Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_snooze | Hacker News Reader

We have the technology to make COVID just a nuisance to broad swaths of the population. Let them live their lives. Now is absolutely the time to quit the tut-tutting.

I don't understand why people are so against taking an easy W like this.

View on HN

Immunocompromised people are allowed to tut-tut until they can actually go outside without significant risk of death.

Personally, I would lock my children in a cellar for 15 years if that's what it took to protect those who have compromised immune systems. Talk about not being able to defend yourself!

Good lord. I know this is hyperbolic but do you have any idea the affect that 15 years of isolation would have on children? And you are willing to place the well-being of random strangers over your own children? You seem to think that your comment is morally superior, but that idea is abhorrent and evil to the idea of being a parent. You should be ashamed to be a parent.

I would love to see how your children feel about that.

Don't feed the troll.

You don't have to lock your kids in a cellar, but measures like mask mandates and temporary school shutdowns are the sorts of things that are necessary to keep covid under control so immunocompromised people can live their lives, instead of having to stay at home because it's incredibly difficult to avoid exposure due to states just going 'eh I'm done with these lockdowns' and repealing mask mandates.

Because it's not an "easy W" and treating it like it is causes more deaths.

Have you even looked at the current situation we are in? Death's are continuing to climb and we're soon to be what is in the second most severe wave of the pandemic [0], and in a week we'll see if we start to compete for the worst wave.

I don't know how people can rationally talk about this being a "mild variant" and encouraging people to get on with their lives.

Since the beginning we've known that Omicron is both less deadly and more transmissible. I don't know how anyone with an engineering background can not see the problem here.

There is a balance where less deadly x more transmissible == more deadly x less transmissible, ie the total deaths during a wave are the same. We can't really control the death rate of omicron, but we can to an extent impact how transmissible it is. If we fight to reduce the transmission rate we have a much greater shot at lower overall deaths. But if we actively encourage people to ignore safe behavior and "live their life" we end up increasing the transmission rate therefore increasing the total number of deaths.

0. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailydeaths

The solution is to get more people vaccinated. Not to ask more of people who are already vaccinated. Vaccinated people have done their part effectively removing themselves as burdens on COVID wards. The leverage point is in getting more people into that protected population.

Remember what this was called in the beginning? Novel coronavirus. The problem was that we were all immunologically naive to it, which resulted in bad outcomes. Vaccines (and to some extent prior infection) make us no longer naive. That's the way out.

We have vaccines. Take the damn win.

> We have vaccines. Take the damn win.

Unfortunately it's still not that simple. If you look at the death rates in very high vaccination rate states/countries you see the same pattern. For example, VT has the highest vaccination rate in the country, at >90% with at least one dose, and is experiencing this as it's worst wave [0].

There's no doubt that vaccination helps and reduces overall severity, but it is by no means an "easy W"

Additionally we are starting to see diminishing returns in Israel's 4th round of shots [1]. It is increasingly looking like, even if we're will to do a life time of booster shots, this strategy may not be effective.

0. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/vermont/

1. https://healthpolicy-watch.news/israel-fourth-covid-booster-...

You have to disaggregate those statistics to account for vaccination status. Here's NYC's dashboard. Huge differences in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths between the vaxxed and unvaxxed population. https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page#daily

Again, this is very simple. Given that the vaccines work, then this pandemic is over for those who are vaccinated. I'm quite happy to change my tune if it turns out vaccines don't work though.

It's not over until the unvaxxed stop crowding hospitals, or we build more hospitals.

Prior infection gives far more protection than vaccination, and a combination of both is as good as it gets (although the addition of vaccination to prior infection gives much less additional protection than prior infection alone): https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm

Only if prior infection doesn't kill you or hurt you more than the later infection would.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com