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Comment by yladiz | Hacker News Reader

Genuine question: given the current situation, what's the alternative? A lockdown for everyone? Vaccine mandate? Doing nothing and removing restrictions? Something else?

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Probably not much. All KPIs are heading down now anyways, just look into the RKI dashboard [1]. Doing a quick math exercise underscores this: 70% are vaccinated, 6 million had it (at least, the number is probably higher), so in total 80-85% of the population already had it or is vaccinated by now. Numbers should go down now from now, which they actually start to do, if you look in the dashboard.

[1] https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...

It's not great, and I do wish that the current coalition had prepared a bit more for this winter, rather than assuming 1. enough people would get vaccinated, and 2. that it wouldn't come back seasonally like last year. They really should have prepared months ago.

I can't think of a better alternative given the current situation if the end goal is to get people to reduce contact and get vaccinated, short of a full lockdown for everyone (which I think is a lot less preferable). Whether this form of lockdown will have any effect remains to be seen.

It’s absurd to believe that this will actually do anything additional to reduce infections on the short term. People don’t get infected while shopping. This is just meant to pressure the unvaccinated to get vaccinated which might help next year.

Unvaccinated people will just meet privately at home and get infected. It’s just the wrong move at the worst possible time.

> Unvaccinated people will just meet privately at home and get infected.

they are anyways

> People don’t get infected while shopping.

What's so special about shopping that it prevents transmission of a relatively communicable disease?

The same force that prevents covid from spreading while you are sitting down at a restaurant but can get you as you walk in and when you use the restroom

Mask wearing is well adhered too, and shop visitors stay only a short time, leaving less droplets in the air than maskless visitors to, say, a restaurant or bar.

While shopping, people wear masks, talk (and breathe and cough) less, and are generally not packed into small spaces breathing a lot of the same air, so the risk is lower than at a house party or bar or dance club.

Does managing indoor humidity help? It seems to with other respiratory viruses.

Yes! Indoor humidity helps in at least two ways: 1) Humidity prevents aerosol transmission 2) Humidity helps the cillia in your airways function better and remove foreign particles, including viruses faster before they have a chance to infect you.

Control the media to stop the panic, that only worsens things with a nocebo effect. Gradually remove restrictions since numbers are going down anyways.

Focus on early treatment. Drugs like ivermectin, hcq, fluvoxamine

Ivermectin and hcq do nothing for covid. No idea what fluvoxamine is.

It's an antidepressant. I don't think it has any effect on COVID, either proven or rumoured.

There have been several small studies which show fluvoxamine is an effective COVID-19 treatment.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=covid+fluvoxamine

Results are still somewhat preliminary and it isn't formally approved for that use but I know that many physicians are prescribing it off label and report positive results. The safety profile is good as a temporary acute treatment so there's little reason not to use it.

Huh I hadn't heard of that yet. I wonder if the same goes for other SSRIs. It's a pretty big class.

I hope you or someone close to you never get as desperate as I was. Saved my life.

Is it worse than last winter?

Quite likely, yes. And no.

In the part of Germany where I live, 7-day incidence among the unvaccinated is 1726, which is much worse than last winter, and it's 112 among the vaccinated. Hospitalisation tells a similar story: The unvaccinated are suffering.

If that 1726 would rise as it did last winter, a lot of unvaccinated fools would die. A hundred thousand dead in three months, perhaps.

Imagine a world in which the vaccine does not exist. What would you do then?

That is the alternative.

We don't live in a world without the vaccine, so I don't see the argument.

A possible answer to your question of what we could do if we do not want to force people to get vaccinated is the same as what we could do if people could not be vaccinated.

You said it was your ‘genuine question’. So I’m not sure why you need to see the argument. It’s an answer to your question, not an argument.

So basically lockdown for all, because restricting the rights of everybody is better than restricting the rights of some. Good luck convincing the courts that that's the minimal necessary restriction.

There are more options than ‘lockdown for all’, but yes, it would be one of the things you could do if vaccinations were not available.

But vaccinations are available, so you likely can't do it legally.

That’s for the courts to decide. Is a lockdown not allowed because forcing people to vaccinate is an option? Or is forcing people to vaccinate not allowed because lockdown is an option?

Forcing people to vaccinate is not really a tool to control infections right now, and more of an independent (also currently hotly debated) longer-term question. (I'm fairly certain its going to come for some jobs at least)

And if applied as here, I doubt many would argue that "forcing people to vaccinate" is a weaker measure than "impose some restrictions on unvaccinated" (although the former is of course going to be a strong form of the latter)

Use my immune system, like people did for millions of years. Unfortunately everyone can’t but the vast majority will be fine after having covid and will have built up immunity.

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