligent, educated people seem to engage in magical thinking about COVID-19. They want to believe that a highly contagious respiratory virus with multiple animal reservoirs would somehow disappear if everyone would just stay home and wear masks for a few weeks. Of course that has no basis in real science. Any non-pharmaceutical infection control measures are at best able to slightly slow the spread. In the long run almost all of us will get infected no matter what we do. So the smart move is to protect yourself by getting vaccinated and aggressively treating co-morbid conditions like obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and hypovitaminosis D.

Public health leaders like Dr. Fauci aren't idiots and I suspect they're privately fully aware of the real situation. So why aren't they being straight with us about how the pandemic is likely to play out long term?

> Public health leaders like Dr. Fauci aren't idiots and I suspect they're privately fully aware of the real situation. So why aren't they being straight with us about how the pandemic is likely to play out long term?

Fauci has been saying exactly this, in public, for a long time.

For example, November 12, 2020: "I doubt we are going to eradicate this. I think we need to plan that this is something we may need to maintain control over chronically. It may be something that becomes endemic, that we have to just be careful about."

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/12/coronavirus-dr-fauci-says-he...

That's why his strategy consists of vaccines to reduce the death rate plus NPIs to "flatten the curve".

Flattening the curve doesn't mean reducing total infections, it means compressing the spikes so the healthcare system doesn't collapse.

None of this is new.

Any part of this you disagree with?

I will say (unscientifically, before someone feels the need to point that out) that I have been supplementing vitamin D and zinc prophylactically since March 2020. Not in any crazy amounts. I have had three household members become infected, and I used a public gym every other day throughout except when quarantining with the sick household. Masking was quite inconsistent at the gym to say the least (maybe one in ten patrons wore them).

I was not vaccinated until late July of this year. Never contracted COVID 19, confirmed by blood test shortly before I was vaccinated.

I don't know if that means I have been lucky, or if it's possible I was exposed but did not develop COVID-specific antibodies that would be detected in the blood test.

I don't think they've been dishonest, or denied that this is endemic, the problem has long been understood to be that of rate. Being physically unable to treat a wave is what will lead to massive numbers of deaths.

Masks, distancing, working from home, won't defeat covid19 but they all slow down its transmission, slow down admissions, and let hospitals recover.

It is a pretty good test to find out which people are simply egoistic bastards, who really don't care about others.

Many of them are somewhat stupid, in that they think that it will not affect them personally, and have not really thought about the effects on other people.

But a lot of them are simply anti-social persons, that don't really give a shit about others.

It's just revealing preexisting irrationality

Off-topic but since there is no other way to get in touch: according to your profile page, you seem to be new here. You've also posted own content a few times. Be advised that - from what I know - submitting only content of a single page will get your submissions automatically "killed" [0] after a few submissions. Just post and comment on other things as well and you'll be fine, I think.

Apart of that: welcome and enjoy the content and discussions!

[0] That means they will be made invisible to everyone but the ones who opt in to see these too. The setting is appropriately named "showdead" if you are curious.

What % of our lives is best spent fighting a disease that has a 0.2% chance of ending them?

That's a common question from specific political circles, and I'm wondering if it's one of those "thought-terminating cliches" we read about the other day. Because the fatality rate of COVID-19 hasn't been 0.2% for over a year now; currently it sits at about 1.7% and rising. (edit to specify that these numbers refer to the US only)

But even setting that aside, the long-term effect of this disease ranges from "had it, got over it, fine now" to "can't breathe properly a year later, possibly ever again." Approximately 30% of COVID-19-infected patients are still ill over a month later.

Finally, I live in an area where the Delta variant is having some kind of field day. I am currently pet-sitting for an elderly neighbor; she had a minor fall and broke her ankle. The nearest available hospital bed was about three hundred miles away, because COVID-19 has overwhelmed my city's medical infrastructure.

My question is, do you really think that death is the only negative consequence of a disease?

Please stop spreading misinformation about a serious subject. CDC data shows that the fatality rate in the US has been 0.6% since the beginning of the pandemic, so your claim of 1.7% is simply a lie. And fatality rates for vaccinated people are virtually zero.

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

> Please stop spreading misinformation about a serious subject.

That's pretty harsh. They are referring to the case fatality rate ("CFR") while you are referring to the estimated infection fatality rate ("IFR").

