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Comment by tenpies | Hacker News Reader

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Omicron is real. It's having very tangible impacts on the ability of countries to provide necessary healthcare services to their citizens. People who normally should be first in line to receive care (cancer patients and the like) are having their critical services interrupted or deferred.

Just because you personally don't see the impact doesn't mean it isn't there.

Source please? It sounds like the most mild of all the 99.97% survival rate variants of covid. If you don't want to get sick, then stay home, but don't tell me how to live my life

Did you even read my post? I said nothing about not wanting to personally get sick (although of course I'd prefer not to). I was talking about cancer patients and people in other similar situations. What are they supposed to do, not go to the chemo clinic?

Since you asked for a source, here you go: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33253013/

They should go where ever their doctor tells them to go. But quite frankly I don't see cancer patients going to bars/resturants/clubs etc. This includes the world prior to 2020

But they're going to the same grocery stores as the rest of us. Often they have to ride public transport to get to their appointments. And so on. Thinking that this is just a matter of people's social enjoyment is naive.

I don't think we'll ever see eye to eye on this. You clearly forgot what life was like before the news scared us into shutting down and will never feel comfortable operating in society again. That's fine, but don't bring others down with you.

You're clearly pining for a world that no longer exists.

it may not exist for you, but people like me are fighting like hell to get back the rights everyone else willingly gave up

Note that any constant factor of "less cases requiring hospitalization" is very quickly compensated by exponential spread. London for example has just locked down because the speed of Omicron spread threatens to overwhelm its hospitals.

The recent study about Omicrons severity is from South Africa where 80% were already infected, so mild symptoms could just be because it's the second infection. The severity of Omicron as a first time infection is not researched enough.

How's that any different from any disease in the history of humanity? We "dont't" know (even though we know covid is harmless for the vast majority of people), so why risk the adverse effects of a shutdown again. Aren't you worried about the mental health of children, the women at risk of being shut in with a domestic abuser, or the resulting inflation disproportionately affecting low income people of color?

Aren't you worried about the hospital overload, the people who die because their operations have to be postponed or cannot be treated thanks to triage, the hospital staff who become physically and mentally overworked and burnt out and quit, so that in the long run the health care system gets worse, which again costs lives.

Aren't you worried that it seems to be bad for children's mental health that they spend more time at home and with their parents, that our world is so broken that the only thing that seems to stop abuse of women is that the abuser goes to work so they don't have time for the abuse? The poor are also disproportionately affected by the disease and death consequences of Corona, the effect this has on children and women doesn't concern you? Financial problems can be solved, it just takes political will, illness and death is more complicated. Not to mention the destroyed trust in the state's ability to act and in the minds of fellow citizens, cue vaccination opponents. It seems to me that you are worried about the whitewash that has so far concealed our problems to some extent and that is now coming to light thanks to the pandemic.

You've made so many assumptions here that it's almost impossible to reason with your slanted and opinionated point of view.

The hospitals never became overloaded. Government run hospitals were mis-managed and appeared overloaded. The government ordered elective surgeries to be postponed, not the hospitals. Children need to socialize with other children, it helps them learn how to be functioning individuals. Telling people "your jobs have been taken away by the government, but here's a few hundred each week" forces people into situations they'd otherwise avoid.

I am VERY concerned about how the poor are affected by the lockdowns. The inflation the biden administration is causing under the guise of covid is hurting them the most. They'd be much better off in a free economy where there's plenty of market rate jobs and minimal to no inflation.

Things were going AMAZING from the start of 2017 until early 2020 when the democratic controlled house and democrat state governments starting forcing all of these lockdowns and moving the goalpost

20% of SA is immunocompromised from having HIV though, which makes them even more of a special case but also means you'd expect them to be sicker.

Totally agree. I think we have been warned more than enough. You afraid? Stay at home and lock down. (Didn’t stay home and) got sick? Your problem if no space is available. Split hospitals 50% covid and continue the rest as usual with limited capacity. We cannot control covid anymore and this was apparent just a few months in. Stop supporting authoritarianism and get real.

> Split hospitals 50% covid and continue the rest as usual with limited capacity

Let me know when you've accomplished this. We'll wait.

The percentage was just a wild guess. Its just that some resources need to be allocated to covid and the rest should continue as usual. That could be up to free market to decide, not me or you or some almighty “leaders”.

> That could be up to free market to decide

I honestly spent a few minutes trying to figure out how to formulate a good-faith response to this, and I couldn't. I don't even know where to begin.

Well it is very hard to argue against this. Do you mean to say that people should not be able to decide what is more important to them so that resources can be appropriately allocated?

> Well it is very hard to argue against this.

That wasn't why I was struggling. I was struggling because I deem it a very heartless argument, and I don't know how to have meaningful conversations with people when they don't seem to have the good of their fellow citizens at heart. The free economy can function as both an instrument of liberation and oppression depending on your place in society. It is not a universal panacea.

Living in a society requires giving up some of your personal liberties from time to time, so that other people can enjoy theirs. That doesn't mean that I condone the government stripping away everyone's personal liberties. I wish that people were individually capable of making those sorts of sacrifices without any government intervention. But that isn't the world we're living in.

> Do you mean to say that people should not be able to decide what is more important to them so that resources can be appropriately allocated?

I'm not saying that people shouldn't be able to decide what is more important to themselves, but rather that they can't always be trusted to respect what's important to others. Thinking that a free market economy will always result in the most equitable distribution of goods and services for everyone -- that's childish.

Ok, so people are too stupid to decide for themselves. In that case can we trust their “chosen” leaders? You know they may be too stupid to pick a good leader too. Monarchy sound good?

unfortunately most people on this website aren't rational, and either want to be a victim or want to be a hero, and view the current state of affairs as their chance to fill that mold.

I believe this comment says more about yourself than it does about others.

that I'm a free thinking, rational person?

Reduced death rate doesn’t change the fact hospitals are overloaded and you might not be able to get treatment for other emergencies.

> stay home

> don’t tell me how to live my life

I hope you see the irony there. If only it was that simple. You want to be out and about, unvaccinated, putting other people at risk, while the ones who took the vaccine and are trying to stay safe stay home? Yeah right.

If you want to live a “free” life you can go setup shop in an island somewhere away from civilization. Total freedom to do whatever you want.

I got three vaccine jabs and I am totally pro vax. But the unfortunately the majority of scientific data shows that fully vaccinated people still can spread Delta variant, because neither of the current vaccines has been tailored for Delta. For omicron this is probably even worse, since it is even more contagious. So I do not see how the narrative of COVID being spread by unvaccinated is true in the end of 2021.

You speak in absolutes, but it’s not like vaccines suddenly stopped working for Delta or Omicron variants:

> effectiveness against infection with the delta variant declined from 94.1% (90.5% to 96.3%) 14-60 days after vaccination to 80.0% (70.2% to 86.6%) 151-180 days after vaccination

80-90% is still infinitely better than zero. The “narrative” of infection being spread by the unvaccinated (also usually non-mask-wearers which doesn’t help) is obviously true, as logic would suggest, and hospitalization numbers everywhere confirm. Most recent data suggest slightly lower protection for Omicron, around 70%.

Not to mention, again, that hospitalization is still reduced by 95%+ even if infected which makes a huge difference for healthcare systems.

[1] https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj-2021-068848

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