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Comment by awsthro00945 | Hacker News Reader

This is a false equivalency. Being vaccinated or not is the difference between requiring days/weeks in the hospital or only spending 1-2 days with a mild headache. It's "mildly inconvenienced if you do, damned if you don't".

I was at the hospital yesterday (for something unrelated to covid) and there are 0 rooms available. The hallways are still packed with unvaccinated people with covid laying in every open space they can find. Nurses and doctors are still worked past their breaking point.

We cannot move on until the thick-skulled members of society realize that their unwillingness to get vaccinated is the number one thing stopping us from moving on.

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It ain't happening though so we need to move on with it. There are too many stubborn people in the United States and probably elsewhere.

There are people who would rather die than take the vaccine for whatever ridiculous reason so why are we sitting around waiting for them.

I'll say it again: we cannot move on with it until people are vaccinated. It's not a choice. It's not something where we just say "eh well it looks like it won't get better so let's move on". It physically cannot happen.

So let's assume these people never get vaccinated. We wait forever?

You're still not understanding. We are not "waiting". Waiting implies that we are making some type of conscious choice to put things on hold. But there is no choice. We cannot simply choose to stop waiting. We cannot move on until people are vaccinated. We are blocked, not waiting.

Lol, you act like this is the first time in humanity's history that we've had a virus. Humanity continues despite it and we will continue despite many people choosing not get easily vaccinated.

Eventually people will move on. It's the human condition.

Humanity "continuing" or "moving on" naturally due to the passage of time (which will be quite a long time) is a completely different thing than humanity "choosing" to move on. Your original comments imply/ask that humanity collectively "chooses" to move on and stop letting covid affect us, but again, that is simply not possible. It's not something we choose.

Individuals can individually choose to pretend covid isn't a thing, but society as a whole cannot simply choose to suddenly restore our medical infrastructure, fix supply chains, grow the labor market, etc. Covid's effect on those things won't magically go away just because someone says "you know what, I'm tired of waiting on covid! I'm going to be normal now!"

Adjustments to these will happen over time and humanity may "continue", but when that happens is not a choice we make.

See! We agree.

I mean, there is a third option that neither of you have presented. We could fix the emergency room and infectious disease ward situation with federal money, and then move on instead of using federal money to prolong lock downs. Addressing infrastructure isn't always popular, or the fastest, but it lasts longer and solves the problem of overcrowding.

Yes, it might mean another 9 months to a year of lockdown, but it would be there still when (not if) another disaster occurs. Now, people will get angry at subsidizing private hospitals... but I could go on about how emergency care should be publicly funded anyway. But I digress.

> Yes, it might mean another 9 months to a year of lockdown

Oh goodness no. There’s a supply limit for medical professionals that will take half a decade to solve even with unlimited funding. And as this is a worldwide issue, not just an American one, you can’t just outbid the rest of us for migrant healthcare workers.

Is there a fix for this? Is it just a payment of loans issue, or is it a working conditions issue or is it a lack of interest issue? Or is it some combination of the three, or another, unknown thing (or a known, unmentioned thing)?

Granted, I have zero power. I ask because I'm curious and just want to know.

It takes a long time to train medical professionals, and the current number is for the world 5-ish years ago (the training delay depends on the actual role, but that looks to me like the common one). If you want to have enough to cope with the extra demand from COVID, it will just take a long time.

Most of those issues are due to choices like quarantine and lockdowns.

In the UK we have issues with driving tests because everything closed down "cus Covid". Except the virus had nothing to do with it and now most of the instructors have already had their mild cold anyway.

0.2% of the population dying, heavily weighted towards the elderly, does not break supply chains.

I think there's a possibility that omicron may mark the end of this pandemic. Anybody who refuses to get vaccinated will very likely get omicron within the next few weeks. So your immune system will either develop antibodies as a result of being vaccinated, or as a result of being infected. Well, there is the third option of dying from covid, but the current evidence seems to indicate that the risk of hospitalization or death from omicron is lower than from covid-19 or delta.

To be sure, the descendants of the novel coronavirus that appeared in Wuhan in 2019 will float around the human population indefinitely. Omicron isn't the end of covid, but it could be the end of widespread hospitalizations and deaths. At least until the next crisis comes along.

I encourage everyone eligible to protect themselves by getting vaccinated, but moving on is an entirely separate issue. We can move on as soon as people stop panicking and decide to accept the risks. In fact that's already happening in some states.

Strong circumstantial evidence indicates that another coronavirus HCoV-OC43 caused another worldwide pandemic starting in 1889. It killed a lot of people. There were no vaccines or effective treatments. The same virus is still endemic today; the only reason it doesn't kill many people today is that most of us get infected as youths and the resulting immunity protects us later in life. People moved on.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC544107/

Circumstantial evidence - no direct evidence for HCoV-OC43. In fact it is simply conjecture.

It would be instructive to compare the virulence factors encoded in SARS-CoV-2 vs the common cold coronas.

People can move on when Covid stops making people seriously ill and compromising our healthcare systems. That is not yet, indeed the way we are going it may be never. Even if Omicron turns out to be 'mild', the next variant may not be.

> I was at the hospital yesterday (for something unrelated to covid) and there are 0 rooms available. The hallways are still packed with unvaccinated people with covid laying in every open space they can find. Nurses and doctors are still worked past their breaking point.

Anecdote: I had to go to the ER in 2017 in San Francisco and my experience was exactly like this back then too. It was a ~4 hour wait in the ER waiting room, then another several hours on a bed in a bright loud busy hallway, then some tests, back to the hallway for a few hours, and then emergency inpatient surgery.

Unfortunately that can vary from hospital to hospital, it also depends on how you're triaged.

If you go to SF General, yes, you're in hell. Its an extremely poorly run city hospital that is where most GSW victims go, its busy. If you go to UCSF or CPMC, you'll get world class care.

It was UCSF

Interesting, I guess it could be related to CV.

Whenever I've had to go there its very speedy.

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