Edit: OK, I usually don't do that but please tell me in which way parent's comment is possibly better than a comment like this would have been: "Looks like you are referring to the CFR. That's a bad way to measure fatality rate and the CDC has an estimate for the IFR anyways. You can find it here."

Speaking for myself (as I am pretty healthy). My concern is not about dying as much as it is about developing long Covid and other not fully confirmed potential complications. Saying that, I think at this point in the US we should completely reopen and stop arguing about the measures. I am maximizing my chances of survival and staying healthy by getting vaccinated and wearing a mask. Many people don’t - and that’s their choice that is at this point we should not try to fight. The only thing we should accept is that unvaccinated Covid patients should have a lower priority in hospitals than patients with other conditions.

Except there are multiple states out if ICU beds because they tried this. Every person in the hospital with COVID is another person who can't use that bed to get medical treatment.

That’s what I meant in my last sentence. Unvaccinated Covid patients should have a lower priority. I haven’t heard of any hospitals trying that.

Deleted incorrect information, the decision was reversed.

That sounds like a good start. I hope more hospitals will follow this example.

In general, I think it’s very unhealthy to attempt to take away people’s agency and treat them as children. Don’t want to get vaccinated? Your choice. But there are consequences of this choice and we should make this consequences clear. Other than that - let people do what they want to do.

Looks like they reversed the decision: https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2021/08/19/if-north...

What about water rationing?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/pledgetimes.com/orlando-declare...

You're healthy. What about immunocompromised people for whom the vaccines have only had a partial effect?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/theconversation.com/amp/immunoc...

Like it or not, we live in a society. Our decisions affect everyone else and we can't fully account for externalities. Solving these sorts of tragedies of the commons is exactly what public policy is meant to do.

Personally, I think vaccine mandates need to happen yesterday. People who don't believe in the vaccines can suck it up. Facts don't care about their feelings.

Sorry do you live in the US? Do you really think a vaccine mandate is possible here? People will literally fight that with assault rifles. This situation is already tearing our society apart, there is no way any large scale mandatory vaccination project would succeed.

Yes, I live in the US. The way I think vaccine mandates can be done here is for every workplace, business and school to require them. Hopefully the upcoming approval of the Pfizer vaccine should unblock more of this.

OK, let’s explore that.

At what level do you think this would be enforced? Federal? Completely unenforceable unless you want to involve the military domestically. State level? Obviously half of the States are not going to do that. City level? Again, completely pointless.

Also, many business owners are antivaxx, why would they participate in this?

Federal funds should be withheld from states and cities until they impose mandates (this is the traditional way the feds have exercised control over states and cities). Businesses which refuse to implement them should have their lines of credit frozen or their permits revoked. Owning a business open to the public is a privilege, not a right.

There needs to be an all-out effort. The US did far more during WW2.

So, for example, all federal funds should be withheld from Florida until they introduce and enforce statewide vaccination? And we are going to do that with booster shots as well?

This sounds like tyranny to me.

Yes. all federal funds should be withheld from Florida until they introduce and enforce a vaccine mandate.

To the extent that this is tyranny, so be it. As I said, the US did far more during WW2.

Vaccine mandates are constitutional in the USA. We just forget our history from time to time. People also misunderstand the meaning of freedom as well.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/vaccine-mandates-...

Doesn’t matter. The best way to guarantee that the final 28% probably won’t get vaccinated is to mandate it. The best way to get the final 28% vaccinated is to fully FDA approve it, get Fauci and Biden to ease up on the vax shaming and then simply expect that 10-15% still won’t do it. You write them off and let the chips fall.

It’s remarkable to me that our government hasn’t figured out that you don’t get people who are already distrustful of the government to magically become trustful of the government by doing the same shit over and over that caused the distrust.

That's fine, they should get shut out of public life then. That's what fully internalizing the externalities looks like.

Ya know…I seem to recall a bunch of people once thought that same exact thing about some other people about 60+ years ago. They thought they were better than the others, that the others were inferior, dirty, diseased, and less intelligent. Those powerful folks did all they could to keep the others out of stores, restaurants, front seats of buses, off water fountains, etc. and just kind of hoped those folks they hated and didn’t want in their society would just go away too.

The difference is that discrimination based on race is unjust, while discrimination based on vaccination status is just. I'll let you work out why.

Have you worked out the formula to correctly balance personal and collective risk, computationally? I would not dismiss the matter as trivial - I see it more as Nobel prize worth.

Plenty of gray areas, of course, where the decision is legitimately hard. The Vietnam draft was clearly immoral but was the World War 2 draft just? I'm really not sure.

