This is not on me to solve. The government had enough time to convince everyone to vaccinate or prepare the healthcare sector for influx of cases of unvaccinated.
If omicron is actually a breakthrough variant, I'm sure all the people who are about to die will also understand how hurt your feelings are.
I'm merely pointing out the selfishness in your stance and how harmful it is to the overall efforts of the medical community. That's not bad faith.
We've all had an absolutely shit time. You're not special.
>I'm merely pointing out the selfishness in your stance and how harmful it is to the overall efforts of the medical community. That's not bad faith. We've all had an absolutely shit time. You're not special.
Why is your right keeping families separated not selfish?
Perhaps not when it's economic, technological, wartime, etc. Sure. But when it comes to the healthcare of everyone (not just the individual), they absolutely should. The problem is that politicians seem to think they know more about healthcare than the experts do.
> Why is your right keeping families separated not selfish?
My family has been separated, too. By almost half the planet. Your victim appeal doesn't work here.
In pandemic times medical community matters more but nobody should be the only one making decisions about the life of others. People on the front-line lack insight about everything else that's happening. And experts on other fields and even politicians know things that epidemiologists don't. This has gone too far.
There are many bright individuals around the world that could contribute to this fight but as long as their opinion goes against the built consensus they will stand no chance of getting heard. As a global society we are committing all in to a local optima that sucks.
For the last two years I tried my best to stay at home and used respirators even at outdoors. Please see that politicians are the ones that benefits from this new status quo because on this long lasting and seemingly eternal crisis they have absolute power over people freedom to travel, to gather and to express on public. This being the new normal scares me.
I live in a poor country with cases slowly approaching zero, a high vaccination rate and in the midst of the hot/humid season. Also staying at home is a luxury that the large majority of the population can't afford so my decision has a linear effect because nobody on my neighborhood will be "staying at home" or using masks anyways. Right now poverty and hunger are more of an issue than Covid.
Oh yeah let's ignore all the economical, social and health issues that are side effect of the "staying at home" and insist on social shaming and in a policy that is unsustainable. Let's adopt a dogmatic approach to solve novel issues.
If you want to shorten the global pandemic please lobby your politicians into not holding but subsidizing vaccines to poor countries.
I'm a supporter of building longer term effects that contribute into making society more robust against Covid and other kinds of airborne diseases. Like proper indoor ventilation in public spaces, load balancing, better respirators for daily use. Improved vaccine manufacturing capability and shorter lead times for vaccine development. I understand that they are not mutually exclusively in theory but there's so much we can lobby for at the same time and I prefer not to waste it.
And you didn't lose 2 years of your life. You're alive, you didn't die due to the pandemic, did you? That's much less than can be said for 5 million others, mostly older or unhealthy to begin with. They're dead because people didn't follow the guidelines early and it kept spreading and spreading.
So, be grateful you're not dead, and do your part to increase collective resilience.
This is solely on the government. It's immoral to keep vaccinated people in uncertainty and include them in any sort of lockdowns.
>And you didn't lose 2 years of your life. You're alive, you didn't die due to the pandemic, did you? That's much less than can be said for 5 million others, mostly older or unhealthy to begin with. They're dead because people didn't follow the guidelines early and it kept spreading and spreading.
This is not arguing in good faith. Healthy people in their 30s are not dying. Of all the 0.5m children infected in Israel only 200 were severe cases.
>So, be grateful you're not dead, and do your part to increase collective resilience.
I already did my part. Now my part will be attending a demo with all those "antivaxx / 5G chips believing people" and I will fight for my right to live a normal life.
Don't get me wrong, I know there's some sort of middle ground but I wanted to provide food for thought.
There is way too much politics involved. Pandemic should make people naturally empathic not forced by their governments to blindly obey.
The limiting factor is medical professionals, not adding buildings. You can't train a doctor in 2 years.
> preventing normal causes of medial and nursing school drop outs in order to bolster the number of adequately trained medical professionals
What's the drop-out rate? How would you "prevent" this? Do people drop out because they can't cope with the role, or some other reason? What would the overall effect of this policy be in terms of numbers? I suspect it would be minimal.
Why not? Do you really need a "doctor" to treat COVID, or just a "person trained in treating COVID and putting people on the respirator"?
Case in point, in Italy in 2020, at the peak of the first wave ("Bergamo"), they fast-tracked final year medical students. Looks like the change is permanent [1]. So clearly "you can't doctor in X years" (AFAIK 6-7 years in most of Europe) was wrong before the pandemic. We can and should do better.
I’m well aware it’s not possible to train a decent doctor in two years, which is why my point was more that they could have applied positive pressure like merit based scholarship opportunities or any of a number of other ways to assist students in the second/third years of medical school to stay on track to graduate as doctors and nurses. The point is that there’s never been a shortage of people trying to become Doctors, we have social, educational and economic effects in play that limit the number of people that manage to get there all of which the governments around the world could have done things about.
The global nature of the situation makes any solutions focused on a single nation and their own citizens inadequate as they will just be eventually defeated by the natural mutant strains developing elsewhere. In fact “more doctors and nurses and hospital beds because we’re just going to let it happen” is the only local to national level strategy that has any long term ability to make a difference if the virus continues on its course to become endemic.
This isn't about you. And those 2 years are sunk costs for all of us.
You're engaging in magical thinking, here. We can't afford it. It's self-centered. And it does nobody any good, most especially not you. Might get you killed, though.
As an aside, no, the healthcare "sector" is not at all prepared, it has never been prepared, and it can't magically be made prepared, either. The only solution there is to avoid overloading the system. There aren't any other solutions. So rational people will continue to argue for all of the mitigation measures that we know are effective. Whether you like it or not. It's just as much "on you" to participate in that as it is "on" all of the rest of us.
I understand that it's been a long time and you're frustrated, but this simply isn't over yet, and the consequences are real.