Hacker News Reader

Comment by shrikant | Hacker News Reader

Yeah absolutely, I count ourselves reasonably lucky that we only caught the disease after vaccinations.

I have absolutely non-zero desire to go through this every year, unlike my parent commenter though.

Would I be of a similar opinion as parent if I had a similarly asymptomatic-to-mild case? I don't know for sure, but I would hope not, because I wouldn't want to draw conclusions or base policy from just my anecdotal experience.

Other replies to me appear needlessly partisan jibes: I neither said nor implied anything about continued lockdowns and any such inference is pure projection.

View on HN

Your parent commenter wasn't saying that they have a desire to get this every year, just that if the worst case outcome is getting what they had every year, they would find that an acceptable trade-off for getting society back to normal.

> I have absolutely non-zero desire to go through this every year, unlike my parent commenter though.

Many people get sick every year or every other year. Their illness is like you described: 2-3 days of being "knocked out" and about a week to fully recover.

It's not that I "desire" to go through that every year or two, it's just life. I expect that's why people responded incredulously to your post: for them, getting sick occasionally is normal.

to add on — before i had kids i rarely got sick. at one point i went maybe seven or eight years. now, every couple months. and at least one a year that puts me down a few days or more. And those aren’t even the flu, typically. There are many kinds of colds that can knock you out.

Each is likely an endemic version of something that was far more serious and deadly historically. Now it’s a minor or major annoyanace that is part of normal life. i bet eradicating covid would fall into the same bucket S eradicating any of the others. Something to aspire towards, but until then something to simply accept as normal and move on with our lives.

By saying “I don’t want to experience this every year” without any caveats, there is an implication we should do something to prevent it. Especially given the broader context of the pandemic thus far. Surely you can see how many readers might feel that implication.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com