Vaccine mandates are nowhere close to that, though—the individual risk is virtually nonexistent while the collective risk is massive. The general problem does not need to be solved fully for us to move forward with public policy in clear-cut cases.

In the specific case, you write about a «virtually nonexistent individual risk» while many¹ are yet to find such reassurance. If that statement were evidently true, one would agree with your conclusion save some details.

¹(including the brightest people I know - statement disincorporated from the above since anecdotal)

Those people are much less bright than you think they are.

There are zero people in my own social circles who didn't get vaccinated the moment they could (some live in countries where they still don't have access to vaccines). The difference might be that my social circle is mostly queer people like myself, and we know how bad pandemics can be.

Again, I have very little sympathy for anti-vax people. The correct thing to do for society as a whole is to follow New York's and San Francisco's lead and exclude them from public life until they get vaccinated. Public policy can't be based on fringe pseudoscience.

I believe may still be a good idea for me to disambiguate and rephrase:

the set of population I mentioned would not agree with your statement «virtually nonexistent individual risk». They may have taken the vaccine, but e.g. would consider it a non-easy choice to decide whether their infant children should be vaccinated (with Pfz/Mod/OAZ/JnJ) - whether the health risk for a child is higher (and how much) after infection vs after vaccine. (I insist: there's no limit towards the top, but they are the smartest I know.)

In fact, by the way, to help solving these theoretical doubts, the source of the damages should be properly defined. I am not informed of a clear, reliable, strong theory about the cause of damages in either (vaccine vs infection) - I have seen different ideas.

I do not know the NY and SF measures, but in general yes, if the unvaccinated represent a somehow higher risk of contagion they should remain proportionally isolated. But not even this proportion of risk seems to me well defined. Recently I found an article stating "The transmission rate for the vaccinated is 30% the normal". That value was the n-th of many other found in these months (and of course, that very statement is sketchy). But only yesterday I met an article that complicated the matter (and the numbers) for a(/the) dominant strain.

Surely, I find it perverse that ideas are spread like: "Health care is part of the social package, so you do as we impose". At this stage, it makes more sense to go along the lines "If you want to drink soda, you will not be treated for diabetes" (example is stretched) - one's freedom of judgement is respected, and there is no weird blackmailing based on terms and conditions imposed. I much prefer the other idea of "Non-vaccinated shall compensate the proportional part (95%?) of the cost of the treatments".

You give the idea of mixing different sets, with «anti-vax people» and «fringe pseudoscience»: you seem to be focussing on the unreasonable positions, disregarding reasonable doubts. Again: you wrote of «virtually nonexistent individual risk», and it that were evident, the set of the reasonable doubts would not exist. Especially as people receive information of adverse events post-vaccine, they have all right to demand clarity on the scope and measure, what and how much - the opposite would be irrational. And this has nothing to do with pseudoscience - on the contrary.

> Those people are much less bright than you think they are

You should very probably note you used a dismissive unsubstantiated statement.

Yes, perhaps today. People who discriminate are always confident in the moral justifications behind their prejudices.

All I see is just another group of folk devils that people feel the need to create to separate out people they don’t like.

I'm really not interested in meta-level arguments. In general I find them to be tiring and unenlightening.

And I’m not interested in people who advocate discrimination as a solution to anything.

So there, our positions are set.

Not doing any discrimination at all is a genuinely absurd position to hold. Discrimination is a necessary part of life without which society would collapse.

The question always is on which bases discrimination is good and on which bases it is bad. Discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, and other inherent characteristics of people is generally bad. Discrimination based on things like vaccination status is good.

Like I said, people who choose to discriminate against other people always have some subjectively moral justification for why they do it.

And it is our job as human beings to ascertain which justifications are valid and which aren't.

You can't run away from object-level moral arguments. You just can't.

I am very much a moral realist. There are correct and incorrect moral stances.

Any human response that can be considered evil by simply who it is applied to…is an evil response all the time. People may justify that evil by their feeling they have the “correct” moral stance, but it’s still evil and shitty to the target group. Personally, I am not willing to participate in an intentional evil to any group even if I disagree with them r are different from them. If that makes me immoral, so be it.

It's pretty simple yeah, you start withdrawing funds and federal services from people that don't get vaccinated. If there's one thing you can get from US history it's that money rules, and this approach does work historically.

Now I don't know that they should be implemented, and there would be some unrest, but it would end up working.

