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Comment by edmundsauto | Hacker News Reader

And we aren’t shutting society down because of the risk of C19 to small children either. The risk to children is part of that, but the risk to the adults who care for them is another reason. Additionally, staffing levels are impacted because the adults who have it.

Also, generically, when we have a super spreadable disease, we want to minimize transmission. This is done as a precaution against mutation (the more infections mean more mutations!) and because we don’t have a good idea what the long term effects are.

If you only look at the daycare closures in isolation, you’re not doing the calculus for the system. If there is one thing we’re learning during Covid, it’s how interconnected we all are.

Finally, is the acceptance of RSV a result of a good public health decision? Or have we, as a society, just massively underindexed on ignoring public health?

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"Also, generically, when we have a super spreadable disease, we want to minimize transmission."

There is a contradiction in there. Minimizing transmission of super spreadable disease is extremely hard, precisely because it is super spreadable; in this case, just by breathing in the same space. It could be done with very harsh measures - see the Zero Covid strategy in China - but after two years of pandemics, people are tired.

"as a precaution against mutation (the more infections mean more mutations!)"

True, but there are 8 billion people out there and a majority of them aren't living in countries that successfully minimized transmissions of covid. Further mutations will likely come anyway, as the global viral load is probably in trillions of viral particles daily. At that point, it is a question of tradeoff.

At this point, Omicron is looking like its going to vaccinate a large portion of the population, especially the more folks resistant to vaccination. My hope is that Omicron is the real first step to herd immunity.

No, it'll live and mutate in deer, rodents cats etc. Won't see herd immunity ever. Even this 'natural' vaccine won't distribute fast enough to outrun the pace of its mutations.

The more varieties of coronavirii that we encounter, the more our immune system will build a broad-spectrum response to that "class" of virus. To be clear, I am not saying that the coronavirus is going to disappear. I'm saying that it will become closer to a common cold over time.

Let’s hope.

> staffing levels are impacted because the adults who have it.

Specifically, staffing levels are impacted by the policy of people who have tested positive but are not sick.

>>> "The crisis from the Omicron peak is not generated by serious COVID illness in regions with highly vaxxed populations," Noble wrote in an email to SFGATE. "The crisis we are suffering in the Bay Area is largely driven by disruptive COVID policies that encourage asymptomatic testing and subsequent quarantines.

Via professor of emergency medicine at UCSF https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/COVID-San-Francisco-s...

If you wanted to effectively reduce spread and mutations you'd have to vaccinate every mouse, dog, and white-tailed deer - Omicron is so infectious that there is no mitigation only applied to humans that could be effective.

The point of the remaining ones is to not send people to hospital and spread it out some until we get antivirals.

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