The "main concern" aren't tourists - tourists are the lifeblood of many places, and they should be welcomed. They come to you to see your culture, and you encumber them with your own burden and fears.
Uh, where did I say that people shouldn't decide? Do you think we got +80% (87% if you factor in single doses), at gun point?
If these passports had an influence on 5 percentual points I was being extremely generous.
It's all about education, being informed, and a sense of duty. Probably the majority where fearful and anxious to do it, but they did it anyway.
> tourists are the lifeblood of many places, and they should be welcomed.
Being welcoming doesn't mean put up with shit, right? Wear a mask and have the vaccine passport at hand, not that hard now is it?
One is a tiny piece of cloth, the other is a tiny piece of digital paper.
You are immune for fucks sake, how hard is it to actually be welcoming and say: It's ok for unvaccinated to enter a restaurant. We can live without implicitly checking everyone. We don't need to be like that and can act like normal decent humans again! Is that so hard?
If by shit you mean the law, yes. That's what you have to do when you visit another country - even though a lot of people don't act like it truth be told.
Psst, come here, I'll drop you a quick tip: if they don't want to abide by the laws and mandates... don't come?
I don't get why you're ok to enforce your choice onto others, yet others can't enforce their choices onto you just because you're a tourist and we should welcome you.
>You are immune for fucks sake, how hard is it to actually be welcoming and say: It's ok for unvaccinated to enter a restaurant.
Uh, I don't think you can even enter the country without vaccine passport or valid PCR negative test. So you have that for starters, and if you choose to not be vaccinated what's the problem of taking another PCR test to go to restaurants?
>We can live without implicitly checking everyone. We don't need to be like that and can act like normal decent humans again! Is that so hard?
You just need to realize this is temporary, and the faster we go through this, the better - that was the whole game plan. Some people are opting to get infected without vaccines, that'll just delay things, but the end will come eventually.
Also we check people on regular basis: drivers licenses, IDs, tickets, etc.
Human decency is alive and well, and the fact that 87% of a country population, so far, adhered to a cause to protect themselves and the next person is the proof of that.
This is factually incorrect.
The Covid-19 vaccines significantly reduce symptoms, risk of hospitalisation, risk of death, and transmission rate. They are worth it on balance if you care about your own health, and/or the health of other people you interact with, especially those close to you, for almost everyone above a fairly low age.
But they do not provide complete immunity, which is called "sterilising immunity".
Which means other people's behaviour still affects you.
Some vaccines for other diseases do provide sterilising immunity. For example the smallpox vaccine does, which is why that disease is pretty much eradicated. But unfortunately none of the vaccines currently available for Covid-19 provide sterilising immunity.
Even so, if we are able to dampen the transmission rate in each community to below R < 1 by a combination of measures, which includes vaccination, the disease will gradually fade away instead of spreading to everyone. Probabilities are everything in this game.
We have multiple vaccines for well over 9 months now. Anybody who needs them can get them for free. Covid is never going away -- it is endemic. Dragging this pandemic game past vaccines is unethical as hell.
People need to accept that covid is always around now and get back to actual life. It may come as a shock to some people but there is an entire world of problems besides the myopic fixation on exactly one illness. Life is to be lived, not survived. Move on. Covid myopia is a disease much worse than covid itself.
My comment was to address the parent's serious misleading factual idea about immunity, and provide some nuanced background to readers who may find that useful, as the GP's summary is a false but attractively simplistic belief that a lot of people hold about the vaccines. For some people that misunderstanding is causing them to act against their own personal values.
Even if you believe people should act according to their personal values regardless of consequence to others, you probably believe people should be entitled to the correct basic facts if they want them.
I have met too many people who said "I've had the vaccine so I can't get Covid", "I've had the vaccine so I can't give anyone Covid", or "I've had Covid so I can't give anyone Covid", and then walked right up close to other people in confined spaces with other people (service workers etc) unable to leave.
Presumably some of those people believe what they are saying, and would choose based on their own personal values to act differently if they knew they had misunderstood that there are different kinds of vaccine immunity.
Read my comment carefully and you will hopefully see it does not contain value judgements about how people should choose to respond to Covid. (Even if other comments of mine do.)
I agree with you that "Covid is always around now". But that is an over-simplistic, black-and-white summary of something quite nuanced. I'll try to summarise my view in a black and white way (always misleading for a nuanced topic unfortunately):
There is "ok endemic" and "bad endemic". It can still go either way.
Most people want the "ok endemic" version instead of "bad endemic". And they don't know how to get it, so rely on government and other major actors to help chart a path.
To someone who gets that there is a difference, people who say "but it's going to be endemic" as though that settles everything, sound like they are saying "I don't care if it's bad endemic, and you shouldn't care either, stop bleating".
What if we have been doing it wrong until now?
Maybe, going forward, we should have proper vaccine passports which include everything, not only COVID-19.
Have you had all your shots, or not.