Comment by gentleman11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gentleman11 | Hacker News Reader

We need to protect high-risk people, while waiting for the rest of us to reach herd immunity. Anyone with even a suspected risk factor should get help to be able to hide out for the next year.

Instead, we have the opposite: everyone goes into lockdown, the nursing homes are ravaged, and there is no additional support for high risk people. The many high-risk people I know personally (diabetics, older people, people with lung conditions, heart conditions) will get asked to go back to work in the next couple of weeks, and none had any help isolating or buying groceries, and were barely able to isolate at all during the last few months.

I could lose a lot of friends and family over the next year because they have almost zero support, but thank goodness all the healthy people couldn't go to restaurants for 2-3 months.

Unpopular opinion, so downvote away. Nevermind that 96% of hospitalizations in new york were with patients with preexisting conditions that put them at higher risk, it goes against the trending opinion

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/health/coronavirus-patien...

The point of locking down everyone is to slow down the spread of the virus through the entire population, which protects the high-risk people from accidental exposure, until a vaccine can be developed and deployed. That way we get herd immunity without killing the percentage of people who can't survive a full infection, but will be just fine with a vaccination.

Having healthy people isolated is not about protecting the healthy people. It's about stopping the healthy people from spreading the disease to the high-risk people.

It has done very little to protect the high risk people I know, who are all going back to work soon, and nothing for any high risk people who worked in an essential service. I know of an 60ish year old person who was sent back to work at his meat packing plant less than 14 days after testing positive for covid because his life apparently didn't matter. If any of them had quit, they would have lost eligibility for any government support and ended up homeless

I'll agree that allowing corporations to steal most of the resources that were intended to help people trying to quarantine, and failing to ensure both the ability to quarantine and the safety of those who absolutely could not, have been abject failures of the governments handling of this crisis.

I am healthy and in a low-risk group for complications from Covid-19. Nevertheless I do not want to contract it. I don't care about herd immunity - give me a vaccine ASAP. Until then I'm wearing a mask and social distancing as much as possible.

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