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Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

> what level of risk and mortality are we prepared to accept

IMO, the rational answer to this question is 'the same risk and mortality that we have already accepted from influenza.' There is a lot of variability there, of course, but it is way above zero in any case.

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That would seem to make sense if covid displaced flu entirely. But flu + equivalently harmful covid is twice as bad as historical flu.

Influenza B is thought to have been made extinct recently due to the pressures introduced by SARS-CoV-2

https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20211025/covid-pandemic-may-...

Wow, webmd made it really hard to find the primary source for that.

To be clear, they are attributing this drop off of this flu strain to be likely due to pandemic mitigation efforts, as well as maybe lucky timing and some specifics of how this strain spreads

Since it doesn’t seem plausible to repeat the wide scale pandemic mitigation controls any time soon, I doubt we can keep wiping out flu strains, but we could certainly reduce the damage the flu does if we want to

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-021-00642-4

Double the normal flu rate would be just 20% of what we're seeing this year from covid.

I don't think this is quite right. The risk from COVID is in addition to the risk from influenza, and much of the mitigation affects both. Changes like common mask wearing may not have been considered 'worth it' for only lessening mortality and the economic costs of influenza, but the economic benefits alone of reduced productivity due to influenza and COVID combined may mean it is the obvious choice now for governments and businesses to push mask wearing everywhere they can. Similar for vaccination when your yearly flu jab becomes a yearly flu + COVID jab.

There's more to life than economic benefits. I'm certainly not willing to spend the rest of my life wearing a mask, regardless of what governments say.

I am not convinced. Influenza has a pretty wide range, typically 12-52K a year (in the US). Doubling that top number would put it about 20% of the covid deaths we are seeing in 2021. Both diseases disproportionately punish people who are the least productive members of society (based on age alone); I don't think businesses are going to be volunteering to enforce mask mandates themselves. And the government is already showing considerably less enthusiasm than a year ago. Citizens are tiring of the masks, as evidenced by the waning compliance rate.

Vaccines, on the other hand, seem promising. Though the effective mutation rate seems quite a lot lower than influenza and there are good reasons to believe that the covid boosters will be considerably more durable than the original shots. If it really did come down to getting a booster every year, though, I think a lot of people would be okay with that if it meant no more attempts at lockdowns and mask mandates.

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