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Comment by DiffEq | Hacker News Reader

Then why not fire people who are overweight? That kills more people; reduces work capacity more than any other, and costs more money than any other health issue we have. Additionally, if you are healthy and do not have the comorbidities that come with being overweight your risks of being a Covid mortality is less than the flu. So to be consistent Google should fire everyone that is overweight right? And you should be totally ok with that.

Why not fire people who drive cars - the risk of dying and killing other people is greater than Covid presents for most every age category...especially those ages that are working for Google. And you should be o.k. with that too.

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Obesity isn’t transmissible, so far as anyone knows. (With the possible exception of fecal transplants, but those are deliberate so any comparison of that to Covid would be BS).

And obesity doesn’t spike up at random intervals with enough extra hospitalisation to impede the healthcare system as a whole.

And obesity can’t be mostly prevented by getting a tiny low-risk jab in the arm every so often.

And they’re working on self driving cars precisely because it’s such a big cause of death, but those things are currently about as ready as a cure for aging. (As in: yes, but with huge caveats that make it a no in practice).

You can start your own company and fire people for whatever (legal) metric you want.

It's hilarious watching the "muh personal freedoms" people complain about private entities exercising their personal freedoms because it has bad overlap with their own. Either swallow the hard pills that come with "personal freedoms" or shut up about it.

Because obesity does not overload our hospitals within just a few weeks.

True .. and also you can bet that most obese people, if it would be a simple as taking a shot to get rid of that, most would likely do it at some point (similar for smokers).

Also haven't heard of just infecting others with obesity..

Weight-related diseases are generally not communicable, and are certainly not airborne.

My risk of vehicular injury is not increased by being around you, even if you are a bad driver.

Actually, iirc there are studies showing people are more likely to be obese if the people around them are obese. So obesity seems to be communicable in some sense.

As for driving you are of course wrong, other bad drivers can affect your health.

I’d expect proximity to correlate regardless of the cause — environmental, memes, lifestyle, pathogens, etc.

Are there any studies on causation?

Would be interesting, but I don't really know the whole extent of that research atm.

Part of being bad is being more dangerous to others- how solid are your stats?

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