Hacker News Reader

Comment by ianhawes | Hacker News Reader

My wife and I are fully vaccinated and boosted. Our kids are too young to be vaccinated. We're all currently Covid positive. Fortunately, my wife and I have mild symptoms and our young children have manageable symptoms.

I was thrilled to be vaccinated and in awe at the power of mRNA technology. I got everyone I knew that was un-techsavvy a vaccination appointment as early as possible.

With that being said...

I think we are coming to terms with our collective hubris. Omicron has caused many "breakthrough cases". The science would indicate that it either evolved in an immunocompromised human or through an animal. Those are particularly inconvenient paths to blame on "anti-vaxxers".

We were all always going to get Covid whether we liked to or not.

View on HN

There can be multiple vectors sustaining COVID - the unvaccinated and anti-maskers certainly don't deserve all the blame, but they're certainly not helping either and are likely accelerating the speed of the spread and increasing the opportunities for more evolution of the virus.

Immunosuppressed humans are a minority. And each of them would be less likely to get infected (at all) if the regular people around them took vaccination seriously.

Regarding Omicron, there is some cause for hope: so far it does seem to produce less severe illnesses.

> We were all always going to get Covid whether we liked to or not.

One of the main examples of hubris was that we thought we could stop it. The "success story" countries quickly dwindled to Australia and New Zealand--situations not exactly replicatable. Australia's hubris led to a bad vaccine rollout, and a few cases quickly escalated to lockdowns. I think NZ eventually settled on an endemic policy.

NZ was having trouble containing their last outbreak - it had got into the 'gangs', a part of their society that was particularly hard for the government to reach with containment action. So, controversially, they gave up. I suspect they were under a great deal of pressure from 'those who would see Covid win'.

Note that China is still keeping Covid at bay.

> a part of their society that was particularly hard for the government to reach with containment action

I think there are parts of society like this almost everywhere, and that's why it's uncontainable once it hits a critical mass.

China is interesting. I guess they're doing it mostly through testing and restrictions that wouldn't work elsewhere? They have a good vaccination rate, but their vaccines aren't very effective. There's also North Korea; they claim zero cases. I imagine the real number is either surprisingly close or essentially 100%.

> Those are particularly inconvenient paths to blame on "anti-vaxxers".

Why would one feel the need to blame anti-vaxxers for new strains?

> We were all always going to get Covid whether we liked to or not.

That’s not the point of vaccinations. The point of vaccination is to delay and spread out infection peaks as well as make infections as manageable as possible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com