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Comment by boplicity | Hacker News Reader

> So why the fuck am I, "the low risk one", stuck at home alone all day? Who the fuck am I protecting?

It's not about you.

I'm not convinced that boosters should be required, in order to go back to work. But, really, to answer your question: It's not about you. It's about the people you're around. At work.

Just like everything else with COVID -- the reality is that we have to account for the affect on everyone, and not just ourselves. Individually, we have extremely low odds of suffering the worst from COVID. Collectively, hospitals have overflowed, 700,000+ people in the States have died, and many are suffering long-term health consequences.

It's not about you. It's about everyone.

That being said: I'm in Canada, where boosters are still uncommon. I've never heard of any booster requirements, just to go into the office.

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You can qualify a lot of F’d up policy just by saying “it’s not about you, it’s about everyone!”

When we were dealing with a completely and utterly unknown virus for which we had no information, no effective responses, no useful therapies or treatments, no real understanding of how it spread, no vaccines, and not even a clear idea of where community spread already happened, taking some extreme measures in response to a pandemic made sense.

We now have much better information than we had plus vaccines faster than we ever had vaccines in response to a new pandemic before plus the resilience of the COVID survivors, both known survivors and unknown survivors, and useful therapies and treatments.

The risk calculus has changed and so must the response shift from the public to the private: from government to individual.

> The risk calculus has changed and so must the response shift from the public to the private: from government to individual.

I don't think it has shifted all that much in many countries. Yes, we have vaccines and better treatment. At the same time, vaccination rates aren't as high as they should be, plus we're dealing with a new variant that's more than twice as contagious and probably causes more severe cases. We're also dealing with waning immunity.

I wouldn't go as far as saying these factors offset each other completely, but last year, we've had all kinds of non-pharmaceutical interventions in place (masks, contact restrictions). Many countries have now abolished these.

I might buy the "individual choice" argument if negative effects were only felt by those choosing to not get vaccinated, not wear masks or similar, but once hospitals/ICUs overflow, other people suffer or die too.

> Collectively, hospitals have overflowed...

This bears repeating every time this gets mentioned:

In the US, even before the pandemic, it was "standard" for ICUs at most level 1 trauma centers and tertiary care facilities to operate at 80-90% capacity[1] and for ERs to be overwhelmed by patients in bad flu years[2].

SARS-CoV-2 is basically already an endemic virus, just like influenza, and in the near-term it is absolutely unrealistic to expect that somehow miraculously unlike influenza, it won't have a material impact on hospital utilization rates.

[1] https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-flow/2-healthc...

[2] https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...

You're missing the dissonance part: all the people around me, who are high risk, are at work or school. I am classed as low risk (= no booster) yet I'm perma-WFH. If it's not about me, what is it about?

Also to clarify, I'm very much NOT arguing for forcing people to return to work or an in-person model of work. In fact, I quite like the "remote style" of work and would continue it even while in person. I just miss my commute and the scene.

What are you arguing for? If co-workers don't wish to go back into the office even if they're allowed to (which is the situation at a lot of tech companies these days), what does that do for your commute and scene? (I do get some nostalgia for being with co-workers--and I'm certainly happy to be back to events again--but clearly there's a tradeoff that you and co-workers need to make.)

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