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Comment by sreque | Hacker News Reader

If you're at risk of covid, you can get vaccinated and are protected from covid. That's all the defense you need in order to not worry about anyone else being infected.

If you're in an at-risk category where you feel the vaccine isn't enough of a defense, you can wear n95 masks, get a third booster shot, or do whatever other extra mitigation measures you feel you need.

The reality is that covid isn't dangerous enough, given the tools people have at their disposal, to warrant authoritarian government or societal overreach. That unfortunately hasn't stopped the government, or it's political allies, from trying anyways. I firmly believe this overreach will backfire on the US democrat party and they will feel the backlash in the midterm elections of 2022.

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I think I would much rather mildly inconvenience people and have my favorite political team’s score go down than the alternative of Italy-style medical system collapse with massive death totals.

> If you're at risk of covid, you can get vaccinated and are protected from covid. That's all the defense you need in order to not worry about anyone else being infected.

Vaccinated people can still get coronavirus variants, albeit with seemingly milder symptoms and at a lower rate. There is some evidence that they can still be transmissible as well.

More importantly, there are also whole categories of people who cannot get vaccinated or who are not allowed to get the second vaccine dose due to an allergic reaction to the first. My mother is in the second category. https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/who-cant-have-covid-19-vac...

> If you're in an at-risk category where you feel the vaccine isn't enough of a defense, you can wear n95 masks, get a third booster shot, or do whatever other extra mitigation measures you feel you need.

Masks work in part by catching and redirecting particles that come out of your own mouth. I am not an epidemiologist and have limited understanding of the effect, but my limited understanding is that models that epidemiologist have used suggest that effect might be more important than the filtering effect of the mask itself given the other mucus membranes like the eyes or gaps in most masks. So your mask helps protect others as much as yourself if you are carrying the virus asymptomatically. https://science.thewire.in/the-sciences/covid-19-pandemic-ma...

> I think I would much rather mildly inconvenience people and have my favorite political team’s score go down than the alternative of Italy-style medical system collapse with massive death totals.

That's a nice false dichotomy you have there. Florida's average death rates in the US despite having a highly vulnerable elderly population prove that.

Of course vaccinated people can still get COVID. Everyone knows that. Why repeat it? The point is that covid becomes a very low risk to the vaccinated. Once vaccinated, you are more likely to die of the flu than of covid.

Most theoretical mask studies were done when we thought COVID was primarily spread by droplets, not aerosols. To this day I haven't seen any study plausibly show that others' masks protect you as much as your own mask. I'd be happy to be proven wrong if there's any real scientific evidence out there.

I'm not sure I understand the Florida example. Deaths per Capita are currently spiking in Florida again and not in places with strong vaccination rates.

The reason I repeat the point about "breakthrough" infections is that vaccinations are not a cure all and we can't just leave everyone to personal responsibility on vaccination/no vaccinations.

Also, importantly, not everyone can get vaccinated, they are more likely to be infected by those unvaccinated and are affected by the unvaccinated's use of our scarce hospital resources.

Mask mandates and higher vaccination rates seem to result in lower infection rates in pretty much every empirical study I've seen. And in places where they are fought tooth and nail like Florida, people disproportionately tend to die.

Not everyone can medically safely take the vaccine.

So the answer is to simply get the vaccine... Though, if it's so simple then the vaccine mandate makes total sense.

Please report for your mandatory physical training, Comrade. We simply can't have you getting fat.

I was literally in the military and we would train to meet body standards that were based on minimizing the long-term statistical risk of death. We also got vaccined for the same reason. I'm not sympathetic to your argument that a bunch of people should pointlessly die in your wasteland of misinformation so you might feel "free". We didn't say "comrade" so much too.

Most countries call it PE.

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