Hacker News Reader

Comment by newswasboring | Hacker News Reader

The target is to save lives. If the threat is still there, we need to keep the safety measures. And covid measures have always been dynamic. Safety measures have been removed or reintroduced based up on very hard statistics man. I don't know how you don't see that.

edit: My first sentence was a bit garbage. The target is to save lives from covid and avoid its spread. Hospital utilization and mortality rate from the disease are good KPIs for that. Almost all responsible countries are at least trying to follow those KPIs.

View on HN

TSA doesn't go around saying 'we are here to waste your time and humiliate you'. They are also saving lives. In perpetuity.

A negligible number of lives. All terrorist attacks in US history combined resulted in less than three days worth of COVID-19 deaths.

All the more reason to keep draconian covid measures in place in perpetuity. Covid passports, lockdowns, masks, forced vax.

Sometimes I picture our anti-covid measures as piling sandbags in front of a tsunami. Might hold back the water for a little while, but won't do much in the long term.

They can go around staying whatever they want. But the fact is they have never had nor will they ever have the statistical basis that covid regulations have. I can, right now, google covid and be presented with all statistics broken down by days, countries, continents etc. We can start comparing TSA and covid when TSA starts presenting their statistics.

That may be the target, but the real outcome is simply delaying those deaths, spreading them out more over time.

> That may be the target, but the real outcome is simply delaying those deaths, spreading them out more over time. reply

Don't we all die eventually? What's your point then?

Are you saying that if people get COVID they'll all die of COVID related complications *eventually•? Because that's not necessarily true. If someone is the 101st person who needs a ventilator and all 100 ventilators are being used by COVID patients, then that person likely dies and they could have been recovered.

> the real outcome is simply delaying those deaths, spreading them out more over time.

Which is still a good outcome, because you don't want to overwhelm the healthcare system to the point that it can't handle anything that isn't COVID.

That was the whole point of the early-pandemic "flatten the curve" campaigns.

>The target is to save lives. If the threat is still there, we need to keep the safety measures.

Ok your argument just fell apart. Do we not always have the "need" to save lives? The "threat" is never going away.

That's ambigous and completely subjective. What is is not is an objective measure of any sort. Which means it continues indefinitely until our leaders decide otherwise.

The fact you cannot give me a set time when it will end, or what status we need to meet for all of the safety measures to end is pretty telling.

>I don't know how you don't see that.

Because you have no data or facts to back up your claim. You can't even explain it yourself.

You are being Fox-news-level combative about your hobbyhorse here. Others have explained why you are way off base.

What would you have us do? Dispense with masks and vaccines and just let the chips fall where they may? That's madness. COVID is a threat. It's best to work to counteract that threat using the best tools we have available, which are pretty simple: masks, distance, and vaccination.

>The fact you cannot give me a set time when it will end, or what status we need to meet for all of the safety measures to end is pretty telling.

It kinda feels like you're demanding to talk to the manager of coronavirus here.

Give me the numbers and the objective measurement of what we need to meet for this to happen. Why is this hard for you?

>What would you have us do? Dispense with masks and vaccines and just let the chips fall where they may? That's madness. COVID is a threat.

>You are being Fox-news-level combative about your hobbyhorse here.

While you're at it stop with the strawman and ad-hominem attacks. What it looks like is you have nothing to support the idea that this will stop once we meet a certain "threshold".

All I'm asking is what the threshold is. Are you really sure I'm the combative one in this situation?

>Are you really sure I'm the combative one in this situation?

Very much so. That much was clear from your first comment, when you equated the knee-jerk acceptance of insane and ineffective security theater post-9/11 with the entirely rational measures we've taken in the face of a novel pandemic for which there is no existent immunity.

Your tirades here demanding someone tell you the threshold at which point we can dispense with masks and distancing are ridiculously off base. As long as ICUs are packed, and as long as regular care is rationed because of antivaxxers flooding hospitals with COVID or Ivermectin ODs, we'll have to keep doing what we're doing to keep ourselves and those we love safe(r).

You're straw-manning again and still not giving me an objective threshold.

Do you enjoy repeating yourself and making no headway?

The threat will never go away, but fortunately vaccination cuts the risk of death to virtually zero. SARS-CoV-2 is now endemic in the worldwide human population, plus several animal species, so unlike smallpox or polio it can never be eradicated. Obviously we can't keep the safety measures in place forever, so what are the quantitative exit criteria?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com