Now do obesity.

Some states are out of ICU beds due to onerous restrictions on nursing supply, like vax mandates (my own state of Oregon for example)

Without vaccination mandates you run the risk of an epidemic amongst nurses which can knock out 40% of your ICU beds at once. That's why nurses have to be vaccinated against dozens of illnesses.

These nurses have been unvaccinated for more than a year while in proximity with those with COVID-19. Exactly when are 40% of the nurses going to be knocked out in this model?

Nurses up until now practiced exceptionally higher restrictions to avoid this. But safety fatigue sets in and it won't work forever.

Can you find any source which suggests that vaccine mandates are the reason for the shortage of nurses in Oregon? The first 5 results on Google for “Oregon Nurse shortage”, which are mostly from April-May, list workplace stresses and at-risk family members as reasons for the exodus.

Some articles are as old as December, which is before the vaccine was even available, let alone mandated

This is a new policy brown is enacting against the wishes of the Nurses union. There is no data yet, I'm just extrapolating based on the fact that these new requirements will cause some nurses to quit rather than be vaccinated, which will directly reduce the number of ICU beds while not contributing meaningfully to the % vaccinated.

If we are only to rely on already collected empirical data to make decisions or form opinions we would never be able to hold an opinion when it matters most... before

And IMO it would be better the faster they all give it to each other. The longer it circulates between the non-vaccinated, who are interacting with the vaccinated, the likelier a variant arises that isn't affected by the vaccinations.

We don't want vaccinated people constantly catching covid, even if right now the symptoms are mild or nil 99.9% of the time.

When you're operating at the level of a government setting policy for an entire country, you're no longer in position to view the world in terms of "personal responsibility". People, as a mass, are a fairly deterministic blob. "Reopening" sends the message that the pandemic is over. If you want to reopen, you need to accept that this will - directly, as a result of your decision - lead to avoidable deaths.

As for the other half of your proposition, I can see why it might seem appealingly logical - why should people who refused vaccination be entitled to medical care? - but I think it's ultimately inhumane. You don't know why they're not vaccinated. Maybe they weren't even offered it. Maybe they were in a disadvantaged life situation - there's a suspicious correlation between economic class and vaccination rate. Maybe they were prevented from getting it by oppressive relatives or partners. Maybe they were just being honestly cautious, and badly misjudged the relative risks. It's not fair to condemn people to death for those things.

Wise response. I wouldn't be surprised if ~20% of any society/state/country is immune compromised in some way, most of those people work across their societies; letting covid run would force them to separate, and eventually end in poverty, this would weaken any society.

What do you expect to happen? 20% of the population will not get vaccinated and will wait for Covid to go away? This is also highly unlikely. Keeping the country closed and divided is adding a lot of stress to the stress we are already under due to the pandemic.

Just a case in point, some regions only have one vaccine type avy e.g. Australia with Astra, my wife would have serious problems with Astra, fortunately we have Pfizer in NZ, there are many many examples like this.

I do believe there is away to send a more complete and nuanced message. We can reopen and keep communicating the fact that the disease is still here, people should be careful. I am not sure we really have an alternative. Covid might stay with us forever.

As to your humanitarian point - this can also be addressed with more nuance. A patient can explain that they are coming from a situation where they couldn’t get vaccinated. I don’t think it’s fair to prioritize the treatment of intentionally unvaccinated Covid patients who believe doctors are a part of a worldwide conspiracy. It’s a difficult ethical question - but we have to answer it nonetheless.

Sure, if they're unvaccinated but still taking precautions to mitigate the spread to others and reduce the hospital workload, I'll certainly have more sympathy for them. How many unvaccinated people do you believe really do this?

?! Most, surely, if they are rational. You seem to be implying the unvaccinated may tend to be careless.

If people delay vaccination in fear of health consequences, of course they will also be extra careful about avoiding contagion.

If people delay vaccination for other sensible, defensible reasons - I cannot guess them. And I do not want to get inside the pit of the "it's all fake" minds. Even today I had to listen to a mate stating that "only the already compromised got killed" - many of "my" dead were very healthy.

There were plenty of people who spoke out against simple precautions at the beginning of the pandemic, before vaccines were available to anyone. So I don't even need to speculate that at least some people do not take precautions while being unvaccinated; I've already seen a lot of it.

Of course in the population you will see the whole range, the bell has two tails:

do not assume there is one tail only.

