Hacker News Reader

Comment by nkrisc | Hacker News Reader

The point of masking and being cautious at this point is not to avoid ever catching COVID, because it seems certain now that everyone will catch it at some point. The point is to be the last person to catch it when hospitals are at normal capacity and everything else is back to normal, just in case you happen to have a very poor reaction to it.

It also just sounds kind of miserable. I also avoid catching the flu as much as possible. And if I ever go back to commuting by train, I’ll probably wear masks on the train too. I used to get colds all the time just from riding a completely packed train with sick people coughing and sneezing all over.

View on HN

Sterilizing your environment might be actually counterproductive for your immune system. A better strategy is eat more healthy and do moderate exercises, especially during flu season.

Eventually you will come in to contact with a virus, unless you plan to remove all contact with people and animals.

But that's the trick; I can temporarily remove all contact with people and animals, while there's an active deadly virus killing astronomically large numbers of people in my country.

Will I need to be like this forever? No. Can I be like this for another year or so? Yes. It's highly unpleasant, but I (and some others like me) can actually isolate to the degree you jokingly suggest.

And why wouldn't I? Because of some primitive need for physical social interaction? Because of my weak will, my inability to place the needs of others before the totally optional needs of my own?

It just seems like anyone who can isolate and doesn't should have a hard time looking themselves in the mirror. It's obviously a different story for those who can't (most people, really).

Humans aren't robots. There's nothing primitive or optional about the need for physical social interaction. The people who disagree with you aren't wrong, they simply have different subjective priorities and values.

There absolutely is something optional about the need (as in food, water) for physical social interaction, and the people who disagree with me are, factually, incorrect, know they're incorrect, and are acting selfishly at the cost of human lives.

Is it entirely pleasant? No. Is it temporary? Yes. You will survive without physically being around your buddies for a few years while a global fucking pandemic is resolved...

That is one way of looking at it, the other is why force yourself to suffer if neither you nor anyone around you is at threat from the virus.

My threat model is different, everyone around me is healthy and young--with I myself being the only one with a chronic condition leaving me more vulnerable to Covid but still no that much--locking myself would be more unhealthy.

I don't see it as selfish, I'm not forcing anyone who is at risk to take the risks I am taking. They can stay at home for as long as they want, it is their life after all.

There is a long religious tradition of suffering for the sake of faith in order to signal one's virtue or gain favor with a deity. While some pandemic control measures such as vaccination and mitigating co-morbid conditions are well supported by evidence based medicine, others have become kind of a weird secular religion largely detached from science.

I think some people just want to feel like they're in control. Surely if I dance in a circle while beating a drum the rains will come. Surely if I wear the sacred garment and perform the proper cleansing rituals the virus will see my piety and spare my life.

This is unlikely to be true for respiratory viruses. Compared to an ancestral environment, we have:

* Much less contact with bacteria, dirt, allergens, due to sterilization

* Much more contact with respiratory viruses, due to enclosed spaces and modern energy efficiency standards

The whole overactive immune system/hygiene hypothesis is much more likely linked to lack of exposure to the first group of pathogens and substances.

Who's talking about sterilizing their environment? Reply to wrong comment?

Of course I'll get sick, I've had the cold a few times this year already. That doesn't mean I try to get sick. Don't you wash your hands?

Wearing a mask on a crowded train with people sneezing and coughing seems pretty rational to me. I don't like catching a cold and will take reasonable measures to avoid it. Wearing a mask for an hour is hardly a big deal.

In this post-vaccine world we now live in, is slowing the spread of Covid really the absolute most important thing we all need to focus on?

Shouldn’t we move on at this point? What is the end goal here? Why are fully vaccinated adults continuing to freak out about Covid?

Once again: people are dying, right now, because they can't get access to health care, because hospitals in some places are overflowing with mostly unvaccinated people with COVID. This seems like a fairly location-specific issue, so I would expect that different places could do different things at different times.

We can and are focusing on other things, but hospital capacity is a good one to work on keeping down. Once that's down, I guess we see where we are and probably lift some restrictions.

Where are people dying because they cannot get access to healthcare?

https://healthandwelfare.idaho.gov/news/idaho-activates-cris... - comes to mind. Here where I live in Oregon, during the Delta surge, people were waiting on "elective" surgeries for things like cancer treatment, and the hospital system was pretty clear that some ended up dying because the hospital was overloaded.

My large city in Texas is now down to 35 ICU beds across the entire city. That's how.

A friend's father-in-law had to drive 4hrs away to find a hospital with capacity for his cardiac surgery. That's how.

And why is that the fault of the general public? These hospitals had 2 years to figure this out.

Why would it be the fault of hospitals? They have no incentive to construct more ICUs. A large percentage of covid patients entering the ICU for ventilation will die, and you can't collect on a dead patient. ICUs are a money hole -- they require specialized equipment, isolation construction, experienced medical team, etc. If a hospital is motivated by profit, they would construct as few ICUs as legally possible.

It’s not my problem to fix hospitals. I shouldn’t be forced to wear some worthless mask because my lousy government can’t find a way to staff some kind of emergency Covid hospital. I only pissed away two years of my life waiting for them to do so… Time is up. Not my problem.

Masks aren't useless, which is pretty obvious to anyone who thinks about the physics of an airborne pathogen for a few minutes.

Research demonstrates the same thing.

Why would anyone spend billions and billions on field hospitals when there's an easily available vaccine that prevents all of this? No one expected the uptake to be so bad. I mean even T**p is telling people to get their boosters.

I'm not freaking out. I'm just trying to avoid getting myself and my family sick. Who likes being sick? I'm not living in some underground bunker, just taking basic precautions. It's the same reason I buckle my seatbelt: huge potential upside with negligible downside. So worst case scenario, I accidentally wore a mask I didn't need to wear. Oh no.

I have no reason to believe COIVD would be bad for me. But what if it is? Then I'd rather get sick when things have calmed down and hospitals are at normal capacity.

> The point of masking and being cautious at this point is not to avoid ever catching COVID, because it seems certain now that everyone will catch it at some point. The point is to be the last person to catch it

Great justification for making 5 year-olds wear masks for 6+ hours 5 days a week in school. This makes even more sense for the 5 year old kids that have ESL or Speech Pathology needs.

>The point is to be the last person to catch it when hospitals are at normal capacity and everything else is back to normal, just in case you happen to have a very poor reaction to it.

By that reasoning you would only wear masks when rates are very high. But a lot of schools require it when case rates are very low.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com