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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

We need more honest and direct leadership.

You will be exposed to Covid. You can’t do anything about that at this point. You will probably be exposed to it many times in the remaining decades of your life and will probably get sick a few times from it too.

So your decision now isn’t about avoiding it or not. It’s about staying healthy, maybe losing some weight and getting vaccinated so it’s not a huge deal when you’re exposed.

Pretending you can wear masks and stay home and this will end is a fantasy and has been for months. But leaders are living in a fantasy world.

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It's quite bizarre how otherwise intelligent, educated people seem to engage in magical thinking about COVID-19. They want to believe that a highly contagious respiratory virus with multiple animal reservoirs would somehow disappear if everyone would just stay home and wear masks for a few weeks. Of course that has no basis in real science. Any non-pharmaceutical infection control measures are at best able to slightly slow the spread. In the long run almost all of us will get infected no matter what we do. So the smart move is to protect yourself by getting vaccinated and aggressively treating co-morbid conditions like obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and hypovitaminosis D.

Public health leaders like Dr. Fauci aren't idiots and I suspect they're privately fully aware of the real situation. So why aren't they being straight with us about how the pandemic is likely to play out long term?

> Public health leaders like Dr. Fauci aren't idiots and I suspect they're privately fully aware of the real situation. So why aren't they being straight with us about how the pandemic is likely to play out long term?

Fauci has been saying exactly this, in public, for a long time.

For example, November 12, 2020: "I doubt we are going to eradicate this. I think we need to plan that this is something we may need to maintain control over chronically. It may be something that becomes endemic, that we have to just be careful about."

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/12/coronavirus-dr-fauci-says-he...

That's why his strategy consists of vaccines to reduce the death rate plus NPIs to "flatten the curve".

Flattening the curve doesn't mean reducing total infections, it means compressing the spikes so the healthcare system doesn't collapse.

None of this is new.

Any part of this you disagree with?

I will say (unscientifically, before someone feels the need to point that out) that I have been supplementing vitamin D and zinc prophylactically since March 2020. Not in any crazy amounts. I have had three household members become infected, and I used a public gym every other day throughout except when quarantining with the sick household. Masking was quite inconsistent at the gym to say the least (maybe one in ten patrons wore them).

I was not vaccinated until late July of this year. Never contracted COVID 19, confirmed by blood test shortly before I was vaccinated.

I don't know if that means I have been lucky, or if it's possible I was exposed but did not develop COVID-specific antibodies that would be detected in the blood test.

I don't think they've been dishonest, or denied that this is endemic, the problem has long been understood to be that of rate. Being physically unable to treat a wave is what will lead to massive numbers of deaths.

Masks, distancing, working from home, won't defeat covid19 but they all slow down its transmission, slow down admissions, and let hospitals recover.

Honestly I agree with all points besides mask wearing. It's a habit that has been in other countries (speaking from US perspective here) to wear masks when sick. This is a good habit to have.

I think people should wear masks whenever they like and I’m glad that has been normalized as ok.

I also think it’d be a good norm to ask people to wear it when sick.

What I oppose is this idea that we should all wear it all the time by law.

I couldn't agree more. The lack of foresight of many people and leaders about this disease distresses me

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