Remember that one side is louder than the other: do not be fooled scouting by noise. (Nor do commit fallacies of generalization at rights - responsibility is on the individual.)

Anecdote: you tell me? The day before posting that - which already contained other anecdotes - this nice guy went for a takeaway and an unknown fool, the wrong tail of cheeky, started smiling and fake-coughing - owner reported he did that whenever he saw anyone wearing a mask. Is that the end of the pandemic? Because the nice guy saw the same at the early beginning: fake-coughers at the supermarket, mocking those who seemed to want to stay at a distance. She, almost twenty, kept herself coughing smiling and almost adhesive (well, it's nice guy involved, what else can you do) at the counter. The boyfriend went along but while leaving went "Well, on the other hand, when it's full of people...", in a sudden strike of reason. And nice guy looking and the sky thinking, the are so foolish they do not remotely guess that I kept at a distance especially because I had to attend to business, hours before, in the biggest epicenter city of the epidemic. Now: if society thinks that combating and preventing foolery is not a priority...

Yes, probability distributions have two tails, but you can't just assume they're the same size. If you know what the probability distribrution of unvaccinated people is w.r.t. precautionary measures they take, then I'd love to see it. But my bet is that you don't have any actual data on it, and you're just making assumptions.

edit: To be clear, I don't know what the distribution looks like either, but I'm not assuming the average unvaccinated person takes other precautions. I don't think we can confidently say that.

> you can't just assume they're the same size

I did not. I am stating: one can not assume that the set of the unvaccinated who take strong precautions against the infection is negligible. As I wrote, it would be irrational: those who are hesitant about the vaccine for health reasons must also be very wary about being infected - plain logic. Many are are hesitant about the vaccine for health reasons, so they must also be very wary about being infected, if not insane.

I would not call what I have made and again follows 'assumptions': positively both tail exist, that is easy to prove (as above. We do not need to prove the other tail, it is evident and loud). I do not know what benefit is brought by drawing proportions. I am not sure what gain we get by assessing the average.

In fact - but this brings us elsewhere -, I am already extremely diffident towards the opinions of the average. I believe by experience that the distribution also of intellectual resources is in general paretian. I start already by believing that Average Joe and Median Jack "will be a mess". But of course, given that, I also insist that the average and median cannot be representative of the whole.

So, for example, calibrating policies on the median would be a Procuste's bed for the healthy part. "Please open your purse Sir, and let me check your items: the median customer is a shoplifter" - I am very wary of this kind of perspective, I have met it instanced many times in my life. This is also in the area of what I meant with «fallacies of generalization at rights».

>punitive hospital policies

Why not also put fat people + diabetics at lower priority? Why is someone killing themselves by being 350lbs and having high-fructose corn syrup blood somehow more forgivable than someone waiting for FDA approval?

Are hospitals overwhelmed because of fat people in ICUs?

Yes hospitals in some areas are overwhelmed because of obese people in ICUs. The data clearly shows that obesity is a critical risk factor for ICU admission.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7010e4.htm

Well, I was responding to the comment about fat people in general, not obese Covid patients. I don’t think the obesity factor should be taken into account at all.

Re your response: ICUs are overwhelmed because of Covid patients, not because of fat people with non-Covid conditions.

Is that...a serious question?

Do you worry about Lyme disease, Epstein Barr virus or lone star ticks too? How much time do you spend?

Most Americans should be more worried about obesity and heart disease than long covid.

"My concern is not about dying as much as it is about developing long Covid and other not fully confirmed potential complications."

You and most people who are skeptical about the coronavirus vaccines share the exact same concern. But it sounds like you want them to be institutionally deprioritized because of theirs.

That’s not directly comparable. Antivaxx concern is not rooted in science or statistics. It’s rooted in conspiracy theories and anti-science.

In a similar way you could argue that questioning the last election is the same as worrying about the destructive rise of far-right rhetoric because both are rooted in the concern for our society. And therefore we should not institutionally ignore those who doubt the legitimacy of the election.

“Both sides” argument is not valid just because there are many people on both sides.

With «antivaxx concern.... rooted in» are you talking about Pfizer/Moderna/OAZ/JnJ or are you talking in general?

Because if you mean current concerns, and you have the «science and statistics» that debunk such concern, do provide it. Because a lot of hesitants are there, following anecdotal evidence in their close circle and more of post-vaccine damage¹, and data that does not allow for proper computation of risks², and, to say it all, a public rhetoric that does not help owing to oversimplification.

