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Comment by TigeriusKirk | Hacker News Reader

I vaccinated within days of becoming eligible and I'm 100% against this mandate. To such an extent that I'll become a single-issue voter over it.

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I would be with you if it weren’t for the “or test” part. “You must get vaccinated” would be problematic, but “you must do a COVID test once a week if you’re not vaccinated” is totally reasonable IMO.

Give it a few months. First they will pass the costs onto the employee, then they will take away the option altogether. Mark my words.

With a $14k fine per violation, I doubt most employers will give employees the option to test weekly. That's too much of a liability.

Especially considering the load this will put on laboratories.

The people that need the test to determine proper course of treatment will get results days after it matters. It will be just like 2020.

In June of 2020, I waited over 2 weeks for the results of my test. A delay that long makes the test more than worthless for preventing transmission and determining best course of action.

I think more reasonable stance would be to require employers offer sufficient protective gear for unvaccinated employees. Gas masks aren't that expensive. And any private person can at their own cost also buy such device to fully protect themselves.

That's pretty unreasonable unless you can't medically receive the shot and there are active infections.

We require vaccinations for schooling and for healthcare already (e.g TB). This is no huge stretch.

Actually having had to wear a gas mask in the military for hours... I would LOVE to see this. If you think an N-95 grade mask is hard to breathe though, try wearing an NBC mask for 8 hours a day. :-)

It's "reasonable" in the sense of being slightly less draconian but completely unreasonable from a health perspective.

Think about it: two people enter a workplace. One is unvaccinated but recently tested, so it can be said with good confidence they are not infected. The other is vaccinated but may well be sick and spreading it, especially as effectiveness wanes quickly. The other is waved through, the first is penalized with constant charges. Who is making other people the safest here? It's not the vaccinated guy.

"Recently tested" doesn't mean you definitely don't have the Covid. It could that you weren't far enough along in your sickness at the time you were tested.

It's all about risk. Someone who has been vaccinated has a very low likelihood of being sick with Covid. Someone who has recently been tested also has a low likelihood.

IMO, though, if the tests are a week apart, that's a lot of opportunity for Covid to slip through. There's a reason that 72 hours (and sometimes 48 hours, I think) is the time limit for tests for traveling. Even that isn't a guarantee, though.

I can't find the chart now, but Covid progresses pretty rapidly, so if someone gets tested on Friday and was exposed 1-2 days before that, they can pretty much spread it for an entire week before they get tested on the next Friday.

And even if they were tested on Mondays, they could still be spreading it before the weekend.

Tests prevent someone from spreading it for weeks, but not days.

Vaccines are much more likely to prevent the spread at all.

Preventing the spread of an infectious respiratory virus is a fools errand and we’ve known this forever. No amount of authoritarianism is enough to stop the spread. The mitigation efforts were always to avoid overrunning the hospitals, which we have managed easily.

Take a look around right now, multiple states are at ICU capacity. You don’t need to overrun the hospital system but under sustained stress, you quickly degrade service. Not to mention all the burnout and people leaving the field on top of it all.

Icu beds are a function of staffing long before equipment is a limitation. We've fired nurses and not rebuilt over the last 18 months. If nothing has been done to address staffing for seasonal diseases in that time, it's either incompetence or by design. This is why hospitals run at or near capacity all year round and have capacity issues every flu season. It's a business decision. It also happens to be easily exploited by the narrative.

You can go back and look at 10+ years of UK NHS "hospitals desperately overwhelmed" annual articles. Just because you hadn't heard of it before doesn't mean it isn't normal.

The fact that it happens a lot doesn't make it any less true now and the fact we've had sustained stress on the system for a year and a half isn't typical.

In the US, they've relaxed many guidelines and allowed student nurses without gaining licensure yet to practice because of the need [1].

[1] https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20200327.71403...

This all pales in comparison to the mandate Biden announced last night for all healthcare staff at facilities which take Medicare/Medicaid to be required to take the vaccine. Probably a good 20% of our nursing staff is at direct risk of being lost because of that new measure.

I'm not sure why this is down-voted (but I have my suspicions). ICUs are f-ed because hospital's business models are f-ed. Without people voluntarily electing to get minor surgery and other elective services their balance sheets get turned inside out and they cut staffing. The fact that we had a massive uptick in people who need laborious ICU care (because covid) at the same time that people more or less stopped voluntarily going to hospitals was a double whammy.

Measles

Mumps

Smallpox

SARS1

MERS

Chickenpox

Tuberculosis

To name a few.

Not a fools errand. Important to get vaccinated to prevent worse variants.

I’ll cancel out your vote then because I’m 100% for this.

Just FYI, no amount of coercive mandates and force applied against your fellow human beings to make them take these shots, which are marginally protective against transmission at best, will actually do anything to make you safer from Covid or reduce your paralyzing fear of it. TPTB will continue to menace you with the specter of The Virus as long as it is making you behave in ways useful to them -- namely, by handing them more power.

Oh ok, thanks for the heads up. Can't believe I let all these doctors, medical professionals and scientists cloud my judgement and make me believe them. I should definitely trust a stranger online, believe their conspiratorial drivel on a shadow cabal consolidating power and redpill myself out of this fever dream of a life I've been living.

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