Statistically, I only found data about passive monitoring - it may partially somehow set the minimum expected, but they are easily underestimations. Active monitoring, I have not found anything (I also had raised a thread here for the hunt, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28034269).

But if you have the credible data, share it - do not assume it is out in the billboards.

¹(what the, in the past 24 hours alone I read on the papers of a local athlete hit with miocarditis, then in a phone call with a friend was told of an acquaintance of his with odd dire damages, and again I read on the papers of a second athlete with miocarditis. This is not aproblematic: this goes rightfully on the table of notions to be dealt with. And beyond the close circle and the credible sources, there are people who wrote around about having been hit by a meteorite a little after the inoculation - less reliable, but more consolidating the presence of the issue than not.)

²Not too many hours ago a divulgative article appeared here on the probability of long covid as "post 12 weeks symptoms": it mentioned three studies, publishing a conservative 2.3% chance, a well-considered 14%, and a broadly encompassing 40%. And one can compute risks reliably with this? And these generic "adverse events" did not even discriminate "nuisance vs impactive vs impairing"!

Yes, because one thing is true as shown by scientific evidence and the other is not.

It is really really important that public policy is based on scientific and other sorts of evidence. This is why the initial refusal of the CDC to back masks was so bad—it wasn't based on the evidence.

That's not what happens when the disease gets out of control.

When that happens, hospitals fill up, death rates for everything shoot up.

This is much repeated, but has never actually happened.

Already happening, there are 100s of articles like this, https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/08/16/joel-valdez...

That's a primary reason we're so serious about it in NZ, also it would kill tens of thousands of our native people.

Of course.

That's the idea of flattening the curve.

Which is the strategy in the North America and Europe. And it requires a ton of effort. So no, it's not just 0.2%

When you try to flatten the curve you still need to keep 2-3 weeks of headroom because exponential growth is a bitch.

A 0.2% infection fatality rate when treatment is available is pretty obviously not the only consequence of covid.

We'll hopefully get just about there once enough people are vaccinated, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that the lockdown measures were/are intended to prevent an overload of the healthcare system that both sends the covid IFR skyrocketing and also increases deaths and other health complications from other conditions that can no longer receive timely treatment.

This has been played out enough places that it should be obvious. Those who want to just let that scenario play out (with eyes open or otherwise) are clearly in the minority.

> A 0.2% infection fatality rate when treatment is available is pretty obviously not the only consequence of covid.

Fair enough.

Feel free to substitute the right numbers, but that is the question to be answered.

And that same cost/benefit analysis that should be done for any major problem -- opioid, tobacco, alcohol.

I have to admit that it sort of broke my heart to hear that a university teacher and biology scientist would not get vaccinated.

I'm still trying to cope and understand how someone with this kind of job and discipline would think like that.

> I'm still trying to cope and understand how someone with this kind of job and discipline would think like that

Are you trying to understand their reasons, or are you digesting the idea that possibly smart and educated people do not share your own conclusions?

By the way: maybe those people you mention are refusing the available vaccines at the present time, for their own reasons.

They did not share any conclusion.

> refusing the available vaccines at the present time, for their own reasons

So what would they really know about that vaccine if they're not specialized in virology? Does it imply that vaccine was rushed?

> imply

I am fully stating that nobody today can be certified as having the definitive-in-effect, infallible judgement machine.

So, when somebody has different ideas, do not dismiss them beyond your own very possibly partial framework. You disagree, stage A, but it is a long process before being able to rightfully state something as wrong, stage Z.

> what would they really know if they're not specialized

Also non mechanical engineers have to drive cars, also non economists have to invest, also non nutritionists have to eat: we judge with what we have. And, also given the first point, no engineer / economist / nutritionist has perfect judgement in engineering, economy, nutrition. One does their own homework to take their decisions, daily, constantly.

> Does it imply

It implies a number of factors that the individual will present according to objective tentative partial data and subjective importance.

> They did not share any conclusion

(Sorry, I did not quite understand what you mean with this statement, though I presumed I understood the rest.)

Entirely anecdotal, but I've noticed a pattern whereby previous rational people who have/had Covid will deny they have it at all costs. Even after a positive test result.

However, those who end up being negative will have a more balanced viewpoint. ie. maybe I do, maybe I don't, I'll await the results.

It reminds me of that fungus that takes over an ant's brain to help the fungus spread.

Of course my experience is of a small sample set (less than 10 people) and has absolutely no basis in scientific reality. I just found it curious.

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